Confronting the Ideology Behind the Post-Truth Phenomenon: Outlining a Public Theology of Ultimate Concern

The neologism ‘post-truth’ was declared to be ‘the word of the year’ in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary. It came to prominence in the presidential election of that year in the United States and during the Brexit referendum. It represents the eclipse of a sense of shared objective truths and has become associated with terms like ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ – and, with reference to Covid-19, conspiracy theories. The purpose of this article is to provide a theological engagement with this phenomenon; it does so by making a distinction between two types of response in the extant literature. Moreover, it offers a critique on the basis of theories of ideology and politics and draws upon the theology of Paul Tillich to offer a constructive proposal.

建構道教器官捐贈現代教義詮釋

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 道教以不老不死成仙為終極關懷。隨著科學發展和宗教互涉，部份道派已放棄今世肉體永活的基要信仰，轉而信奉輪迴轉世，但是道教生命觀仍然重視身體的保養和修煉，如何在古老成仙終極關懷和現代器官捐贈議題中取得平衡，需要重新詮釋教義。然而，道教教義縱向有時代轉變，橫向有派別不同，必須整體綜觀才能抽取其中必要而共通的元素，繼而以之思考器官捐贈的議題。因此，下文將梳理歷代道經文獻，應用宗教現象學的概念，系統分析主要道派對器官捐贈的可能態度及成因，並提出器官捐贈的教義現代詮釋以供參考：現今道教普遍依然相信人生是樂，追求延壽消災，正一道全真道等主要派別均信奉星斗信仰經典，因此其中《太上玄靈斗姆大聖元君本命延生心經》的身體觀可視為共通教義，它將輪迴主體定位於人體中心，按現代醫學大可定義為腦髓，活體或遺體器官捐贈， 因此均不會對捐贈者或受贈者的轉世投胎有負面影響。而且，道教善於向社會主流道德倫理價值觀屈服，現今維護人權和同理心均是全球主流道德倫理價值觀。活體器官捐贈可利益他人活命或有善功以助成仙，但也或會阻礙自身修行進程，如何抉擇應尊重個人的主動性意願。 The ultimate concern of the Daoist religion is becoming an immortal with eternal youth. Yet with the influence of modern scientific development and increasing interactions between different religions, some Daoist sects have given up the old doctrine of immortality and replaced it with the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation. Nevertheless, Daoism is facing a moral dilemma between its deeply held idea of the somatic cultivation of the body and the modern idea of organ donation. In this paper, the author interprets Daoist texts through the lens of phenomenology of religion and explores the possible reconciliation between traditional Daoist practice and the practice of organ donation. The paper shows that different Daoist sects hold different opinions, but that in general, Daoism grants agency regarding the decision to the individual practitioner.

ESPINOZA, GOVERNMENT FUNDING, AND RELIGIOUS CHOICE

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, holding that religious schools cannot be excluded from a state program of financial aid to private schools, is another incremental step in the Court's long-running project to reform the constitutional law of financial aid to religious institutions. There was nothing surprising about the decision, and it changed little; it was the inevitable next link in a long chain of decisions. To those observers still attached to the most expansive rhetoric of no-aid separationism, it is the world turned upside down. But the Court has been steadily marching away from that rhetoric for thirty-five years now. The more recent decisions, including Espinoza, do a far better job than no-aid separationism of separating the religious choices and commitments of the American people from the coercive power of the government. And that is the separation that is and should be the ultimate concern of the Religion Clauses—to minimize the government's interference with or influence on religion, and to leave each American free to exercise or reject religion in his or her own way, neither encouraged by the government nor discouraged or penalized by the government.

Peran Teologi Budaya dan Agama

Abstrak Aktualisasi iman merupakan keyakinan seseorang terhadap yang diimani. Proses pergulatan menemukan makna terdalam, Paul Tillich menyebutnya Ultimate Concern. Istilah ini menjadi simpul metaphoris ketika manusia mendalami iman. Ultimate Concern bukan sekadar epistemologi, namun lebih pada sisi ontologi sekaligus aksiologi. Beriman tidak bisa lepas dari pengalaman sehari-hari. Paul Tillich mengambarkan bahwa berteologi tidak bisa menghilangkan peradapan manusia. Paul Tillich menjembatani semuanya dengan “Ultimate Reality atau Ultimate Concern. Theology of Culture merupakan refleksi iman Paul Tillich yang merujuk teologi budaya. Pemikiran ini menjadi tawaran menghidupi teologi budaya melalui bahasa, ruang, dan waktu.

Making Meaning without a Maker: Secular Consciousness through Narrative and Cultural Practice

Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this study examines the ways affirmatively secular individuals construct moral frameworks, navigate hardship, and create meaningful selves. Based on an inductive, thematic analysis of the data, we show that secular individuals’ identities and interpretations of everyday experience and important life events are made meaningful through personal narratives and shared social spaces where cultural values are practiced, imbuing secular worldviews with a sense of legitimacy. Through participants’ responses to questions of “ultimate concern” including life’s purpose, and the meaning of happiness, hardship, and death, we argue that a sense of otherness, appeals to normative values, and the reframing of existential questions in secular terms plays an essential role in the lives of a segment of the growing, increasingly diverse nonreligious community. Our findings have implications for scholars of secularity, including the role of ambiguity in secular beliefs and the importance of narrative in worldview formation.

EmoElicitor: An Open Domain Response Generation Model with User Emotional Reaction Awareness

Generating emotional responses is crucial for building human-like dialogue systems. However, existing studies have focused only on generating responses by controlling the agents' emotions, while the feelings of the users, which are the ultimate concern of a dialogue system, have been neglected. In this paper, we propose a novel variational model named EmoElicitor to generate appropriate responses that can elicit user's specific emotion. We incorporate the next-round utterance after the response into the posterior network to enrich the context, and we decompose single latent variable into several sequential ones to guide response generation with the help of a pre-trained language model. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world dataset show that EmoElicitor not only performs better than the baselines in term of diversity and semantic similarity, but also can elicit emotion with higher accuracy.

Christian-Muslim Dialogue Perspectives of “The Muslim View of Christology” and “To Be a European Muslim”

Mahmoud Ayoub and Tariq Ramadan are Islamic scholars working on a Muslim-Christian dialogue study. They proposed the concepts of “ The Muslim View of Christology” and “ To Be a European Muslim”, respectively, and promoted the study of the Muslim-Christian dialogue into a broader field with far-reaching influence. The purpose of this study is to compare the concepts of “ The Muslim View of Christology” and “To Be a European Muslim” , as well as to understand the meaning and contextualization of the dialogue between the Shiʻi and the Sunni within the Muslim-Christian dialogue, in order to seek a new dimension of religious dialogue. The method of this study is a systematic analysis. This entails a close reading of the two thinkersʼ writings on Christian-Muslim encounters, in order to make a comprehensive presentation of their thinking about the Christian-Muslim dialogue in its many dimensions, considering these structures through assessing their inner consistency; in particular, including the viewpoint of “The Muslim View of Christology” and “To Be a European Muslim”. “The Muslim View of Christology”, Ayoub emphasizes, Christians must take as a Muslim view and accept it as such, at least as the methodological basis for their research studies. Ramadan prioritizes Qur'anic interpretation over simply reading the text, in order to understand its meaning and to practice the tenets of Islamic philosophy. He proposed the following perspective: To be a European Muslim and to research the Study of Islamic Sources in the European Contextualisation. We find “the Muslim view of Christology” as a blessing, as a sign of Godʼs abundant generosity in the phenomenon of diversity. The idea that “To Be a European Muslim” is an Islamic worldview is a trend that is universal and rooted in the land. Christian-Muslim dialogue on these two topics is a very indicative key and can contribute to peace in this world. The Christology of this study will be limited to“the Muslim View of Christology” and will limit Muslims to Muslim communities born in Europe. In the context of Abraham’s religion, the purpose of the Christian-Muslim dialogue should be courageous and dare to ascend to the model of coexistence and the unity of God, not just for each others’ tolerance and acceptance. This is the ultimate concern for religious dialogue between Christianity and Islam.