It is now well documented that biology needs morphometrics. Morphometrics can provide useful and often unexpected information about development and growth, functional—especially mechanical—adaptation, and evolutionary difference and relationship. Such studies often apply coordinate data from anatomical landmarks. Recently semi-landmarks and sliding landmarks increase information content, especially of apparently featureless regions . Yet, how we landmark our materials limits the results we get and the questions we ask. Here we show different landmarking schemes leading to different equivalences between specimens and different (...) results. Geometric morphometric methods often treat landmarks as points on rubber sheets. Distortions of the sheets are often visualized by techniques like thin plate splines showing changes or differences as stretches or contractions. The statistics of morphometrics can handle these. Further consideration of anatomical landmarks, however, implies that real biologies are sometimes more complex. Sometimes two-dimensional rubber sheets of anatomies contain cusps or holes representing appearances or disappearances of structures. In three dimensions, equivalent rubber blocks may show not only appearances or disappearances but also reversals of positions of structures. Such phenomena are generally ignored in landmarks and analyses. We show that in some cases morphometrics can take account of such matters. But we also suggest that sometimes these modifications from elastic analogues are so complex that new methods may be required for our morphometric packages. It is in this sense that improvement of morphometrics needs deeper understanding of biology. (shrink)

Abstract: The systemic role of corruption and its link to low human development is explored. The extractive resource industry is presented as an arena where conditions for corruption—monopoly and discretion without accountability—are especially intense. Corruption is maintained by a self-reinforcing cycle. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the maintenance of and/or opposition to the cycle: investing corporations, host country regimes and officials, inter-governmental bodies like the OECD, industry associations, non-governmental organization (NGO) watchdogs like Transparency International, and international agencies facilitating global investment (...) like the World Bank. Complementarity of interests between the demand and supply sides provides strong incentives for entrenched players to maintain corruptive relationships, to protect past gains and sustain current ones. Compulsory international regulation, maximum transparency, effective detection, and enforcement are recommended to enhance accountability, thereby reversing the cycle. It is also necessary to create a corporate culture built on integrity, if regulation itself is to succeed. (shrink)

This paper examines moral misconduct and recidivism at the corporate level. We analyze the factors that facilitate moral transgressions and why some companies appear to be serial offenders. We propose that negative learning is a core process that encourages repeat misconduct. We offer a framework of negative learning, grounded in a case example. The framework also suggests circumstances that reverse the vicious selfreinforcing cycle of negative learning, so companies learn to adopt a more ethical stance when faced with moral choices.

The human resources profession emphasizes the personal and interpersonal aspects of work, that make it conscious of complex ethical issues in relationships in the workplace, while finance specialists are conversant with routine compliance with regulations. Marketing professionals are under pressure to produce revenue results. Thus, this research hypothesized that human resources managers would be more disapproving of unethical conduct than both finance and marketing functional managers, and that finance managers would be more disapproving than marketing managers. When asked to evaluate (...) instances of unethical behavior in vignettes, human resources and finance managers were both significantly more disapproving than marketing managers. However, human resources managers were not significantly more disapproving than finance managers. Explanations for the results lie in the divergent antecedent conditions, objectives, perceptions of ethical problems and demands of the various functions. Alternative behavior patterns to resolve ethical dilemmas and expected consequences by the different functions also define their ethical orientations. Average responses on the disapproving side from all three functional groups are explained by two complementary trends that promote ethical awareness among all functional managers. One is the adoption of homogeneous conventions in ethical business practice. The other trend is the increase in ethical awareness specific to each of the functional professions. (shrink)

The Ireland Report is based on in-depth interviews, in person or online, with representatives from 10 university business schools and 6 business and professional training organisations. Terminology and key recurring concepts, focus areas of business ethics, themes in teaching, training and research in business ethics, and what are considered to be major business ethical concerns in the next five years—all point to the growing importance of the topics of sustainability, climate change, diversity, responsible management and leadership, business and society and (...) the digital revolution in university business schools and professional training organisations, reflected in their teaching, training and research activities. In university business schools, the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) feature strongly, as does an awareness of conforming to standards for the sake of accreditations. While it is not without its challenges and cynical resistance, in general, it is accepted that ethical issues cannot be ignored and have to become an inherent part of universities business schools myriad activities and professional business training organisations to remain relevant. (shrink)

This article presents a descriptive conceptual framework comprising four different company configurations with respect to orientations toward corporate social responsibility (CSR). The four types are Skeptical, Pragmatic, Engaged, and Idealistic. The framework is grounded in instrumental and normative stakeholder theory, and a company's configuration is based on its instrumental and/or normative stance toward stakeholders. Its configuration indicates what position a company adopts in relation to CSR. This article argues that there is no one formula to fit all companies, descriptively or (...) prescriptively, but the potential variety in approaches to CSR is not infinite, as it can be distilled logically into a few fundamental approaches, embodied in the four organizational configurations presented in the conceptual framework. Each configuration constitutes a middlerange theory of interlocking characteristics in terms of CSR, and so each type of company will assume responsibilities to civil society in ways consistent with its configurational characteristics. The framework incorporates previous empirical findings and theoretical explanations. It is intuitively clear and reasonable to managers, and thus, has practical value in organizational management. (shrink)

Person-centered Politics, in dialogue with some of major contemporary philosophers and thinkers, proposes a renewed vision of politics by presenting a renewal of the real social and transcendent dimensions of personal existence.

This study draws on and extends contingency theory, in relation to stakeholder theory to understand the corporate social performance and financial performance link, by evaluating under what circumstances CSP influences CFP. Contingencies include stakeholder configurations/salience and crisis conditions. Using differentiated measures of CSP, this study examined financial effects of various specific stakeholder facing activities pre- and post-crisis in the food/beverage and pharmaceutical industries, and in firms selling search versus experience goods. The results indicate that pre-crisis CSP is related to post-crisis (...) financial effects, but the relationships are dependent on the interactions among the contingencies studied, so investments in certain social areas improve CFP, whereas others may hurt it. This confirms that a finer grained approach should be taken to the examination of CSP and CFP. On a practical basis, it shows that deep stakeholder knowledge and attention to complementary factors to CSP, such as advertising, must be understood, so CSP activities are of benefit to the firm. (shrink)

Mike accidentally knocked against a bottle. Seeing that the bottle was about to fall, Jack was just about to catch it when Peter accidentally knocked against him, making Jack unable to catch it. Jack did not grab the bottle, and it fell to the ground and spilled. In double-prevention cases like these, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike tend to judge that Mike knocking into the bottle caused the beer to spill and that Peter knocking into Jack did not cause the beer (...) to spill. This difference in causal judgment is a difficult puzzle for counterfactual theories of causal judgment; if each event had not happened, the outcome would not have, yet there is a difference in people’s causal judgments. In four experiments and three supplemental experiments, we confirm this difference in causal judgments. We also show that differences in people’s counterfactual thinking can explain this difference in their causal judgments and that recent counterfactual models of causal judgment can account for these patterns. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking and causal modeling. (shrink)

This article makes a case for wide reflective equilibrium in doing African epistemology. It argues that on the issue of formulating a viable theory of knowledge, such an approach is more promising than the extant dominant approaches, namely the method of ethno-epistemology and the method of particularistic studies. More specifically, wide reflective equilibrium articulates a proper balance between philosophy and culture and endows a theory of knowledge with multiple sources of normativity.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 60, Issue 2, Page 154-172, June 2022.

According to an influential characterisation of reflective equilibrium, it is a kind of algorithm for licensing explicitly normative claims in philosophical inquiries. Call this the machine-view of reflective equilibrium. The machine-view implies a causal relation between input and output data that is devoid of human agency in any significant sense. In this paper, I argue for a neo-Aristotelian alternative view. According to this view, the judgement that is called forth in the decision procedure of reflective equilibrium is a rational response (...) of an epistemic agent, which integrates the whole of her character as a knower, both cognitive and affective, and which cannot be reduced to the explicit following of rules or an algorithm. Unlike the machine-view, this alternative account is able to support the dynamic structure and the normative status of the decision procedure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Buddhists and Christians Through Comparative Theology and SolidarityPaul O. IngramBuddhists and Christians Through Comparative Theology and Solidarity. By James L. Fredericks. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. xiv + 134 pp.This elegantly written book is not only a call to Christians to act in solidarity with persons of other faith traditions as well as persons professing no religious identity inmatters of social, economic, and ecological injustice. It is also (...) a challenge posed directly to Christians to create new forms of interreligious solidarity that can empower political and social solidarity with other religious communities. Of course, interreligious solidarity requires interreligious dialogue, but Fredericks seeks to [End Page 223] deepen the Christian theological underpinnings of interreligious dialogue by delineating a model of theology of religions that moves beyond the usual exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist models. He calls this model "comparative theology of religions."Given the fact of religious pluralism that necessitates living out one's own particular faith tradition surrounded by faithful persons who religiously dwell in other faith traditions, and given the emerging realities of globalization, no religious tradition can remain in isolation from any other religious tradition nor from the growing secularization that challenges persons of faith wherever persons of faith are found on this planet. The issue is not the emergence of a new global religion that will supercede Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism. Fredericks argues that the contrary is the case: as globalization and secularization erodes national, civic, and religious identity everywhere, interreligious solidarity that does not wash over the diversity of religious traditions becomes more important as a source of personal and communal identity, meaning, and purpose.Since the meaning of "solidarity" depends on how one understands the practice of interreligious dialogue and the theological models through which interreligious dialogue is practiced, Fredericks expends much effort describing and critiquing the exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist models of theology of religions. Strictly speaking, as Fredericks notes, "theology of religions" is not an issue for other religious traditions. Appropriating the words of Martin Luther, "this is most certainly true." Given the universal claims of Christian theology about the significance of the Incarnation and the notion that Christ is the only way to salvation, non-Christian traditions do not face the same exclusivist or inclusivist issues in their dialogues with other religious persons. This traditional Christian claim makes theology of religions a distinctively Christian problem.Fredericks's main criticism of exclusivist and inclusivist theologies are that both models are "replacement theologies" because (1) they either argue for the "replacement" of all non-Christian traditions with a form of Christian tradition, either Catholic or some form of Protestant tradition, or (2) they replace non-Christian traditions by assuming that what is good and true in these traditions is found most completely in Christian tradition. Much Protestant theology is exclusivist, and the current theological stance of Roman Catholicism is inclusivist. Both approaches are thoroughly nondialogical and thereby incapable of promoting Christian solidarity with non-Christians, and Fredericks's arguments in this regard are exceptionally cogent.But the trouble with pluralist theologies of religion, Fredericks argues, is that they "require Christians to recognize that Jesus is not the full revelation of God to the World. God is always more. Christians need to pay attention to other religious traditions in order to learn more of God" (p. 9). The idea of the incompleteness of God's revelation in Jesus doesn't make this revelation less true. But theological pluralism does make it difficult for Christians to be faithful to the depth and fullness of Christian faith and experience. In so doing, it fosters a debilitating theological relativism that often falsifies both Christian traditions and the non-Christian traditions with which one is engaged in dialogue. Given the relativist theology inherent in pluralist [End Page 224] theologies, it is difficult to see, Fredericks concludes, how theological pluralism can promote interreligious solidarity.So how should Christians understand the nature of religious pluralism and thereby enter into dialogue with faithful non-Christians in order to create religious solidarity, a sort of unity in diversity that aids all religious persons in confronting issues of injustice that are not religion-specific and haunt all religious human... (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—that is, judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects are (...) not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

Plato’s Menexenus is a persistent puzzle for interpreters, in the main because of its obscurity of purpose and apparent lack of philosophical matter. This article argues that, while no doubt an elusive piece, it can be counted quite definitely a sdialogue of philosophical import, as well as one of its author’s most subtly accomplished works. The article focuses on two portions of Aspasia’s oration—the account of the earliest Athenians and the exhortation to the living in the voice of the dead—to (...) demonstrate the radical nature of the speech. Close attention to its subtle internal dynamic reveals not only the range of philosophical themes touched upon, but also its outrageous aspects and the strength of its indictment of the Athenian democracy. The article also affirms the consistency of this critique with Plato’s reservations regarding that regime as expressed with most force and clarity in Republic and Gorgias. (shrink)

To several critics of the philosophical method of cases—Robert Cummins, Jonathan Weinberg and his colleagues, and Avner Baz—the fact that philosophical intuitions cannot be calibrated means that we cannot rule out the skeptical hypothesis that the outcome of our theorizing based on these intuitions is deeply distorted by our cognitive artifacts. Moreover, they take this hypothesis to license the negative conclusion that we are unable to have much of the armchair knowledge we typically attribute to ourselves when philosophizing based on (...) appeal to philosophical intuitions. This paper addresses this skeptical argument and shows how this negative conclusion can be resisted. (shrink)

This paper does three interrelated things. First, it argues that the universalism that forms the target of criticism and attack by decolonial theorists from the Global South is a debased form of universalism, what might be termed “ethnocentric universalism.” Second, equipped with a conceptual grip on ethnocentric universalism, it shows that the picture on which ethnocentric universalism confers some innocuous epistemic privilege to members of dominant groups is not quite accurate—ethnocentric universalism is incompatible with the epistemic flourishing of members of (...) dominant groups. And third, based on that claim, and the additional consideration that ethnocentric universalism equally undermines the epistemic flourishing of members of historically marginalized groups, it proposes an emancipatory framework for engaging with it. (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...) are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

Ethnophilosophy is widely regarded as a disreputable orientation in African philosophy. For example, critics of ethnophilosophy think of it as a ‘defective philosophy’, a ‘semi-anthropological paraphrase’, a merely ‘implicit philosophy ’, a ‘crazed language’ and so on. Although these negative portrayals were made in the 1980s and 1990s (roughly, 1981–1997), and some of these critics softened their position with time, they persist in the thoughts of some contemporary African philosophers. This is visible in the rather inarticulate unease about ethnophilosophy in (...) many quarters today, witnessed in the characteristic disposition of some African philosophers to distance themselves from the works of Placide Tempels, John S. Mbiti, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Alexis Kagame, and in the talk of a post-ethnophilosophy among some contemporary African philosophers rooted in the belief about the inadequacy of ethnophilosophy. Call those who today still think of ethnophilosophy in this fashion the ethnophilosophy holdouts. The aim of this paper is to give reasons to think that the position of the ethnophilosophy holdouts is not tenable. More positively, I defend a thesis that makes a claim about the positive status of ethnophilosophy as a philosophical orientation. (shrink)

This case study describes the design, learning experiences, and student outcomes in one Instructional Design course with an explicit focus on globally competent teaching. We make the argument that forefronting global competence in an Instructional Design course, prior to social studies methods, is a necessary precursor to accelerate students’ progress on a pathway towards teaching for global competence. In support of this argument, we (a) describe the ways in which an Instructional Design course in one university forefronted global competence; (b) (...) explain the short- and long-term outcomes of this design; and (c) highlight four students to illustrate how the Instructional Design course helped to move students along a pathway towards global competence. We nest our approach within a globally competent teaching framework. (shrink)

Practices of concept-revision among scientists seem to indicate that concepts can be improved. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union revised the concept "Planet" so that it excluded Pluto, and insisting that the result was an improvement. But what could it mean for one concept or conceptual scheme to be better than another? Here we draw on the theory of epistemic utility to address this question. We show how the plausibility and informativeness of beliefs, two features that contribute to their utility, (...) have direct correlates in our concepts. These are how inclusive a concept is, or how many objects in an environment it applies to, and how homogeneous it is, or how similar the objects that fall under the concept are. We provide ways to measure these values, and argue that in combination they can provide us with a single principle of concept utility. The resulting principle can be used to decide how best to categorize an environment, and can rationalize practices of concept revision. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 214-217 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: Creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: Creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World. Edited by Dennis Hirota. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 257 pp. One of the lessons I learned from Martin (...) Luther is about "vocation." Basically, one's "vocation" is to express love and compassion toward all through engagement with the structures of existence that hinder justice through whatever social or occupational role (one's "calling") one occupies. In Luther's theology, there is no privileged ecclesiastical institution, no privileged theological class, and in his better moments, no privileged doctrinal system that mediates God's grace—meaning God's love and compassion. Instead, grace meets us where we are in the midst of whatever our "calling" might be; our "vocation" is to serve others in community through our callings: teacher, pastor, parent, physician, farmer, clerk, politician, or any other honest occupations by which persons make their way in the world. Luther's ideas of vocation—part of his doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers"—functioned as part of his critique of received medieval Christian tradition; it remains a defining theological principle of Protestant thought that Paul Tillich called the "Protestant principle."Being critical of Christian tradition is still widely practiced in mainline Protestant circles, even though Protestantism since Luther has produced absolutized forms of Luther's original critique of Christian tradition. My own Lutheran tradition is as guilty of this sort of idolatry as other Christian traditions. But the best of Protestant thought and practice has always generated critical attitudes in many theologians. So each generation of mainline Protestant theological reflection since Luther rejects, even as it builds upon, the work of previous generations, sometimes even retrieving elements of earlier tradition that their predecessors had rejected—as Luther retrieved Pauline-Augustinian notions of grace as a means of critiquing the sale of indulgences and the entire sacramental system of medieval Catholicism. [End Page 214]So as a Lutheran who believes that the process of personal and corporate self-criticism is an expression of faith, and that every attempt to absolutize any given form of tradition or religious practice is idolatry and constitutes nonfaith, I am always interested in learning how other religious traditions encourage personal and corporate self-criticism. As a Lutheran who happens to be a historian of religions engaged in interreligious dialogue, especially with Buddhists, and who has also thought and written about Pure Land Buddhism, I am especially intrigued when I encounter self-criticism similar to the Protestant principle at work in a form of Buddhism I deeply admire.Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhismis a collection of essays that evolved from a 1989 symposium planned by Dennis Hirota and sponsored by the Institute for Buddhist Studies that was held in Berkeley on campuses affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union. The focus of the conference—and of this volume—was constructive criticism of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist tradition. The essayists—three Buddhists and two Christians—share the conference's two convictions: (1) Pure Land Buddhism has a significant contribution to make to life in the contemporary world, and (2) Pure Land teachings and practices in the forms in which they are commonly communicated appear alien to contemporary persons both East and West. The structure of this collection flows from these convictions: first, three Pure Land authors (Dennis Hirota, John S. Yokota, and Musashi Tachikawa) offer three distinct proposals for deconstructing and reconstructing Pure Land Buddhism so that practitioners can more adequately reflect on contemporary intellectual and social circumstances as the context for faithful practice in a global context of religious and secularism pluralism, followed by critical comments on the Pure Land Buddhist proposals by two Christian theologians (Gordon D. Kaufman and John B. Cobb Jr.), and concluding with reconsiderations of their original proposals by the three Pure Land... (shrink)

Champions of the methodological movement of experimental philosophy have challenged the long-standing practice of relying on intuitive verdicts on cases in philosophical inquiry. They argue that th...

This book explores the complex questions associated with health care, technology, peacemaking, and other twenty-first century ethical issues. It provokes critical thought and a renewed awareness of the need to uncover unexamined assumptions that can impact decision making, while holding in tension the fact that there are no perfect answers to these issues. The essays offer substance for study and stimulate religious and ethical analysis.

B Corporations are for-profit companies meeting specific social and environmental standards. This exploratory study into B Corporations aims to enhance the understanding of the certification on organizational performance. As previous research indicates that third party labels impact financial performance and that positive corporate social performance can lead to positive financial performance, this paper first seeks to determine whether B Corporation Certification positively impacts companies’ financial performance. Second, following previous B Corporation literature, this research tests whether certification leads to positive non-financial (...) results in the form of strategic advantages. Finally, it asks whether Certification negatively impacts organizations’ plans to develop internationally and/or by going public. While this study’s results provide little support that B Corporation Certification impacts organizations’ financial performance or growth, they do indicate that B Corporations experience positive non-financial strategic results post certification. The results of this study may be used to infer or test conclusions about socially responsible labels more broadly in the future. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reply to Sandra Costen Kunz's "Respecting the Boundaries of Knowledge"Paul O. IngramI am gratified by Sandra Costen Kunz's application of my thoughts on boundary constraints and my call for a Buddhist-Christian-science "trilogue" to her work in spiritual formation within the context of Protestant theological education. Over the past fifteen years I have witnessed numerous examples of what process theologians call "creative transformation" in contemporary science-religion dialogue. To this (...) date, creative transformation has occurred mainly among Christian theologians involved in this particular dialogue. But Buddhists are now beginning to engage the natural sciences in serious conversation. Most of this conversation is with the neurosciences because of Buddhism's strong emphasis on meditation and the fact that the physical realities described in scientific theory imply that nature—from the level of quantum events to the larger-scale structures of the universe—is interdependent and "empty" of permanency. I have argued, as has Kunz, that the New Testament reflects this same view of existence. But it is also true that classical Christian theological tradition, which presupposes Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic substance categories, is in conflict with biblical anthropology and portrayals of God. Process theology, science-theology dialogue, and Buddhist-Christian dialogue have clarified the biblical foundations of Christian faith apart from classical theism, at least among Christian liberal theologians. In my view, it is now time to deepen the process of creative transformation occurring in Buddhist-Christian dialogue by including the natural sciences as a third dialogical partner.Kunz's essay is an example of possibilities of creative transformation and dialogical engagement with the sciences; in her case, the cognitive sciences and Buddhism. She notes that in similarity with most theologians, most scientists are caught up in a Cartesian mind-body dualism. The result is that scientific accounts of mental processes tend to reduce subjective experience to the physical processes occurring in regions of the brain coupled with ignoring what meditators actually say they are experiencing, which scientists sometimes hold to be epiphenomenal. Kunz does not accept this dualism because it not only misrepresents reality, it undercuts the disciplines of spiritual discernment. She argues that combining third-person cognitive [End Page 187] scientific accounts of subjective experiences with Buddhist or Christian first-person descriptions of what is experienced in the disciplines of meditation or contemplative prayer offers a more comprehensive, more accurate account of meditative and contemplative experience. B. Alan Wallace draws a similar conclusion in regard to Buddhist meditation.1Although acknowledging that Christians have much to learn from Buddhist "discernment practices," distinctively Christian forms of meditation are rooted in the conviction that God's nature as love proclaimed by the historical Jesus is active in any situation. Kunz notes that Christian processes of spiritual discernment engendered by centering and contemplative prayer can be described as "making decisions" that correspond to the sorts of decisions the historical Jesus is portrayed as making in the New Testament: unselfish decisions for the common good. This means that authentic Christian faith is experienced and lived at the boundaries of ordinary conventional concerns. Or, to paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), when God as Jesus experienced God calling a person, God calls that person to his or her death. Sometimes an actual death, but always to life lived at the boundaries beyond mere conventionality. As a Lutheran, I can only agree.Paul O. IngramPacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)note1. B. Alan Wallace, Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). [End Page 188]Copyright © 2011 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Other Side of Nothingness: Toward a Theology of Radical OpennessPaul O. IngramThe Other Side of Nothingness: Toward a Theology of Radical Openness. By Beverly J. Lanzetta. Albany: State University of New York, 2001. 182 pp.The central thesis of The Other Side of Nothingness is that apophatic mystical experience offers Christians a theology of humility sensitive to religious pluralism, which in turn is a means of overcoming the (...) "pains of spiritual oppression" caused by religious intolerance and doctrinal imperialism. The book's argument is that "mystical consciousness" overturns the dogmatic truth claims of "conventional theology" by preparing the self for the experience of radical openness to "divinity," however "divinity" is theologically named in the "conventional theology" of humanity's religious traditions. The book's author, Beverly J.Lanzetta, draws on a variety of Christian mystical texts to support her claims: Meister Eckhart, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, Teresa of Avila, Bonaventure, and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. She also makes comparative references to Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, along with contemporary writers such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Dorothy Day to illustrate her claim that apophatic mystical experience—the experience of the utter [End Page 306] annihilation of the self—draws the mystic to a place beyond a tradition's historical and normative self-understanding to new dimensions of the Sacred and, sometimes, to new "revelatory paradigms." The revelatory paradigm Lanzetta believes she has discovered in the evidence she cites is that "the divine nature itself is pluralistic, non-absolute, and is continually the source of new religious traditions," by which she means something similar to what John Cobb calls "creative transformation." For her, this is the antidote to religious imperialism and the exclusivism of conventional theology, meaning "non-mystical theology," which she argues is the source of religions fanaticism in all religions traditions, particularly in Christianity.There is much to admire about Lanzetta's take on mysticism and its importance for undercutting theological absolutism of the sort one encounters in the Christian Right or in certain radical movements within contemporary Islam. Her analyses of the mystical texts she cites to support her arguments are carefully crafted and accurately express the theologies of the Christian mystics who are the foci of her own theological reflection. Her writing style is elegant and clearly expresses the passion with which she embraces her views. I especially liked her focus on kenotic Christology in her description of the "Apophatic Christ" who "bears the generosity of speech and teaches an ethic of radical openness," which Lanzetta claims is also an openness to truths found outside Christian tradition. "All are called not to his name, his ministry, or even to his person, but are called to sustain the tension between the saying and the unsaying, and between the living and the dying, in which God's nonviolent heart yearns for unconcealment" (p. 90). Indeed, this is the heart of Christian mystical experience of Christ, particularly attested to in the writings of Maguerite Porete and Hildegard von Bingen. Yet kenotic Christologies are also found in nonmystical theology, which Lanzetta tends to lump together pejoratively under her category "conventional theology." Consequently, as much as I admire this book and agree with its essential conclusions—but for different reasons—my trouble with this work originates in Lanzetta's assertion of a hard dualism between mystical theology and "ordinary theology," a dualism that undermines her arguments and conclusions. My concern is threefold.First, mystical experience is primarily a matter of consciousness in the sense that something previously unknown and unexperienced is suddenly "there." This unanticipated presence is as real to the mystic's perspective as everyday experiences are, which is why mystics so often speak of being empowered to "see" or "touch" or "taste" what has been up to now imperceptible. If the experience is apophatic in structure—a usually brief moment of awareness in which all subject-object duality is overcome so that the mystic isn't aware of a self separated from what the self experiences or even that there is an "experience happening"—the mystic is neither thinking, feeling, or interpreting. That is... (shrink)