Toward a Postmodern Ethic of Radical Freedom is one of the first, if not the first, to bring Cornel West and Michel Foucault together in a meaningful dialogue to formulate "a postmodern ethic of radical freedom." This dialogue begins with the practical posture of West, more specifically his notions of truth and reality and work, then goes back to his more theoretical work to explore the same notions. As a project in constructive ethics, this book examines Cornel West's epistemology (notion (...) of truth) and metaphysics (notions of reality) as foundational components for a postmodern ethic of radical freedom. These foundational components are then brought into a discursive conversation with aspects of Michel Foucault's archaeology and genealogy, with a method called reconstruction. This reconstruction results in two important trajectories, radical ontology and radical epistemology, which become the pillars for a postmodern ethic of radical freedom. The last chapter of the book weaves together all components with the womanist work of Monica Coleman and Patricia Hill Collins as examples of this ethic of radical freedom. Practically speaking, this postmodern ethic of radical freedom serves as a platform to ensure transcendence so that all people, regardless of race, gender, or sexuality, can enjoy a flourishing and fulfilled life. (shrink)

Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy. The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by Jacob Neusner, Darrell Fasching and Dell deChant, Regina Wolfe and Christine Gudorf, and Sumner Twiss (...) and Bruce Grelle. In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field. (shrink)

The value of human bodies for the teaching of anatomy has been recognized since the 16th century. Many medical students are exposed to the process of body donation as human dissection continues to play a fundamental role in many medical courses. The opportunity of dissection not only provides students with an educational approach to learning human structure but also exposes them to the emotions surrounding death and dying and the role of the anatomical donor in their journey. This paper explores (...) the subject of body donation in relation to anatomical examination, the relationship the donor has to the medical student experience and the purpose of thanksgiving services. The paper concludes with a brief description of a study carried out at a UK medical school to seek the views of first- and second-year medical students on the purpose, place and value of thanksgiving services. (shrink)

While reading, and thinking about how to respond to, Willem Drees’s Religion, Science and Naturalism, I was reminded of an earlier dispute between George Santayana and John Dewey about, among other things, how to incorporate religion into a naturalistic world view. Dewey described Santayana’s naturalism as "broken backed" because of his dualistic distinction between the mechanism of nature and the life of the mind and his relegation of religion to the latter, epiphenomenal realm.

In “Revive and Refuse,” Marshall et al. (2024) argue that many individuals who are revived from opioid overdoses have diminished decision-making capacity (DMC), given that so many of them have opio...

William Dean is a tireless proponent of a public role for religion in American society, most recently in his American Academy of Religion award winning book The Religious Critic in American Culture . He writes there about the importance of, and need for, both a common American spiritual culture and public intellectuals who would understand, criticize, and innovatively rework that shared American religion. Dean represents a metaphysical strand of American pragmatism. His thought is rooted in William James’s radical empiricism, Bernard (...) Meland’s and Bernard Loomer’s empirical theology, and Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics. He takes seriously what I will call the problem of cosmic estrangement. The American public religion that he advocates, among other things, is supposed to resolve that problem. Its theoretical core is Dean’s version of Whiteheadian panpsychism, which he calls ontological conventionalism. (shrink)

Pragmatism is first and foremost an intellectual self-image. It is a unique way of understanding the mental abilities that distinguish we humans from other living things on earth. The pragmatist description of our mind and its relationship to the rest of the world is a relatively new one. It has its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. These philosophers, influenced by Darwinian biology among other things, redefined the (...) human mind. (shrink)

Confronts the Janus-faced myth of technology as both the object of dread and the source of hope, which leads both to the demonic final solution and to the merciful, healing sacrifice.

The text places special emphasis on the ethical co-operation that emerged between religious traditions during the civil right-Vietnam war era.

The purpose of this text is to draw attention to eight forgotten heroes: William C. Bagley, Charles DeGarmo, David Felmley, William Torrey Harris, Isaac L. Kandel, Charles McMurry, William C. Ruediger, and Edward Austin Sheldon. They have been marginalized from our profession, and drawing upon their legacy is the best hope for restoring the profession of teaching today. This work also includes a chapter at the end of the book entitled "John Dewey's Forgotten Essays." The audience for this book includes: (...) 1) classroom teachers, 2) school administrators, 3) teacher educators, 4) deans and other university administrators, 5) college and university presidents, 6) legislators, 7) historians of education, 8) curriculum specialists, 9) specialists in teacher training, and 10) the general public. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga titles the closing chapter of his book Warrant and Proper Function "Is Naturalism Irrational?" He answers that it is. More precisely, he claims that anyone who is aware of the epistemological argument that he presents in this chapter has an unavoidable reason to doubt the combination of naturalism (according to which there is no God as conceived of in traditional theism) and evolutionary theory (according to which our cognitive capabilities are the products of blind processes operating on genetic (...) variations). But then, he says, anyone who still accepts these propositions is irrational because it is irrational to accept a belief for which one knows there are unavoidable reasons to doubt. (shrink)

Critical realists would have us believe that representations have a connection to the world, that of truth or reference for example, which is independent of their usefulness to us. They would have us believe further that knowledge about this connection serves to put religion and science in their proper places with respect to one another. This essay raises pragmatic objections to these belief's.

Nancey Murphy claims that a shift in “thinking strategy” from modern to postmodern modes of thought makes it easier to exhibit the intellectual respectability of theology vis‐à‐vis the sciences. Her case for this proposition depends on modernist interests, most notably in systematizing the sciences for reasons that have their origin in Plato's divided line.

I will, first, describe my brand of pragmatism. Then, second, I will use it to discuss two beliefs that have played an important role in American religious history, the belief that America is a Christian nation and the belief in religious freedom.

We Americans put a lot of stock in ingenuity. We admire people who come up with better mousetraps or with better ways to predict economic cycles. William James, in his early essay "Great Men and Their Environment," was the first American pragmatist to suggest that there are interesting analogies between the roles that ingenious people play in social change and bearers of genetic variations play in biological evolution.(1) He proposed that the categories in terms of which we conduct various cultural (...) activities start as idiosyncratic "brainstorms" in the heads of individual human beings, much as Darwin theorized that species start as genetic variations in ancestral organisms. When these mental variations occur in a suitable environment, they may end as new forms of science, morality, art, or religion. Such new ideas enable their bearers to cope with the world differently, and perhaps more profitably, than their ancestors did before them. Social progress when it occurs is a function of the meliorative power of this fortuitous human creativity, not of anything preprogrammed with its own logic or method. (shrink)

This article draws upon the history of teacher education to provide an introduction to 4 competing pedagogical philosophies. These 4 philosophies battled for control over curriculum for teachers during the period from 1890 to 1930. I begin by defining curriculum for teachers to include the liberal, the professional, and the experiential dimensions. Then, I identify 4 interest groups that sought to gain power over curriculum for teachers. I categorize these interest groups as the traditionalists, the integrationists, the technicians, and the (...) romantics. Then, I explain how leading individuals from each interest group answered questions regarding human nature, the purpose of schooling, and curriculum for teachers. Finally, I argue that education schools should revitalize the integrationist tradition within pedagogical philosophy. This view has been forgotten for nearly 50 years, and the profession of teaching has suffered because of it. (shrink)

Pragmatism and critical realism are different vocabularies for talking about the cognitive value of religion and science. Each can be, and has been, used to make the case for cognitive parity between religious and scientific discourse. Critical realism presupposes a particular form of cognitive psychology that entails general skepticism about the external world and forecloses scientific inquiry in the name of a preconceived idea of what the nature of human cognition must be. Thus, of the two, pragmatism is the better (...) vocabulary for fostering mutual understanding between religion and science. (shrink)

This popular textbook has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect recent global developments, whilst retaining its unique and compelling narrative-style approach. Using ancient stories from diverse religions, it explores a broad range of important and complex moral issues, resulting in a truly reader-friendly and comparative introduction to religious ethics. A thoroughly revised and expanded new edition of this popular textbook, yet retains the unique narrative-style approach which has proved so successful with students Considers the ways in which ancient stories (...) from diverse religions, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the lives of Jesus and Buddha, have provided ethical orientation in the modern world Updated to reflect recent discussions on globalization and its influence on cross-cultural and comparative ethics, economic dimensions to ethics, Gandhian traditions, and global ethics in an age of terrorism Expands coverage of Asian religions, quest narratives, the religious and philosophical approach to ethics in the West, and considers Chinese influences on Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Buddhism, and Augustine's Confessions Accompanied by an instructor's manual which shows how to use the book in conjunction with contemporary films. (shrink)

The philosopher Michael Ruse accounts for the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives, and thus the origin of distinctively moral obligations like that of altruism, in genetic terms. This is part of an attempt to develop a philosophy that takes Darwin seriously by substituting respectable scientific entities, specifically those of evolutionary biology, for suspect theological or philosophical ones, like God or the transcendental ego, as a basis for addressing philosophical questions. Pragmatists take Darwin seriously, but in a very different way (...) from that proposed by Ruse. Darwin introduced a "logic" into the study of living things-including human beings, the human mind, and culture-that leads philosophers to ask new and different questions about morality rather than trying to supply new answers to the same old questions. This essay contrasts these two different ways of taking Darwin seriously for purposes of philosophy and claims certain advantages for the pragmatist way over Ruse's. (shrink)

Sheila Davaney’s Pragmatic Historicism provides yet another opportunity for us to discuss disagreements between two kinds of pragmatism. One, which I espouse, is a non-metaphysical pragmatism. It is rooted in James’s and Dewey’s appropriation of Darwinian biology for philosophical purposes and, more recently, Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. Richard Rorty is its most influential contemporary spokesman. The other is a metaphysical pragmatism. It is rooted in James’s radical empiricism and Whitehead’s process philosophy. In the Highlands Institute, William Dean and now (...) Davaney, among others, advocate versions of metaphysical pragmatism. (shrink)

Often a physician’s first introduction to a patient is not a physical encounter but a review of their chart. A glaring “violence risk” flag in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is often noticeable...

John Dewey's A Common Faith is an exercise in cultural innovation. In those lectures Dewey re-works some of the key words from traditional Christianity into vocabulary for what amounts to a new, humanistic, religion. Faith is made to be a matter of devotion to ideals that are imaginatively projected out of goods currently enjoyed. Divinity becomes a function, that of uniting ideals with one another and with actual conditions.

The organizers of the 1992 Highlands Institute seminar were kind enough to invite me to comment as a neo-pragmatist on John E. Smith's keynote paper "Experience, God, and Classical American Philosophy." It is my pleasure to do so. I read portions of both GOD AND EXPERIENCE and THE ANALOGY OF EXPERIENCE when they were published. I was impressed then, and continue to be impressed, with Professor Smith's intellectually responsible and powerful defense of Christianity, carried out, as it was, in a (...) philosophical environment where that was not the most popular thing to do. More recently, in preparation for this event, I have profited from reading THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, particularly the chapters on James and Dewey. And, I can only second his presidential call in "The New Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" for a live-and-let-live attitude amongst the cacophonous multitude of those of us who call ourselves "philosophers.". (shrink)

Events in 2020 have sparked a reimagination of how both individuals and institutions should consider race, power, health, and marginalization in society. In a response to these developments, we exa...