In her paper ‘Mercy Not Sacrifice: Toward a Celtic Theology’ delivered in Dublin in 1996, Mary Condren began by addressing the problem of ‘a way of knowing’, that is, the concept of knowing and the relationship between power and knowledge, asking, ‘When we yearn for a Celtic or female way of knowing what is the fundamental impulse behind it, what is the longing behind it? What is the myth behind it?’[1]Is it possible to look to the Celtic past (...) for answers or does any epistemology emanating from a colonized people, need to be examined carefully in regard to the inherent power politics and the question as to who owns the past? Can the myth of a pristine past be used to empower? (shrink)

Western practices and theories of the sacred have been ritually performed and culturally elaborated mostly by male theorists who ignored the historical exclusion of women from sacral arenas. Shaped by male morphologies, their practices and descriptions quickly became prescriptions for theological rectitude and/or healthy social functioning. Women's exclusion appears to have been essential rather than epiphenomenal to the political and ecclesiastical structures established. Through the lens of Sigmund Freud, in this article I will attempt to analyse why the question as (...) to how the Western sacred has been achieved, defined, and elaborated is inherently antithetical to the future of the earth and of women. I will argue that Freud's focus on repression rather than nurture enables the Western sacred to forge gender dichotomies and legitimize those forms of religious and political mentalities that now carry lethal capacities. For that reason, we need to de-construct its most dangerous capacities, challenge the toxic stories, develop spiritual and disciplinary practices that nurture human creativity, foster independent thinking, and radically address the acute gendered imbalance that currently pervades the religious and political social imaginary. I argue that a feminist call for mere equality within existing theological or political frameworks fails to do justice to the issues at stake. I will then point briefly to some alternative approaches to the sacred mentioned above in the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray; anthropologist, Peggy Reeves Sanday; Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, and artist, psychoanalyst and theorist, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the work of Irish feminist theologian Mary Condren. Her book, The Serpent and the Goddess, offers a thought-provoking treatment of the Irish situation and provides a solid starting point for the consideration of my topic, which is the potential for liberative responses to the rise of the Celtic Tiger—the economic boom that Ireland underwent during the 1990s. Ireland is interestingly placed as a country with a firm Catholic identity, a repressive history (...) of conquest, a history of widespread poverty, a rich cultural heritage and now a strong economic life. These factors are analysed in the context of feminist liberation theology. (shrink)

'Journey Towards the Goddess' is a personal narrative tracing the writer's path from the space left by a Christian faith that has become irrelevant, through a series of earth-based, feminine-orientated experiences and brief spiritual encounters with non-human life forms and with the non-physical world, towards an openness to the divine feminine in its pre-Christian and post-Christian guises. Citing Quaker sources as well as Starhawk, the anthropologist Felicitas Goodman and feminist theologians such as Mary Condren and Beverly Wildung Harrison, (...) she arrives at a conviction that goddess theology is not only valid but may be an essential component of a morally responsible spiritual outlook in the twenty-first century. The author is a poet and fic tion writer, and has also written two books that offer the non-judgmental life narrative as a way of spiritual understanding. (shrink)

Using the terms "cosmology" and "cultivation," the religious nature of Confucianism is explored, beginning with a discussion of the ambiguity surrounding Confucianism and its political uses, which often obscure its religious dimensions. It is also assumed that categories of Western theology such as immanence and transcendence are not adequate to describe Confucianism as religious. In this spirit, it is suggested that beyond political distortions or theoretical interpretations, Confucianism has religious dimensions that need to be explored further. The interaction of the (...) microcosm of the self with the macrocosm of the universe is a central dialectic for establishing inner and outer harmony. Thus, cultivating oneself, responding morally to the social and political order, and resonating with the patterns in nature are at the heart of Confucian religiosity. This is illustrated by two examplars of the Japanese Neo-Confucian tradition: Yamazaki Ansai (1618-1682) and Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714). (shrink)

The traditional Christian teaching is that engaging in sexual activity, whether heterosexual or homosexual, outside the marriage of one man and one woman is sinful. In direct contrast, there are those in the Church who quite recently have begun to insist that the traditional teachings concerning sexual sin need to be changed. In particular, the effort is being made to have the Church accept homosexual behavior as not sinful or problematic in any way—at least not for committed homosexuals, as comparable (...) to committed heterosexuals in a marriage. As we all know, this relatively recent view has been promoted heavily in the media and popular culture, and even by our national government. As we make our observations, we will particularly focus on traditional Orthodox Christianity as the fullness of the truth and, thus, the source of the true alternative to this “new” outlook that is gripping much of popular Western culture today. (shrink)

Demonstrates the dramatic interplay of elements that comprise the concepts of norm, bisexuality, and development.

I argue that in her first novel Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector puts forth a critique of Baruch Spinoza’s idea of freedom from Books IV and V of the Ethics. Although scholars have noted that Lispector was influenced by Spinoza, and that she quoted the Ethics in Near to the Wild Heart, none have yet explored her critical engagement with Spinozism. I argue that through the intimate relationship of two characters in Near to the Wild Heart, both of (...) whom strive to be free in Spinozist terms but fail, Lispector shows that freedom must depend on more than reason alone. For Lispector, I argue, freedom depends additionally on circumstances such as human relationships and societal structures. I give biographical background to establish Lispector’s stake in the question of what freedom means and how it can be achieved, then explore the ways her two respective characters, Otávio and Joana, strive yet fail to be free. (shrink)

**** Revision of the second edition of 1983 (cited in BCL3). Now arranged in chronological order, with a new introduction and headnotes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Should Medicaid pay for supportive housing for homeless persons? After describing current limits on how states can use Medicaid funds to support housing, this article considers whether justice requires treating Medicaid recipients residing in nursing homes and Medicaid recipients needing supportive housing similarly.

The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has declared that to achieve accredited status, “engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility.” Many engineering professors struggle to integrate this required ethics instruction in technical classes and projects because of the lack of a formalized ethics-in-design approach. However, one methodology developed in human-computer interaction research, the Value-Sensitive Design approach, can serve as an engineering education tool which bridges the gap between design and ethics (...) for many engineering disciplines. The three major components of Value-Sensitive Design, conceptual, technical, and empirical, exemplified through a case study which focuses on the development of a command and control supervisory interface for a military cruise missile. (shrink)

Pindar, perhaps more than any other ancient poet, seems to demand from his interpreters declarations of their critical premises. In recent years scholars customarily have made initial acknowledgment to the work of E. R. Bundy, as psychoanalysts must to Freud, before they begin to offer their own modifications to and expansions of his fundamental work. Much contemporary scholarship has concentrated on the identification and classification in the odes of the elements whose function Bundy labelled and explained. But useful as this (...) type of analysis has been for exorcising the demon of biographical interpretation, it has, like all orthodoxies, prevented perception of other equally important truths. It constitutes no radical heterodoxy to try to account for the fact that each individual ode, for all its dependence on common conventions of structure and of content, makes a different impression. Nor is it unreasonable to try to explain what makes Pindar's style and approach distinctive.In my own work I have argued, though perhaps not always convincingly, that language as well as structure contributes to an ode's coherence. Scholars trained in America are more willing to assume that repetition of phrase or theme within a poem has significance, and that metaphors can simultaneously bear more than one connotation. The issues at stake have most recently been delineated by Michael Silk, in his discussion of the effect of metaphor in archaic poetry: ‘By “patent”, I mean effects whose existence is not in doubt, though their character may be disputed; by “latent”, those whose effective significance is so tenuous or marginal that one resents the impression of solidity that even mentioning them produces. Such insensitivity is more common than it should be among American classicists, many of whom have also been influenced by the “New Criticism”…’ As illustration of the erroneous American approach Silk cites Cedric Whitman's description of the thematic relation of fires in theIliad.Silk himself avoids the trap Whitman falls into by considering only ‘patent’ metaphors, and these consistentlyout of context, so that there is no necessity to comment on the existence or non-existence of thematic connections among them. But it is possible—at least logically—to frame the question differently, and to ask whether a metaphor cannot have patent and latent associations at the same time. (shrink)

L'A. s'inquiète au sujet du tour que prend le projet de la déclaration universelle des droits de l'homme depuis quelques années, notamment dans son recours croissant au domaine international. Il expose la vision de 1948 de ce projet, puis prend en compte le fait que la protection familiale se déconstruit pour enfin envisager le rôle des catholiques dans le projet des droits universels des droits de l'homme.