Michael Spezio

After a period in l’Arche communities, members’ self-other concept often changes from what is typical for modern secular societies to that of receiving “life” from and giving “life” to others. The two kinds of construal are mutually contrary. Following Jean Vanier, we call the ethos guiding the first construal _the Normal_. Its leading concepts are _success, competence, competition, advancement, achievement, power, superior-inferior_, and _rival_ as criteria for evaluating persons. Here the relations of self and other are distancing, alienating, ones of differential competence, superior or inferior achievement, competition for power, being winner and loser, etc. Contrastingly, the concepts governing self-other construals characterizing long-term living in l’Arche are _mutuality, vulnerability, forgiveness, compassion, reconciliation, belonging_, and _friendship_. Humble love combines two complementary virtues: humility and agapê. The tyranny of the Normal erects walls that impede the symmetrical construals of self-other characteristic of humble love. Humility dissipates or undermines the distancing, alienating self-other construals, bringing down these walls.

Exploring the concept of virtuous humility helps to highlight paths of human flourishing. Yet humility is difficult to study because it is often stereotyped as shame or self-abasement, it tends to defy uniform conceptualization across contexts and cultures, definitions are difficult to justify, and operationalizing humility challenges standard approaches in the social sciences. The present work develops a theory of interactive humility as openness to others (IHO) by foregrounding interaction and interpersonal context. IHO theory builds on a previously published theory of humility as the absence of the vices of pride and tests the new proposal against research done in conjunction with l’Arche communities. Conceptual networks from core l’Arche texts showed that openness ranks second among concepts most similar to humility (0.85), while humility ranks first for openness. These networks support the view that humility as openness in the context of l’Arche is primarily interactive and interpersonal, rather than intellectual.

What are the biological bases of religious experience? Are there biological constraints upon or determinants of religious narratives and practices? How does understanding the biology of religious experience inform the ongoing reconstruction of religious rituals and myths? In The Mystical Mind, Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg address these central questions and others from a distinct perspective called biogenetic structuralism. They propose a model of how brain activity gives rise to mystical experiential states, examine how neurobiological responses to rhythmic behavior form religious ritual, and point toward the development of a megatheology, or a theological system appealing to the widest scope of religious world‐views. This paper is a critical review of d’Aquili and Newberg's exciting work.

After providing a brief overview of social neuroscience in the context of strong embodiment and the cognitive sciences, this paper addresses how perspectives from the field may inform how theological anthropology approaches the origins of human persons-in-community. An overview of the Social Brain Hypothesis and of simulation theory reveals a simultaneous potential for receptive/projective processes to facilitate social engagement and the need for intentional spontaneity in the form of a spiritual formation that moves beyond simulation to empathy and love. Finally, elements of a virtue science that draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's relational imago Dei are shown to be helpful in framing and motivating theological approaches to human origins

. In Minding God Gregory Peterson takes a careful look at the kind of freedom that human persons have. He concludes that humans are constrained to be free and unpacks this into a version of compatibilism. That is, humans are not metaphysically free under current existence because of the causal determination inherent in their physical nature, but they can take credit for the origination of selfforming decisions because the causes occur inside of us. Peterson does advocate an eschatological hope looking forward to the breaking of causal determination by God's own action. Thus, Minding God presents an eschatologically limited compatibilism. Compatibilism of any kind, however, presents serious challenges to most Christian theologies and to many religious traditions broadly considered. After I interpret Peterson's position I make the argument that compatibilism is neither desirable nor required for a theological anthropology intent on serious engagement of cognitive science

In the context of crises in science, understanding what virtue in science is requires attention to virtue studies and virtue science themselves. Within and beyond the study of practices in laboratories and in scientific collaborations held up as exemplary or noted for being less so are core beliefs about what trust in science is or should be. Prevailing conceptions of trust in science and scientists are at the root of the crises in science. Virtue science and studies can help to identify the noxious tendencies of some conceptions of trust and suggest possible new ways of thinking. This article reviews evidence for sciences in crisis before drawing on Bayesian thinking to propose ways of thinking about trust, reliability, and validity in relation to science. Corrigibility, rather than fallibility, is the defining feature of science, calling for a trust in the persons, systems, and institutions of science as ever error-probable-plus-corrigible.

Empathy and character are concepts that many hold to be at the center of human morality. Currently, however, they are subject to sustained scholarly suspicion among social scientists, genealogically minded humanists, and moral philosophers from both utilitarian and deontological perspectives. This paper presents a close reading of influential attacks and their scientific bases and argues that they emerge from a shared model of the human mind and self that opposes reason and affect in a zero-sum game. The paper critiques these accounts and presents an alternative model of moral character for virtuous construal in which character is not identified with static, inflexible traits, dispositions, or habits, but with affectively dynamic and context-sensitive schemas supporting a mindfulness of others needs in action.