Stark disparities exist in the United States' health care system. Thirty-five million Americans are uninsured, severely impeding their access to necessary health care. Concurrently, others receive health care services that are of unproven necessity and benefit. We assert that this situation is unjust and morally indefensible.

Over the past 25 years, no religious institution in America has done more to explore the link between the environment and spirituality than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Now, for the first time, a selection of the finest of the Cathedral's ecological sermons appears in a single volume.

Mathematics word problems provide students with an opportunity to apply what they are learning in their mathematics classes to the world around them. However, students often neglect their knowledge of the world and provide nonsensical responses (e.g., they may answer that a school needs 12.5 buses for a field trip). This study examined if the question design of word problems affects students' mindset in ways that affect subsequent sense‐making. The hypothesis was that rewriting standard word problems to introduce inherent uncertainty (...) about the result would be beneficial to student performance and sense‐making because it requires students to reason explicitly about the context described in the problem. Middle school students (N = 229) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. In the standard textbook condition, students solved a set of six word problems taken from current textbooks. In the modified yes/no condition, students solved the same six problems rewritten so the solution helped answer a “yes” or “no” question. In the disfluency control condition, students solved the standard problems each rewritten in a variety of fonts to make them look unusual. After solving the six problems in their assigned condition, all students solved the same three “problematic” problems designed to assess sense‐making. Contrary to predictions, results showed that students in the modified yes/no condition solved the fewest problems correctly in their assigned condition problem set. However, consistent with predictions, they subsequently demonstrated more sense‐making on the three problematic problems. Results suggest that standard textbook word problems may be able to be rewritten in ways that mitigate a “senseless” mindset. (shrink)

Over the last generation, the womanist idea--and the tradition blooming around it--has emerged as an important response to separatism, domination, and oppression. Gary L. Lemons gathers a diverse group of writers to discuss their scholarly and personal experiences with the womanist spirit of women of color feminisms. Feminist and womanist-identified educators, students, performers, and poets model the powerful ways that crossing borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-state affiliation(s) expands one's existence. At the same time, they bear witness to (...) how the self-liberating theory and practice of women of color feminism changes one's life. Throughout, the essayists come together to promote an unwavering vein of activist comradeship capable of building political alliances dedicated to liberty and social justice. Contributors: M. Jacqui Alexander, Dora Arreola, Andrea Assaf, Kendra N. Bryant, Rudolph P. Byrd, Atika Chaudhary, Paul T. Corrigan, Fanni V. Green, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Susan Hoeller, Ylce Irizarry, M. Thandabantu Iverson, Gary L. Lemons, Layli Maparyan, and Erica C. Sutherlin. (shrink)

In this contribution, I will focus on Chogyam Trungpa's presentation of the basic practice of samatha-vipassana sitting meditation, assuming that his description is almost scientifically meticulous, similarly to Husserl's phenomenological descriptions, and allows the latter to be endowed with concrete richness and practical operability. Meditation is an activity that develops attentional qualities which are extremely accurate, i.e. both very well-defined and remarkably embodied. I will first detail the different forms of attention inherent to meditation, then show how they surprisingly echo (...) some of the gestures specific to the phenomenological Husserlian reduction. In other words, I will adopt a circular method of random comings and goings between the two, in order to gradually create, in the reader's mind, echoes and resonances between practices that reveal experiential relationships between them. (shrink)

We prove that in a nilpotent-by-finite stable group an equation that holds generically holds everywhere. Combining this result with results of Wagner and Bryant, we conclude that a soluble-by-finite stable group of generic exponent n has exponent n.

Molla Halil’e göre insanların bu dünyada yaptıkları iyiliklere karşılık Yüce Allah onları ahirette lütfuyla nimetlendirecek ve Cennetine koyacaktır. Bu, Allah’ın insanlara bir va‘didir. Allah va‘dinden asla dönmez. Çünkü Allah’ın va‘dinden dönmesi, O’nun hakkında bir eksiklik sayılır. Ancak bu durum O’nun için vucûbiyet ifade etmez. Vucubiyet kavramı çeşitli anlamlarda kullanıldığı için anlam kargaşasına yol açabilir. Buna sebebiyet vermemek için kelamda özellikle de bu makalede “zorunluluk” anlamına kullanılacak olup bazen gereklilik anlamı da ihtiva edebilir. Allah, kötülük yapanları ise adaletiyle cezalandıracaktır. Bu da (...) Allah’ın va‘îdi olup, va‘îdi’nden dönebilir. Bu, O’nun hakkında bir noksanlığa sebebiyet vermez. Çünkü cezalandırmaktan vazgeçmesi Allah’ın merhametinin ve lütfunun bir sonucudur. Bununla birlikte ne va‘d ve ne de va‘îd Allah’a vacip değildir. Molla Halil’e göre, büyük günah insanı imandan çıkarmaz. Mu‘tezile’ye göre büyük günah işleyen kimse dünyada ne mümin olur ne de kâfir ikisinin arasında bir yerde durur. Buna da fasıklık denir. Haricîlere göre ise, ister büyük, isterse küçük olsun, her türlü günah sahibini iman dairesinden çıkarır ve küfür dairesine dahil eder. Molla Halil’e göre, ahiret hayatı ruh ve cesetle birlikte olacaktır. Bu üm-metin günahkârlarına peygamberler, şehitler ve salih kimseler şefaat edecek-tir. Mu‘tezile‘ye göre şefaat sadece iyilerin derecesinin yükselmesi içindir. Günahkârlar için şefaat olmayacaktır. Günahkâr müminler Cehenneme girseler de ebedi kalmayacaklar. Kâfirlerin azapları ise devamlı olacak ve bunlar ebedi olarak Cehennemde kalacaklardır. Biz bu makalede önce sevap ve İkâb kelimelerinin lügat ve ıstılah anlamları üzerinde duracak, sonra bu bağlamda ayet ve hadislerde verilen bilgileri ve bunların açıklamalarını ele alacağız. Daha sonra Molla Halil’in bu konulara dair görüşlerini sunmaya çalışacağız. Onun sevap ve İkâb ile ilgili tanımlarını, bunların sonuçlarına dair yaşanacakları ve varılacak yerleri ele alan yaklaşımlarını sunmaya çalışacağız. Burada farklı görüşlere sahip olmaları nedeniyle çoğunlukla Mu‘tezile’nin ve az da olsa Haricilerin görüşlerine de mukayese oluşturması için değineceğiz. Burada sadece Molla Halil’in görüşlerini değil, onun içinden geldiği Ehli Sünnetin görüşlerini, sünni kaynakları temel alarak aktarmaya çalışacağız. (shrink)

On evidence of ancient cosmology found in Khmer temple ruins in Sakon Nakhon Province, Thailand.

For the last four years I have been working on a book on the origins and\nimpacts of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution. I have\nsubtitled the book a ’philosophical history’ because one of my aims is to\nrevive the lost art of passing judgement on history, in this case the history\nof our own times. This is not an easy art to practise even in the best of\ntimes, and ours is not one of them. As I delved more deeply into Kuhn’s\nbackground (...) and influence, it became clear that he was indeed correct to\nhave disowned the more radical sociological readings of Structure that\nplaced all disciplines on an equal epistemic footing. However, in the long\nterm these misreadings have unwittingly served to contain the critical\nimpulses of the would-be radicals, a result that should meet with Kuhn’s\napproval and certainly the approval of his mentor, Harvard president and\nCold Warrior James Bryant Conant, the man to whom Structure is dedicated.\nIn terms of the new sociology of science associated with the Edinburgh\nschool and its successors, ’Kuhnification’ has affected both the form\nand the content of their inquiries. In form, most of the work consists of\n’normal science’ that speaks to a narrow community of specialists rather\nthan to scientists or society at large. In content, it continues to centre on\nscience as a society in the small, at the expense of science’s role in society\nat large. While it is indeed possible, as feminists have shown, to study the\nscientific workplace as a microcosm of the injustices perpetrated in the\ngreater society, such studies have been in the minority, thanks to a lingering\nKuhnian sense of what is properly within the domain of ’science\nstudies’. (shrink)

The author recounts major personal and moral tensions that arose during an 11-month period living in Ghana and shares how she has since learned to reconcile those tensions.

One of the five pillars of the Islam, zakat (alms) was made necessary after the hijra. Although Zakat was one of the most important resources of Islamic state treasury for many years, it was excluded from the state authority in the period of Omar bin Abdul-Aziz. In recent years, it has been seen that some Muslim-majority states have made significant attempts to manage zakat under the control of the state. For example; Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, and Nigeria are very important (...) states in terms of zakat application in İslamic world and Malaysia, a Southeast Asian country, comes first among those. Especially after 1990, Malaysia activated a new zakat management. This study deals with the Malaysian zakat system in the context of the state administration of zakat. The aim of the study is to examine the Malaysian zakat system in a comprehensive way. In the study, the history of zakat system in Malaysia, the current zakat models applied in there and the areas to which zakat is distributed are investigated. As a qualitative research method, document analysis was employed in the study. In this context, many international studies were examined which are directly related to the subject, and twenty-five Malaysian websites belonging to the institutions which collect and distribute the funds were also scanned. It has been found that Malaysian zakat system consists of public model, semi-public model and private model and seen that the states are divided into three regions and different zakat models are applied in each region. (shrink)

A systematic study of rational or justified belief, which throws fresh light on current debates about foundations and coherence theories of knowledge, the validation of induction and moral scepticism. Dr Nathan focuses attention on the largely unsatisfiable desires for active and self-conscious assurance of truth liable to be engendered by philosophical reflection about total belief-systems and the sources of knowledge. He extracts a kernel of truth from the doctrine that a regress of justification is both necessary and impossible, contrasts the (...) resultant scepticism with more familiar complaints about the inapplicability of supposedly essential cognitive concepts and explores the feasibility of non-Humean modes of consolation. This is an original and carefully constructed book, which will interest professional philosophers and advanced students of epistemology. (shrink)