Reintroduction programs in which captive-bred or reared animals are released into natural habitats are considered a key approach for conservation; however, success rates have generally been low. Accounting for factors that enable individual animals to have a greater chance of survival can not only improve overall conservation outcomes but can also impact the welfare of the individual animals involved. One such factor may be individual personality, and personality research is a growing field. This type of research presents animal welfare scientists (...) with the opportunity to develop behavior profiles that may predict how particular individuals cope with challenges. This has direct implications for both in situ and ex situ populations and can bridge the gap between animal welfare and conservation. We designed a project to ascertain the presence of personality traits in Blanding’s turtles (Emydoidea blandingii), a species of special concern in the state of Michigan, and assess potential links between traits and post-release success. As hypothesized, the Blanding’s turtles in this study displayed behavioral responses to modified open field tests indicative of distinct personality traits: exploration, boldness and aggression. Additionally, the personality traits were correlated differently with survival and behavior patterns when the turtles were released into the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge. More exploratory turtles had higher survival rates, while neither boldness nor aggression were related to survival. Exploratory turtles were also more likely to travel longer distances after release. The use of muskrat dens was related to increased survival, and both bolder and more exploratory turtles made higher use of this feature. Exploratory and aggressive turtles were found basking outside of water more often, while bold turtles were more likely to be found at the water surface. Both of these basking behaviors may increase the risk of predation and may be reflective of a trade-off between risk and behaviors related to physiological health. Understanding how personality affects behavior and survival post-release can be a critical tool for improving reintroduction success. Zoo animal welfare scientists and practitioners can implement approaches that improve the welfare of individuals within the context of conservation initiatives. (shrink)

This paper presents a refreshing new reading of Augustine's view on matter. It argues that Augustine's evolving view on matter from the negative to the positive, from the overly simplistic understanding of matter as something purely physical to a nuanced view of spiritual matter, played an essential role in the Confessions. Matter, in this new understanding, accounts for both space and time. As Augustine matured as a thinker, he saw matter's potentiality also positively as possibility for grace for the (...) embodied self and that which creates the depth of our being. Augustine owed this nuanced view of matter partly to its Plotinian origin but he modified it with his lived experience of faith. (shrink)

White, Robert; Moo, Jonathan In an age when many have begun to consider widespread environmental collapse inevitable, the certain hope held out in the Christian gospel rules out both complacency and despair. Scripture's vision of a future for all of creation that is secure in Christ and given by God's grace challenges Christians to a radical environmental ethos that is marked by wisdom, self-sacrifice, perseverance, love and joy.

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; (...) his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin. (shrink)

American suffrage history is dominated by white suffragettes; however, this essay aims to bring to light another vibrant dimension of the American women’s suffrage movement. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee turned tides when she marched horseback at a women’s suffrage parade at the age of sixteen, and further entrenched herself as a prominent Asian-American suffragette as she continued to fight for women’s suffrage throughout her lifetime, although the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred her and all Chinese people from voting or (...) obtaining citizenship until the act was repealed in 1943. This article explores many dimensions of Mabel through several of her primary environmental and personal influences, from Guangzhou, China to New York City’s Chinatown, which all shaped her into an admirable, and selfless social justice advocate that claims an unforgettable chapter in American and Asian-American political history. (shrink)

Korean American women are the foundation of the Korean American church. We are devoted, contributing members in the church, but we are seldom given positions of leadership or power. From our subordinate role in the church and wider society, Korean American women have been perpetually subject to racial and gender injustice. To work toward equal empowerment, it is imperative to reimagine historical Christian teaching about God so that it liberates rather than oppresses. As we engage in theological reform, we can (...) begin to experience the wholeness that comes from a Spirit God who embraces all people regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or social status. As a result, Korean American women can finally feel included and contributive to a society which has historically treated them as “perpetual foreigners.” They can also push for multicultural excellence rather than sustaining the dominant white criterion of value. As hybrid spaces proliferate in diversifying America, Korean American women can be an integral source of reimagining the places we inhabit, something that proves to be increasingly necessary to keep the church accessible and contemporary. (shrink)

THE OCCASION FOR THE ESSAYS RESPONDING TO MANAGING DIVERSITY IN academe follows in response to a challenge issued by Miguel De La Torre in a 2006 plenary panel regarding the invisibility of minority scholars' work in SCE publications. That 2006 panel, which included presentations by De La Torre, Melanie Harris, Gabriel Salgado, and Darryl Trimiew, stimulated discussions in both the Women's Caucus and the meeting of the Board of Directors; this set of essays from a 2008 plenary session and a (...) concurrent session held later in the meeting is the result of those earlier discussions. The two sessions both address diversity: these essays feature minority voices presenting specific proposals for how minority scholarship should and should not be used by majority and other minority scholars; the concurrent session featured a discussion by majority scholars on what whites must do to diversify the society. Our hope is that these essays and the discussions they generate will shed more light on this extremely complex and important issue for the SCE and the institutions in which members work. (shrink)

This paper examines Augustine’s analysis of the possible causes of akrasia and suggests that an implicit two-phased consent process takes place in an akratic decision. This two-phased consent theory revolves around Augustine’s theory of the two wills, one carnal and the other spiritual. Without the help of grace, the fallen will dominated by the carnal will can only choose to sin. After exploration of this two-phased consent theory, the paper turns to examine the accusation made by Julian of Eclanum, (...) a fifth-century Pelagian, and J. Van Oort, a contemporary Augustinian scholar, that Augustine’s doctrine of the two wills and concupiscence led the Church into a Manichaean position. The paper concludes that this accusation fails to hold up, especially when one considers the more nuanced view on the human body and concupiscence in Augustine’s later works. (shrink)

James Wetzel in his recent book argues that Augustine's statements in 'Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum' (hereafter, 'C2EP'), especially that "(t)he apostles...were free from consent to evil desire," directly contradict his long-held anti-Pelagian thesis. For in 'C2EP' and his other anti-Pelagian works, Augustine apparently defends the thesis that in this earthly life every human being consents to concupiscence daily. Thus, all need God's forgiveness daily. This is, Augustine argues, the true meaning of the Lord's Prayer. But this seems to contradict Augustine's (...) statement that the apostles "were free from consent to evil desire." By distinguishing different ways that an agent consents to concupiscence, the author argues that this seeming contradiction can be removed. Consequently, Augustine is consistent in his polemic against the Pelagians. (shrink)

This article addresses how Asian racialization grounds contemporary social media experimentation on—and comprehensive surveillance of—users. To make this point, we focus on the relationship between the sentimentality of white benevolence as an expression of US empire and the social scientific history of sentiment analysis, which derives from early twentieth-century analyses of women workers and Japanese internment camps. The drive to “read” the inscrutable other—framed as a benevolent alternative to direct coercion—underlies methods to better capture and control individuals by understanding (...) their reactions within experimental and disruptive environments. In tracing these histories, we contribute to larger efforts to unpack the centrality of racial formations to current forms of social media and to reveal how contemporary digital campaigns to protect Asian Americans sustain the mutually constitutive logic of white love and white hate. We conclude by reading for moments of Asian affective opacity as ways to move beyond the sentimental economy of love and hate that so easily feeds the digital economy of sentiment analysis. These examples of opacity make possible contradictory meanings to any particular affective response and makes possible practices of care that coexist with, but exceed, the extractive logics of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

One’s ‘Asianness’ signifies to the white dominant group, that s/he is a foreigner and consequently a second-class citizen. Asian American women have been perceived to be the perpetual foreigner. The understanding of the foreigner within the book of Ezra brings to light how foreign women were treated, excluded and forced to move away. As more immigrants come into North America, we need to learn ways to welcome them fully and not as second-class citizens or the Other.

As David White explains in the Introduction to Tantra in Practice, Tantra is an Asian body of beliefs and practices that seeks to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. The subsequent chapters reflect the wide geographical and temporal scope of Tantra by examining thirty-six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of Tantric experience--Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and even (...) Islamic. Each text has been chosen and translated, often for the first time, by an international expert in the field who also provides detailed background material. Students of Asian religions and general readers alike will find the book rich and informative. The book includes plays, transcribed interviews, poetry, parodies, inscriptions, instructional texts, scriptures, philosophical conjectures, dreams, and astronomical speculations, each text illustrating one of the diverse traditions and practices of Tantra. Thus, the nineteenth-century Indian Buddhist Garland of Gems, a series of songs, warns against the illusion of appearance by referring to bees, yogurt, and the fire of Malaya Mountain; while fourteenth-century Chinese Buddhist manuscripts detail how to prosper through the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper by burning incense, making offerings to scriptures, and chanting incantations. In a transcribed conversation, a modern Hindu priest in Bengal candidly explains how he serves the black Goddess Kali and feeds temple skulls lentils, wine, or rice; a seventeenth-century Nepalese Hindu praise-poem hammered into the golden doors to the temple of the Goddess Taleju lists a king's faults and begs her forgiveness and grace. An introduction accompanies each text, identifying its period and genre, discussing the history and influence of the work, and identifying points of particular interest or difficulty. The first book to bring together texts from the entire range of Tantric phenomena, Tantra in Practice continues the Princeton Readings in Religions series. The breadth of work included, geographic areas spanned, and expert scholarship highlighting each piece serve to expand our understanding of what it means to practice Tantra. (shrink)

This article describes the spiritual formation training program for counseling students at Richmont Graduate University, an evangelical institution providing Master’s-level instruction for counselors and ministers. This model of spiritual formation has a dual foundation which includes the centrality of love to the Christian life and the importance of attachment to the development of persons. The training is intentionally designed to invite students to pursue a more secure attachment to God, healthier relationships with others, and a more grace-based self-awareness. Integrative (...) and clinical instruction, and experiences that foster establishment of secure attachment are described. Co-curricular efforts in research and student advisement focus on grace and wellness, as well as opportunities for service, and these serve to further contribute to a supportive environment for spiritual formation. (shrink)

South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world and any discussion around poverty and the church's response cannot exclude this reality. This article attempts to analyse the response of wealthy, 'majority white' suburban congregations in the southern suburbs of Cape Town to issues of poverty and inequality. This is attempted through the lense of restorative justice, which is broadly explored and defined through a threefold perspective of reconciliation, reparations and restitution. The first part explores a (...) description of the basic features of poverty and inequality in South Africa today, followed by a discussion on restorative justice. This is followed by the case study, which gives the views of clergy and lay leaders with regard to their congregations' perspectives and responses to poverty and inequality within the context of restorative justice. Findings from the case study begin to plot a tentative 'way forward' as to how our reality can more constructively be engaged from the perspective of congregational involvement in reconstruction of our society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Utopia on Earth?: Sustainability, White Tourism, and Neocolonial DesireRoslyn Fraser (bio)IntroductionSeveral scholars, and even a few journalists, 1have written about the figure of the international tourist who uses South Asia as a canvas upon which one can create and recreate the self. Perhaps the most discernable example in the pop culture imagination is Elizabeth Gilbert's trip to an ashram in India, documented in Eat Pray Love(2006), which inspired (...) a problematic succession of travelers who followed her footsteps to communities that simply could not accommodate the traffic. International travel and tourism from the Global North to places like India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka frequently represent a form of neocolonialism wherein destinations and the people who live there are imagined not as places with a complex history inhabited by humans with their own subjectivity, but as mirrors the traveler can hold up as part of their search for a personal identity. 2This imagining is perpetuated through imagery from film and literature (like Eat Pray Love), in tourism advertisements, on social media, and in spaces like yoga studios. These texts often objectify South Asian people as they beckon the middle-class Western traveler to the [End Page 226]subcontinent to embark on their own process of self-actualization and self-discovery. Specific to India, Rumya Putcha and Sangeeta Ballabhan explain the phenomenon in detail:In these stories, India is consistently described as a place where those from North America or Europe can "find themselves," "surrender," "find grace in poverty," "learn tolerance," "experience culture," or "withstand an assault on the senses." 3Whether the focus is a yoga retreat in India or a backpacking trip in Nepal, one need only look at a handful of online travel blogs to encounter these themes.One peculiar version of Western imaginings of South Asia is found in places like Auroville, a settler colonial utopia or intentional community near Pondichery in south India. In his 2021 book, Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia, Akash Kapur estimated that thousands of these utopian experiments were set up in the 1960s and 1970s. 4Focusing on the relationships and power dynamics inside Auroville, which still exists today, Kapur presents us with many reasons to question its idealism. But as a utopian experiment, Auroville continues to be praised as a model for sustainable living. 5Its site is protected by UNESCO and it receives funding from the Indian government. Auroville also receives aid from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and cash donations from individual donors, and supports itself through product sales and tourism. Photographs on their website highlight the 372 acres of farmland 6established at Auroville over the last fifty years as well as the community's commitment to "green practices." 7One cannot help but wonder how much of their success in reforesting land and sustainable living is a direct result of their economic resources alone.Colonial ResiduesThe enduring idea that South Asia is a space where utopia can be realized, experienced, or built has its roots in the era of European colonization of the subcontinent. In her analysis, Jessica Namakkal reminds us that Auroville was founded in the direct shadow of colonialism, twenty years after British Imperial rule ended and a mere six years after the end of French colonial rule [End Page 227]over Pondichery. 8Its opening ceremony was attended by an international cast of interested people, mostly from the Global North and West. A sizeable area for viewing the ceremony was reserved for people from the surrounding villages of Tamil Nadu, but with a barrier separating them from the rest of the crowd. 9Not exactly a great beginning for a place that was designated a cradle for a better humanity, or, as Aurovillians put it, "the city the Earth needs." 10For its part, Auroville addresses the issue of neocolonialism directly and succinctly in a section of its website for frequently asked questions, 11 question: Is Auroville sometimes accused of being neo-colonialist? answer:Very rarely; mostly by Westerners who know little about Auroville and how it functions, and equally little about the colonial era.How might we unpack the above statement? First, the... (shrink)

This article is taken from a lecture to a convention of white Lutheran pastors who struggle to find their role in the present South African dilemma. The author hopes it will convey more of the actual atmosphere in one section of the community than a theoretical treatment could. Lutherans call their theology ‘evangelical’ because it is based on the gospel in contradistinction. His contribution to the discussion at a recent conference of the ecumenical ‘National Initiative for Reconciliation’ has been (...) added at the end. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue ed. by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph WhiteFrederick Christian BauerschmidtThomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue. Edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013. Pp. viii + 304. $36.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6976-0.The essays collected in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue are the fruit of (...) a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2011. As presented in this volume, they form five pairs, one each by a Catholic and a Protestant theologian, focused on the topics of (1) the being of God, (2) the Trinity, (3) Christology, (4) grace and justification, and (5) election, providence, and natural law. Thomas Joseph White provides a lengthy introduction, and Bruce McCormack concludes with a brief epilogue. All of the essays at least touch on both Barth and Thomas, though in varying degrees. It must be noted that, with the exception of the essays by White and Wawrykow, the Catholic interlocutors generally engage Barth less deeply than the Protestant interlocutors engage Thomas. Why this might be the case is a point to which I will return.Under the topic of the being of God, Robert Jenson begins with a brief, reflective essay focusing on the radical implications of Barth’s account of God’s “being” or “reality” as “event,” “I,” and “decision” (Ereignis, ich, Entscheidung), and on the content of God’s essence as “the loving One.” Jenson argues that if we follow Barth’s trajectory, we arrive at the paradoxical view that “God’s being is an implosion of freedom, so sheerly contingent that it is not contingent on anything and so is the one necessity. And it is an explosion of love, so sheerly a commitment to the other that it is freedom” (51). Thomas gets only a brief mention, though presumably he stands as the conventional account of God’s being that provides the background against which the true radicalism of Barth’s account can appear. Richard Schenk offers a Catholic counterpoint, engaging not so much with Barth himself as with Jenson and other post-Barthian thinkers such as Ebeling. His essay responds to Jenson’s paradoxes of imploding freedom and exploding love by educing from Thomas’s writings “a theodicy-capable theology of the cross” (57) that operates within a commitment to God’s impassibility as traditionally understood. Implicit in Schenk’s argument is the wager that a God who is, qua [End Page 301] God, beyond all suffering is a richer resource of hope for suffering humanity than is a God who suffers with us in his divinity.Under the topic of the Trinity, Guy Mansini’s essay launches something of a preemptive strike on Bruce McCormack, who, in a widely discussed essay (“Grace and Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 92-110) and in subsequent writings, has developed Barth’s notion of Christ’s obedience on the Cross as the manifestation in time of his “intra-trinitarian obedience” to the Father in order to argue against traditional notions of divine being and in favor of something like the view Jenson sketches in his essay. Mansini draws on the patristic and monastic traditions as well as Thomas to explore the humility and obedience of Christ, arguing that obedience can only be a virtue of a created will: “’To obey,’ like ‘to be caused’ or ‘to be moved,’ belongs exclusively to the created order” (82). Thus, Christ is humble and obedient qua human, not qua divine, and therefore one cannot sensibly speak of an intra-trinitarian obedience but only of the obedience of Christ’s human will to the one divine will that is common to the Father, Son, and Spirit. McCormack’s essay, which follows, seeks to show that the position he has developed by way of Barth’s theology can also be grounded in Thomas’s theology of the relation of divine processions and missions, at least as this has been interpreted by Matthew Levering. McCormack reads Thomas with notable ecumenical generosity, seeing in Thomas’s view that the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sodalism as Open Worldview: Conspiring to Dismantle the White FranchiseSunny Heenenin the introduction to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you—from the new mestizas” (Anzaldúa 20). Mestiza is a specifically feminine descriptor for a Latin female-identifying person of mixed descent. What Anzaldúa proposes in this theory of the new mestiza is a consciousness (...) rooted in “the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Anzaldúa 103). Just as the mestiza gracefully learn to navigate their complex multicultural identities, fashioning a new hybrid culture within which to flourish, so can we all develop an enlightened conception of who we are. The invitation extended by Anzaldúa is not meant only for those who identify as mestiza. The who being invited to help build this new culture is the group that identifies as white; Anzaldúa believes that those she invites are capable of learning to improve their behavior and their consciousness regarding their relation to other human beings. In fact, it is this dominant group who is needed for this new story because collectively dismantling hegemonic whiteness is the only path toward the kind of inclusive culture that Anzaldúa envisions. I will argue that a proposal like Anzaldúa’s first requires a new worldview for white people: one that restructures cognition toward communal activity.An ushering in of this new worldview can be made practical, I submit, through Audre Lorde’s theory of difference. Lorde advises that it is the recognition of and embracing of our differences that has the potential to move us forward. To reclaim difference and celebrate our pluralistic world, we require an in-depth look at the ways in which identity is formed through difference, especially white identity. In an essay on defining difference, Lorde worries that it is something we respond to with fear and contempt, when instead, [End Page 32] these differences have the capacity to be the strength of our foundation as social beings: “We have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.... Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation” (Lorde 115). According to Lorde, we misunderstand and misuse our differences, relying on them to form dualistic identities in negation to one another, identities that sow hatred and division. It is through confronting these identities based on difference that we might begin to approach them in new ways that take us forward together and that build these patterns of relating as equals.The new worldview that I am suggesting must be, primarily, a form of education. In examining the epistemic problems of white identity, I have developed something that I call “sodalism.” The word is derived from the Latin sodalis, which holds various meanings for our purposes, including comrade, fellow, and conspirator. The theory of sodalism connotes a sense of conspiring together toward a collective purpose of betterment, toward a world in which we perceive each other as comrades and fellow humans with beneficial and beautiful differences. Sodalism refrains from becoming totalizing by making visible and celebrating a plurality of identities and experiences. This skill can be developed through educated interchange, of which Anzaldúa writes hopefully: “Whites could allow themselves to share and exchange and learn from us in a respectful way” (90). But how can white people adopt a new open consciousness that will allow this interchange? After all, according to sociologist Anibal Quijano, the colonial structure of power—whiteness—“was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations” (168). If white perceptions are still lodged in these hierarchical epistemologies, where can we begin to break down these mental barriers and decolonize minds? Anzaldúa suggests... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth's Ad Limina Apostolorum ed. by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, O.P.Gavin D'CostaDogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth's Ad Limina Apostolorum edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America Press, 2020), ix + 369 pp.In May 1966 Karl Barth visited Rome. He (...) was invited to reflect on the Second Vatican Council, to ask questions to leading curial figures, and peritus theologians, as well as Pope Paul VI. Barth's book Ad Limina Apostolorum: An Appraisal of Vatican II contains his questions and an account from Barth of his visit, along with some other important essays. It is still deeply challenging in its incisiveness, despite its brevity. I have always been struck by Barth's Marian criticisms that are so central to his viewpoint about divine agency and human cooperation. These give us an excellent insight into his ecclesiology. They represent the reasons for much of his questioning of various Roman Catholic positions on all sorts of matters. Eberhard Busch's diaries, while Barth's assistant during this period, form a fascinating complimentary account of the visit. These tell of the not-so-fruitful visit to Augustin Cardinal Bea and the great highpoint (for Barth) of his one-hour audience with Pope Paul VI. Barth was impressed by the Jesuits during his visit, but not so much by the Dominicans. He thought the latter had absorbed too many streams of liberal modernity. The two Dominicans participating in this book turn those tides. Indeed, all the authors could be located within the conserving wings of their ecclesial membership, which makes the volume all the stronger in raising serious unresolved disagreements and noting important common ground. It is testimony to Barth's enduring value that this volume seems so timely. The Barth Centre at Princeton and the Pontifical Faculty of the Dominican House in Washington were the sponsors of this collection.The volume is structured around five of the key documents commented on by Barth, with a Catholic and Reformed voice reflecting on both the particular document and Barth's input (with the exception of Francesca Aran Murphy, who deals with George Lindbeck rather than Barth), thereby simultaneously pushing forward the Catholic–Reformed engagement with the Council and with Barth. There is a preface with a penetrating introduction by Thomas Joseph White, O.P., and an irenic opening chapter by Matthew Levering on biblical renewal at Vatican II. Then follow the twin reflections on the five documents.First (and rightly so) comes the Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum. Katherine Sonderegger develops a nuanced reflection on the metaphor of Scripture as mirror of God (found in Dei Verbum), showing [End Page 971] a deep appreciation of currents within Dei Verbum that Barth had not detected, but which are more connective with his concerns and preoccupations. Lewis Ayres rather impishly takes what Barth saw as the main weakness of the text (its chapter 2: "Handing on Divine Revelation") and makes it the greatest strength. Ayers provides a deeply learned and original exploration of the concept of "tradition" as sacramental. In this duet, Barth comes out looking like he may have missed hearing the melodies while too closely studying the score.Then follow two profound essays on Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Christoph Schwöbel builds up a strong Protestant case for the necessary visible ecclesial identity of the Church, thus showing a deep convergence without denying differences that remain. White, in a deeply insightful and probing essay, goes to the heart of the ecclesiological difference between Barth and Yves Congar (and some other key Catholics at the time): the relationship between uncreated divine agency and created human agency, especially within the context of the post-apostolic Church. White suggests that, without some stable ecclesial mediations, there can be no proper relationship envisaged between the transcendent causality of God operating in Christ and the created, active cooperative acts with this grace. While building up both a metaphysical and a theological case against Barth's criticisms... (shrink)

For decades, Christiane Northrup has been helping women navigate their lives with grace and joy. This elegant, compact volume offers her trademark wisdom in a fresh form, filled with pointed reminders "to help you develop a deeper respect for, and connection to, your own body and its exquisite guidance system [to] create a vibrantly healthy body, mind, and spirit." Each beautifully designed black-and-white page carries a quote that touches on a topic of deep significance: everything from heart-listening to (...) epigenetics to the importance of knowing that your decisions about medical treatment are not irreversible. Examples include:You are an ever-renewing, ever-changing, ever-growing being, born with an inner guidance that helps you create and maintain vibrant health and happiness. / When faced with a dilemma, take a moment to sit with the issue. Don't rush to decide what to do. Intend to let Divine inspiration flow to you, and it will be so! The next time you get an ache or a pain, soften the area around it with compassion. Ask your body what it needs. Listen deeply for the answer. (shrink)

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support (...) transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

“William Frederking's most effective photographs approach the everyday as still life, avoiding artful arrangement or self-conscious design. They are rich, elegantly photographed records of real life, lived-in and unkempt fragments that retain the echoes of a human presence.”—Michael Bonesteel What makes a house more than just a physical shelter? The old swing on the front porch? The garden in the backyard? The wall clock passed down through generations? We all have furniture, knick-knacks, and other items that represent for us joys (...) and pains, triumphs and tragedies, and the history of our presence in the world. William Frederking takes his own home in Oak Park, Illinois, as the site of such personal talismans, exploring through his photographs the intangible essence of the things that transform a house into a home. In striking black-and-white still-life portraits, Frederking captures the small and large elements that define the spirit of his home, as well as revealing why the home is at the heart of the American dream. Home is a place where objects become enlivened and symbolic—a newspaper lying askew on the kitchen table, a fluffy bedspread spilling through the iron lattice of a bedframe, a staircase spiraling down into mysterious shadows—and thus affirm our existence. Everything we buy or touch, renovate or borrow becomes a mark of our selves, and these marks are nowhere more concentrated than in the home. Frederking’s powerful visual sequence examines the simple backdrop that anchors our complicated lives—and ourselves. A moving photographic chronicle of the materials that shape the home, At Home offers an intimate and graceful meditation on the fragments and ephemera that help us navigate the world. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," (...) it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

Initially commissioned to record the progress of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance I, these unforgettable black-and-white photographs of Roy Stryker's Pittsburgh Photographic Library capture the city in a state of flux. They reveal a union of opposites—the suited wonderment of the downtown businessman with the easy grace and competence of a shirtless construction worker balanced high over his head; the anonymity and isolation of planned housing with the belief in expansion and renewal; the energy and excitement of a city on the (...) move with the traditions of the established elite; the juxtaposition between the growing optimism about the ability of technology to improve our lives; and the traditional steel and other heavy smokestack industries that still dominated the region. The Renaissance was seen as a way for Pittsburgh to keep abreast of modern urban life and to preserve its economic position, but the rapid development of a white suburban middle class was sapping the very essence of the personalized downtown neighborhoods. These photographers have captured the convergence of destruction and rejuvenation that is the essence of an urban renaissance—all the anxiety and hope of the decade is reflected in these poignant photographs. Constance Schulz's fascinating essay on the story of the PPL, in order to present a full picture of the political and civic goals, achievements, and failings of the project, provides a thorough discussion of the background of the Pittsburgh Photographic Library, putting into perspective the Allegheny Conference's purpose for initiating the PPL, Roy Stryker's own vision and work, as well as those of the photographers who worked for Stryker on the project, and the politics that undermined the full implementation of it. Clark M. Thomas's accompanying narrative offers an eclectic range of facts and fascinating bits of the city's history and neighborhood lore, as well as noting important political and economic episodes. It also provides a glimpse into the often underrepresented lives of minorities and women in the region's development. Anyone moved by the incredible social upheaval and expansion that occurred in cities across the nation in the 1950s following years of depression and war will want to have this collection. (shrink)

This article argues that Carol Gilligan's research in moral development psychology, work which claims that women speak about ethics in a "different voice" than men do, is applicable to business ethics. This essay claims that Gilligan's "ethic of care" provides a plausible explanation for the results of two studies that found men and women handling ethical dilemmas in business differently. This paper also speculates briefly about the management implications of Gilligan's ideas.

The politics of interpretation should not be confused with interpretive practices such as political theory, political commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that informs or motivates them—“politics” in the sense of political values or ideology—is relatively easily perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required. The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those interpretive practices which are ostensibly (...) most remote from overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry into the natures of things which appear to have no political relevance at all. This “politics” has to do with the kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à-vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation, on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem utilizes as a matter of course in his practice—the appeal to force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.11. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase “politics of interpretation.” In “Politics as Vocation,” Weber wrote that “ ‘politics’ means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state” . Rather than discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter’s political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is endemic to the pursuit of truth—the striving to share power amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity of belief or conviction, it is “political” only in a metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union, Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no bearing upon political policies or practices.Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of realism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" and "The Narrativization of Real Events". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanticism and Coleridge’s Idea of HistoryMichael John Kooy*Romantic historiography is widely understood in methodological terms as a subjectively determined treatment of the human past, according to which historical knowledge is grounded in imaginative activity. That ambition was amply fulfilled in Scott’s historical novels, as Georg Lukacs once demonstrated. 1 Writing in broader terms, Hayden White characterized that whole creative enterprise as an “effort at palingenesis,” the striving to (...) recreate or relive the past in individual consciousness. 2In more recent years, as the approach to the period has become more historicist, criticism has begun to separate the historical and the aesthetic aspects of this romantic sensibility, usually emphasizing one at the expense of the other. The result has been a standoff in critical thinking about the way Romanticism represents the past. One side is occupied by some new historicists who claim to find a precedent for their own methodology among prominent figures of the period. Heyne, Wordsworth, and Keats, it turns out, not only were engaged actively in their own contemporary history, but they also demonstrated in their sophisticated evocation of the past the impossibility of overcoming historical difference by reference to natural law. 3 Arguments advanced on the other side of the controversy insist that the Romantics were not nearly such good historicists as supposed. In these accounts, often allied to post-structuralism, the aesthetic absolutism implicit in the high romantic argument is undiminished by the burgeoning historical consciousness in the period. Indeed, Romanticism’s aesthetic [End Page 717] retrieval of the past appears to be an instance of how subjectivity, rather than admit its own historicity, again asserts mastery over the object through its own self-will. 4Each of these accounts commands a considerable following, and a peace between them seems unlikely, indeed undesirable. On one matter they do agree, though, and that is in their distrust of Coleridge. His historiography—the notion that ideas make history and that the way to get at these ideas is aesthetically—is too idealist for today’s historicists and too monumentally subjective for the post-structuralists. I think both judgments are hasty. Coleridge, more than most contemporaries, reflected for many years upon the difficulties that arose in his own attempts to interpret historical knowledge (which appeared as a subjective, aesthetic construct) in systematic terms (as the reflection of natural order); and a good look at the record will show that his thought is not quite so anti-historical as some believe, and his subjective approach not nearly so absolutist.The goal of this essay is to rehabilitate Coleridge’s idea of history, considering what it tells us about Romanticism and how it foreshadows current debates about methodology. 5 More specifically, I want to show how in different contexts Coleridge treats, with varying degrees of success, history as an ideational field that is both created and then interpreted by an inquiring subject. First, at the literary and cultural level, history is conceived as the object of imaginative reconstruction, where subjectivity provisionally orders the mass of material according to an idea found nowhere within history itself. Here the anti-positivist bias of Coleridge’s idealist historiography dominates a project that is, both in orientation and achievement, not so much cognitive as aesthetic. Secondly, at the level of religion, history is conceived in mythic terms, the past being revealed only symbolically to the discerning inquirer who must interpret the Christian mythos as recorded in the inspired biblical account of the nation of Israel. Here it is the application of certain interpretive or hermeneutic strategies that determines success or failure. Finally, as a single idea, history is conceived as the process of humanity seeking consciousness of itself, and this Coleridge expresses in a narrative of universal proportions, beginning in apostasy and ending in grace. Here teleology dominates, but as Coleridge discovers, this providential [End Page 718] history is a story that cannot be fully told, thought, or even, it turns out, imagined. It can only be postulated as an idea of reason or, in religious terminology, held as an article of faith. In a curious return to aesthetics Coleridge argues that for the grand historical narrative, just as for art... (shrink)

Because health care professions exist to provide a good for society, ethical questions are inherently part of them. Such professions and their members can be assessed based on how effective they are in developing knowledge and enacting practices that further the health and well‐being of individuals and society. The complexity of contemporary health care environments makes it important to prepare clinicians who can anticipate, recognize, and address problems that arise in practice or that prevent a profession from fulfilling its service (...) goals and obligations. Different health care professions have evolved distinct perspectives about appropriate goals for, and the purposes of, their clinicians, even when the goal of improving health and well‐being for society is shared across professions. While medicine and nursing goals are shared in principle, they differ in the particulars. Given the centrality to nursing of ethical questions, the profession has a collective responsibility to help clinicians at all levels of practice become ethically savvy and to reinforce their moral agency as needed. Both knowledge of nursing ethics and knowledge of the interdisciplinary field of bioethics are critical to nursing work. (shrink)