Eighteen Christian theologians and ethicists offer a rich engagement with the theological ethics of Glen Stassen (1936-2014).

Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers including Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. The book offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world.

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

The collected essays and consensus statements of the second round of the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue, and the second book of the series on Evangelicals and Catholics in dialogue. The essays address the Christian ideal of life lived in pursuit of the good that is God, and the witness and imitation of God's action in Christ, as a pathway to fruitful dialogue between Catholics and Evangelicals.

A crisis continues to brew within the pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) enterprise: productivity continues declining as costs rise, despite ongoing, often dramatic scientific and technical advances. To reverse this trend, we offer various suggestions for both the expansion and broader adoption of modeling and simulation (M&S) methods. We suggest strategies and scenarios intended to enable new M&S use cases that directly engage R&D knowledge generation and build actionable mechanistic insight, thereby opening the door to enhanced productivity. What M&S requirements (...) must be satisfied to access and open the door, and begin reversing the productivity decline? Can current methods and tools fulfill the requirements, or are new methods necessary? We draw on the relevant, recent literature to provide and explore answers. In so doing, we identify essential, key roles for agent-based and other methods. We assemble a list of requirements necessary for M&S to meet the diverse needs distilled from a collection of research, review, and opinion articles. We argue that to realize its full potential, M&S should be actualized within a larger information technology framework—a dynamic knowledge repository—wherein models of various types execute, evolve, and increase in accuracy over time. We offer some details of the issues that must be addressed for such a repository to accrue the capabilities needed to reverse the productivity decline. (shrink)

Just as it is impossible to understand the American religious landscape without some familiarity with evangelicalism, one cannot grasp the shape of contemporary Christian ethics without knowing the contributions of evangelical Protestants. This newest addition to the Library of Theological Ethics series begins by examining the core dynamic with which all evangelical ethics grapples: belief in an authoritative, inspired, and unchanging biblical text on the one hand, and engagement with a rapidly evolving and increasingly post-Christian culture on the other. It (...) explores the different roles that scholars and popular figures have played in forming evangelicals' understandings of Christian ethics. And it draws together the contributions of both senior and emerging figures in painting a portrait of this diverse, vibrant, and challenging theological and ethical tradition. This book represents the breadth of evangelical ethical voices, demonstrating that evangelical ethics involves nuance and theological insight that far transcend any political agenda. Contributors include David P. Gushee, Carl F. H. Henry, Jennifer McBride, Stephen Charles Mott, William E. Pannell, John Perkins, Soong-Chan Rah, Gabriel Salguero, Francis Schaeffer, Ron Sider, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Glen H. Stassen, Eldin Villafañe, Allen Verhey, Jim Wallis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and John Howard Yoder. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important, and otherwise unavailable, texts—English-language texts and translations that have fallen out of print, new translations, and collections of significant statements about problems and themes of special importance—in an easily accessible form. This series enables sustained dialogue on new and classic works in the field. (shrink)

In the Fray collects David Gushee's most significant essays over twenty years as a Christian intellectual. Most of the essays were written in situations of ethical conflict on the highly contested ground of Christian public ethics. Topics addressed include torture, climate change, marriage and divorce, the treatment of gays and lesbians in the church, war, genocide, nuclear weapons, race, global poverty, faith and politics, Israel/Palestine, and even whether Christian ethics is a real academic discipline. Quite visible in the collection is (...) Gushee's deep research interest in the Nazi era in Germany and how the churches fared in resisting Nazi intimidations and seductions and, finally, the Holocaust. All essays reflect the desire for a church that has learned the lessons of that period--a church with resistance to racism, militarism, nationalism, and other social-ideological toxins, and with the discernment and courage to resist these in favor of a courageous allegiance to the lordship of Christ at the time of testing. Considerable attention is directed to contesting some of the public ethics found in the author's own US evangelical Christian community. Concluding reflections on Gushee's ethical vision are offered in an illuminating essay by senior Christian ethicist Glen Harold Stassen. (shrink)

Ever since its original publication in 2003, Glen Stassen and David Gushee's Kingdom Ethics has offered students, pastors, and other readers an outstanding framework for Christian ethical thought, one that is solidly rooted in Scripture, especially Jesus's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. This substantially revised edition of Kingdom Ethics features enhanced and updated treatments of all major contemporary ethical issues. David Gushee's revisions include updated data and examples, a more global perspective, more gender-inclusive language, a clearer focus (...) on methodology, discussion questions added. (shrink)

This article interrogates the use of a Kingdom-of-God narrative frame, in the work both of progressive evangelicals Glen Stassen and David Gushee ( Kingdom Ethics) and in liberation theology, claiming that this narrative has often inspired hope and moral action but can be questioned on a variety of theological and methodological grounds. It considers startling recent claims by liberation ethicist Miguel De la Torre that all talk of a coming Kingdom of God is mythic, a middle-class illusion that undermines (...) radical commitment to ethical praxis for justice. Engagement with two classic liberationist texts (by Gustavo Gutiérrez and James Cone) confirms both that liberation theology offers a somewhat radicalized Kingdom-of-God narrative and that De la Torre’s new claims represent a clear break with liberationism. The article concludes by briefly considering options in eschatology for those who have heretofore invested considerable hope in an immanentist, participative, certainly-coming Kingdom-of-God narrative to ground their Christian ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Evangelical Peacemakers: Gospel Engagement in a War-Torn World ed. by David P. GusheeLisa Sowle CahillEvangelical Peacemakers: Gospel Engagement in a War-Torn World Edited by David P. Gushee EUGENE, OR: WIPF AND STOCK, 2013. 135 PP. $21.00This short volume collects papers from a 2012 Evangelicals for Peace conference at Georgetown University. This should not mislead potential readers as to the book's timeliness, coherence, significance, or ecumenical and interreligious appeal. (...) Much of its incisive analysis owes to the editor's preface, introductory chapter, and concluding critical discussion of the positions represented, including his own.Four chapters lay out the Christian arguments for just war, biblical pacifism, and the late Glen Stassen's "just peacemaking theory," presenting ten practices to deter or transform violent conflict. Although Gushee's chapter would have to be placed among just war theorists, he stresses that war must be a last resort to defend innocent life, carried out with the least violence possible. Gushee appreciates the paradox of expressing love through acts of violence. Lisa Sharon Harper insists this goes beyond paradox to outright denial of the redemption Jesus brings, failing to honor the image of God in all persons. Following Anglican theologian Oliver O'Donovan, Erik Patterson sees publicly authorized force to protect society as a positive Christian duty. Striving to unite these two sides in practice, Stassen derives alternative, nonviolent strategies from the Sermon on the Mount to transform conflict at the local, national, regional, and international levels.But are such efforts successful? Can and do Christian peacemakers actually bring about significant societal and political change? Twelve further chapters offer experience-based evidence from Evangelical organizations and ministries that the answer is yes. Authors describe initiatives at home and abroad, giving special attention to Christian–Muslim outreach and understanding. Examples range from Evangelical pastors and churches welcoming Muslims and mosques; to educational ventures in Pakistani madrassas; to organizing Afghan youth as "peace volunteers"; to conflict mediation in Egypt and Indonesia; and the memoir of a Lockerbie bombing victim's sister, who went personally to reconcile with Muammar Gaddafi. Sojourners editor Jim Wallis gives plenty of illustrations of the power in the United States of massive civil disobedience and efforts to pressure Congress or the president through letter and phone campaigns, protests, media attention, and high-level advocacy. Christian political resistance and mobilization can no longer be dismissed as utopian, naïve, or marginal. In many cases, it works.Gushee honestly and acutely articulates why pacifism and just war have had longstanding places in Christian political ethics, and why their adherents are [End Page 206] not easily reconciled. First, Jesus was nonviolent, and even those who construe rare and restrained violence as a form of neighbor love cannot deny that Jesus himself never expressed love in this way (121). Second, although Jesus calls disciples to participate in God's reign, that reign is but "eschatologically" present in a fallen world (119). Violence-transforming practices do not always work (125). Reconciling love may define kingdom discipleship, but when do we gauge love-in-action by the "present" reality of the kingdom, and when by the "not yet"? Third, according to Gushee, there is a difference (not separation) between church and government. This yields the conundrum that although their roles are different, Christians participate in both spheres, responsible not only for the peacemaking activities of the church but also for their social effects and for building just structures (5–6).Gushee does not claim to resolve these paradoxes. The collection underscores a more urgent challenge: to embody and expand Evangelical peacemaking as an integral dimension of discipleship and a powerful form of real-world politics. This book furthers theological-ethical analysis while leading scholars, students, and congregations to become active agents of change.Lisa Sowle CahillBoston CollegeCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. (shrink)

Ronald Aylmer Fisher is today remembered as a giant of twentieth-century statistics, genetics and evolutionary theory. Alongside his influential scientific contributions, he was also, throughout the interwar years, a prominent figure within Britain's eugenics movement. This essay provides a close examination of his eugenical ideas and activities, focusing particularly upon his energetic advocacy of family allowances, which he hoped would boost eugenic births within the more ‘desirable’ middle and upper classes. Fisher's proposals, which were grounded in his distinctive explanation for (...) the decay of civilizations throughout human history, enjoyed support from some influential figures in Britain's Eugenics Society and beyond. The ultimate failure of his campaign, though, highlights tensions both between the eugenics and family allowances movements, and within the eugenics movement itself. I show how these social and political movements represented a crucial but heretofore overlooked context for the reception of Fisher's evolutionary masterwork of 1930, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, with its notorious closing chapters on the causes and cures of national and racial decline. (shrink)

Glen Stassen has approached his life and work "as if Jesus mattered," and this new collection of essays in his honor demonstrates that the contributors share that commitment, each in her or his own way. Ethics as if Jesus Mattered will introduce Stassen's work to a new generation, advance dialogue and debate in Christian ethics, and inspire more faithful discipleship just as it honors one whom the contributors consider a mentor.

Consent documentation for research studies is often inaccessible to people with neurogenic communication disorders following brain injury and there is limited literature on specific modifications for informed consent. This exploratory study aimed to identify effective strategies and modifications to consent processes for adults with brain injury. Using a fictitious research study, we developed a set of Participant Information Sheets (PISs) varying in complexity, presentation format, and communication modality. Evaluations were conducted with eight participants. Findings indicated diverse participant preferences for PIS (...) modifications, suggesting simplified vocabulary, reduced text, carefully selected images, and an interactive presentation modality as helpful strategies. Building on previous literature, we present refined guidelines for consent modifications for adults with neurogenic communication disorder after brain injury. These guidelines can promote more appropriate inclusion of communicatively impaired populations in research and assist ethics committees and researchers in preparing modified consent documents. (shrink)

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Is it to be earned or can it be freely given? Is it a passion we cannot control, or something we choose to do? Glen Pettigrove explores the relationship between forgiving, understanding, and loving. He examines the significance of character for the debate, and revives the long-neglected virtue of grace.

Why do political philosophers shy away from politics? Glen Newey offers a challenging and original critique of liberalism, the dominant political philosophy of our time, tackling such key issues as state legitimacy, value-pluralism, neutrality, the nature of politics, public reason, and morality in politics. Analyzing major liberal theorists, Newey argues that liberalism bypasses politics because it ignores or misunderstands human motivation, and elevates academic systembuilding over political realities of conflict and power.

Toleration is becoming an increasingly questioned issue in modern democratic and multicultural societies and is debated within the academic disciplines of politics, history and cultural and literary studies. In this book Glen Newey systematically analyses toleration in relation to broader issues in meta-ethical theory and offers a new, rigorous philosophical theory of toleration as a virtue. A wide range of questions in ethical theory is addressed, including ethical responsibility, character and virtue, the nature of reasons for action, the acts/omissions (...) doctrine, and the nature of normativity itself. This analysis offers a new understanding of the limits of moral theory, and reveals problems with understanding toleration philosophically and with implementing it politically. As a unique contribution to the toleration debate, this book will be of importance to all those with an interest in political theory, philosophy and ethics.* An original and highly sophisticated analysis of toleration* Unique in applying toleration to meta-ethical theory* Covers a broad range of questions in ethical theory* Toleration is a key issue in political theory and also outside the academy - issues of censorship and political correctness, etc. remain strongly to the fore. (shrink)

Political disputes over toleration are endemic, while toleration as a political value seems opposed to those of civic equality, neutrality and sometimes democracy. Toleration in Political Conflict sets out to understand toleration as both politically awkward and indispensable. The book exposes the incoherence of Rawlsian reasonable pluralist justifications of toleration, and shows that toleration cannot be fully reconciled with liberal political values. While raison d'état concerns very often overshadow debates over toleration, these debates – for example about terrorism – need (...) not be framed as a conflict between toleration and security. Framing them in this way tends to obscure objectionable behaviour by tolerators themselves, and their reliance on asymmetric power. Glen Newey concludes by sketching a picture of politics as dependent on free speech which, he argues, is entailed by the demands of free association. That in turn suggests that questions of toleration are inescapable within the conditions of politics itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In virtually every corner of ethics—including discussions of value, practical reasoning, moral psychology, and justice—it is common for theorists to suggest that our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the objects or events to which they are responding. I argue that there is a fundamental problem with these approaches: they overlook the character of the agent and what it adds to the equation. I show that a commitment to proportionality is at (...) odds with both ordinary and admirable instances of love, ambition, and forgiveness. To make room for disproportional attitudes and actions, I introduce a novel account of virtue and its relation to value. (shrink)

If asked to generate a list of virtues, most people would not include meekness. So it is surprising that Hume not only deems it a virtue, but one whose 'tendency to the good of society no one can doubt of.' After explaining what Hume and his contemporaries meant by "meekness", the paper proceeds to argue that meekness is a virtue we, too, should endorse.

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face (...) of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature on forgiveness it is almost universally assumed that only the victim of a wrong has the standing to forgive. This paper challenges that assumption and argues for the possibility of meaningful second- and third-party forgiveness.

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari are utilized to help construct a 32 dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities and perspectives. In applying the framework to the (...) Google–copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was “born political”: in that it was, and still is, disposed by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where “politics is born”: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of ‘recognition’ — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, ‘recognition’ has now come to occupy a central (...) place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka, Simon Keller, and Julia Annas have recently argued that virtue ethics is self-effacing. I contend that these arguments are rooted in a mistaken understanding of the role that ideal agency and agent flourishing (should) play in virtue ethics. I then show how a virtue ethical theory can avoid the charge of self-effacement and why it is important that it do so.

Etzioni has recently proposed that the success of Internet enabled commerce is surprising due to what I label the “trust in strangers” problem. In here responding to Etzioni, I argue that the “trust in strangers” problem effectively dissolves once it is recognized that current manifestations of Internet commerce are not associated with high levels of anonymity, but rather, with high levels of surveillance. In doing so, I first outline how data capitalism and security considerations have contributed to Internet surveillance being (...) close to ubiquitous. Following this, I differentiate between three types of surveillance—i.e. top-down, bottom-up, networked—that many people who digitally connect rely upon. In concluding, I emphasize my basic argument. Namely, that it is “trust in surveillance”, rather than “trust in strangers”, that supports current manifestations of commerce online. (shrink)