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 The Endless Quest and Perfect Knowledge: Searching and Certainty

Terryl C. Givens

in People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture

Joseph built the church on the foundation of dialogic revelation, physical artifacts, testable historical claims, and the promise of spiritual certainty. Truth claims are absolute and categorical. At ... More

Joseph built the church on the foundation of dialogic revelation, physical artifacts, testable historical claims, and the promise of spiritual certainty. Truth claims are absolute and categorical. At the same time, Mormonism conceives of salvation as a process rather than event, tied to learning, knowledge acquisition, and growth in intelligence. Eternal progress and continuing revelation are key doctrines.Less

“Plain and Precious Truths”: The Book of Mormon as New Theology, Part 2—Dialogic Revelation

Terryl L. Givens

in By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion

Perhaps the Book of Mormon's most important and radical contribution is a model of revelation that is unstintingly literal and dialogic. Unlike the three main Christian varieties (revelation as ... More

Perhaps the Book of Mormon's most important and radical contribution is a model of revelation that is unstintingly literal and dialogic. Unlike the three main Christian varieties (revelation as history, as doctrine, and as inner experience), the Mormon version emphasizes communicated content, particularism, and egalitarian access. Unorthodox implications of the Mormon version include an anthropomorphic God and an open canon. Even admitting significant parallels with 19th‐century frontier religions and some varieties of contemporary Christianity, dialogic revelation found unusually dramatic expression and exemplification in the phenomenon of the Book of Mormon itself, thus providing a powerful “revelatory appeal.”Less

The Conciliar Movement

Hamilton Hess

in The Early Development of Canon Law and the Council of Serdica

Church councils and synods (terms used in the West and the East, respectively) began as gatherings of leaders and representatives from several church congregations for the resolution of issues of ... More

Church councils and synods (terms used in the West and the East, respectively) began as gatherings of leaders and representatives from several church congregations for the resolution of issues of shared concern by discussion and collective decision‐making. From the evidence available to us, such gatherings first appeared during the latter part of the second century, but the practice may have begun earlier. By the third century, strong congregational leadership by bishops had become almost universally established; and, as fully evidenced by the letters of Cyprian of Carthage, councils and synods became occasions for the assembly of neighbouring bishops for deliberation together with the bishop, clergy, and people of the host congregation. The procedures employed at these gatherings were patterned on those of civil government, the most directly influential model having apparently been the Roman Senate. While the strength and effectiveness of episcopal leadership continued to increase, during the third century the clergy and laity of the local congregation where the council or synod was held retained a voice in the proceedings. Two other conciliar styles—dialogic discussion and judicial investigation—were also adopted from civil models to ecclesiastical use during the third and fourth centuries.Less

Virtues of Practice

Christine Swanton

in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View

This chapter discusses moral epistemology from a virtue ethical perspective, rejecting an account of virtuous agent as oracle, and replacing it with a virtue ethical kind of dialogic ethics.

Approaching Culture in Cross-Cultural Technology Design

Huatong Sun

in Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users

This chapter explores why action and meaning is unintegrated in cross-cultural technology design from the angle of culture. It first assesses the status of culture in cross-cultural design practices; ... More

This chapter explores why action and meaning is unintegrated in cross-cultural technology design from the angle of culture. It first assesses the status of culture in cross-cultural design practices; discusses how narrow representations of local culture result in poor user experience of localized technologies; and reviews the movement of capturing local culture from the surface to its core with case studies of three approaches commonly adopted in cross-cultural design—DOs and DON’Ts, cultural dimensions, and structured fieldwork methods. To further contextualize the discussion, it examines the complex interactions between culture, technology, and design in a contemporary situation and develops a position for technology design that attends to both instrumentality and social circulation. Built on that, this chapter establishes a dialogic view of culture as a semantic space that connects action and meaning and describes local culture as the dynamic nexus of contextual interactions for requirements gathering in cross-cultural design practices.Less

The Unity of the Penal Law

Alan Brudner

in Punishment and Freedom

This chapter introduces the idea that unifies the several paradigms of penal justice competing for control of the penal law. It calls this idea dialogic community and exhibits its form of mutual ... More

This chapter introduces the idea that unifies the several paradigms of penal justice competing for control of the penal law. It calls this idea dialogic community and exhibits its form of mutual recognition as the latent theme of the paradigms explicitly ordered to formal agency, real autonomy, and citizenship. The chapter shows the self-contradictoriness of dialogic community insofar as it submerges the other paradigms into an undifferentiated unity, and it criticizes the practice of restorative justice insofar as it reflects this hegemony of the communitarian idea. The chapter then shows how a self-consistent idea of dialogic community requires the political community to respect the difference of each paradigm and to incorporate them as constituent elements of a complex whole. Finally, it argues that the unity of the paradigms harmonizes apparent contradictions in the law — for example, that harm is irrelevant to punishability but relevant to measure of punishment and to defence and that virtue is irrelevant to culpability yet excuses the culpable.Less

John Dewey, Participatory Democracy, and University-Community Partnerships

Robert Innes, Leigh Gilchrist, Susan Friedman, and Kristen Tompkins

in Academics in Action!: A Model for Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Service

The educational philosophy of John Dewey and the contemporary constructivist learning theories that have evolved from his pragmatist perspective provide a foundation for guiding efforts to introduce ... More

The educational philosophy of John Dewey and the contemporary constructivist learning theories that have evolved from his pragmatist perspective provide a foundation for guiding efforts to introduce higher education reforms that harmonize the three global missions of the university: teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and service to communities and society. A broad principle of Dewey’s perspective is that useful knowledge is the unity of abstraction and application (i.e., praxis). Useful knowledge is constructed in communities of inquiry when learners in classrooms and participants in university-community partnerships engage in dialog to solve meaningful problems. Core concepts and practices consistent with pragmatism and constructivism are explored (e.g., participatory democracy, dialogic discourse, project-based learning, service learning, participatory research) in the context of efforts to enhance the quality of communication across cultural barriers in both the classroom and the community.Less

The Book of Job as Polyphonic Text

Carol A. Newsom

in The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations

This chapter argues for the recuperation of genre as a critical category for understanding the book of Job. Here is a means by which Kautzsch’s frustrated and impatient questions can be turned from ... More

This chapter argues for the recuperation of genre as a critical category for understanding the book of Job. Here is a means by which Kautzsch’s frustrated and impatient questions can be turned from rhetorical into serious ones to which serious answers can be given. To do this, however, one must have a more robust theory and a more thoroughgoing analysis of genre than historical criticism was prepared to conduct. Yet in order to avoid the “Humpty Dumpty” effect that can come from privileging differences within the book, this revaluation of genre must be closely linked to an alternative understanding of literary unity, authorship, and truth. This understanding is based neither on the modernist assumptions of historical criticism and New Critical literary approaches nor on the assumptions of deconstruction. This approach is based rather on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his distinction between monologic and dialogic truth and his conception of the polyphonic text.Less

Dialogue and Incompletion

Gavin Alexander

in Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586-1640

This chapter studies Sidney's writings in detail and develops two models for thinking about how their own internal dynamics condition the relationship between Sidney and his followers and imitators: ... More

This chapter studies Sidney's writings in detail and develops two models for thinking about how their own internal dynamics condition the relationship between Sidney and his followers and imitators: dialogue and incompletion. The first is framed with reference to the literary and philosophical tradition of dialogue, as well as to the literary theory of Bakhtin and the hermeneutics of Gadamer. The second centres its thinking around the rhetorical figure aposiopesis (the broken sentence) and looks at broken sentences and other kinds of interruption in Sidney's writings. Both models make use of the classical and Renaissance theory of rhetoric, and especially of rhetoric books based on Sidney's own writings, by Fraunce and Hoskyns. Both offer readers and later writers a way of thinking of Sidney's texts as open, dialogic, starting conversations, asking questions, leaving things unsaid, and therefore in need of some kind of response.Less

Family Members Interacting While Watching TV

Deborah Tannen, Shari Kendall, and Cynthia Gordon

in Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families

This chapter uses a Bakhtinian dialogic approach to demonstrate how families socialize children in interactions prompted by television programs. It explores the relationship between the public and ... More

This chapter uses a Bakhtinian dialogic approach to demonstrate how families socialize children in interactions prompted by television programs. It explores the relationship between the public and the private in family discourse by examining how family members linguistically engage with each other as they watch television. Family members negotiate and maintain their family's values, beliefs, and identities by repeating words and phrases from television programs. By combining the concept of repetition as a discourse feature with Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogicality and Julia Kristeva's intertextuality, this chapter argues that the public and private interpenetrate within interactions in which family members repeat television texts. She demonstrates that family members do not passively repeat words and phrases from television texts but create a “dialogic unity”—a complex combination of public and private that is saturated with previous and new meanings. This type of family talk both reflects and transforms the lives of the viewers and links family members with the world that lies outside their circle of family and friends.Less

Johnson's Conclusiveness

FRED PARKER

in Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson

Johnson's counter-sceptical impulses towards conclusiveness and general assertion in argument existed in a vital, dialogic tension, often expressed as irony, with his understanding of thinking as an ... More

Johnson's counter-sceptical impulses towards conclusiveness and general assertion in argument existed in a vital, dialogic tension, often expressed as irony, with his understanding of thinking as an open-ended, ongoing process where conclusions are at best partial and provisional. Finality in argument was coloured for Johnson by the dread with which he contemplated the finality of life, and the general conclusiveness of The Vanity of Human Wishes is cogent only because it is totalisingly bleak. Rasselas, differently but correspondently, finds a tenuous comedy, perhaps ground for affirmation, in the inability to draw general conclusions, an inability essentially sceptical. These matters are related to the conclusiveness of Johnson's style, which is inflected with irony in a manner not always acknowledged, and to the Boswellian construction of ‘Dr Johnson’ as an authority figure, yet paradoxically singular and un-normative in his performance of that role.Less

Mishnaic Topography

Moshe Simon-Shoshan

in Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah

Chapter four explores the implications the finding that Mishnah is a heterogeneous text from a literary point of view. In contrast to earlier approaches the Mishnah that either emphasize the history ... More

Chapter four explores the implications the finding that Mishnah is a heterogeneous text from a literary point of view. In contrast to earlier approaches the Mishnah that either emphasize the history of the text or seek out the texts underlying unity, this chapter proposes a “dialogic” approach to the Mishnah based on the work of M M Bakhtin. In this view the meaning of the Mishnah emerges from the interaction of the different voices of the Mishnah as represented by a spectrum of approaches to the law. On the one end we have the apodictic approach which sees law as an unchanging and universal system of rules and principles, much like a natural science. The law in any given situation emerges from a proper application of the rules to the case at hand. On the other extreme, the narrative approach to law views law as a dynamic process whose ultimate expression is the issuing of a ruling regarding a specific case. General rules and principles are at best only non-binding summaries of earlier rulings. The narrative approach to law views law as a dynamic process whose ultimate expression is the issuing of a ruling regarding a specific case. General rules and principles are at best only non-binding summaries of earlier rulings. The Mishnah thus conducts an ongoing dialog between these two approaches to halakhah and the possibilities that lie between them.Less

The Right to Security in Criminal Law Theory

Peter Ramsay

in The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the Criminal Law

This chapter assesses the penal protection of the right to security in the terms of thee recently published broadly liberal theories of criminal law: Douglas Husak's theory of the limits of ... More

This chapter assesses the penal protection of the right to security in the terms of thee recently published broadly liberal theories of criminal law: Douglas Husak's theory of the limits of criminalization; Markus Dubber's critique of the police power; and Alan Brudner's theory of dialogic community. The enemy criminal law theory of Gunther Jakobs is also briefly considered. The purpose of the assessment is to understand the relationship of the right to security to liberalism. It argues that from the point of view of liberal political theories of criminal law, protection of the right to security is inconsistent with the state's authority understood either as a traditional (and essentially illiberal) patriarchal order or as a modern liberal state.Less

Prologue: Mediating and Immediating at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Robert Baron

in Curatorial Conversations: Cultural Representation and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which ... More

The prologue reflects on the relationship of conventional museum curatorial practice to Smithsonian Folklife Festival curatorial practices. In particular, it examines the multiple mediations in which Festival curators are involved and the process of “presenting” artists and participants to the public. It raises questions about the perils of objectification of artists within these “living exhibitions” and argues for dialogic approaches to developing Festival programs that incorporate participatory or community curation.Less