Becoming Fully Human in Community: Towards a Critical Theology of Ubuntu

The rapid development of technogenic civilization, consumer culture, and transhumanist ideologies has reshaped the boundaries of subjectivity, freedom, and moral responsibility. These processes challenge the traditional philosophical understanding of the human being and demand a renewed humanitarian framework capable of preserving existential integrity amid the pressures of technological and social change. The purpose of the paper is to explore the philosophical and anthropological dimensions of personality transformation in the conditions of modern consumer and digital society, to reveal the mechanisms through which technological progress and economic rationality influence human subjectivity, and to justify the need for a new ethics and educational paradigm that safeguard human dignity and freedom. The methodological framework combines existential and phenomenological approaches (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre), the critical tradition of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Fromm), and contemporary theories of digital culture and transhumanism (Bauman, Stiegler, Harari, Deleuze). Comparative analysis, hermeneutics, and axiological interpretation are employed to trace the evolution of philosophical conceptions of subjectivity and to reveal shifts in value orientations caused by informational and economic transformations. The study demonstrates that the digital and consumer revolutions lead to a reduction of the human being to a functional role within algorithmic systems, causing the erosion of autonomy, authenticity, and reflective capacity. However, it also argues that through the cultivation of moral and ethical virtues – prudence, justice, courage, love, faith, and hope – it is possible to restore human subjectivity and reaffirm existential freedom. The prospects for further research involve developing an integrative model of digital humanism that unites philosophy, education, and ethics. Such a model should provide a conceptual foundation for rehumanizing the digital environment, forming critical and moral competencies, and strengthening the existential resilience of the individual in the globalized world.

1. Introduction 2. 'Life from the third dimension': Human action in Barth's early ethics 3. 'The great disruption': Word of God and moral consciousness in Barth's Munster ethics 4. 'The firmest grasp of the real': Barth on original sin 5. 'Assured and patient and cheerful expectation': Barth on Christian hope as the Church's task 6. Freedom in Limitation: Human freedom and false necessity in Barth 7. Eloquent and radiant: The prophetic office of Christ and the mission of the Church 8. 'The grammar of doing': Luther and Barth on human agency 9. Justification, analogy and action: Barth and Luther in Jungel's anthropology Further Reading Index of names

This research aims to explore by offering theodicy as the basis for anthropocentric theology to purify God of all the bad images that occur creation of God, and theological criticism of the theocentric view which positions God with his absolute will to do anything, including creating and allowing environmental crises to occur also the anthropocentric opinion which positions humans with their free will has led to an environmental crisis. The contradiction of belief in God as the Most Perfect Essence with the fact that there is a problem of evil (imperfection) in creation of God that a perennial debate that has existed since the birth of these religions. These research method uses a literature review and data analysis using a qualitative hermentic approach. The results of the study describe the views of the Bible and the Qur'an about human freedom and present theodicy debates from traditional to modern in Christian and Islamic theology, about the role and ethics of humans towards nature or the environments. The results of the research are hoped it will become theological literacy or provide theological arguments for the need for human intervention to be fair, good, and true to the environment. Apart from being an implementation of faith in the Supreme Being, this intervention is also a human responsibility as a moral agent for protecting the environment.
 
 

Science challenges faith to seek fuller understanding, and faith challenges science to be socially and ethically responsible. This book begins with faith in God the Creator of the world, and then expands our understanding of creation in light of Big Bang cosmology and new discoveries in physics. Examining the expanding frontier of genetic research, Ted Peters draws out implications for theological understandings of human nature and human freedom. Issues discussed include: methodology in science and theology; eschatology in cosmology and theology; freedom and responsibility in evolution and theology; and genetic determinism, genetic engineering, and cloning in relation to freedom, the comodification of human life, and equitable distribution of the fruits of genetic technology. The dialogue model of relationship between science and religion, proposed in this book, provides a common ground for the disparate voices among theologians, scientists, and world religions. This common ground has the potential to breathe new life into current debates about the world in which we live, move, and have our being.

Reviewed by: Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy Benjamin Hill James A. Harris. Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 264. Cloth, $99.00. Early modern historians and philosophers interested in human freedom can profitably read this book, which provides a synoptic view of the eighteenth-century British free will debate from Locke through Dugald Stewart. Scholars have not ignored the debate, but as they have tended to focus on canonical figures (Locke, Hume, and Reid), the author’s inclusion of lesser-known yet significant thinkers such as Lord Kames, Jonathan Edwards, and James Beattie is especially welcome. The main thesis of James Harris’s book is that the eighteenth-century British debate was animated by a general commitment to “experimentalism,” i.e., the view that we should be faithful to the data of our experiences of willing. Locke initiated the turn to experimentalism, but in Harris’s judgment it was Hume who first fully adopted it. Of course, Hume’s deflationary moves did nothing to slow the debate, let alone settle it, and necessitarians (Kames, Edwards, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander Crombie) continued to battle libertarians (Beattie, Reid, James Gregory, and Stewart). An equally important theme in the book is the changing fortunes of the contrary notions of moral and physical necessity. In the beginning, only libertarians (Bramhall and Clarke) ascribed moral necessity to the motives underlying human behavior, over the objections of necessitarians (Hobbes and Collins) that physical necessity is the only sort of necessity. Later, however, necessitarians such as Edwards began utilizing the distinction between moral and physical necessity. The book seems to imply a connection between these two themes and the idea that somehow the commitment to experimentalism, which is lacking in the Hobbes-Bramhall and Collins-Clarke debates, pushed necessitarians toward the distinction between moral and physical necessity, but the nature of that connection remains obscure. In any case, the story is fundamentally one of philosophical failure because the commitment to experimentalism provided these thinkers with no leverage against questions about [End Page 646] our freedom. Despite their new orientation, the debate remained stalled because, Harris suggests, there was “profound disagreement about what exactly it meant . . . ‘to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects’.” What makes this a good book are its interesting and provocative discussions of Hume and Reid. Harris sees Hume’s treatment as more revolutionary than most, arguing that it rests on a “contentious” understanding of the copy principle that all simple ideas are copies of impressions—it does not follow from my being unable to identify an idea’s aboriginal impression that the resulting idea is incoherent. And regarding Reid, Harris finds parallels between his common-sense commitments to libertarianism and the possibility of knowledge that suggest his critique of the way of ideas is inadequate without a full defense of libertarianism. To have made this a great book, however, Harris should have engaged the secondary literature more and shown why his interpretations are preferable to the alternatives. He clearly knows the literature and has something to say about it, but his comments are buried in footnotes and tend to be passing notices of differences rather efforts to engage the contrary arguments. The biggest flaw, however, is the book’s failure to demonstrate the impact of the rise of experimentalism, a thesis that looks strained when applied to thinkers after Reid. James Gregory, for example, rejects the experimentalist’s “direct appeals to [our] consciousness” of willing for deciding the issue in favor of a priori arguments, and against the necessitarian’s conception of human agency and causation as constant conjunction. So too, Alexander Crombie defends necessitarianism by postulating that many of our motives are unconscious, contrary to Reid’s experimentalist appeals to motiveless activity. Moreover, there are several thinkers, often though not always necessaritarian (e.g., Richard Price and James Oswald in their arguments from moral responsibility), who utilize speculative theses in their analyses of the experience of willing, which makes one wonder about their commitment to experimentalism. Part of the problem is the way Harris focuses on simply laying out...

In The Future of Human Nature, Jürgen Habermas raises the question of whether the embryonic genetic diagnosis and genetic modification threatens the foundations of the species ethics that underlies current understandings of morality. While morality, in the normative sense, is based on moral interactions enabling communicative action, justification, and reciprocal respect, the reification involved in the new technologies may preclude individuals to uphold a sense of the undisposability (Unverfügbarkeit) of human life and the inviolability (Unantastbarkeit) of human beings that is necessary for their own identity as well as for reciprocal relations. Engaging with liberal bioethics and Catholic approaches to bioethics, the article clarifies how Habermas’ position offers a radical critique of liberal autonomy while maintaining its postmetaphysical stance. The essay argues that Habermas’ approach may guide the question of rights of future generations regarding germline gene editing. But it calls for a different turn in the conversation between philosophy and theology, namely one that emphasizes the necessary attention to rights violations and injustices as a common, postmetaphysical starting point for critical theory and critical theology alike. In 2001, Jürgen Habermas published a short book on questions of biomedicine that took many by surprise.[1] To some of his students, the turn to a substantive position invoking the need to comment on a species ethics rather than outlining a public moral framework was seen as the departure from the “path of deontological virtue,”[2] and at the same time a departure from postmetaphysical reason. Habermas’ motivation to address the developments in biomedicine had certainly been sparked by the intense debate in Germany, the European Union, and internationally on human cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryonic stem cell research, and human enhancement. He turned to a strand of critical theory that had been pushed to the background by the younger Frankfurt School in favor of cultural theory and social critique, even though it had been an important element of its initial working programs. The relationship of instrumental reason and critical theory, examined, among others, by Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse and taken up in Habermas’ own Knowledge and Interest and Theory of Communicative Action became ever-more actual with the development of the life sciences, human genome analysis, and genetic engineering of human offspring. Today, some of the fictional scenarios discussed at the end of the last century as “science fiction” have become reality: in 2018, the first “germline gene-edited” children were born in China.[3] Furthermore, the UK’s permission to create so-called “three-parent” children may create a legal and political pathway to hereditary germline interventions summarized under the name of “gene editing.”In this article, I want to explore Habermas’ “substantial” argument in the hope that (moral) philosophy and (moral) theology become allies in their struggle against an ever-more reifying lifeworld, which may create a “moral void” that would, at least from today’s perspective, be “unbearable” (73), and for upholding the conditions of human dignity, freedom, and justice. I will contextualize Habermas’ concerns in the broader discourse of bioethics, because only by doing this, his concerns are rescued from some misinterpretations.[1] Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003).[2] Ibid., 125, fn. 58. 8[3] Up to the present, no scientific publication of the exact procedure exists, but it is known that the scientist, Jiankui He, circumvented the existing national regulatory framework and may have misled the prospective parents about existing alternatives and the unprecedented nature of his conduct. Yuanwu Ma, Lianfeng Zhang, and Chuan Qin, "The First Genetically Gene‐Edited Babies: It's “Irresponsible and Too Early”," Animal Models and Experimental Medicine (2019); Matthias Braun, Meacham, Darian, "The Trust Game: Crispr for Human Germline Editing Unsettles Scientists and Society," EMBO reports 20, no. 2 (2019).

Capabilities and the “Value” Flows of International Graduate Returnees and Their Networks

This article analyses a case involving the dismissal of a tenured faculty member at Hiroshima City University of Japan. The university dismissed a Korean woman associate professor after filing a criminal complaint against her, leading to a house raid, her arrest and media coverage. After 11 days of detention, the Hiroshima Prosecutor’s Office decided not to indict her because they could not find criminal intent on her part. With the suspicion of the university’s fabrication of her criminality looming large, she was dismissed within a few hours of her release. The university’s attempt to purge a critical foreign faculty member from the university campus, faculty housing and the country of Japan was an almost complete success until the case became an international controversy with counter-media exposure and the formation of a transnational support network. This case reveals a volatile mixture of race- and gender-based discrimination, administrative incompetence and politicised financial subsidy as a backdrop to violations of human rights and academic freedom. The present article shows that the rights’ violations in this case are closely connected to rising nationalism, the politicisation of educational subsidy and ideological human agencies with a set of professional agendas.

In this paper, I draw on the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas to comment on natural patterns of flourishing in human virtuous life. Through the concept of “natural goodness” borrowed from Philippa Foot, I aim to show how in light of Aquinas’s moral philosophy the realm of physical nature serves as an exemplar for human reason and action. While acknowledging a great variety of cultures and the crucial role of free choice in shaping human action, I emphasize the inherent orientation of human freedom towards moral flourishing, as I find it in Aquinas’s doctrine. The desire for happiness and the natural seeds of moral virtues, terms of which the human mind discovers from various instances of natural or morally virtuous action, provide some basic orientation to human virtuous conduct according to reason. The diversity of virtuous flourishing of human lives and cultures has an immense scope according to the degree to which ordered practical reasoning allows and fosters it. At the same time, however, virtuous flourishing depends on and keeps in congruence with the intelligible patterns of nature that reason and virtue imitate.

The text, in continuity with the group’s previous publication and following Antiqua et Nova , highlights the difference between the prevailing AI definition of intelligence as rational action and problem-solving (often influenced by behaviorism and functionalism) and the traditional theological view of intelligence as a rational understanding and interpretation of reality. It stresses that human agency is fundamentally relational, rooted in the imago Dei (image of God), which involves intellect, free will, and stewardship. It discusses how AI, through practices like manipulative nudging, algorithmic governance, deskilling, and the rapidification of life, negatively impacts human freedom and promotes a paradigm focused on efficiency and control. Finally, the text proposes that the principles of Catholic social teaching, particularly subsidiarity and a focus on human dignity, offer ethical guidance for developing AI as a tool that genuinely supports human flourishing and responsible action rather than eroding it.

Summary Christians often presume that immediate and universally extensive divine governance of human behavior is incompatible with human agency and responsibility. Against this presumption, Kathryn Tanner argues for a distinctive metalinguistic paradigm whereby Christians can coherently speak of God’s transcendence in such a way that divine action could never in principle ‘compete’ with human action. Thus, it is said, God can comprehensively will each human action without thereby compromising significant human freedom and corresponding moral responsibility. In this article, it is argued that Tanner’s non-competitivist paradigm fails to circumvent a theological version of the ‘direct argument’ for the incompatibility between human moral responsibility and causal determinism.

This article examines the philosophical and theological implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and the technological singularity for core religious concepts. The predictive capacities of AI challenge traditional accounts of divine omniscience, raising critical questions about the distinction between algorithmic foreknowledge and theological models of perfect knowledge. The increasing determinacy of human behaviour through data-driven systems complicates classical formulations of human freedom and moral responsibility. Additionally, the potential for artificial suffering demands an expansion of theodicy and a reassessment of the creator-creature relationship in light of human technological agency. Finally, emerging technological eschatologies, promising digital immortality and transcendence, confront religious soteriology with novel anthropocentric models of salvation.This study argues that the philosophy of religion must critically rearticulate its categories of knowledge, suffering, and eschatological hope to remain conceptually viable in a world mediated by intelligent systems.

Wound Without EndEnvisioning Permanence through Lucio Fontana’s Concetti Spaziali Giulia Privitelli (bio) . . . for tho’ we sit down within The plowed furrow, listening to the weeping clods till we Contract or Expand Space at will: or if we raise ourselvesUpon the chariots of the morning, Contracting or Expanding Time! Everyone knows we are One Family! One Man blessed for ever. william blake, jerusalem, plate 55, v. 42–461 In response to Philippe Nemo’s question concerning the origin of man’s thought, Emmanuel Levinas tentatively proposes that it “probably begins through traumatisms or gropings [sic] to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time.”2 In other words, man’s thought—as a creative process—arises from the conflicted and limited scenario of the human condition. It embodies and reflects a need to transcend it, whereby the unified may emerge from distinction, creation from violence and destruction, and the liberating and transformative action of the eternal from the enslaving immutability of historical time. I will attempt to unpack this premise through a Christian theological understanding of the infinite and [End Page 25] eternal as expressed in a series of works by Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), who, in the decades following the Second World War, became singularly concerned with the creative possibilities of the hole or cut (taglio), a hallmark of his artistic career and with which he is almost exclusively and synonymously associated to this day. This crucial phase of Fontana’s artistic output coincides with a period of transition following the devastation of the war, a phase suspended between the reality of the threat of modernity to human freedom and fraternity and, on the other end, the promising yet alienating reach of technological and scientific development. The void that opens through the tension of Fontana’s destructive and creative gesture will be addressed in view of this enigmatic transition: from the trepidation and psychological anguish of man’s earthly existence before the unknown abyss to the radicalized and unprecedented perceptions of man’s relation to space. True to the words of Paul VI, where “only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light,”3 the implications of the cut as an ambivalent open space shall therefore be explored within a Christian framework of creational, soteriological, and eschatological doctrine. Furthermore, the cut as a pierced image that exhibits its own independent aesthetic reality, will be brought into dialogue with biblical representations of the wound, particularly, the implications of Christ’s wounds as permanent signs of God’s self-disclosure to man and, in turn, of man’s recovery and transformation of identity, meaning, and purpose. Thus, it shall be seen how both artist and beholder participate and tend to the creative act—in the essential transfiguration of the void from a site of emptiness, absence, and finality, to a “non-synthesizable” space of encounter which, as Levinas contends, opens the space for the infinite.4 Indeed, the emphasis on relation as a means of gauging the complexity of one’s being in the world—that is, where the ground of being and seeing infinity arises from the recognition of otherness—affords a promising edge by which to sharpen, on one side, Lucio Fontana’s artistic and environmental [End Page 26] experimentations with the “cut” and, on the other, our understanding of the notion of the permanent wound as the identifiable “face” of the risen Christ. The Call Towards Unity: the Gesture and the Image In the introduction to this article, I proposed to unpack the creative process on three levels based on Levinas’s conception of the origin of thought: separation, violence, and transformation. As shall be seen, these three “gestures” are related in an essential and teleological way, yet each will be explored in turn through Lucio Fontana’s treatment of the void or, rather, the “discovery of the hole” which he considered to be, in the last analysis, his single and most important contribution to contemporary art.5 It would therefore seem appropriate to first and foremost...

This chapter examines the second consideration supporting Kant’s stance that human freedom of will is incompatible with the causality of nature: if our faculty of choice (Willkür) were exclusively conditioned by natural causes, then our choices would lack the absolute metaphysical contingency that is integral to our moral self-conception as imperfectly rational agents who can go either way with regards to moral laws of reason. The chapter reconstructs Kant’s argument for this view. Kant’s claim that it is always possible for human agents to violate moral norms does not (contrary to what some commentators suggest) require his hedonism about our empirical motives. Rather, this claim rests on a compelling contrast between desire-based and reason-based motivation that pervades all human choice. The chapter further shows that we freely violate moral laws of reason in three distinctive ways: through self-deception, rationalization, and (controversially) akrasia or weakness of will. In this context, it emerges that Kant does not unequivocally endorse the so-called “Incorporation Thesis” or the “Guise of the Good” view of human agency.

Community can be a form of organization just as organization can create a sense of community. There are multiple ways for human agency to organize itself in and across the community. They include online and social media networks, grassroots community groups, partnerships between communities and NGOs, affirmative action for gender equality, and Millennium Villages. Each of these has demonstrated its power to make a difference to community goals in poverty reduction, prosperity enhancement, and the promotion of human freedoms. Key principles in moving from one to the other are conscientization and problematization, from Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. These are social and community processes for action. They begin with a self-raising of awareness about the power of human agency to change the situation, and end with fighting back to re-establish dignity and freedom. Psychologically, they remind us that change often proceeds from the inside out, from the unconscious to the conscious, and that anti-poverty psychology is constructed socially. Affirmative action quotas for female community leadership meet surface resistance. However, this may reflect the sparks from underlying cognitive restructuring. “Think leadership, think male” may be on the run, pulled along by women leaders and quota systems. Other systemic structures, like dual salaries and caste systems in general, undermine confidence not only within groups (stereotype threat) but also between them (social confidence). Research is informative about (a) which implicit processes are in play, (b) how to manage them, e.g., by quotas and (c) training for community advocacy via “new diplomacy” skills.KeywordsNew diplomaciesConscientizationProblematizationFreireSocial mediaMillennium villagesStereotypes