Sociological rythms as a basis for prediction

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University, 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Understanding Human Sexuality in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: An Analysis of the Historical Development of Doctrine in the Catholic Tradition

The most volatile area of contention in the discourse between a pure secularized world and the Church in contemporary times is located in the area of sexuality, marriage and family life. Modernist and liberal post enlightenment culture accuse the Church to be unchanging, and unreflective of modern ‘personal’ choices in the contested areas of human sexuality. Within the Church, there are voices also who call for ‘developments’ in such areas of doctrine. For over forty years, these conversation has taken on many shades of grey coming to a head with questions of discordancy and same sex unions among other pressing and related issues. This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation by attempting to clarify the foundational understanding of what constitutes the possibility of a development in doctrine or the lack of it. There are five chapters of this work devoted to this endeavor. In chapter one the encyclical tradition of a hundred years timeline, focused on questions of sexuality and family life are reviewed to establish a historical development in the magisterial position of the Church. Chapter two is devoted to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body which is set up as the frame work upon which this project argues for what is perhaps the current magisterial position on the topic under discussion. In chapter three, a review is undertaken to explore questions about the natural law which forms a bedrock of Catholic argument in its moral theology and for cases of personal sexual ethics. A historical analysis is employed to see how the theory itself has evolved from its ancient origins, into scholasticism, and how it has been used in political jurisprudence. More importantly to its reemergence within the last century as the new natural law theory which seeks to establish the same argument purely from a philosophical aspect and without a theistic foundation. Four theological voices are engaged in chapter four to try and locate what broadly contemporary and wider theological contexts have to say from an anthropological, feminist, and cultural context. In chapter five, the idea of development of doctrine is reviewed. The questions of discordancy and same sex unions are used as theoretical frame work to presenting how development in doctrine has the possibility of a shift or the impossibility their off. A hypothetical idea is borrowed from liturgical theology, using the idea of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ to explain essentials of Christian doctrine (also known as dogma) which remains unchanging as defined position. And the accidental aspects of Christian doctrine which is open to re-interpretation in the light of new cultures and new questions. The entire notion of doctrine rests on ‘Christian tradition’, therefore a question of tradition, and what is being traditioned across time is explored to clarify the process necessary for proper understanding of development. In conclusion, some pastoral recommendations are made based on current papal and magisterial documents as possible means of approaching newer questions raised by a secularized and post enlightenment world

Dis/Orienting \u27Middle East\u27: A Cart-Rhetorical Rhizomatic Mapping

This dissertation focuses on the association between the geopolitical region Middle East and the unjust profiling of Islamic terrorism. I examine this connection from the lens of border-politics and deconstruct Western cartographic discourses that constructed the current misrepresentative and extensively totalizing identity of Middle East as the land of Muslim terrorists. My conjecture is framed around Karen Culcasi’s argument on how Middle East was re-invented in the discourse of Orientalism during the early twentieth century. To challenge the region’s current misrepresentative and unjust socio-spatial identity, I map how the region’s inherently othered identity under the European gaze of Orientalism has arrived to its current state as a result of changing discourses of power and geopolitical relations throughout the twentieth century. In this light, I investigate three central questions in this dissertation: 1) How the discourse of global war on terrorism has emerged from the haunting image of the Oriental discourse and continues to respond and counter-respond to the great Middle Eastern question: continuous reproductions of the region in the totalizing image of the Western tree-system. 2) How this continual process of reproducing Middle East in the same problematic rhetoric has mirrored itself into re-constructing the cartographic reality of the region both in its Western perceptions and Middle/Eastern receptions: internalization of the Western tree-image and finally arriving to the Islamic tree-system of a violent and fundamental ideology of terrorism. 3) How these cartographic reproductions have been suppressing the diverse identities in the region while these socio-spatial formations have always already been disrupting various systems of subordinations: how the internalized tree-system of the West and its tap-roots have been cutting the lines and paths of the rhizomatic identities of the region. As I unpack these three questions, I approach the Western modern scientific knowledge production and information design (dominant mode of production) as a form of alienating rhetorical re-invention. I best understand the working structure of the Western rhetoric of alienation through Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘mechanical reproduction.’ I draw from cartographic hermeneutics and cartographic deconstruction to unpack how the Western ground logic of this machinic system has been re-inventing the socio-spatial consciousness of Middle East. I argue that the unjust image of Middle East as the land of Muslim terrorists has been another process for Western society to re-define its non-Western other. I define the mapping of this project as a dis/orienting rhizomatic mapping which draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s models of rhizome and tree-system. As I analyze the shifting discourses to map the shifting borders, changing names, and transforming otherness of Middle East, I approach the Western process of re-inventing and homogenizing Middle East as a tree-system while I read the region’s organic heterogeneity and complex relations of meaning-making as rhizomatic. In this light, I conduct a carto-rhetorical deconstruction on the cartographic discourses (maps of dominant gaze) representing Middle East with a focus on the rhetorical and narrative qualities of maps as technical documents. The central agenda is to dis/other the geography of Middle East by mapping with its rhizomatic socio-spatial identities and to write an anti-memory challenging the Islamic stereotypes and prejudices that have been produced in the dominant vision and discourses of alienation, enemization, and victimization of the region

No Place like Home: Ecological Destruction and Loss of Knowing in Late Modernity

This thesis argues that our culture is grounded in fundamental ontological error. This error posits human being as a form of being that is separate from the other-than-human world, its mortal and fleshy confines. Drawing on the insight of Gregory Bateson, I propose that insofar as ontology and epistemology are inextricably entwined, error in one implies error in the other. Thus the consequence of our faulty ontology is that epistemological error is built into the system. The danger of systemic epistemological error is that, as a culture, we rely on our ways of knowing to find solutions to cultural/social/ecological problems. Yet where our ways of knowing are themselves erroneous, recourse to these, simply further perpetuates problems and at the same time deepens error. This is particularly the case where recourse to systemic correctives to such error have been lost – where ethical knowing (at the level of culture) and a perspective giving and defining relationship with nature and the sacred are not available to the system. Where these correctives are not available, the dominant knowing multiplies, a spreading pandemic across the landscape, suppressing and eradicating other ways of knowing and thus, other ways of being. A key result of this is the diminishing capacity, at the level of culture, to detect this epistemological (and ontological) error. The norm quickly overwrites difference, removing alternative knowing from the system. This has resulted in a condition in late modernity whereby the separation of ways of knowing and being from embededness in place are all but undetected in our cultural psyche. Ecological and epistemological destruction thus continue fundamentally unchecked. This thesis traces the loss of awareness of loss through shifts in, what I term, the epistemological baseline. An overlooked dimension of this ecological and epistemological change is the impact that loss of knowing has on the self. This loss, has, I propose, produced a collective and heightened existential anxiety, a loss of the sense that the self in any meaningful way exists. As a result, the late-modern self is caught in the endless search for proof – looking for evidence of existence through the given cultural form - material reflections, particularly images, of the self. Such evidence, however, merely reproduces the search for, and the dominance of, ‘objective’ knowledge and the reign of the object, ultimately producing the impermeable self. This process of self-referencing has over the last thirty to forty years been a matter of some theoretical scrutiny. Yet this conversation is one that has, primarily, been separated from conversations surrounding ecological destruction and diminished relationship with the other-than-human world. The making and mapping of the self is seen to bear no inherent relation to the destruction of species and of place. Where a connection is made it is material. Further, this is a materiality that is stripped bare of all subjectivity and presence. Hence we find most of the mainstream discourse and much environmental and cultural theory linking our habits of consumption to ideas of unsustainability but not to the effects this has on ways of being or knowing oneself as human. In this, the other-than-human world as the core constituent of our human being, (and our potential to know of this being) is absent, forgotten, lost. In revealing the limitations of cultural and environmental theory and protest, due to their historical locatedness in (and thus tendency to reproduce) epistemological error, I draw attention to the way in which ecological destruction and the loss of subjectivity are caught in a self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop which is taking us towards epistemological crisis. In this crisis we are trapped in a systemic failure to know of error and thus a failure to know otherwise, and as a system, we are heading not towards recovery but death

From Albert Salomon: Essays on Social Thinkers

https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_newfound-ebooks/1017/thumbnail.jp