This Christian sermon uses a DNA lab experience as a basis for theological reflection on ourselves and our offering. Who are we to God? What determines the self that we offer? Can the alphabet of DNA shed light for us on the Word of God in our lives? This first attempt to introduce the language and laboratory environment of genetic testing (represented by DNA fingerprinting) within a parish preaching context juxtaposes liturgical, scientific, and biblical language and settings for fresh insights.

The outcry to God of every suffering people, like that of the Hebrews in Egypt, operates as the place where humanity meets God through the dialogical interaction of human lament and divine intervention.

The metaphorical understanding of historical movement as spiral is due to the symbolism of the spiral. Spiral is the geometric pattern to depict a self-accumulative growth of energy or life force. For Ham, history neither reiterates “the eternal return” to the primal archetype nor generates “the unilateral straight move of teleology. If history is a living move, it should follow the basic principle of life evolution as all the living experiences the gradual and yet creative advance by long accumulative changes. (...) There are several factors for Ham Sok Hon to establish the idea of the spiral history. First, he studied the Bible and newly experienced the ‘not-yet-being ontology’ in the Abrahamic religion, a view of a religious utopianism toward the future. It is not the view of “the eternal return” ofMircea Eliade but the view of historical reality that urges a life-formation in expectation of the novel emergence of the new. Second, among various streams of East Asian thoughts, Ham was greatly influenced from the neo-Confucian idea of the nature of mind and Hua-yen Buddhism, that is, ‘one is many; many is one’. Finally, Ham’s spiral history is different from Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit in that he denies the historical perspectives of heroism or classism and instead advocates the perspective of ssi-al, a perspective that ssi‐al bears all burden of historical suffering and opens a new chapter by overcoming the historical suffering. (shrink)

Traditional Western Christology, focussed on the maleness of Christ, has skewed and limited Christian understandings of God away from female images of the divine and towards masculine language and imagery. The creation of a male norm within the Western Christian tradition has marginalized women of all colours and cultures. Asian North American women have struggled not only to make new sense of 'God-language', but also to harmonize traditional Christian claims with the world-view and culture of the East. Since Christian feminists (...) have attempted to recover a more positive God-language by use of the concept of Sophia Wisdom, this article suggests that an effective strategy would be for Asian women to inculturate the language of Sophia into Eastern philosophical categories. This could be achieved by way of harmonization with the Buddhist concept of wisdom, prajna. (shrink)

This study reveals how human attitudes to the long-term effects of their actions are crucially bound up with their ideas of personal identity. This collection of essays contrasts eastern and western philosophies of concern for the future, and offers some suggestions for their possible reconciliation.

Given the instructional challenges posed by the influx of minority-language children in North America, this article attempts to examine early childhood bi- or multilingualism in one of the fastest growing ethnic minority groups in Canada, Korean-Canadians. By drawing on a Vygotskian perspective, the article focuses on the affective and social aspects of learning for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children and their families. With an emphasis on the integration of language and thought, this article first identifies the instructional applications of (...) Vygotskian perspectives and then describes iterative phases of design-based research aimed at developing technology-mediated collaborative learning environments for trilingual Korean-Canadian children. The technology-mediated collaborative learning environment supported young CLD children's affective, social and cognitive needs and created meaning-centered collaborative learning environments. The paper concludes with a consideration of implications of this technology-mediated collaborative learning environment so as to assist teachers who might be confronted with the educational needs of the growing population of CLD children. (shrink)

Being most familiar but characteristically elusive, the problem of time has long become a scandal to the philosophical ingenuity. True, many of the great thinkers have only joined to testify in chorus to the ever growing Augustinian bewilderment in their pursuit of the mystery of time. ;The purpose of this work is twofold and simple: to clarify and consequently vindicate what contributions the Husserlian phenomenology as a radically altered perspective has made to help us out of the time-old predicament surrounding (...) time. ;In the first part of clarification , the status and significance of time as one of the most controversial issues in philosophy are discussed, and its historical background is thematically traced back that helps track down how the time-study has come to turn to the phenomenological perspective. The second part of clarification is primarily devoted to expounding the central message of Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness as the prime example of the phenomenological approaches to time-experience. The essence of Husserl's exploration into time-consciousness lies in showing how we constitute temporal and experiential unity be overcoming our commonsensical addiction to the transcendent, objective time and through the unique notions of retention and protention. ;Vindication also consists of two parts: comparison and application. Comparative studies of Augustine, Kant, James, and Bergson in Chapter 3 are done in order to illustrate and help vindicate Husserl in his phenomenological insight into time-consciousness clarified in the preceding chapters. The application part is primarily concerned with whether or/and how the phenomenological insight into time can be extended to exploring the sense of history as a meaningful whole. ;In short, this work claims to be a comprehensive assessment of the significance of phenomenological insight of time-experience, based on a critical understanding of Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness and of its historico-thematic background and through its thematic comparisons with the corresponding wisdoms of some of the most profound thinkers, and by attempting to apply it to constituting the sense of history. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples, and information, creating various problems but also opportunities as well –especially for the movement of people. Such demographic movement makes multiculturalism a major issue for many societies. Differences between immigrants and the society receiving them tend to create conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity. Within any society, identity is constructed (...) in the subjective process of culture. But where two or more cultures come into close contact, a dominance–subordination struggle frequently develops between their respective subjectivities. One solution to such conflict might be found in the legal provision of equality of rights for all members of society, including cultural minorities. But if the legal solution alone is considered, the resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents for amenable social coexistence would go unused, and tension and conflict will frequently persist. As an intermediate position, cultural subjectivities, whether personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities within the general society. Even such a system may not, however, be completely effective. The adoption by all parties of an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis could meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but its ultimate goal would be to prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for the enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for the whole of humanity. (shrink)

Background: Empirical ethics inquiry works from the notion that stakeholder perspectives are necessary for gauging the ethical acceptability of human studies and assuring that research aligns with societal expectations. Although common, studies involving different populations often entail comparisons of trends that problematize the interpretation of results. Using graphical model selection—a technique aimed at transcending limitations of conventional methods—this report presents data on the ethics of clinical research with two objectives: (1) to display the patterns of views held by ill and (...) healthy individuals in clinical research as a test of the study's original hypothesis and (2) to introduce graphical model selection as a key analytic tool for ethics research. Methods: In this institutional review board (IRB)-approved, National Institutes of Health-funded project, data were collected from 60 mentally ill and 43 physically ill clinical research protocol volunteers, 47 healthy protocol-consented participants, and 29 healthy individuals without research protocol experience. Respondents were queried on the ethical acceptability of research involving people with mental and physical illness (i.e., cancer, HIV, depression, schizophrenia, and posttraumatic stress disorder) and non-illness-related sources of vulnerability (e.g., age, class, gender, ethnicity). Using a statistical algorithm, we selected graphical models to display interrelationships among responses to questions. Results: Both mentally and physically ill protocol volunteers revealed a high degree of connectivity among ethically salient perspectives. Healthy participants, irrespective of research protocol experience, revealed patterns of views that were not highly connected. Conclusions: Between ill and healthy protocol participants, the pattern of views was vastly different. Experience with illness was tied to dense connectivity, whereas healthy individuals expressed views with sparse connections. In offering a nuanced perspective on the interrelation of ethically relevant responses, graphical model selection has the potential to bring new insights to the field of ethics. (shrink)