Israel, the Church, and Election

A Jewish theological examination of the meaning of election

Learning To Be Affected: Social suffering and total pain at life’s borders.

The practice of Live Sociology in situations of pain and suffering is the author’s focus. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu’s ‘social suffering’ (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of ‘total pain’. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in attempts to bridge intersubjective divides, where the causes and routes of pain can be ontologically and temporally indeterminate and/or withdrawn. The paper contends that these latter phenomena are the incitement for the inventive bridging and performative work of care and Live Sociological methods, both of which are concerned with opposing suffering. Drawing from the ontology of total pain, I highlight the importance of (i) an engagement with a range of materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material, and the temporally linear; and (ii) an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and non-relational

The Violence of the Canon: Revisiting Contemporary Notions of Canonical Forms

The historical conditions surrounding the processes of forming a canon are rarely examined directly, yet it is these processes which govern over the realm of religious representations and identity constructions. In light of recent critical scholarship, it is imperative to address theologically the role that the canon plays within a religious tradition. This essay demonstrates the cultural necessity of canonical forms despite their “monotheistic tendency” to subdivide the world into binary oppositions. By utilizing a scale of violence to determine the impact of the canonical form upon culture this essay offers an account of canons and their role in forming religious identities over and beyond the violence they are said to provoke. Through this clarification, an alternative perspective of canons can emerge that reveals the violence at the core of cultural-canonical norms, thus providing a valuable distinction between differing (violence-concealing or violence-revealing) canonical forms

RE: pedagogy – after neutrality

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an approach which has become ‘black boxed’ on account of the work that it achieves. A series of new orientations within the academy that are broadly associated with post-structuralist philosophies, feminist and post-colonial studies, together with insights from Science and Technology Studies, question the plausibility of these claims for neutrality whilst in turn raising a series of new questions and priorities. It therefore becomes necessary to re-think and re-frame what it is to make sense of religious and cultural difference after neutrality. The gathering and co-ordination of new planes of sense-making that are responsive to an emergent series of epistemological, ontological, and ethical orientations are considered. Some of the distinctive pedagogical implications of such an approach that engages material practice, difference and uncertainty are then entertained

The Givenness of the Human Learning Experience and Its Incompatibility with Information Analytics

The rise of learning analytics, the application of complex metrics developed to exploit the proliferation of ‘Big Data’ in educational work, raises important moral questions about the nature of what is measurable in education. Teachers, schools and nations are increasingly held to account based on metrics, exacerbating the tendency for fine-grained measurement of learning experiences. In this article, the origins of learning analytics ontology are explored, drawing upon core ideas in the philosophy of computing, such as the general definition of information and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Drawing upon a reading of Descartes Meditatio II, which extends the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion into a pedagogy of intentionality, the article identifies a fundamental incompatibility between the subjective experience of learning and the information-theoretic account of knowledge. Human subjects experience and value their own information incommensurably with the ways in which computers measure and quantify information. The consequences of this finding for the design of online learning environments, and the necessary limitations of learning analytics and measurement are explored

‘The deserving’: Moral reasoning and ideological dilemmas in public responses to humanitarian communications

This paper investigates everyday moral reasoning in relation to donations and prosocial behaviour in a humanitarian context. The discursive analysis focuses on the principles of deservingness which members of the public use to decide who to help and under what conditions. The paper discusses three repertoires of deservingness: 'Seeing a difference', 'Waiting in queues' and 'Something for nothing ' to illustrate participants' dilemmatic reasoning and to examine how the position of 'being deserving' is negotiated in humanitarian crises. Discursive analyses of these dilemmatic repertoires of deservingness identify the cultural and ideological resources behind these constructions and show how humanitarianism intersects and clashes with other ideologies and value systems. The data suggest that a neoliberal ideology, which endorses self-gratification and materialistic and individualistic ethics, and cultural assimilation of helper and receiver play important roles in decisions about humanitarian helping. The paper argues for the need for psychological research to engage more actively with the dilemmas involved in the moral reasoning related to humanitarianism and to contextualize decisions about giving and helping within the socio-cultural and ideological landscape in which the helper operates