Nous formulons et illustrons l’hypothèse que les sites de réseaux socionumériques constituent un mécanisme emblématique de la « société de contrôle » prophétisée par Gilles Deleuze. Au centre de ce dispositif, se retrouve en effet un double mouvement contradictoire : d’une part, le processus de captation capitalistique des informations déposées par les usagers contributeurs − nous pourrions décrire ce premier mouvement comme étant celui d’une surveillance institutionnelle se réalisant par le contrôle centralisé de l’information ; d’autre part, et de manière (...) surprenante, l’on constate un consentement − voire même parfois, un désir − exprimée par de nombreux usagers d’exposer publiquement des informations et des images concernant leur vie personnelle, et cela malgré les risques qui se rattachent à de telles opérations de dévoilement. Ce second mouvement apparaît être le mécanisme central du processus d’intériorisation douce du contrôle social par des usagers pratiquant une forme de « servitude volontaire » rattachée aux besoins du capitalisme informationnel, c’est-à-dire un système dont la production de la valeur économique est fondée sur l’agrégation en bases de données gigantesques et monétisables, des informations déposées sur les sites selon une logique du grand nombre .The hypothesis we put forward and illustrate in this article is that social networking sites have become a mechanism which is emblematic of the “society of control” prophesied by Gilles Deleuze. At its hub are two conflicting movements: one is a capitalistic process of capturing information posted by contributing users, which might be seen as a tendency towards institutional surveillance through centralised data control. The other is the somewhat surprising consent of many users – and even their active desire – for public disclosure of information and images on their private lives, despite the ethical and professional risks attached to these practices of self-disclosure. This second movement seems to be a central mechanism that governs a process of painless internalisation of social control by users, as they consent to a kind of voluntary enslavement to the needs of information capitalism, in other words to a system where the production of economic value is based on aggregating, or “crowdsourcing”, often minuscule items of information into gigantic databases capable of generating money. (shrink)

Background Advance Care Planning via Group Visits (ACP-GV) is a patient-centered intervention facilitated by a clinician using a group modality to promote healthcare decision-making among veterans. Participants in the group document a “Next Step” to use in planning for their future care needs. The next step may include documentation of preferences in an advance directive, discussing plans with family, or anything else to fulfill their ACP needs. This evaluation seeks to determine whether there are identifiable subgroups of group participants with (...) differing needs prior to delivery of the ACP-GV program and, if so, to use information about the subgroups to enhance the program offered to veterans in United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare settings. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of national data from a quality improvement evaluation. Patient- and provider-level data from administrative healthcare records for VA users in all 50 states, territories, and the District of Columbia provides data on veterans attending ACP-GV during federal fiscal years 2018–2022 (N = 26,857). Latent class analysis seeks to identify the various subgroups of veterans based on their level of ACP self-efficacy before attending ACP-GV and any demographic differences across the resulting subgroups of veterans attending ACP-GV. ACP self-efficacy is derived from seven items obtained from a participant worksheet used during the group. Results Analysis revealed two distinct groups of veterans, distinguishable by their pre-ACP-GV levels of one aspect of ACP self-efficacy: prior knowledge of ACP. Veterans with higher prior knowledge of ACP are associated with an identified next step focused on checking their current AD status and updating it, and veterans with lower ACP prior knowledge are associated with identifying a next step to discuss ACP more fully with family. Differences in age, sex, race, ethnicity, and marital status exist across subgroups of veterans. Conclusion Greater attention must be paid to ACP and veterans’ prior knowledge of ACP to consistently encourage annual review and status updates. (shrink)

Bringing together the expertise of rhetoricians in English and communication as well as media studies scholars, Arguments about Animal Ethics delves into the rhetorical and discursive practices of participants in controversies over the use of nonhuman animals for meat, entertainment, fur, and vivisection. Both sides of the debate are carefully analyzed, as the contributors examine how stakeholders persuade or fail to persuade audiences about the ethics of animal rights or the value of using animals.

The Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA provided opportunities for women to conduct research in the late 19th and early 20th century at a time when many barriers existed to their pursuit of a scientific career. One woman who benefited from the welcoming environment at the MBL was Mary Jane Hogue. Her remarkable career as an experimental biologist spanned over 55 years. Hogue was born into a Quaker family in 1883 and received her undergraduate degree from Goucher (...) College. She went to Germany to obtain an advanced degree, and her research at the University of Würzburg with Theodor Boveri resulted in her Ph.D.. Although her research interests included experimental embryology, and the use of tissue culture to study a variety of cell types, she is considered foremost a protozoologist. Her extraordinary demonstration of chromidia in the life history of a new species of Flabellula associated with diseased oyster beds is as important as it is ignored. We discuss Hogue’s career path and her science to highlight the importance of an informal network of teachers, research advisors, and other women scientists at the MBL all of whom contributed to her success as a woman scientist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 526-529 [Access article in PDF] Jane D. Chaplin. Livy's Exemplary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 245 pp. Cloth, $70. Hoc illud est praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu foedum exitu quod vites. —Livy, Preface 10 Livy's programmatic assertion (...) has served as the point of departure for a number of recent studies. Indeed, the book one writes seems to depend on which word or words provide inspiration: intueri (Feldherr) and monumentum (Jaeger) have had their day; now it is the turn of exempli documenta. In this beautifully argued study, Chaplin argues that close readings of scenes involving exemplary figures produce a misleadingly static view of Livy's history as a repository of fixed lessons; by studying exempla, not just at their moment of generation but as they are invoked, altered, and allowed to die away over the course of the narrative, one can see Livy showing historical processes at work and thus gain appreciation of Livy as an historian as well as a literary artist.Chaplin defines exemplum broadly, including not only what the text points [End Page 526] to as exempla or documenta but also "any specific citation of an event or an individual that is intended to serve as a guide to conduct" (3). Exempla occur at various levels of the narrative: in the historian's own voice; focalized through characters who remember the past and use it as a guide to conduct; and most frequently, in speeches. Throughout the book Chaplin is careful to distinguish between the external, reading audience and the various audiences of speeches and spectacles within the text. She points out that the reading audience has information that audiences within the text do not and thus can draw conclusions that they cannot. In showing characters within the text interpreting, reinterpreting, and learning from the past, Livy's history teaches its reading audience how to engage constructively with history, both past events and the narrative of past events.The introduction briefly reviews the use of exempla in rhetoric, the didactic features of Greek and Roman historiography, the Roman tendency to teach by example (fathers pointing out models to sons, the trappings of aristocratic funerals, statues in public places), exempla in Livy's annalistic predecessors, and their use in Polybius, and Sallust. It is hardly surprising that Livy employs exempla, but Chaplin argues well from the meager evidence that Livy surpasses his Roman predecessors in the depth and complexity with which he uses them.A close reading of Caudium in chapter 1, first the narrative of the defeat and comeback, then as an exemplum both focalized through the thoughts of others and included in various speeches, shows that great events do not have one meaning. Even the recent past is subject to interpretation, misinterpretation, and reinterpretation. The Romans' expression after their defeat has a different meaning depending on one's knowledge of the Roman character. In its early appearances as an exemplum, Caudium is a model of behavior to avoid; later, ominously invoked among other Roman comebacks by a person about to lead Romans to near disaster (22.14.4-14), it becomes an example of behavior to imitate. Chaplin's discussion of Cannae (chapter 2) reinforces this claim that exempla are malleable; which aspects of an exemplum are invoked depends on the speaker, the audience, and the immediate situation. The reading audience can see that Romans use exempla better and learn from the past better than Carthaginians do. They also learn that history does not achieve closure; rather, people move beyond it as the Romans moved beyond Cannae, because they have learned its lessons.Concluding her discussion of Cannae, Chaplin observes that "the ability to manipulate an audience's perception of the past may come from oratory, but Livy converts it into a tool of historical interpretation" (72). Chapter 3, "Reading the Past," expands on this observation. Various figures in Livy (the Praenestines at the second battle of the Allia... (shrink)

"Multiverse" cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. While this idea has captivated philosophy, religion, and literature for millennia, it is now being considered as a scientific hypothesis--with different models emerging from cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the universe: nature's (...) constants are so delicately calibrated that it seems they have been set just right to allow life to emerge. For some thinkers, these "fine-tunings" are evidence of the existence of God; for others, however, and for most physicists, "God" is an insufficient scientific explanation. Hence the allure of the multiverse: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse. (shrink)

Introduction: Wonder and the births of philosophy -- Socrates' small difficulty -- The wound of wonder -- The death and resurrection of Thaumazein -- The Thales dilemma -- Repetition : Martin Heidegger -- Metaphysics small difficulty -- Wonder and the first beginning -- Wonder and the other beginning -- Theaetetus redux : the ghost of the Pseudes Doxa -- Once again to the cave -- Rethinking Thaumazein -- Openness : Emmanuel Levinas -- Passivity and responsibility -- The ethics of the (...) cave -- Infinity and astonishment -- Opening out : from existent to existence -- Closing down : from existence to existent -- Locking up : totality and infinity -- The phantom of the autrement -- Awakening -- Relation : Jean-Luc Nancy -- The problem of Mitsein -- Mitsein as essential inessentiality -- The myth of essentialism -- Unworking -- Interruption -- Repetition -- Decision : Jacques Derrida -- Thaumazein, the irresponsible, and the undecidable -- Hospitality -- Undecidability revisited -- Much madness is divinest sense (or, who comes after the decision?) -- How to avoid the subject (or, that's not my hedgehog!) -- Undecidability, take three : think here of Kierkegaard -- Mysterium tremendum -- Postlude: Possibility. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Introduction: 1. Personal epistemology in the classroom: a welcome and guide for the reader Florian C. Feucht and Lisa D. Bendixen; Part II. Frameworks and Conceptual Issues: 2. Manifestations of an epistemological belief system in pre-k to 12 classrooms Marlene Schommer-Aikins, Mary Bird, and Linda Bakken; 3. Epistemic climates in elementary classrooms Florian C. Feucht; 4. The integrative model of personal epistemology development: theoretical underpinnings and implications for education Deanna C. Rule and Lisa (...) D. Bendixen; 5. An epistemic framework for scientific reasoning in informal contexts Fang-Ying Yang and Chin-Chung Tsai; Appendices; 6. Who knows what and who can we believe? Epistemological beliefs are beliefs about knowledge (mostly) to be attained from others Rainer Bromme, Dorothe Kienhues, and Torsten Porsch; Part III. Students' Personal Epistemology, its Development, and Relation to Learning: 7. Stalking young persons' changing beliefs about belief Michael J. Chandler and Travis Proulx; 8. Epistemological development in very young knowers Leah K. Wildenger, Barbara K. Hofer, and Jean E. Burr; 9. Beliefs about knowledge and revision of knowledge: on the importance of epistemic beliefs for intentional conceptual change in elementary and middle school students Lucia Mason; 10. The reflexive relation between students' mathematics-related beliefs and the mathematics classroom culture Erik De Corte, Peter Op 't Eynde, Fien Depaepe, and Lieven Verschaffel; 11. Examining the influence of epistemic beliefs and goal orientations on the academic performance of adolescent students enrolled in high-poverty, high-minority schools P. Karen Murphy, Michelle M. Buehl, Jill A. Zeruth, Maeghan N. Edwards, Joyce F. Long, and Shinichi Monoi; 12. Using cognitive interviewing to explore elementary and secondary school students' epistemic and ontological cognition Jeffrey A. Greene, Judith Torney-Purta, Roger Azevedo, and Jane Robertson; Part IV. Teachers' Personal Epistemology and its Impact on Classroom Teaching: 13. Epistemological resources and framing: a cognitive framework for helping teachers interpret and respond to their students' epistemologies Andrew Elby and David Hammer; 14. The effects of teachers' beliefs on elementary students' beliefs, motivation, and achievement in mathematics Krista R. Muis and Michael J. Foy; Appendices; 15. Teachers' articulation of beliefs about teaching knowledge: conceptualizing a belief framework Helenrose Fives and Michelle M. Buehl; Appendices; 16. Beyond epistemology: assessing teachers' epistemological and ontological world views Lori Olafson and Gregory Schraw; Part V. Conclusion: 17. Personal epistemology in the classroom: what does research and theory tell us and where do we need to go next? Lisa D. Bendixen and Florian C. Feucht. (shrink)

The matter with Pantheism -- Panic -- Pan -- Panterruption -- Hyle -- Panfusion -- Cosmos -- Pancarnation -- Theos -- Pandemonium.

« Ma Chérie, ceci n'est pas censé être un journal, et il se peut même que ça ne te parvienne jamais, mais j'aime penser à toi en train de le lire, page après page, un jour dans les années à venir, après que je serai partie. J'aimerais t'entendre rire en regardant ces photos de moi. Je suis seule dans ma cabane ce soir et fatiguée ». Avertissement ou défi, ceci est la première lettre écrite par Calamity Jane à sa (...) fille le 25 septembre 1877. Une vingtaine d'autres lettres suivront, de fa.. (shrink)

At this point, it would be a considerable accomplishment not to be aware that there is something very strange going on in the Anglican Communion. Nearly every day brings fresh stories of increasingly complicated ecclesiastical warfare: Nigerian bishops in Virginia, Ugandan churches in California, same-sex blessings in Canada, threats of schism, charges of heresy—and perhaps you've heard about the gay bishop in New Hampshire?1The current difficulties in the American Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion can be traced back to (...) a number of different events in the life of the church, depending on how deep the storyteller would…. (shrink)

Sustainable development (SD) has contested meanings, and perspectives vary within and across societies. Emphases can range dramatically from recycling advocacy to eradication of poverty. Assumptions and approaches to sustainable development inherently contain many ethical considerations, yet U.S. students often have a limited understanding of ethical considerations in non-Western and global contexts. This paper describes an academic program on sustainable development we ran to Morocco and Spain. We describe the program’s pedagogy and assess learning related to ethics. The largest impact on (...) students’ awareness of ethics resulted from their observations and experiences with socioeconomic inequities and unequal access to infrastructure. However, without explicitly teaching ethical frameworks to sustainability students, they tend to equate sustainability with morality, imputing their own normative presuppositions of right versus wrong onto the concept of sustainable development. Therefore, we conclude with a discussion on how ethics could be more systematically integrated into education for sustainable development abroad. (shrink)

The sexuality of young people arouses controversy and remains a source of concern for parents, teachers, policy-makers and politicians. But what young people really think about sexuality and gender and how these issues impact upon their lives is often marginalized or overlooked. Based upon extensive ethnographic research with young people and teachers, _Sexuality, Gender and Schooling_ offers a telling and insightful account of how young people acquire sexual knowledge and how they enact their understanding of their own gender. It highlights (...) the ways in which young people's constructions of gender and sexuality are formed outside the school curriculum, through engagements with various forms of popular culture - such as teen magazines and television programmes - and through same-sex friendship groups. Offering a fresh perspective on a subject of perennial interest and concern, _Sexuality, Gender and Schooling_ provides accounts from the inside - some of which may challenge and eclipse current approaches to sexuality education. It has significant implications for policy and practice in Personal, Social and Health Education and is also an excellent introduction to key debates and issues in the study of gender and sexuality. (shrink)

Scant attention given to gender in Latin American prison experiences implies that men and women suffer similarly and react according to their shared beliefs. This essay explores the prison memoirs of four Latin American women. Each account uses a standardized prison narrative adjusted to suit the narrator's own purpose and hints at how sexuality and motherhood, which shape women's experiences in prison, have been removed from sight.

Peer learning partnerships are voluntary, reciprocal helping relationships between individuals of comparable status, who share a common or closely related learning / development objective. These dyadic or small group partnerships often occur incidentally or are confused with mentoring; hence they are easily overlooked and / or misunderstood. Yet they warrant the attention of professional developers,classroom teachers, and others as an intentionallearning strategy because of their potential to foster bi-directional learning through joint reflection.Using her qualitative case study of peer learning partnerships (...) in an innovative statewide community college faculty development initiative - the “Teaching Partners Program” - the author draws on participants’ first-hand perceptions of this alternative modality to demonstrate how it fosters reflective practice, leading to enhanced discovery and professional development. The study’s findings highlight the benefits of using peer learning partnerships to promote reflective practice, as well as barriers to utilization. Recommendations for applying this approach and for future research are provided. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pantheology of Pandemic: Sex, Race, Nature, and The VirusMary-Jane Rubenstein (bio)I. PunitheologyThe explanations started pouring in even before the virus attained “pandemic” status in March of 2020: we were being punished. According to a vocal subset of Evangelical pastors and ultra-Orthodox rabbis, the death-dealing virus was divine retribution for the sins of (who else?) LGBT-identified people and their allies, who aggressively violated what the pastors and rabbis (...) called “the order of nature.”1 Meanwhile, their left-leaning counterparts argued that the sin in question wasn’t so much sexual as ecological: in the words of one Roman Catholic commentator, the coronavirus was God’s punishment for “our unfettered domination attitude toward nature.”2At the same time, an equally vocal throng of secular environmentalists called the virus nature’s own punishment for our manifold violations against her—in particular, the extractivism, pollution, alleged overpopulation, deforestation, carbon emissions, and industrial slaughterhouses that allowed the zoonotic strain to break out among humans in the first place.3 Depending on whom [End Page 5] you ask, then, the disaster we’ve come to encapsulate as COVID-19 is either godly or natural retribution for our manifold sins against “nature.”Although these sacred and secular punitheologies are not equivalent, they bear striking similarities to one another thanks to the monotheistic heritage of the concept of “nature” itself. As we will see, whether it is invoked by pastors, politicians, activists, or scientists, “nature” in the Western-descended world is presented as singular, nonwhite, and feminine; morally normative; and prone to abuse. Nature is often capitalized, often maternalized, and reliably distinguished either from a disembodied male God, a universalized “humanity,” or both. Nature, in short, carries immense ideological freight. Specifically, it installs and polices the work of what Kelly Brown Douglas calls “theo-ideology”: a “sacred legitimation” for a social order that seeks to present itself as unquestionable.4 And “nature” does this unparalleled ideological work thanks to the freedom it keeps promising from ideology: “your” way of being might be constructed, distorted, historical, subjective, contingent, artificial, cultural, or indeed sinful, but “ours” is natural—which is to say universally, even transcendently, true.Whether it comes from the mouths of angry clerics or righteous ecologists, then, the call to get right with nature is a call to adhere to one or another self-concealing social arrangement—to a set of interests and values whose power derives from its seeming so “natural.” For this reason, many contemporary thinkers recommend abandoning the term altogether. Donna Haraway suggests we try the non-binary and carefully pluralized “naturecultures”; Bruno Latour proposes “critical zones,” and Timothy Morton pivots to ecological practice which, he insists, can only function if we let go of the romantic delusion of “nature.”5Regardless of nature’s conceptual integrity, it is important to attend to the term in order to account for its rhetorical force and ubiquity—for the polyphibious presence of “nature” within the left and right-wings of science, religion, and politics alike. In this article, I will decode some of the recent, theologically [End Page 6] retributive appeals to nature within early, informal, literary responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. In the process, I hope to unearth some of the mythic norms of race and gender that this concept both entrenches and conceals in the American imagination. Finally, I will ask what happens when we start messing with these categories, beginning with the mirroring chasms between humans and nature, and nature and God. How might we start to think pantheologically about this unrelenting pandemic, and why would anybody want to?II. Sins against NatureAs Catherine Keller noticed as early as April 2020, American pundits across the political spectrum immediately attributed COVID-19 to the relentless justice of an angry God.6 It is perhaps America’s favorite theological maneuver: explaining natural and social disasters as the product of divine vengeance. From Jonathan Edwards’s spider to Fred Phelps’s funeral protests, American preachers and political commentators have got a long-standing knack for putting the fear of God into a suffering nation. (Even my home insurance policy washes its hands of... (shrink)

This article offers a critical reflection on the mutually resonant recent works of Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, both of whom expose “radical theology” as insufficiently political, “political theology” as insufficiently radical, and “radical politics” as insufficiently attuned to theology. In light of these shortcomings, they offer a radical political theology as a “necessary supplement” to the project of radical democracy—which is to say a politics of, by, and for “the multitude.” This article tracks the shifting and occasionally conflicting contours (...) of this radically democratic theology. (shrink)

The artist's process -- Making -- Experiencing -- Practice -- The social value of art -- Democracy -- Participation -- Communication.

This article reviews and also compares developments within international humanitarian law and human rights law in regard to matters relating to child soldiers. Beginning with the Geneva Conventions and early twentieth century legal developments for children in general, this article identifies the legal and conceptual discrepancies in the child soldiers issue and how they relate to and affect each other. It also includes an overview of the child soldiers issue, followed by summary discussions of the respective strengths and weaknesses of (...) international humanitarian law and human rights law in regard to child soldiers. Following from that, conceptual problems in the field that are problematic in regard to law are also considered, and some concluding observations are then offered. Among them is how the patch-work developments of the past still prevail, as evidenced by the ongoing two-tiered age division that exists within the under-18 category. (shrink)

This article offers a feminist deconstruction of legitimacy regarding the intentional decision by midlife independent single women to enter solo parenthood. Data collection involved interviews with 26 single mothers by choice and two years of participant observation in two Single Mothers by Choice support groups. Their accounts indicate that SMCs feel entitled to enter solo motherhood because they possess four essential attributes: age, responsibility, emotional maturity, and fiscal capability. SMCs use economic, moral, and religious justifications to further legitimize their decisions. (...) These justifications allow SMCs to present themselves as competent, ethical, and mainstream mothers. (shrink)

Darwin proposed that evolutionary novelties are environmentally induced in organisms “constitutionally” sensitive to environmental change, with selection effective owing to the inheritance of constitutional responses. A molecular theory of inheritance, pangenesis , explained the cross‐generational transmission of environmentally induced traits, as required for evolution by natural selection. The twentieth‐century evolutionary synthesis featured mutation as the source of novelty, neglecting the role of environmental induction. But current knowledge of environmentally sensitive gene expression, combined with the idea of genetic accommodation of mutationally (...) and environmentally induced change, supports a revival of Darwin's original theory that is consistent with modern molecular and population genetics. †To contact the author, please write to: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, c/o Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, Costa Rica; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Pre‐abortion counselling may play a key role in abortion seekers’ understanding of their decision to terminate a pregnancy and the subsequent emotions that they feel. In this paper, we report on a study conducted in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa concerning womxn's experiences of the pre‐abortion counselling offered as part of the implementation of the Choice of Termination Act that governs the provision of legal abortion in the country. Using a narrative‐discursive lens, the analysis revealed four micro‐narratives in (...) which participants appreciated non‐directive and empathic counselling, as well as being provided with information. They also indicated that the counselling was upsetting and hurtful, particularly when providers drew on the awfulisation of abortion discourse to suggest that abortion leads to terrible consequences, and foetal personhood discourse to intimate that terminating the pregnancy is wrong and other alternatives (adoption, parenting) are better. The connection between these broadly positive and negative responses may lie in the dominance of anti‐abortion discourses coupled with the powerful positioning of healthcare providers as experts. The attendant disempowerment of clients within the health clinic setting may constrain pregnant people's ability to question such ‘expert’ information. The implications for feminist client‐centred pre‐abortion counselling are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition. By EDWARD FARLEY. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1990. Pp. xxi + 295. The Evils of Theodicy. By TERRENCE W. TILLEY. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 277. The Co-Existence of God and Evil. By JANE MARY TRAU. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. 109. Evil is deeply and endlessly fascinating to the religious mind. (...) On the one hand, it challenges religion. The existence of the evils within our ken poses a threat to the rationality of central tenets of theism; the presence of overwhelming evils within our lives can threaten the viabil· ity of our religious attitudes and practices. On the other hand, religions typically offer strategies for coping with evil. They propose explanations of its origins that may aid us in understanding it, and they con· tain salvific practices that are meant to lead to redemption from sin or the cessation of suffering. So religious responses to evil are bound to be complex, and this complexity will inevitably be reflected in the treatment of evil in academic discourses. In addition, the present academic division of labor results in religion being studied in many disciplines. Each of them has its own traditions and agendas, and this often leads to a diversity of approaches that gives interdisciplinary dis· cussion of religious responses to evil something of the air of conversa· tion after Babel. The three books under review here, which represent the disciplines of philosophy, religious studies, and theology, illustrate nicely both the complexity and the diversity. Jane Mary Trau, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Barry University, has written a short essay in analytic philosophy of religion proposing a solution to the logical problem of evil. The problem arises from the fact that there are arguments purporting to show that the proposition that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent is inconsistent with the proposition that evil exists. One way to solve the problem would be to find a possibly true proposition such that it is consistent with the proposition ·that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent and together with that proposition entails that evil exists. Alvin Plantinga's celebrated free-will defense offers a solution of this sort. Trau's alternative solution is a version of the familiar greater-goods defense. Trau's main claim is that it is possible that evil has positive value. An evil has positive value if it is logically necessary for some greater 525 526 BOOK REVIEWS good, and it certainly seems to he possible that some evils have positive value. Thus, for example, suppose God creates nothing other than two angels, A and B. Nothing interrupts the felicity of either hut a mild pang of sorrow felt by A, to which B responds with compassion. A's sorrow is logically necessary for the greater good of B's compassionate response to A's sorrow. Hence A's sorrow is an evil that has positive value. Moreover, the proposition that evils with positive value exist is consistent with the proposition that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent. So the existence of evil is consistent with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent deity. In other words, Trau's version of the greater-goods defense does seem to provide a solution to the logical problem of evil. But that is not to say that all the evils there actually are or even all those we know about do or could have positive value. Thus it does not follow, without further assumptions, that the existence of all the evils there actually are is consistent with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnihenevolent deity. In a discussion of natural evil near the end of her hook, Trau acknowledges the need for such additional assumptions. She says: "Four assumptions underlie the claim that natural evils have positive value: (1) The material universe has positive value. (2) The material universe must function in a way that requires the occurrence of natural evils as secondary effects. (3) The material universe is either the best or the only possible universe. (4) If the universe as we know it did not function the way it does... (shrink)