Posted by: gcarkner | October 21, 2012

The Lost Art of Compassion

Grad Identity: Is Charity a Lost Art?

In the rough and tumble of  academic life, high achievers are not often challenged to work on their skills of compassion, or to develop a caring heart. The hyper-concern for brilliance wins hands down. In this post, we want to problematize a fear and avoidance, yes even a distaste for commitment to the Other in the West (Global North).  A self-constructing outlook has great currency among today’s university culture. For instance, one survey suggests that a good percentage of undergraduate students think that they should be given a B Grade just for showing up to class. Recently a friend visiting from Cambridge University noted among students there the intense obsession with science alone, a refusal to think about anything else. Tough Question: Does academic achievement also foster an indifference, or a perceived  freedom from responsibility for the Other, and an obsession with self-interest? Is one’s commitment calculated first and foremost in favour of oneself and one’s own growth and advancement, to the exclusion of the needs of other fellow travellers? Under social pressure, this posture can easily be adopted and sanctioned by Christian postgrad students. Can we be brilliant and compassionate at the same time? That is the question. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 19, 2012

George Egerton, Professor Emeritus, History UBC

PUBLIC RELIGION IN CANADA FROM MACKENZIE KING TO TRUDEAU:

ENTERING THE AGE OF PLURALISM

1945-1982 George Egerton, UBC History, December 2009

This is an article I wrote for an encyclopaedia.   It studies the history of public religion in Canada from the period of the Second World War to the patriation of the Canadian Constitution of 1982 with its Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Through these years, Canada would be transformed from a self-proclaimed ‘Christian democracy’ of denominational pluralism, through an interval of religious pluralism, to a secularist pluralism, based on how courts and politicians have applied the Charter. Although attention will be given to the spectrum of world religions represented in Canada, the analysis focuses primarily on the predominant Christian churches to which most Canadians, including aboriginal peoples, belonged. Until the 1970s, Christianity, in its national denominations, presented the only religion with public functions beyond the private realm – in culture, social institutions, law and politics.[1] Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 19, 2012

Quality of the Will…4

Intuitions of Qualitative Discriminations

In our continuing series on quality of the will, Taylor recognizes the existence of a plurality of moral positions and constructions in society, but in tension with relativism, he has a conviction that some features of the self are universal regarding moral self-constitution. He contends that there are certain features of the moral self and its world that are endemic or common to all healthy humans. He recognizes plurality in the shape of human moralities, but does not follow the tradition/ideology of pluralism (relativism where all are of equal value in exploring one’s morality–Weberian choice).

Taylor scholar Ruth Abbey (2000, p. 29) comments on this point that: “He does not suggest that in trying to explain morality we imagine a moral world devoid of humans and attempt to separate its subject-dependent properties from its objective or real properties.” He begins by claiming that all humans have certain moral intuitions, and all make moral judgments, including judgments about the behaviour of others. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 16, 2012

Notre Dame History Scholar @ UBC Wednesday

Losing My Religion: The Reformation Era and the Secularization of Knowledge? Wednesday, October 17, @ 4:00 p.m.,  Woodward IRC Room 5 (Gate One UBC) Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 15, 2012

Critical Alternative to Scientism…Point 2

Beyond Scientism: Retrieval of Excluded Knowledge

In our recovery from scientism, we attempt to retrieve excluded knowledge, addressing the refusal of the transcendent inherent in scientism, including the biases endemic to the new atheists. During the Cold War, the Russians constructed a city map for Moscow which excluded churches, a practice that made it difficult for tourists. They were making a point; they wanted to eliminate knowledge and memory of religion in their quest for the New Man. Charles Taylor offers some very insightful discernment on this problem of the closed or one-sided mind. He notes that transcendence can be read from two opposite angles, both of which involve faith at some level, i.e. the belief goes beyond mere rational argument or evidence.

We can either see the transcendent as a threat, a dangerous temptation, or an obstacle to our greatest good. Or we can read it as answering to our deepest craving, need, fulfilment of the good. … Both open and closed stances involve a step beyond available reason into the realm of anticipatory confidence (Taylor, A Secular Age, 548 & 551). Read More…

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Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Science Reflections, Seeker Corner

Posted by: gcarkner | October 13, 2012

Quality of the Will…3

Charles Taylor and the Quality of the Will Part 3

Many people today attempt  to operate within a realm of moral neutrality. Is this realistic and liveable or some kind of fantasy? The focus is on the centrality of the autonomous will, or rational will (Kant) and it is problematic because of its thinness.  At times, it seems that this idea of the will is hollowed out so that it reduces to pure freedom of autonomous choice with no sense of responsibility for others. Ethics is reduced to lived experience as one chooses to live and stylize it (aesthetic solipsism like that i Foucault). Morality is defined, not through the conformity of behaviour with codes, or norms, but in reference to the intention and freedom of the subject, and thus, ultimately, to the way in which the indiviual will determines itself and judges/justifies itself. Charles Taylor raises serious questions regarding assumptions about a moral self that does not have any relationship to the good (or is in denial of this relationship). It becomes a self focused on its own desires and such an individual lobbies the government to protect the right to express those desires and indulge in decisions in one’s own self-interest. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 12, 2012

Albert Borgman on Technology

Albert Borgmann: a Philosopher of Technology

Albert Borgmann, a University of Montana philosopher of technology, gave a thoughful GFCF lecture last November 2011. Some of us had lunch with him at Sage’s Bistro at UBC following the lecture to pick his brain. Like Sam in the last blog post, he wants us to reflect on how technology is changing us, how it is more than a way of getting things done more efficiently or conveniently. Borgmann believes there is more than meets the eye, that technology is a form of culture that shapes our lives, values and relationships in certain ways, even if we are unaware of it. In general, technology claims and promises liberty and prosperity, to make life less burdensome and make us more wealthy and comfortable.

He believes that up to 1950, we had the ‘constructive phase’ of technology where in general it was supportive of human well-being; after that, according to Borgmann, we entered the ‘degenerative phase’ where technology became a burden and a distraction from important relationships, values and priorities. It now offers the good, the bad and the really bad. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 11, 2012

Smartphones and God Substitutes

Reflections on Smartphones

Theomania, the desire to be like a god, is alive and well today. Theologian Christoph Schwöbel notes that there is an interesting historical-cultural coincidence between the birth of radical concept of freedom and the denial of God in Western philosophy. He suggests that it results from humans attempting the kind of freedom one normally attributes to God—omniscient, omnipotent, infinite. This perspective on freedom tends to imply that the self must occupy or usurp the space once given to God in Western consciousness—human and divine freedom in a strange way are set up in a direct conflict and competition. This has dire consequences; the quest for immanent radical freedom can sacrifice unnecessarily much that is good in life, and perhaps to some extent my well-being.

[There emerges] a dislocation in the relational order: when they aspire to be more than human, they actually become less than human….We often find the radical conception of freedom as absolute and unlimited lies at the heart of many of the most dehumanizing tendencies…in modern history. Where freedom is seen as radically self-constituted, responsibility is restricted to the responsibility of agents to themselves, and it is at this point that the claim of radical autonomy cannot be distinguished from the escape into unaccountability.  (C. Schwöbel)

These radical individuals as they gain power and influence, grow in narcissistic tendencies and ultimately can become a law unto themselves; the scope of perceived moral responsibility ends with one’s self, one’s perceived needs, desires and creativity. The reigning ethos claims that I alone must reach my full potential and even create my own moral and intellectual universe. This posture constitutes a failure of freedom in a game of self-deception and illusion. From whence does our freedom really come? Here are some thoughts on modern personal technology from UBC Geography Grad Student, Samuel Johns: samuelgjohns@gmail.com Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 9, 2012

Quality of the Will…2

Charles Taylor’s Case for Moral Realism

Indeed, who are we late moderns? Taylor challenges the current superficiality regarding moral convictions and the over-emphasis on living one’s desires into a trajectory of self-interest alone. His argument for moral realism is five-fold. In terms of moral givens, he argues that certain perennial features of the self are present irrespective of culture or the way they are expressed or understood. He starts his analysis with the question of how humans operate as moral beings in their actual moral experiences, and how they reflect upon those experiences. So he is interested in praxis as well as moral theory. Beginning with humans and the way they experience morality (the phenomenal dimension), he claims that the most plausible explanation of morality is one that takes seriously humans’ perception of the independence of moral goods. It has been my privilege to wrestle with Taylor’s engaging ideas for more than a decade; there is much depth to capture the best minds and the most fervent hearts. Read More…

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Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner

Posted by: gcarkner | October 8, 2012

Paradigm Shift: Beyond Scientism

A Paradigm Shift in Understanding Reason

What is the way forward beyond the narrow thinking of scientism? Is there a path towards a more integrated and whole understanding of reason and reality itself? It is our conviction that science must be more engaged with, tempered by wisdom. Philosophy, of which science is traditionally a sub-discipline, by classical definition is the love of wisdom about natural things. This is a posture that prompts persons to use all the skills of reason in the quest for truth, goodness and beauty. Rationalism unfortunately pits truth against beauty and goodness, and this is epistemologically dysfunctional as we have seen. French philosopher Jacques Maritain boldly cautions that ‘science without wisdom is blind’, meaning that its explorations and usage requires insight from something other than science qua science. What are the new possibilities of a re-aquaintance of sapientia  and scientia  wisdom and science/knolwedge? Read More…

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