Colin Grant

Whistle Blowers: Saints of Secular Culture

Neither the corporate view of whistle blowers as tattle-tales and traitors, nor the more sympathethic understanding of them as tragic heroes battling corrupt or abused systems captures what is at stake in whistle blowing at its most distinctive. The courage, determination and sacrifice of the most ardent whistle blowers suggests that they only begin to be appreciated when they are seen as the saints of secular culture. Although some whistle blowers may be attempting to deflect attention from their own deficiencies and others may be disgruntled employees, the most serious instances involve a level of moral sensitivity that approaches religious proportions that are baffling for a culture that has dispensed with sainthood.

Altruism: A Social Science Chameleon

The self-interest paradigm that has dominated and defined social science is being questioned today in all the social sciences. Frontline research is represented by C. Daniel Batsons experiments, which claim to present empirical evidence of altruism. Impressive though this is against the background of the self-interest paradigm, its ultimate significance might be to illustrate the inadequacy of social science to deal with a transcendent reality like altruism.

Giving ethics the business

The criminal conviction of Amway Corporation for evasion of Canadian customs duties not only belies the high ethical profession of its president, Richard DeVos, but his reissuing of the book which makes this profession, without mentioning the conviction, supports the view that ultimately ethics and business are pulling in opposite directions.

Theodore Levitt's Marketing Myopia

Theodore Levitt criticizes John Kenneth Galbraiths view of advertising as artificial want creation, contending that its selling focus on the product fails to appreciate the marketing focus on the consumer. But Levitt himself not only ends up endorsing selling; he fails to confront the fact that the marketing to our most pervasive needs that he advocates really represents a sophisticated form of selling. He avoids facing this by the fiction that marketing is concerned only with the material level of existence, and absolves marketing of serious involvement in the level of meaning through the relativization of all meanings as personal preferences. The irony is that this itself reflects a particular view of meaning, a modern commercial one, so that it is this vision of life that LevittÕs marketing is really SELLING.

What's Wrong with Spong?

a plausible hypothesis that this common material comes from a document on which both the evangelists drew. It is sheer conjecture, however, to declare that the passages which are common to Matthew and Luke comprise this Q document in its entirety, or that the few passages found in only one of the Gospels which some scholars are prepared to ascribe to Q would make no difference to its theology. The passages in Mark that cannot be recovered from Luke and Matthew make a very great deal of difference to Mark’s theology. Once that is realized, it becomes obvious that to attempt to present the theology of Q is utter folly. As ’Mark’ is

The Greying of Jesus

but to give life itself a chance ... We want a revolution not in the name of money or work or any of that, but of life ... Oh, it’s time the whole thing was changed, absolutely ... I get more revolutionary every minute, but for life’s sake’ (SL, 173). Like Blake, he considered the concepts produced by the mind to be cerebral abstractions untouched by an intuitive experience of life. Thus he opposed a mechanical and intellectualist conception of existence with a vitalist and emotional one. His emphasis fell always on the wonder and reverence created by a

The Gregarious Metaphor Of The Selfish Gene

Science establishes facts; the arts create imaginary possibilities; theology speculates. Although this characterization might receive wide endorsement, highly creative and literary developments in contemporary science suggest otherwise. The intriguing genes-eye view of life promoted by sociobiology, and especially in Richard Dawkins ‘biography’ of the selfish gene, represents a highly literate and imaginative account of reality that not only shatters the science/arts stereotype but even suggests that ultimately science involves views of reality of theological proportions.

The Theological Significance of Hartshorne's Response to Positivism

Charles Hartshorne is usually regarded as the developer of the theological approach initiated by Alfred North Whitehead. Justification for this view is to be found not only in the central focus of Hartshornes voluminous writings, but also in his own references to Whiteheads accomplishments. He notes that Whitehead did not regard himself as a theologian, but rather saw his task as that of attempting to reconcile the professedly neutral burgeoning fields of science and the wider ideals necessary to civilized human life. It is in the context of this pursuit that Whitehead makes his extremely suggestive, but tantalizingly vague, comments which provide a foundation for theological reconstruction. According to this approach, two dimensions, or natures, must be distinguished in God, a conceptual primordial nature which structures the possibilities for life and a concrete consequential nature which receives the actualities which result from the possibilities that are realized.2 However, the understanding of Hartshorne as a refiner of Whitehead must be qualified in two respects. In the first place, Hartshorne is not really a disciple of Whitehead, but rather came to this dipolar view independently, and, in fact, sees elements of it in various writers, although Whitehead is the most suggestive. He refers to the superb final chapter of Process and Reality, which gives the only sustained statement of Whiteheads theology, as characterized by sublime poetry and partial technical clarity .3 Hartshorne can be seen as attempting to extend the technical clarity of the vision of God Whitehead suggests there, and this is where the second qualification comes in. Not only is Hartshorne not a disciple of Whitehead, but his interests are different as well, with the result that he approaches the issue in a different context and from a different perspective. It is generally recognized that Whitehead developed his understanding of God in the context of metaphysics. He found that he had to invoke God to