This article identifies two different paths where the amnesia described by Hannah- Arendt and the fragmentation identified by Willie James Jennings of our historical past has distorted how people today view dan-cing. I set out how the Christian entanglement with colonial powers has impacted on people’s abilities to relate to their bodies, lands and other creatures of the world. I describe how the colonial wound of Western society forms the basis of the loneliness and alienation that totalitarianism inculcates. After this, (...) I examine how people who seek to find a solid tradition of dance within the Western traditions of Christianity often end up in a conundrum when they seek to legitimize the existence of the tradition in the wrong places. I show how seeking roots for Christian dance practices in Jewish customs is often entangled in supersessionist understandings. These arguments are constructed by means of both J. Kameron- Carter’s writings on race and theology and the black political theology outlined by Vincent W. Lloyd. The second-most-often chosen option for creating a dance tradition for Western forms of Christianity is to romanticize the non-Western ‘other’. Using Lindsey Drury’s work, I argue that dancers have perpetuated the interests that seek to possess the ‘other’ by bringing exotic dancers to the Western marketplace. Finally, I describe the third option – more commonly found amongst those critical of Christian tradition – to seek the roots of transformational dance practices in Hellenistic and more esoteric teachings flourishing in the early twentieth century. We run into the often forgotten or neglected stories of renowned dance teachers like Rudolf Laban and Isadora Duncan on this path. By combining esoteric bodily practices, Mother Earth ‘spirituality’ and superior views about race, they not only promoted but laid the foundation for how people were manipulated in the Third Reich. I end by sharing ethnographic stories of resistance towards how these past historical patterns have affected how dance is viewed today. Those exhibiting such resistance are not always consciously aware of the historical roots I have described. However, engagement in contemplative and healing dance practices seems to be forging new and better ways to create community and to live in a connected way with creation and our creatureliness. The central theme of these practices is to resist the illusion of perfection and control while helping people to listen to and discern the Holy Spirit leading them into a new way of living. (shrink)

For those who maintain that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, a persistent problem is to give a coherent characterization of action that is neither determined by prior events nor random, arbitrary, lucky or in some way insufficiently under the control of the agent to count as free action. One approach—that of Roderick Chisholm and others—is to say that a third alternative is for an action to be caused by an agent in a way that is not reducible to (...) event causal terms. A different approach than the Chisholmian appeal to primitive substance causation is one that, instead, involves causal relations purely among events. This paper presents a particular event-causal indeterminist account of free action, describing both its attractions and recent objections to it, and then proposes a revised version, with the aim of supporting the plausibility of an event-causal indeterminist approach to free will. (shrink)

For a symposium on Dana Nelkin's Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility.

ABSTRACTThis study examined duration judgments for taboo and neutral words in prospective and retrospective timing tasks. In the prospective task, participants attended to time from the beginning and generated shorter duration estimates for taboo than neutral words and for words that they subsequently recalled in a surprise free recall task. These findings suggested that memory encoding took priority over estimating durations, directing attention away from time and causing better recall but shorter perceived durations for taboo than neutral words. However, in (...) the retrospective task, participants only judged durations in a surprise test at the end, and their duration estimates were longer for taboo than neutral words. Present findings therefore suggest that the same emotion-linked memory encoding processes can cause underestimation of durations in prospective tasks but overestimation in retrospective tasks, as if emotion enhances recall of ongoing events but causes overestimation of the durations of those... (shrink)

It is common to believe that some of our concerns are deeper concerns of ours than are others and that some of our attitudes are central rather than peripheral to our psychological identity. What is the best approach to characterizing depth or centrality to the self? This paper addresses the matter of the depth and authenticity of attitudes and the relation of this matter to the autonomy of action. It defends a conception of the real self in terms of preferences (...) and convictions that cohere in a particular structural sense. It thereby gives content to the notion of wholeheartedness to which various action theorists make appeal. The approach is defended in part by an examination of how it handles the phenomenon of ambivalence.1. (shrink)

This chapter develops a divine intimacy theodicy. The central idea is that, sometimes when persons suffer, they experience closeness to God, either through an awareness of God's presence with them or through identification with a God who suffers. Some instances of human suffering, then, might reasonably be viewed as religious experiences that serve as a means to knowledge of God.

This chapter contains sections titled: Will as Faculty, Capacity, or Power Will as an Attitude or Collection of Attitudes Will and Free Will Theory Volitional Disunity and Wholeheartedness References Further reading.

This article provides an overview of current and prospective ethical issues facing commercial (as opposed to leisure) travel agents. Industry wide ethical issues include conflicting pressures from suppliers and clients, competency requirements for agents and misleading advertising and sales claims (vaporware in industry jargon). Issues with travel suppliers include calculation and payment of commissions, fare loopholes, frequent flyer plans and the use and abuse of benefits directed to individual employees. Issues with corporate clients of travel agents include hidden preferred carriers (...) or suppliers, client pressure to use fare loopholes and hidden relationships with corporate travel consultants. Future issues include protecting client privacy, free riding, and divergent international business practices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal (...) theory” as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

This series of responses was commissioned to accompany the article by Singer et al, which can be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6939/2/1. If you would like to comment on the article by Singer et al or any of the responses, please email us on editorial@biomedcentral.com.

The discovery of conjunctive causes--factors that act in concert to produce or prevent an effect--has been explained by purely covariational theories. Such theories assume that concomitant variations in observable events directly license causal inferences, without postulating the existence of unobservable causal relations. This article discusses problems with these theories, proposes a causal-power theory that overcomes the problems, and reports empirical evidence favoring the new theory. Unlike earlier models, the new theory derives (a) the conditions under which covariation implies conjunctive causation (...) and (b) functions relating observable events to unobservable conjunctive causal strength. This psychological theory, which concerns simple cases involving 2 binary candidate causes and a binary effect, raises questions about normative statistics for testing causal hypotheses regarding categorical data resulting from discrete variables. (shrink)

Black, Alan W The Rationalist Press Association, which was one of the original sponsors of the British Humanist Association, was also one of the influences which helped to bring the New South Wales Humanist Society into being. The immediate event which triggered the formation of the latter society was the visit to Australia in 1959 of the American evangelist, Billy Graham. Bill and Daphne Weeks, two Sydney school teachers who were members of the Rationalist Press Association, felt the need (...) for an organisation to promote humanism in Australia. Even prior to the Graham visit, they and others of similar persuasion had been writing to the ABC Weekly urging the Australian Broadcasting Commission to include humanist views in its programmes. (shrink)

In this essay David Black claims that, if one pieces together the many sketches of educational decorum found in the Confucian Analects, one will discover three types of misguided student; that is, one will come to recognize that Confucius admonishes three types of insensitive learners who, due to the lure of personal advantage and social rhetoric, begin to mismanage the exchanges of respect particular to the educational process. These students misappropriate key rituals of decorum and dialogue, and consequently create (...) a degree of disorder that, for Confucius, actually threatens the existence of civil society. (shrink)

Metaphors for describing the introduction, impacts, and management of non-native species are numerous and often quite outspoken. Policy-makers have adopted increasingly disputed metaphorical terms from scientific discourse. We performed a critical analysis of the use of strong metaphors in reporting scientific findings to policy-makers. Our analysis shows that perceptions of harm, invasiveness or nativeness are dynamic and inevitably display multiple narratives in science, policy or management. Improving our awareness of multiple expert and stakeholder narratives that exist in the context of (...) non-native species management, as well as metaphorical alternatives, is critical. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 26-28.

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

Phage DNA packaging occurs by DNA translocation into a prohead. Terminases are enzymes which initiate DNA packaging by cutting the DNA concatemer, and they are closely fitted structurally to the portal vertex of the prohead to form a ‘packasome’. Analysis among a number of phages supports an active role of the terminases in coupling ATP hydrolysis to DNA translocation through the portal. In phage T4 the small terminase subunit promotes a sequence‐specific terminase gene amplification within the chromosome. This link between (...) recombination and packaging suggests a DNA synapsis mechanism by the terminase to control packaging initiation, formally homologous to eukaryotic chromosome segregation. (shrink)