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Word of the week: W/c 29/06/15 - Charisma

28/6/2015

From the Greek; charisma is any good gift that flows from God's love (charis) to humans; any Divine grace or favour, ranging from prophecy and teaching to serving and healing.

Tony Blair: An example of a charismatic politician Source: commons.wikimedia.org

The word Charisma, when used today, means someone who is compelling, inspirational and has a great deal of charm; leaders, speakers, politicians or even comedians are all said to be charismatic. But this is a corruption of the original term as used by St Paul in his letters to the early Churches. When he wrote to the Romans and the Corinthians, Paul used the term to denote any gift that might built up the life of the Church and these are many and various:

“Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness”.
Romans 12:6-8

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Last week we took our Year 7 pupils to St Albans Abbey and the United Synagogue in St Albans. Both visits shared in common that they they were highly educational, experiential and gave pupils a chance to be immersed in the history and practices of Christianity and Judaism. At the same time they were vastly different in the size and grandeur of the buildings; The Abbey is an ornate Norman Cathedral, one of the largest buildings in the country and amongst the most beautiful. By contrast, the Synagogue is a small, unassuming building that lacks the splendour of the Abbey yet is no less loved by the community it serves.

Source: www.flickr.com

The other striking similarity was the enthusiasm and devotion of the volunteers who looked after us during our visits. All had given of their time and talent to serve their community and their faith; in short, they used their charisma. Whether they were telling the story of Alban, teaching about Baptism or the History of the Abbey; or if they were showing us how Tefillin are put on, showing us the Sefer Torah or retelling the story of the Passover; they used their own gifts of teaching to enrich our pupils’ learning.

When thinking about this post I was worried that by using the term Charisma to describe the work of both the Abbey and the Synagogue volunteers I might cause offence by using such an overtly Christian term. But actually the term seems rather fitting; Paul was writing to mixed communities of Jews and Gentiles and he himself was a Jew by birth. He would have developed his understanding of the importance of community and the various roles that need to be played from his own Jewish community and transferred this structure onto the fledgling Church. There is a great deal of shared heritage to be celebrated here.

The challenge to my students is this: Where, in your own life and over the summer holiday, can you make the most of your own particular gifts? How can you use your charisma to enrich the lives of others, just like those who served us at the Synagogue and Abbey did?

Francis Bacon Lecture 2015: Rectificatory Justice and Amending Action – Prof. Onora O’Neill

22/6/2015

Below is a summary of the 2015 Francis Bacon Lecture given by Professor Onora O'Neill at the University of Hertfordshire on Monday 22nd June. I wrote about this opportunity in this "Dig Deeper" post.

Professor Onora O'Neill

Rectificatory justice refers to actions that help people to deal with the past – it is retrospective reasoning that takes account of violations in either human rights (those we all hold by virtue of us being human) and special rights (those formed by transactions, contacts, marriages etc) or both. It is the kind of justice that has occurred in South Africa under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in Northern Ireland and for indigenous peoples in countries such as USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Justice is an ancient topic for Philosophy that began with philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle and runs throughout Philosophical history. Prof. O’Neill outlined three types of Justice; punishment, compensation and restitution that might be employed for ancient injustices but for one reason or another don’t really work very effectively on their own. Instead she suggested a combination of these that she called Rectificatory Justice.

Punishment (retribution) – This form of punishment focuses on the perpetrator of the crime and might employ methods such as Capital Punishment, loss of state, torture etc. It provides a limited basis for securing true justice – especially in a global scenario. The big risk is that through using it we might violate someone else’s rights. The International Criminal Court is one body that tries to enact this form of justice – but she questioned the efficacy of these bodies for ancient crimes. The problem is that justice for ancient wrongs must not be vicarious - they cannot be carried out on someone else in the place of another, even if this is an ancestor. So this is not a good way of dealing with ancient wrongs.

Compensation – This method focuses on the victim and can be given even when the perpetrators are dead, so it is potentially useful. And, unlike retribution it can be done vicariously – but it does require that cause is properly established. One simple example of compensation is insurance pay-out, reparation after sub-standard treatment by regulated industry such as medical services. The problem is what happens when the cause of an injustice is multifarious and hard to determine? Or the result of unintended consequences? This is especially difficult in putting right ancient wrongs.

Restitution – This is a form of justice that restores the state of affairs that existed before; one example she gave was of looted art taken by the Nazis being given back after WW2. However in many cases this is not possible. Restitution may be vicarious for ancient wrongs but only if it is symbolically adequate. For example it may be done by the heirs of wrongdoers who are symbolic of the wrongdoers. Prof. O’Neill suggested that it can be “a deep and important response”. One example she cited is in New Zealand or Canada – those given restitution may those who are of mixed descent now. For it to be symbolic there must be a common view of who represents the past victims.

Prof. O’Neill then outlined various types of what she termed “amending action” that leads to Rectificatory justice – this can be as simple as an apology and forgiveness, or other more symbolic of practical actions to restore relationships. It does not need to be monetary compensation or for boundaries to change hands but can can be actions that restore relationships between nations or within a state. She suggested that an apology both in personal life and in politics can be very effective – as long as the person apologising is the right person to be apologising.

The most effective Rectificatory Justice cases mix up these different methods of compensation and amending action – e.g. in South Africa at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But even this case was fraught with problems. These two can’t be spliced easily – She gave the example of the loss of sacred spaces; the sacred is beyond price and so offering money just adds insult to injury. They want the actual place or artefact back.

Prof. O’Neill did not try to suggest what should be done in any particular case and indeed in the questions afterwards she avoided getting embroiled in political cases such as Iraq. But all in all it was a very illuminating and thought provoking talk.

Questions that I had following the talk:

Another reason why governments seek justice is to deter others from doing the committing the same. Does Rectificatory Justice deter people or states from committing offences in the same way?

Who is the best judge that we have for Rectificatory Justice?

Does a symbolic apology count for anything in reality?

Does the apology made as part of amending action have to be heartfelt to be make it truly effective?

Word of the Week: w/c 21/06/15 - Ontological

21/6/2015

An Argument for the existence of God based on the idea that the definition of God means that God must, by definition, exist.

I am cheating a little bit with my word of the week this week - I am not going to write it myself! Instead I'm going to suggest a few places where you can find out more about this unique yet ultimately flawed argument for the existence of God. I am also cheating because I blogged about this back in October when the word of the week was A Priori.

The first place is Dr Andrew Chapman’s 1000-word essay from his blog which you can find here (I featured this blog on a dig deeper post recently). Dr Chapman sets out the basic argument as proposed by Anselm in the twelfth century followed by the criticisms of his contemporary Gaunilo and the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant.

The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God

The other source I am going to suggest is Mr McMillan REvision a vlogger on YouTube who produces really excellent videos on a variety of RS topics. These two are on the Onotlogical Argument:

Dig Deeper: 1000-Word Philosophy

20/6/2015

Dr Andrew Chapman

This elegant blog has a very simple but effective format - it posts essays by a range of contributors that are 1000-words long on lots of topics within Philosophy. It provides a very good introduction to a large, and ever-growing range of topics, that go beyond A-level knowledge and so are a great opportunity to “dig deeper”.

In the words of the website itself: “1000-Word Philosophy is a constantly-growing collection of original essays on important philosophical topics. These essays are introductions rather than argumentative articles. Each essay is as close to 1000 words (while never going over!) as the author can get it. A 1000-word essay takes between five and ten minutes to read. That’s about the length of a bus ride or a waiting room stay or the lead-up to a class meeting.

“Professional philosophy can seem abstract, esoteric, and hyper-specialized. But we all ask and try to answer philosophical questions myriad times daily—philosophy is the purview not just of the expert, but of all thoughtful people. Our goal in writing and sharing these essays is to provide high-quality introductions to great philosophical questions and debates. We hope that philosophers and non-philosophers alike will benefit from perusing these essays. Our authors generally provide references or sources for more information for readers whose interest is piqued by a particular topic or debate”. (https://1000wordphilosophy.wordpress.com/about/)

The essays are helpfully organised at the bottom of the landing page into different categories including Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Science, and Social and Political Philosophy. The blog is edited by Dr Andrew Chapman, a Philosophy lecturer at the University of Colorado. All of the essays are well referenced but my only criticism is that the authors are not given any context - it would be nice to know who they were to provide them with more credibility.

A few essays to look out for which are very relevant to A-level are: Just War Theory, The Problem of Evil, The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, Because God Says So: On Divine Command Theory, Can We Believe in Miracles?, Situationism and Virtue Ethics, and Introduction to Deontology: Kantian Ethics

You can also follow them on Twitter (https://twitter.com/1000wordphil) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/1000wordphilosophy)

Visit 1000-Word Philosophy Essays

Word of the Week: w/c 15/06/15 - Family

13/6/2015

A group consisting of two parents and their children Living Together as a unit.

BLOG UPDATE: 06/10/15

The Roman Catholic Church has been going through a review of The Family and Marriage which culminates in a synod (meeting) this week. (See the BBC Article here). To mark this important debate the radio programme Beyond Belief produced a discussion about the history and nature of the family.

Listen Here

Single Parent Family

For one reason or another, be it bereavement or divorce, parents sometimes end up raising their children on their own. According to gingerbread.org.uk there are about two million single parent families in the UK. Contrary to popular perceptions only about 2 percent are teenagers. Whilst only about 9 percent of single parent families are headed by the father.

Extended Family

This refers to the members of a family on the fringes of the nuclear family. This includes the obvious candidates such as Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins and Nephews. There has been a trend over the past century for couples, when they marry to be less attached to their extended family and families now live further apart than they once did. However extended families often provide care and support to the most vulnerable of families; You can find out about the work of one charity that supports grandparent carers here. This care could be needed whilst parents work, due to bereavement or separation and in the most extreme of cases, because of parents losing the right to care for their own children through drug or alcohol abuse or imprisonment.

Image: www.leftilon.co.uk

Nuclear Family

This is your “traditional” family and matches the definition above; A mother, father and children living together as a family unit. Many Christians argue that this is how God intended the family to be. Roman Catholics would go as far as to argue that this is the Natural Law. They might look to the bible as evidence where Adam and Eve are declared to be One Flesh in Genesis chapter 1. Furthermore one of the decalouge (link) commands that children should honour your Father and Mother and that marriage is the environment in which this can happen. Finally the marriage ceremony itself declares would say that “it is given as the foundation of family life in which children are [born and] nurtured and in which each member of the family,in good times and in bad, may find strength, companionship and comfort, and grow to maturity in love”.

Reconstituted families

With a rise in the number of people getting divorced has come a rise in the number of reconstituted families; where two sets of children become one family when divorced parents marry each other.

Cohabiting parents

As societies attitude towards marriage have changed and the need to be married has diminished more and more couples cohabit - live together as a couple but without being married. Many of these couples inevitably have children. They might not agree with the religious or social reasons for marriage or simply do not feel the need to marry.

Childless Family

Many married or cohabiting couples would still suggest that they are a family - just one without children. Does this still count a family? Certainly it is a long way from our first definition. What do you think?

Below is a little infographic created by me to sum up this post - The data at the bottom is from this PDF from the Office of National Statistics.

You will also find below it a fantastic video from MrMcMillanREvis - a YouTube Channel with great summaries of learning.

The definition above comes from Oxford Dictionaries Online and is, in fact, rather controversial. The reality of modern life is that families are often not as described above; the situation is often more messy and complicated. Part of the reason for this is that Divorce, Remarriage and Cohabitation have become much more socially acceptable and this has led to many more combinations of families being created. I want to look at a few types that you might need to know for GCSE or IGCSE and link these to Christian beliefs about the family.

Word of the Week: W/C 08/06/15 - NDE

6/6/2015

A Near-Death-Experience (NDE) is reputed to take place in a small number of people on the brink of death and is recounted by a person on recovery. typically they recall features such as an out-of-body experience, a tunnel of light, feelings of peace and/or meeting family or Angelic beings.

Image: www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com

Image: www.thirdeyeactivation.com

Many religions make claims about the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul that can survive our bodily death. This is known as dualism and is believed in by many religions such as Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. But can these beliefs be proved by science? Science has not been able to identify the location of the soul in the body despite attempts by philosophers such as Descartes to propose that it is contained somewhere within us (in Descartes’ case he argued that the soul interacted with the body through the pineal gland. This has obviously been dismissed by modern medicine). But what if there was a moment when the soul did become evident? Some believe this to be when people nearly die, the soul starts to leave the body and then returns (when they are resuscitated) with memory of its “journey” out of the body.

Image: zalozba.intuicija.si

Many of these events have been analysed by psychologists such as Dr Raymond Moody, Dr Kenneth Ring and Amber Wells, who have interviewed hundreds of people who claim to have had such an experience. As a result of these interviews he came up with 15 ‘common experiences’ and, while no one had all 15, one of the most common experiences was that of meeting dead relatives.

If NDEs are accepted as real, then people meeting those who have died can be seen as ‘proof’ that there is life after death. In Moody’s study, nearly all of the patients felt that they both understood, and were no longer afraid of, death as they knew what would happen when they die. If NDEs are accepted as ‘true’, then consciousness after death does ‘prove’ life after death.

Image: www.tophdgallery.com

On the other hand, this argument hinges upon the assumption that NDEs are ‘real’ and not induced by pharmacological, psychological or neurological issues. Dr Susan Blackmore, a psychologist, may have explained one of the more common features in the study which was travelling down a tunnel to see a bright light. She has suggested that, when dying, the cells on the outside edge of the cornea begin to shut down, while the sensitivity of the inner cells is increased by impulses from the brain; this could produce the effects described. It could be argued that, given that our bodies are contain the same components, it is not surprising that people experience the same sensations when undergoing a traumatic experience such as nearly dying. If then, NDEs are not ‘real’ but merely in the mind of the person, then they cannot prove that there is life after death.

Image: www.lazerhorse.org

But what about cases when the individual has an out-of-body exeprience? One such incidence was that of Pam Reynolds, a woman who had an out-of-body experience while clinically dead. She was later able to describe a conversation in the operating room and the tools used to cut into her head. She should not have known this information as she was sedated at the time. Advocates such as Moody believe that this provides a strong reason to belief in life after death, especially when combined with other testimonies.

On the other hand, while a good deal of NDEs imply the existence of an afterlife, people who claim to have experienced them are not consistent in their description of that afterlife. Moody’s subjects were all American - a country that is culturally Christian (and even the non-religious would have knowledge of Christianity) - they describe meeting a being of light and dead relatives which is the traditional Christian idea of the afterlife. However a student of Dr Kenneth Ring, Amber Wells, conducted a similar study to Moody using subjects who were from different countries. Her results demonstrated that 70% of the group had an experience that supported the idea of reincarnation rather than a final destination of heaven. This would appear to imply that NDEs are influenced by cultural upbringing. If cultural upbringing instils a belief in life after death, then the experience could not be proof of the afterlife, but merely a reflection of the cultural (or religious) beliefs of the subject.

In conclusion, if NDEs are real then they appear to advocate some form of dualism and also offer reasons to believe in the afterlife. However, alternative psychological explanations for NDEs cast serious doubt upon this. What do you think?

Dig Deeper: The 2015 Francis Bacon Lecture

3/6/2015

One topic that we don't get to study a great deal, just because of the combination of IGCSE, GCSE and A-level courses we study is Justice. And yet this is an immensely important ethical issue - one could argue that a society can be judged by how it treats its criminals. Should we simply be in the business of punishing them in order to "get even", are we locking them away so that they don't harm anyone else, are we trying to make an example of them so others don't commit the same crime or are we trying to make criminals better people so they can come out of jail and rejoin society? But what happens when there is no one person to blame because the state is to blame? Or what if the perpetrator is long dead? What do we do then? To think about these issues I am going to go to, and am recommending that pupils attend, a lecture on 22nd June, 2015 at Univeristy of Hertfordshire.

This lecture is going to examine the the idea of rectificatory (putting right a past wrong) or corrective justice which goes back to Aristotle, and can take many forms, including punishment, compensation, restitution or restoration, as well as other forms of amending action. The problem is that too often punishment focuses on wrongdoers, often to the exclusion or even to the detriment of victims; compensation focuses on victims rather than wrongdoers. So what is the best way to deal with these problems?

Addressing these questions will be Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve. She is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a cross-bench member of the House of Lords. She has written extensively in the areas of political philosophy, ethics, international relations, bioethics and Immanuel Kant, including giving the BBC Reith Lectures on A Question of Trust in 2002.

The lecture starts at 1930 on Monday 22nd June preceeded by registration and light refreshements from 1845. You need to book in advance - follow the link below. I hope to see you there!

Click Here!