A contemporary perspective on mission: the blue flower

Alison Milbank offers an aesthetic approach to models of mission and evangelism, arguing for a model which is responsive to cultural production. Drawing on Romanticism, particularly the work of Novalis, she challenges some current understandings of mission and suggests an alternative approach through philosophical dialogue.Publisher PD

“What a tale we have been in”: Emplotment and the Exemplar Characters in The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter Series

Linda Zagzebski's theory of moral exemplarity emphasizes the importance of admiration in developing ethical behavior. This essay argues that admiration involves wonder and distance and is best evoked by mixed or flawed characters; it demonstrates this through discussion of the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Using Paul Ricoeur's taxonomy of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration in narrative work, it discerns a self-reflexivity in the protagonists of these fantasy novels, which is echoed by that of the readers, who are brought to realize their own emplotment in larger narratives. Features in Tolkien and Rowling that aid this exploratory reading include the length and depth of the novels, the decentering of the reader's own reality, and their open endings, which offer an invitational role to further interpretation. Virtue is viewed more teleologically than in Zagzebski, for moral realism is woven into the metaphysics of these novels, which allows mimesis of flawed characters to be ethically productive

A contemporary perspective on mission: The blue flower

Alison Milbank offers an aesthetic approach to models of mission and evangelism, arguing for a model which is responsive to cultural production. Drawing on Romanticism, particularly the work of Novalis, she challenges some current understandings of mission and suggests an alternative approach through philosophical dialogue

“The many faces of sorrow”: An empirical exploration of the psychological plurality of sadness

Sadness has typically been associated with failure, defeat and loss, but it has also been suggested that sadness facilitates positive and restructuring emotional changes. This suggests that sadness is a multi-faceted emotion. This supports the idea that there might in fact be different facets of sadness that can be distinguished psychologically and physiologically. In the current set of studies, we explored this hypothesis. In a first stage, participants were asked to select sad emotional faces and scene stimuli either characterized or not by a key suggested sadness-related characteristic: loneliness or melancholy or misery or bereavement or despair. In a second stage, another set of participants was presented with the selected emotional faces and scene stimuli. They were assessed for differences in emotional, physiological and facial-expressive responses. The results showed that sad faces involving melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair were experienced as conferring dissociable physiological characteristics. Critical findings, in a final exploratory design, in a third stage, showed that a new set of participants could match emotional scenes to emotional faces with the same sadness-related characteristic with close to perfect precision performance. These findings suggest that melancholy, misery, bereavement and despair can be distinguishable emotional states associated with sadness

“Speak of the Devil… and he Shall Appear”: Religiosity, Unconsciousness and the Effects of Explicit Priming in the Misperception of Immorality

Psychological theory and research suggest that religious individuals could have differences in sensitivity to immoral behaviors and cognition compared to non-religious individual. This effect could occur due to perceptual and physiological differences that religious and non-religious individuals experience when processing and responding to immoral stimuli. In this manuscript we employ masking to test this hypothesis. We run a series of experiments to explore whether religiosity could involve higher perceptual and physiological sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety. We rate and pre-select IAPS images for moral impropriety. We present these images masked with and without negatively manipulating a pre-image moral label. We measure detection, moral discrimination, emotional and physiological responses. We found that religious participants experienced higher physiological and unbiased ROC perceptual sensitivity to masked images relating to moral impropriety when a negative moral label did not precede a masked image. When a negative moral label was presented, religious individuals experienced the interval following the label as more physiologically arousing and responded with lower specificity for discrimination. We suggest that religiosity could involve higher conscious perceptual and physiological sensitivity to morally improper stimuli but also higher susceptibility to moral classification

“There Is No (Where a) Face Like Home”: Recognition and Appraisal Responses to Masked Facial Dialects of Emotion in Four Different National Cultures

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness

La visión teopolítica de G.K. Chesterton y J. R. R. Tolkien y su relevancia contemporánea

What could Chesterton and Tolkien have to offer to the contemporary po-litical thought and practice? This essay discusses on what they share as a com-mon project in their fiction and dis-cursive writing, that is to find a way to acknowledge the value of the local and personal, while directing private good to the universal through the concept of the common good. This has implica-tions for our response to environmental crisis as well as the manner in which we relate the one and the many. Here, me-diating institutions such as friendship are all important, and are shown to be built on gift-exchanging and engagement. The sources of Chesterton’s thought in Anglo-Catholic and Guild socialism as well as in Hilaire Belloc’s Distributism are discussed, besides the roots of this political anthropology in a theology of creation as art and gift¿Que pueden ofrecerles Chesterton y Tol-kien a la práctica y al pensamiento políticos contemporáneos? Este ensayo argumenta que ambos autores comparten un proyecto común en sus obras de ficción y escritura discursiva: encontrar una manera de re-conocer el valor de lo local y lo personal, mientras se dirige el bien privado hacia lo universal mediante el concepto de bien co-mún. Esto tiene implicaciones para nuestra respuesta a la crisis ambiental, así como para la manera en que relacionamos lo uno y lo múltiple. Son importantes aquí las institu-ciones mediadoras, como la amistad, que parecen estar cimentadas en el intercambio de dones y el compromiso. Las fuentes del pensamiento de Chesterton, tanto el socia-lismo Anglo-Católico y gremial, como el Distributismo de Hilaire Belloc, son discu-tidos, así como las raíces de esta antropolo-gía política que se hallan en una teología de la creación como arte y don

God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, & Reality in the English Literary Tradition

God and the Gothic undertakes a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, now seen as usurpation of power by the authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part I interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe’s melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part II traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In Part III, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in Part IV, nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost-story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restores the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects