David Galston is the Executive Director of the Westar Institute and a founding member of the Seminar on God and the Human Future. Learn more here.
Worldview is the English word used to translate the nineteenth-century German use of the word, Weltanschauung. There are several ways to understand "worldview," depending on the discipline engaged. In the nineteenth-century, Wilhelm Dilthey linked a worldview to interpretation; we interpret the world the way we do because of the worldview we hold. In this basic [...]
Human beings are symbol makers, and as we grow up the first challenge in life is to learn how to use our most basic symbol system, which is language. Other animals and even plants use symbols in certain ways. Some plants, for example, can mimic insect eggs on their leaves to prevent insects from laying real [...]
The Westar Institute cannot condone using the Bible for pointed, political gain. Relying on selected and isolated Bible verses to justify separating children from parents in cruel and inhumane acts not only insults the Abrahamic faith traditions, it also turns the Bible into a 21st Century political manifesto. The Bible is full of politics that [...]
Deconstruction involves the display of history. It involves demonstrating that no historical event has an absolute center or a final meaning. In place, every event everywhere is a composite, a collection, of relations and relationships. This basic insight is a departure from modernity where meaning was rooted in central identities. This insight is also Buddhist [...]
This post is the opinion and contribution of the author. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Westar or its scholars. Westar welcomes diversity of thought. If you’d like to contribute to the blog, click here. Neo-orthodox theology is a fancy term for traditionalism. It identifies a theology that begins with the absolute sovereignty [...]
Westar Institute fosters collaborative, cumulative research in religious studies and communicates the results of the scholarship to a broad, non-specialist public.
