Browsing by Author "Parsons, William B."
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Item A response to Christian critique of psychology as a religion(2001) Bukaty, Peter James; Parsons, William B.Modern psychology and psychotherapy for some, has become a functional religion. Certain Christian scholars have employed deontological ethics of mutuality and obligation to critique the implicit ethical egoist perspective of humanistic, Jungian and ego psychologies as scholars such as Don Browning believe that therapists and pastoral counselors have appropriated clinical psychologies without examining their implicit ethical egoist orientations. They believe that an ethic of generativity best exemplifies the fit between modern psychology and Christian theology. So-called "generative man" is the preferred archetype to "productive man" or "psychological man." However, the aretaic ethics of individuation and self-actualization have paradoxical utilitarian benefits for the community. It is argued that the process of narcissism associated with individuation is necessary before one can authentically embrace a deontological ethic of mutuality.Item Animal Remainders, Remaining Animal: Cross-Species Collaborative Encounters in Victorian Literature and Culture(2014-04-24) Basnett, Kattie; Michie, Helena; Wolfe, Cary; Parsons, William B.; Patten, Robert L.“Animal Remainders” responds to the challenge of—and challenges to—Victorian animal studies, a sub-field of Victorian scholarship that has not seen the same popular critical reception as modernist or contemporary literary animal studies. Departing from the Victorian critical trend of reading literary animals as salient figures only so long as they can be imagined as symbolic or metaphoric for humans and human concerns, “Animal Remainders” takes literary animals—whether domestic pet or insect—seriously as animals. Moreover, these literary animals are acknowledged as agents of ethical production and transformation structured through a “chimerical collaboration.” The chimerical collaboration is inherently cross-species in nature and, within this collaboration, animals are capable of co-authoring the human and cross-species relations through the act of co-constitution, as well as being capable of explicitly or implicitly co-authoring texts such as literature and music in spite of communications barriers. By reading literary animals as collaborators with, rather than metaphors for, the human I demonstrate that the humanism and anthropocentrism we credit the Victorians and their literatures with as a discipline breaks down—at least in part—as Victorian literary animals are more radical than they have been given credit for. In this spirit, each chapter of “Animal Remainders” focuses primarily on critically marginalized readings of cross-species collaborations as they manifest in Victorian texts—including Charles Dickens’ early novels, Wilkie Collins’s antivivisection novel Heart and Science, animal autobiographies by Virginia Woolf and Anna Sewell, and the poetry of Michael Field—as well as in contemporary literature, experimental music, and the digital humanities. “Animal Remainders” foregrounds important methodological questions about the forces which discipline Victorian scholarship and the history informing our historicism, as well as more intimate questions about ourselves as scholars and living beings in a cross-species world. It enacts a fundamental un-knowing of the Victorian human and its—real or represented—animal other by asking, who is this nineteenth-century human (or) animal we study, but also who is the “we” doing the studying and through what histories and structures of knowledge have we come to know ourselves (and others) as such?Item Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Whither Being Spiritual but Not Religious(Michigan State University Press, 2022) Parsons, William B.Item Reversers and restorers of religion: Mourning and meaning in contemporary psychological portraits of religious leaders(2010) Carlin, Nathan; Parsons, William B.After reading in psychology of religion and pastoral theology for several years, I began to notice that a certain strand, which might be described as iconoclastic or subversive with regard to traditional religion, runs through both fields, and characteristic of this strand often includes what I call a dynamic of reversals and restorations. That is, pastoral theologians and psychologists of religion, from Oscar Pfister to the present, often use psychological methods to critique (reverse) and then to rebuild (restore) religion. Here I explore this strand as it exists in the present by examining three recent psychological portraits of religious leaders---Donald Capps's portrait of Jesus, James Dittes's portrait of Augustine, and William Bouwsma's portrait of Calvin---in light of each author's own personal experiences. What I find is that this strand can be understood fruitfully in light of Peter Homans's writings on, and William Parsons's elaborations of, mourning religion.