Excerpts from a study course by Henry Nelson Wieman

This study consists of materials contributed by Henry Nelson Wieman to a book titled, "Experiments in Personal Religion" which was published in 1928 by the American Institute of Sacred Literature in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. An editorial note at the beginning of the original text comments that the fourfold purpose of this course is "to help people to think more clearly concerning the nature and function of religion, to quicken their powers of observation in their customary contacts with the religious life of others, to cultivate skill in the evaluation of the results of observation, and to foster a deeper religious life in themselves and others."

In preparing the following excerpts for web publication it is hoped that the purpose of the original publication will bear additional fruit in a new generation of truth seekers.

Study I: Religious Experience through the Outer World of Nature
       The Method of Religious Experience

Study II: Religious Experience through Communion, Meditation, and Worship
       How to Get the Benefit of Private Worship

Study III: Religious Experience through the Influence of Beauty
         1. The Religious Experience of Beauty
         2. How Beauty Leads to God
         3. A Personal Experiment with Beauty

Study IV: Religious Experience through the Struggle of Life
         1. The Practical Problem of Struggle
         2. The Sources of Personal Energy
         3. Personal Experiment in Religion for Release of Energy

Study V: Religious Experience through Loyalty to a Great Cause: Experiment in Loyalty to a Cause
         1. The Problem
         2. The Proposition
         3. The Method

Study VI: Religious Experience through Happiness
         1. How to Enjoy the World
         2. How to Cure the Joy-Killing Attitude
         3. How to Preserve Critical Moral Judgment and Spiritual Aspiration in the Midst of our Joys

Study VII: Religious Experience through Crisis in Individual Growth and Social Experience: Salvation through Crisis
         1. The Problem of the Crisis
         2. How not to Meet a Crisis
         3. The Right Way
         4. How to Achieve the Right Way

Study VIII: Religious Experience through the Church: The Method of Spiritual Fellowship
         1. Sympathetic and Instrumental Association
         2. Organic Association
         3. Organic Association as Adjustment to God
         4. The Personal Experiment

Phronetic social science

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Phronetic social science is an approach to the study of social – including political and economic – phenomena based on a contemporary interpretation of the classical Greek concept phronesis, variously translated as practical judgment, common sense, or prudence. Phronesis is the intellectual virtue used to deliberate about which social actions are good or bad for humans. Phronetic social scientists study social phenomena with a focus on values and power. Researchers ask and answer the following four value-rational questions for specific instances of social action:

1. Where are we going?
2. Is this development desirable?
3. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?
4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

Phronetic social science was first described by Bent Flyvbjerg in his book Making Social Science Matter. Here he presented phronetic social science as an alternative to epistemic social science, that is, social science modeled after the natural sciences. Flyvbjerg observed that despite centuries of trying the natural science model still does not work in social science: No predictive social theories have been arrived at as yet, if prediction is understood in the natural science sense. Flyvbjerg held that as long as social science would try to emulate natural science, social science would stand as loser in the Science Wars. If, however, the social sciences modeled themselves after phronesis they would be strong where the natural sciences are weak, namely in the deliberation about values and power that is essential to social and economic development in modern society. Flyvbjerg's position was further developed in the so-called Flyvbjerg Debate.

REVELATION SOCIAL SCIENCE BASED UPON THE INSTRUCTIONS OF GOD AND THE PROMISES OF GOD Achievable only by living faith, following God's instructions and believing in God's Promises

From SpiritualFamily.net Revelation Papers

  ^157:4.4 After they had partaken of their meal and were engaged in discussing plans for the forthcoming tour of the Decapolis, Jesus suddenly looked up into their faces and said: "Now that a full day has passed since you assented to Simon Peter's declaration regarding the identity of the Son of Man, I would ask if you still hold to your decision?" On hearing this, the twelve stood upon their feet, and Simon Peter, stepping a few paces forward toward Jesus, said: "Yes, Master, we do. We believe that you are the Son of the living God." And Peter sat down with his brethren.

  ^157:4.5 Jesus, still standing, then said to the twelve: "You are my chosen ambassadors, but I know that, in the circumstances, you could not entertain this belief as a result of mere human knowledge. This is a revelation of the spirit of my Father to your inmost souls. And when, therefore, you make this confession by the insight of the spirit of my Father which dwells within you, I am led to declare that upon this foundation will I build the brotherhood of the kingdom of heaven. Upon this rock of spiritual reality will I build the living temple of spiritual fellowship in the eternal realities of my Father's kingdom. All the forces of evil and the hosts of sin shall not prevail against this human fraternity of the divine spirit. And while my Father's spirit shall ever be the divine guide and mentor of all who enter the bonds of this spirit fellowship, to you and your successors I now deliver the keys of the outward kingdom -- the authority over things temporal -- the social and economic features of this association of men and women as fellows of the kingdom." And again he charged them, for the time being, that they should tell no man that he was the Son of God.