JIS VIII 1996
THE CITY IN THE 21st CENTURY
JIS VIII 1996: 1-18
THE CITY UNDER SIEGE:
DRUGS AND CRIME
George B. Palermo, M.D.
Medical College of Wisconsin
This essay explores the impact of alcohol and drug abuse on the individual’s life, family, and community in a secularized society. The upsurge of crime in the city is the consequence of many variables, besides drugs and alcohol: lack of education, training, and jobs, the disintegration of the family, and inadequate administration of justice in the midst of a social climate of relativism. There is a need for the reintegration of the family, particularly the re-inclusion of a responsible father as a role model. In order to restore city life, there is an urgent need for a more active religious involvement at all levels, especially for teaching moral values in homes and schools. A new global evangelization of communities would highlight the importance of Judaeo-Christian values for the formation of character, and personal and community responsibility so necessary for a civil society.
JIS VIII 1996: 19-30
THE INNER CITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY:
HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED?
Michael L. Siegfried
Coker College
Drugs and crime are resounding issues with regard to contemporary cities. As we approach the twenty-first century, their impact on American cities in particular requires attention. The realities of life facing the residents of inner cities today are leading to a future that may resemble in many ways Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, Brave New World. Unless a serious national commitment is made to alter present trajectories, the future may well be one in which drugs, crime, and social pathologies, combined with a lack of educational and economic opportunities, relegate many people to the bottom of society, enslaved by soma and casual sexual gratification, eerily reminiscent of Huxley’s genetically-engineered society.
JIS VIII 1996: 31-48
THE MORAL IMPERATIVE:
OLD LIBERALISM’S NEW CHALLENGE
Stephen H. Wirls
Rhodes College
This essay explores the relationship between moral community and the principles and practices of liberal individualism. Insofar as these principles afford the widest latitude to the individual’s judgment concerning the government of his life, they have contributed to a decay in the rigor and authority of moral and civic codes. Moreover, they and the way of life they foster seem to militate against any political or social solutions to problems of morality and civility, reflecting a disparity between liberal regime principles and the moral preconditions of a decent society. A moral revival may thus have to be founded on the recognition that healthy liberal democracies require policies and practices in tension with liberal principles.
JIS VIII 1996: 49-68
LEWIS MUMFORD:
MAPPING THE IDEA OF THE CITY
Leonidas Donskis
Klaipeda University-Lithuania
Lewis Mumford’s discursive map, uncovering the trajectories of modern consciousness and Western social philosophy, dates back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the great tradition of American Romanticism. However, Mumford’s discursive map of the idea of the city cannot be reduced to architecture and city planning alone. His world of ideas draws on such thinkers and concepts as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, Benton MacKaye’s Eutopian ideas, Patrick Geddes’ regional planning, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture (Broadacre City), anticipated by Louis Henri Sullivan. Mumford’s theoretical constructions also reflect the worldviews of Simmel, Tonnies, Spengler, and Toynbee, as well as other influential social theories of the last two centuries. Mumford was apparently the first among twentieth-century intellectuals to grasp that human creation, interaction, self-fulfillment, and the search for perfectibility all take place in the city.
JIS VIII 1996: 69-80
THE CITY AS REMEMBRANCE:
A RESPONSE
Wayne Allen
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
Human action is both the field of human expression and, until recently, formed the field of politics in which both individual and collective identities served as the basis for judgment, temporal and divine. Indeed, it was actions that formed the panoply of regulatory principles in Greek ethics, Jewish Law, and Christ’s Word, from which good and evil took direction, and thereby invoked protection or prosecution, salvation or damnation. Judgment is always a retrospective on the worthiness of human actions, which redound to the good of the whole of which they are integral parts. Within the Judeo-Christian cosmology, sin is action against God, Who is the Whole. God’s judgment is final, since it is a retrospective summation of action on earth. Thus, the city of man serves as the foyer to the city of God.
JIS VIII 1996: 81-104
DIE KUNST IN DER ZUKUNFTSSTADT *
Zygmunt Stankiewicz
Muri, Switzerland
Jede Aussage eines Menschen, sei es durch Wort, Tat oder Werk, hat eine direkte Beziehung zu seiner Umwelt und im besonderen zur menschlichen Gesellschaft. Der wahre Kunstler ist in den meisten Fallen ein mit der Natur eng verbundener Mensch. Aus ihr nimmt er seine Inspiration zur schopferischen Aussage. Denn, am Anfang war die Idee, die Idee war bei dem Schopfer, und die Idee war der Schopfer. Jedoch, wir brauchen eine neue, verantwortungsbewusste Kunstlerschaft. Jeder von uns ist dazu auserwahlt–schon seiner Berufung wegen–falls er das Geheimnis des Wandelns und der Wiedergutmachung erfahren hat. Eine umfassende Kunstlergemeinschaft setzt voraus, dass alle Kunstler, in ihr vereint und um Erfahrungen reicher, mit neuen Ideen der Menschheit dienen (View Art).
* Oleg Zinam Award for Best Essay in JIS, 1996.
JIS VIII 1996: 105-130
AUGUSTINE’S TALE OF TWO CITIES:
TELEOLOGY / ESCHATOLOGY IN THE CITY OF GOD *
Bruce W. Speck
University of Memphis
St. Augustine’s The City of God has deeply influenced the development of Western political thought. As a seminal thinker, Augustine provides important insights concerning the future of the city. However, Augustine’s politics cannot be separated from his theology, particularly his teaching on original sin and predestination. Augustine’s understanding of teleology or purpose, especially with respect to ethics, and eschatology–the end or consummation of all things–form an integrated whole. Hence, to assess Augustine’s politics, one must first grasp his theology. Notably, Augustine’s theology invests history with meaning and provides a basis for the inevitable pluralism as well as cooperation between the citizens from the two cities living in the same world with diametrically opposed loves.
* David Morsey Award for Best Biblical Exegesis, 1996.
JIS VIII 1996: 131-148
THE BRIDGE TO ETERNITY:
MEDJUGORJE AND THE YUGOSLAV CIVIL WAR
Oskar Gruenwald
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
This essay considers Medjugorje, a small mountain village in Bosnia-Hercegovina, as an icon or a bridge between God and man. The contemporary quest for national roots in the Balkans has led to cultural policies in the Yugoslav successor states which deny all common bonds among the South Slavs, resulting in a Kafkaesque civil war. Drawing on the crisis of liberal democracy and community in the West, the essay explores the prospects for peace in the former Yugoslavia, as reflected in Our Lady of Medjugorje’s call for moral and spiritual renewal. It concludes that the quintessential, universal, Christian, and ecumenical Medjugorje message of peace represents a bridge to eternity, just as the historic Old Bridge in Mostar and the Visegrad Bridge over the Drina River are symbolic of a common South Slav history and destiny.
JIS VIII 1996: 149-167
A LOGIC – BASED TYPOLOGY
OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY
K. Helmut Reich
University of Fribourg-Switzerland
The classification, comparison, and evaluation of science-theology relationships is facilitated by employing a high-level abstraction, such as a logic-based typology. The application of formal symbolic logic, fact-related dialectical logic, and the logic of complementarity yields six logical relationship types. Typologies proposed by leading exponents of science-theology interfaces like Barbour, Bube, Drees, Hefner, Miller, Peacocke, and Russell are examined in terms of logical types. Since both science and theology have a role in individual and societal life, the types “overlap” and “complementarity” look particularly promising: the distinctiveness of each domain is recognized, but also their linkages. An analysis of the New Age worldview highlights its deficiencies and suggests an elaboration of more complex logical types as combinations of basic types.
JIS VIII 1996: 168-175
OF LOGOS, WONDER AND MORNING UNDERSTANDING:
A RESPONSE
David Grandy
Brigham Young University-Hawaii
Science and theology impinge on us in different ways. However, since both enterprises reach toward a comprehensive understanding of reality, each must eventually take cognizance of the other. After all, to comprehend means both to understand and to embrace, and understanding comes about as our circles of explanation grow larger and more comprehensive. Like two stones thrown into the same pond, science and theology produce ripples that inevitably interact. Will those ripples cancel each other out, or will they constructively merge to produce larger ripples or circles of explanation?