Cultural Landscapes

Religion and Public Life

Gabriel R. Ricci, Editor

ISBN: 1-4128-0598-8
Pages: 167
Publication Date: 09/30/06
Binding: Paper

Description:

A dualism between man and nature has been a persistent feature of Western thought and spirituality from ancient times to the present. The opposition of mind and body, consciousness and world has tended to obscure the ways in which humans are ecologically part of interconnected systems, some of which are obvious while others operate in hidden but life-sustaining ways. Cultural Landscapes explores the physical ways in which we are intimately linked to the land and the intellectual and aesthetic connections human consciousness has with the landscape.

Following the editor’s introductory essay, the lead article by Jame Schaeffer, “Quest for the Common Good: A Collaborative Public Theology for a Life-Sustaining Climate,” assesses the lightning rod issue of global warming in the context of a public and ecumenical theology and sets the tone for this normative assessment of our relationship with nature. Likewise, David Kenley’s essay, “Three Gorges be Dammed: The Philosophical Roots of Environmentalism in China,” reveals the traditional philosophical and cultural values that can sustain a vital environmentalism in the East. David Brown’s historical insights into the use of the American landscape to define historical writing complement Patricia Likos-Ricci’s historical treatment of nineteenth-century landscape painting and the first call to preserve wilderness in the United States. Matt Willen, “An Feochán,” and David Martinez, “What Worlds are Made of: The Lakota Sense of Place,” both demonstrate how space is transformed into place through song and mythic tales. On a metaphysical note, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopolos’ essay “On the Line of the Horizon, Anxiety in de Chirico’s Metaphysical Spaces,” provides the reader with psychological and existential insights into the disorienting paintings of de Chirico, and Gabriel Ricci’s concluding essay tours the landscape that underpins Heidegger’s ontological speculations.

The contributions to this volume are posited on the belief that culture, society, and human history are ultimately rooted in the natural world. This integration may explain why humanity has always looked to nature for moral and ethical guidelines.

Gabriel R. Ricci is associate professor of humanities and the chair of the Department of History at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, published by Transaction.

Faith in Science

Gabriel R. Ricci, Editor

ISBN: 0-7658-0842-0
Pages: 122
Publication Date: 2004
Binding: Paper

Description:

There is growing academic interest in addressing the relationship of religion and science. There are also very generous funding sources that encourage scientists to demonstrate the reality of purpose in the world. Still, there are organizations offering support to community groups dedicated to discussing religion and science. Contributors explore this development in Faith in Science.

The intellectual initiatives analyzed here seem far removed from the deep religious and cultural divisions that dominate the contemporary geopolitical landscape. This emerging industry, however, originates in a cultural debate that set the evolutionary view of Nature against revelation’s conception of Nature as the fulfillment of God’s creation. The two worldviews are hopelessly mismatched, although scientific creationism purports to have uncovered scriptural evidence that invites another look. Along the way, the imposition of theological themes onto the geological record became a tendency for many naturalists.

Peter Medawar’s scathing review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man in 1961 remains as a warning for those who mix Darwinian orthodoxy and theological parlance. The challenge, Medawar would have us believe, is not to abandon the exacting methods and logic of science in favor of a poetic dream of how consciousness is a manifestation of energy. But does this mean that science and religion are only methodologically demarcated? Must we insist on the traditional boundaries instituted by scientific conventions and religious beliefs?

From various historical, religious, and scientific vantage points, contributors to this volume, who include Guy Consolmagno, David Ray Griffin, Gerald L. Schroeder, Robert Pollack, Robert Pennock, Carol Wayne Whitet, Bill Durbin, Kathleen Duffy, and Anthony Matteo, take up these challenges.

Gabriel Ricci is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, published by Transaction.

Justice and the Politics of Memory

Gabriel R. Ricci, Editor

ISBN: 0-7658-0999-0
Pages: 157
Publication Date: 2003
Binding: Paper

Description:

Memory is not a mere repository for past events. This was Henri Bergson’s fundamental claim about consciousness. In distinguishing our psychic constitution by its sense of the past, Bergson differentiates our perception of time from a process in which one instant merely replaces another. While Bergson cast his ideas in terms of the biological sciences, his analysis did not neglect the moral impulse that accompanies the condensation of history with which we continuously live. Classifying human existence in this way bears on ethical and political questions. How such questions can plague the memory of a people and the entire human community is addressed in Justice and the Politics of Memory.

The contributors explore the manner in which cultural and psychic violation undermine collective identity, and destroy traditions. They raise troubling questions on how recompense and reconciliation is possible after abominable wrongs have been systematically perpetrated against a community. Faced with the burden of memory, those committed to the righting of wrongs are faced with pursuing an elusive justice that sometimes includes levying reparations and memorializing horrific historical episodes. Guided by the muse of forgiveness, restoration and a more harmonious future are likely to be rooted in the sources of spirituality that had been previously eclipsed by the conquering and homogenizing historical processes.

This volume includes Heribert Adam’s “Collective Reckoning with a Criminal Regime,” Jeffrey Olick’s “Lessons from and for Germany,” James Hatley’s “Levinas, Witness and Politics,” James E. Young’s “Germany’s Holocaust Memorial Problem—and Mine,” Tim Giago’s “Killing the Indian to Save the Child: The Near Death of Spirituality,” Jordan B. Peterson’s and Maja Djikic’s “Running Ahead: You Can Neither Remember Nor Forget What You Do Not Understand,” Derick Wilson’s “Where Religion Confuses yet Faith Gives Hope: Conflict Resolution in Northern Ireland,” and Leonard Kaplan’s “Justice Perfected: Cinematic Exemplifications,” and an introduction, “Morality and Memory,” by the editor.

Gabriel R. Ricci is associate professor in the department of philosophy at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Time Consciousness: The Philosophical Uses of History, published by Transaction.

Humanities and Civic Life

Gabriel R. Ricci, Editor

ISBN: 0-7658-0861-7
Pages: 97
Publication Date: 2001
Binding: Paper

Description:
This volume in Religion and Public Life, a series on religion and public affairs, provides a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The contributions address the decline of social capital-those patterns of behavior which are conducive to self-governance and the spirit of self-reliance-and its relation to the demise of the civic-humanist tradition in American education.

The unifying theme is that classical studies do not merely result in individual mastery over a particular technique or body of knowledge, but also link the individual to the polity and even to the whole of the cosmic order. At the same time, American republicanism, in its exaltation of the common man from the Jeffersonian agrarian soldier to the apotheosis of Lincoln tempers the classical ideal into something less exalted, if more democratic. The effects on the contemporary state of the liberal arts curriculum are demonstrated in articles critical of the market-model university. Two essays explore the historical and philosophical significance of the discipline of rhetoric that has suffered under the hegemony of rationalistic philosophy. A concluding contribution invokes Giambattista Vico as an eloquent defender of the humanities.

Humanities and Civic Life includes: "Rome, Florence, and Philadelphia: Using the History of the Humanities to Renew Our Civic Life" by Robert E. Proctor; "The Dark Fields of the Republic: The Persistence of Republican Thought in American History" by David Brown; "Unleashing the Humanities" by Robert Weisbuch; "Liberal Arts: Listening to Faculty" by Dennis O'Brien; "Historical Consciousness in Antiquity" by Paul Gottfried; "Taking the Measure of Relativism and the Civic Virtue of Rhetoric" by Gabriel R. Ricci; "The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education" by Randall E. Auxier.

Gabriel Ricci is associate professor in the department of philosophy at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

Volume 36, The Moral Dimensions of Literature, will be published in
November 2007.