People (chiefly Canon Kendall Harmon), attempting to make sense of the controversy in the Anglican Communion right now, have claimed it helpful to describe the two competing views of how the Church should use the Gospel to understand and speak to culture as being either “reasserting” or “reappraising”. (Reasserters seem to be understood as those arguing that the Gospel is a timeless truth that transcends any momentary culture and that the task of the Church […]
It occurred to me that I should probably have been a little more clear about something in my post about different folks in the Anglican unpleasantness using either Thomistic (Aristotelian) or Process reasoning. I had in my mind the difference between discrete and non-local properties that undergird so much of Quantum Physics (the particle/wave duality). I was thinking that the Thomistic methodology would be roughly analogous to the Particle description of matter and the Process […]
Episcopal News Service has the story today: “The Very Rev. Mark Lawrence was re-elected as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina August 4 at a special electing convention held at St. James Church on St. James Island, South Carolina. Lawrence was the only candidate in the election since no petitions to add other names to the slate were received by the July 11 deadline. A majority of bishops exercising jurisdiction and diocesan Standing […]
I’ve not seen a distinction made before between reductionist materialism and eliminative materialism. “Reductive and eliminative materialism describe the poles of the process known as intertheoretic reduction. Intertheoretic reduction refers to what happens when a new scientific theory either better explains or else completely invalidates an existing scientific theory. If the new theory better explains the old one, it is said to have reduced it to a fuller, more convincing explanation. A successful reduction of […]
I’ve been spending my morning reading up on materialism and the various attempts both philosophical and theological that have tried to refute it. That reading led me to a long treatise on Process Philosophy. The key point of Process Philosophy is that processes (like a storm) are at least as real, if not even more fundamental, than an object (like an orange.) Or I suppose you could say that waves and quantum states are more […]
There’s been some discussion in the blogsphere of late about trying to figure out various group’s motivations within the Anglican Communion. One of the new ideas that I’ve seen bandied about is that there’s a large group of various strands of institutionalists at the center of the political spectrum in the Communion. (I think the terms used are “conservative and progressive institutionalists – or something along those lines.) I’m not sure I can figure out […]
Chuck Blanchard has a piece up on his blog about some recently published research that shows that diversity in the juror pool leads to greater accuracy in determining guilt or innocence: “In all, Sommers’ data show that diverse juries reason better, not just as groups but as individuals; everyone on the jury benefits, and justice, it appears, is better served. As Sommers concludes, these results make the benefits of diverse juries not just more concrete […]
Kendall Harmon has posted a link to paper posted by Prof. Christopher Seitz that discusses some of the challenges inherent in designing an Anglican Covenant. I’m particularly taken by this quote: “It is not the task of those who undertake to compose a covenant, and those who obligate themselves, in Christ, to do what it asks, to imitate some precise form or event from within scripture’s panoramic account. This would be an odd kind of […]
Here’s a bit of stunningly surprising news: “People from Western cultures such as the United States are particularly challenged in their ability to understand someone else’s point of view because they are part of a culture that encourages individualism, new research at the University of Chicago shows. In contrast, Chinese, who live in a society that encourages a collectivist attitude among its members, are much more adept at determining another person’s perspective, according to a […]
Chuck Blanchard, picking up on a comment left on his blog (that I’ve already noted) has gone on to make some suggestions about the next steps we Episcopalians might make in response to the Primate’s requests and as part of the Windsor process: “First, another response by the House of Bishops that speaks of polity and the independence of the Episcopal Church will not be helpful. We have made our points about polity and independence. […]
