Secularism form an Islamic prospection

This article looks or reviews the contemporary discourse of secularism from Islamic Prospection. Observation of facts, including a religious consciousness, and the politicalreligious language of recent times, it is shown that there is no natural given boundary separating the two dimensions, the whole discussion derives from an advanced or traditional state from a religious mind. In the nineteenth and the twentieth-century thoughts in an international era by invaders, for example, in the fields of law, education, administration, and mass culture, there was experienced a visible process of change towards secularity.

“I have to wait and look around”: George Fedotov’s letters from New Haven to his wife, 1941

The letters of the well-known émigré historian and essayist are published. The letters are stored in the Bakhmeteff archive of Russian and East European culture at Columbia University. In the introduction, the publisher shows the assistance rendered to G. Fedotov by the well-known figures of the Russian diaspora in the United States and characterizes the importance of the correspondence for study of how he was looking for his place in the American academic community. The historian hoped to find it due to the invitation to attend the meetings of the Theological Discussion Group. Particular attention is paid to G. Fedotov’s critical understanding of the intellectual heritage of his former colleague, Fr. S. Bulgakov, caused by the need to deliver lectures at Divinity School. The consequences of this were reflected in The Russian Religious Mind, the final work of the historian, in which he criticized pagan hylozoism found in Kievan Christianity, and negatively assessed the Byzantine influence. The text of the letters is presented in accordance with the present-day spelling rules and accompanied with the necessary commentary.

The 7E Model of the Human Mind: Articulating a Plastic Self for the Cognitive Science of Religion

This article proposes a 7E model of the human mind, which was developed within the cognitive paradigm in religious studies and its primary expression, the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This study draws on the philosophically most sophisticated currents in the cognitive sciences, which have come to define the human mind through a 4E model as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Introducing Catherine Malabou’s concept of “plasticity,” the study not only confirms the insight of the 4E model of the self as a decentered system, but it also recommends two further traits of the self that have been overlooked in the cognitive sciences, namely the negativity of plasticity and the tension between giving and receiving form. Finally, the article matures these philosophical insights to develop a concrete model of the religious mind, equipping it with three further Es, namely emotional, evolved, and exoconscious.

The Early Church

This chapter is the first of four to explore the ways in which the different layers of the Christian past came to symbolize distinctive Victorian problems. It focuses on the early church, and its significance for debates over the authority of Christian orthodoxy. Beginning with the Oxford Movement and its prehistory, a period during which high church Anglicans emphasized the static authority of patristic orthodoxy, the chapter highlights John Henry Newman’s role in distilling a more dynamic conception of the growth of religious mind. Anti-dogmatic liberals such as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley tried to separate early Christian progress from its doctrinal dimensions. But a larger number, beginning with Christian Karl Josias Bunsen, preferred to intensify the apologetic emphasis which Newman had placed on orthodoxy as the expression of developing religious subjectivity: a stance which gave new kinds of rational justification to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Religious Cognition as a Dual-Process: Developing the Model

Several authors in the field of the cognitive science of religion have resorted to ‘dual-process’ models in their own developments. These models distinguish between non-conscious (fast, intuitive, and automatic) and conscious (slow, reflective and controlled) forms of religious reasoning. Most of the published studies focus only on the first of those two processes when dealing with religion. The present pages offer a summary of the current state of dual-process research, their application to religion to the date, and a plea for their broader use, aimed at building a more integrated view of religion as a combination of both cognitive dimensions. The developments on ‘heuristics’ might contribute to a better understanding of several features of the religious mind.