Prosperity and Prophecy in African Pentecostalism

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Quayesi-Amakye
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life

AbstractThis essay discusses how prosperity is understood and articulated in Ghanaian Pentecostal prophetic circles. It seeks to show that in the peripheral prophetism of Pentecostalism, prosperity is perceived as the good life Christ offers those who believe in him. The good life is a religious and social quest of Ghanaians. The bad life is a privation of goodness in this life. Coping with the bad life has necessitated the patronage of Ghanaian prophetic services where rituals of transformation are employed to negotiate evil and suffering in the life of the faithful. Critical in the discussion is the role of the 'Other' who creates conditions of impoverishment for people and who justifies the necessity of prophetic negotiation. The paper also analyses the content of the bad life and finally attempts to show that Christ's parables in Luke 16 propose a guiding paradigm for conceiving prosperity as a tool for harmonious interhuman relations.

Zeit und gutes Leben

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-513
Author(s):  
Holmer Steinfath
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Good Life ◽  
External Factor ◽  
Life Time ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Gutes Leben

Time is a neglected subject in recent, especially analytically minded reflections on the good life. The article highlights the fundamental role of time and temporality for an adequate understanding of the good life. Time functions both as an external factor with which we have to reckon in our practical deliberations and as an internal structure of living our lives. It is argued that striving for a good life also means striving for being in harmony with the time of one's life. The exploration of this idea allows to link analytical with phenomenological approaches to time and good life.

Public Reason and Prostitution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Conception Of The Good

This chapter critically engages with the “sex work” approach to prostitution and argues that treating “sex work” like any other form of work is neither possible nor compatible with valuing the freedom and equality of women as citizens. Liberals often claim, erroneously, that liberalism’s commitment to a kind of neutrality among competing conceptions of the good life and its commitment to antipaternalism requires either decriminalization or legalization of prostitution. While arguments that rest on a particular conception of the “good” of sex or of the role of sex in a broader conception of the good are illegitimate grounds for state policy, it is argued that there are, nonetheless, good public reason arguments against decriminalization or legalization of prostitution. A defense of the Nordic model is offered.

scholarly journals A GOOD LIFE? CRITICAL FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INFLUENCER ECOLOGIES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Glatt ◽  
Sarah Banet-Weiser ◽  
Sophie Bishop ◽  
Francesca Sobande ◽  
Elizabeth Wissinger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Creative Industries ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Barriers To Entry ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued in the early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also Bishop, 2017). In Western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain success. A key aim of this panel is thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and success. More broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid, frivolous, or eager to freeload. We locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of feminized cultural production (Levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations.

The Fourfold Division of Beings

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-89
Author(s):  
Mary Louise Gill
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life

The fourfold division in Plato’s Philebus develops machinery to decide the contest between pleasure and reason for second place after the mixture in the debate about the good life. The machinery consists of the limit, the unlimited, the mixture of limit and unlimited, and cause of the mixture. Plato’s Socrates collects instances of the unlimited and mixture to determine their unified nature and marks off the cause from the other three kinds and argues for its priority. We gain understanding of the limit by considering its operation in relation to the other three kinds. The limit is responsible for external and internal boundaries in an unlimited, bringing definiteness either by marking something off from things outside it or by providing internal structure. Chapter 5 argues that one key function of the limit is omitted in the fourfold division: guaranteeing the goodness of a mixture.

4. Scepticism as a way of life

2019 ◽  
pp. 72-96
Author(s):  
Duncan Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Intellectual Virtues

‘Scepticism as a way of life’ considers the case for a moderate scepticism, by looking at the work of the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce). This idea concerns the role of the virtues, and the intellectual virtues in particular, in the ‘good life’ of human flourishing; what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. Understanding the role that the intellectual virtues play in the good life enables us to see how embracing a moderate scepticism could be necessary for living such a life. It also helps us to resolve a possible tension between adopting a healthy moderately sceptical attitude while at the same time living a life of genuine conviction.

Tourism as a Pathway to the Good Life: Comparing the Top–Down and Bottom–Up Effects

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (5) ◽  
pp. 866-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chun-Chu Chen ◽  
Sukjoon Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Life Satisfaction ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Novelty Seeking ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up

This research examined the relationships among tourism, well-being, and novelty-seeking as a personality trait based on the top–down and bottom–up theories of well-being. A structural model that includes a direct effect of novelty-seeking on life satisfaction (top–down influence) and an indirect effect through tourism experiences (bottom–up influence) were proposed and tested using a sample of 556 American residents. Results showed that novelty-seekers were well aware of travel benefits and traveled more frequently. It was also found that the top–down influence of novelty-seeking on life satisfaction was significantly greater than the bottom–up influence. These findings highlight the crucial role of personality as a predictor of well-being as well as the importance of applying positive psychology principles to further enhance the potential contribution of tourism experiences to tourists’ well-being.

Nordic urban history and urban historians in the last decade

Urban History ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 65-77
Author(s):  
Jan Eivind Myhre
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Conference Report ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
Hans Magnus Enzensberger

To people from the Continent, like the German essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Norwegians seem to be something of an urban puzzle. While crowding in towns and cities — about three-quarters of the population now live in urban settlements — the minds and lifestyles of Norwegians, their concept of the good life, are stubbornly rural. More or less the same applies to the Finns. The Danes, on the other hand, are conceived as quite the opposite, a fundamentally urban nation. The Swedes fall somewhere in between.Differences in urban attitudes, as well as other diversities between the Nordic countries, are cherished among the inhabitants themselves, although most people are well aware that the culturally unifying elements are strong, too. The variations are real, however, and different urban experiences may partly account for them. Take the case of nineteenth-century urbanization, with examples extracted from the 1977 Trondheim Nordic history conference report on urbanization.

scholarly journals Creatures Bound for Glory: Biotechnological Enhancement and Visions of Human Flourishing

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Burdett ◽  
Victoria Lorrimar
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
The One ◽  
Secular Humanist ◽  
Grand Vision

The human enhancement debate is fundamentally based on divergent ideals of human flourishing. Using the complementary, though often contrasting, foci of creaturehood and deification as fundamental to the good life, we examine these visions of human flourishing inherent in transhumanist, secular humanist and critical posthumanist positions on human enhancement. We argue that the theological anthropologies that respond to human enhancement and these other ideologies tend to emphasise either creaturehood or deification to the neglect or detriment of the other. We propose in response that understanding humans as creatures bound for glory integrates both dimensions of the human being into the one grand vision of flourishing God has for humanity.

scholarly journals The Other Dimension of Caring Thinking (with a new commentary by Phillip Cam)

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Margaret Sharp
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
Matthew Lipman ◽  
Mental Acts

Life comes from physical or biological survival. But the good life comes from what we care about, what we value, what we think truly important, as distinguished from what we think merely trivial. What we care about is the source of the criteria we use to evaluate ideas, ideals, persons, events, things, and their importance in our lives. And it is these criteria that determine the judgments we make in our everyday lives. In the second edition of Thinking in Education, Matthew Lipman (2002) has indicated the importance of fostering critical, creative and caring thinking in children, if one is to prepare them to make better judgments and live qualitatively better lives. He tells us that caring thinking is appreciative thinking, active thinking, normative thinking, affective thinking and empathetic thinking and then goes on to list a number of mental acts under each of these categories. Maybe it is because ‘caring thinking’ is not as common a term as ‘critical thinking’ and ‘creative thinking’ in everyday educational language that we stop for pause when we hear it. However when we read what Lipman says about caring thinking, we find ourselves nodding and saying to ourselves, ‘Yes, that makes sense. To think caringly means to think ethically, affectively, normatively, appreciatively and to actively participate in society with a concern for the common good’ (Lipman 2002, p. 271). In a real sense what we care about is manifest in how we perform, participate, build, contribute and how we relate to others. It is thinking that reveals our ideals as well as what we think is valuable, what we are willing to fight and suffer for.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document