Much historical investigation has been conducted into the Victorians' fear of moral decline at the end of the nineteenth century. In part, concerns about the future of human morality and ethics were intimately connected with the rise of materialist science that appeared to be permeating every facet of human life and civilization. Uniquely, Alan Rauch's work moves this investigation back in time to examine the fear of moral decline in the early years of the Victorian era. Rauch posits that in (...) this period there was, on the one hand, a cultural recognition of the importance of the growth of “knowledge” production, often of the scientific kind. Such knowledge was considered to be useful in making technological advances that would improve human life. Yet, on the other hand, there was also concern that too much emphasis on the “getting and spending” of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, would lead to materialism, atheism, and, thus, a loss of moral and ethical standards.Arguing that novels in this period reflected and responded to the larger cultural movements of the time, Rauch takes up a discussion of five novels: Jane Loudon's The Mummy , Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , Charlotte Bronte's The Professor , Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke , and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss . Each of these novels, he argues, attempts to balance the need of British society to recognize the usefulness of scientific knowledge with the desire to retain traditional morals and values: “The challenge for the novelist was to create societies that responded to these inevitable developments without succumbing to a cynical dismissal of moral responsibility” . Before beginning his discussion of the novels, each of which gets a chapter, Rauch includes a useful introduction to the process of the dissemination of knowledge in this period that attends to the rise of encyclopedias, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and popular works for children. In each instance he shows how knowledge was paired with moral responsibility in this wider literary milieu. Rauch then moves on to show how novelists were clearly as fascinated as other writers by scientific and technological advances. They were also as worried as other groups in society that such progress could cause humans to lose their sympathy and concern for others, their spirituality, their ability to cooperate with members of other classes, their ability to grow and change for the better as physical, moral, and religious beings, and their respect for the natural world. The novelists Rauch discusses seem to argue that a balance may be struck between scientific knowledge and morality, maintaining the advantages of both.While the last chapter, on The Mill on the Floss, takes the reader beyond Rauch's time frame of the early Victorian period, his aim here is to show how the depiction of the relationship between science and morality in the novel must necessarily change after Darwin. Rauch argues that, unlike the earlier novelists, Eliot “constructed a world where scientific knowledge is, prima facie, the appropriate measure of the material world, and moral knowledge must bend to accommodate it” . Still, despite her acceptance of the laws of nature, Eliot, according to Rauch, still looked for a way to maintain human free will and moral duty. The introduction of this post‐Darwinian writer, in contrast to the earlier writers, raises the question of whether there were other novelists attempting to reconcile science and morality in this way in the later period and, if so, how they went about it.Rauch's main argument is convincing and contributes to the work to date on the relationship between literature and science and, more generally, to the recognition of the importance of science as a powerful cultural force in nineteenth‐century society. The book would certainly have benefited, however, from a much stronger gender analysis. Of the five novels treated, four are by women. The Victorian association of women with the moral, spiritual, and religious world, together with the female authorship of the majority of novels under discussion, leaves the reader to ponder the relationship between Rauch's main thesis and the gender of his chosen novelists. This is particularly relevant as Rauch argues that only Kingsley's novel fails in its endeavor to “link science with tradition” and attributes that failure to his insistence on “invoking religion” rather than a moral tradition that is not necessarily connected with the Church . Are women novelists alone responsible for successful explorations of the relationship between morality and scientific knowledge? Do the men who explore this relationship always fail? Considering his choice of novelists, this is an issue Rauch ought to have explored. (shrink)

While lawyers' independence initially developed as a way of protecting lawyers and their clients from the power of the state, it is now also associated with the protection of the public interest from lawyers who are too close to their clients. In this context independence is seen as a way of ensuring that lawyers act ethically, that is, with regard to their overriding duty to the court and the administration of justice rather than according to sectional, personal or economic interests. (...) It has been noted in various contexts that lawyers who work closely with powerful clients may be less able to withstand client pressure and uphold their obligations to the administration of justice. In-house lawyers are seen as particularly vulnerable due to their position within the client's organisational structure. On the other hand some have argued that the position of in-house lawyers gives them greater potential to exercise independent judgment and influence the ethical behaviour of their organisation. This paper argues that the concept of independence is multi-faceted with the essential aspect being the capacity for independent judgment or independence of mind. This is supported by status, power and structural protections. The paper goes on to critically consider the courts' interpretations of independence of in-house counsel in the context of claims of client legal privilege (also known as legal professional privilege). The paper argues that the judicial tests reveal a number of different approaches with limited connection to core concepts of independence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)Suzanne Guerlac (bio)If there is a single term poststructuralism could not live without—at least within the intellectual circles associated with the review Tel quel—it is “transgression,” inherited from Bataille. “God-meaning,” Philippe Sollers writes in an early essay, “... is a figure of linguistic interdiction whereas writing—which is metaphoricity itself (Derrida)—transgresses... the hierarchic order of discourse and of the world associated with it” [“La science (...) de Lautréamont” 808, my emphasis]. In their Dictionnaire des sciences du langage Ducrot and Todorov declare grandly that text “has always functioned as a transgressive field with respect to the system according to which we organize our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics and even our science” [443–44, my emphasis]. They describe the advent of poststructuralism as a “Copernican revolution,” and it became customary to characterize the before and after of this break by referring to Bataille’s distinction between “restrained” and “general” economies.An influential essay by Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), might be considered the opening move in what would become Tel quel’s appropriation of Bataille. Foucault’s essay examines Bataille’s L’érotisme (1955), a study that theorized transgression in a complex elaboration which articulated philosophical discourse (Hegel/Kojève) with a “sociological” discourse of the sacred (Caillois). Foucault’s reading of the text removes the transgression of eroticism from both these discursive horizons and moves it toward late Heidegger (an ontology of the limit) and Nietzsche. If one of Bataille’s most radical gestures was to insert the ethnographic distinction sacred/profane into philosophical discussion, Foucault’s analysis reinscribes transgression within the intertextual field of philosophy, radicalized, of course, through the inclusion of the “marginal” figure, Nietzsche, and the philosopher who announced the end of philosophy, Heidegger. Foucault’s rewriting of Bataille may read philosophy against itself, may even propose the transgression of philosophy; nevertheless, it is structured by the vicissitudes of philosophical discourse. Bataille on the other hand had confronted philosophy with something radically other—tout autre.In “Préface à la transgression,” Foucault defined transgression as “a gesture concerning the limit.” He presented it as a flash of lightning, an image that not only figures transgression but also emblematizes the move into what will become the philosophical register of poststructuralism. It traces a line, a line that figures the Heideggerian ontology of limitation, the coming into being (or appearance) of beings on the horizon of Being; it suggests the limit of the ontological difference between Being and beings.Anticipating Derrida through Heidegger, Foucault analyzed transgression as an event of difference, alluding to Blanchot’s “principe de contestation” and to a Nietzschean notion of affirmation. “Might not the instantaneous play of the limit and transgression be today the essential test of a thinking of ‘origin’ which Nietzsche bequeathed to us... a thinking that would be absolutely, and in the same movement, a Critique and an Ontology, a thinking that would think finitude and being?” [Foucault 759]. Transgression becomes identified with a “philosophy of eroticism” (which plays on Sade’s “philosophie dans le boudoir”), a gesture that transvalues philosophy from the realm of cognitive or rational activity to “an experience of finitude and of being, of the limit and of transgression.” The [End Page 6] “philosophy” of eroticism is thus a “test/ordeal [épreuve} of the limit,” one that “no dialectical movement, no analysis of fundamental laws [constitutions] and of their transcendental foundation [leur sol]” can help us think. Foucault then asks a rhetorical question that could be said to structure much of the discourse of theory in the next decade: “Would it be an exaggeration, to say,” he asks, “... that it would be necessary to find a language for the transgressive that would be what dialectic has been for contradiction?” [759].In this way Foucault established transgression as an alternative to the machine of dialectical contradiction. Attuned to the recent discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations between the subject and language (the subject is no longer considered master of his or her language but structured by it), Foucault announced that “the gesture of transgression replaces the movement of contradiction by plunging the... (shrink)

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An outdated geography supplies the bond among the thirty‐one articles in Sur les traces des Cassini. In the seventeenth century, when the Italians Gian Domenico Cassini and his nephew Giacomo Filippo Maraldi were born in Perinaldo, north of Genoa, their birthplace belonged to the County of Nice. Hence the rationale of building a set of papers on astronomy in the south of France around Cassini I and his family, which for four generations ran the Royal Observatory in Paris.Over half the (...) articles concern the Cassinis, mostly Cassini I and his great‐great‐grandson and namesake Cassini IV. There was also a Cassini V, Henri de Cassini, who countered the family genius and stamina by preferring botany and dying early, of the same outbreak of cholera that took the life of Sadi Carnot, without having created Cassini VI. He had already entered the Academy of Sciences with a push from his father. “I dare to beg of you [Cassini IV wrote to his fellow academician A. M. Ampère] to consider whether this unique situation in the history of letters, [a family's] devotion to the sciences for five successive generations and 170 years, ought not add some weight to the scientific credentials of my son.” It is hard to refuse the children of important alumni.The portion of Traces dealing more directly with astronomy in the south of France gets off to a distant start. Pytheas of Marseilles, who lived about 350 b.c., sailed to the Orkneys and the Baltic and earned himself the reputation of a liar back home for his stories of midnight suns and frozen lakes. He measured the latitude of Marseilles, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the size of the earth. Ptolemy praised him. Strabo did not: “Pytheas lied about everything and covered it up with his knowledge of astronomy and numbers.”No traces worth following up were laid down for just under two thousand years. Then, in 1580, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc first saw the light of day. He lived in Italy for four years as a very young man, deepening his knowledge of astronomy and human nature and meeting the main future actors in the Galileo affair: Galileo himself, Bellarmine, and Matteo Barberini . At his center in Aix‐la‐Provence, Peiresc made many useful astronomical observations, some in collaboration with Pierre Gassendi. He died in harness, worrying about the change of the obliquity since the days of Pytheas.There follow articles on Provençal astronomers who determined longitude and latitude at sea, on neglected observers in Languedoc who assisted the cause of the Enlightenment, and on modern observatories in the south of France. The political circumstances after the defeat of 1870–1871 favored decentralization of astronomy away from the Paris Observatory. In Italy, too, recent political events—the unification of 1870—made a restructuring of astronomical institutions desirable and possible. But whereas France had too few observatories, Italy had too many. Georges Rayet and Pietro Tacchini, both astrophysicists, compared the circumstances in their countries and made mutually reinforcing proposals to their colleagues and governments. Their respective proposals, most of which were enacted, called for reassigning some Italian observatories to meteorological work, building new observatories in Besançon, Bordeaux, and Lyon, and refurbishing older ones at Marseilles and Toulouse. Once again, as in the days of Cassini I, Italy made a decisive contribution to the practice of astronomy in France.Sur les traces des Cassini mixes slight and weighty work, admits antiquarian and broader approaches, offers new documentation, displays pertinent illustrations, and does it all at a high level of scholarship. Since, because of its title, the book's primary audience probably will be people interested in the Cassinis, its fullest articles about them may usefully be mentioned here: Anna Cassini on Cassini's brief return to Italy, 1694–1696; Claude Teillet on the provincial life and poetry of Cassini IV; Christiane Demeulenaere‐Douyère on the Cassinis and the Académie des Sciences; Fabrizio Bonoli and Alessandro Braccesi on Cassini I's astronomical work in Bologna, with full bibliography; and Monique Pelletier on the Cassini map of France, on which she has written a book . Pytheas and Peiresc are the subjects of collaborative articles by Simone Arzano and Yvon Georgelin. (shrink)

Volume 21, Issue 1, July 2018, Page 93-95.

Bion de Borysthène, qui a fréquenté l’école académicienne (Xénocrate), cynique (Cratès) et cyrénaïque (Théodore), ne faisait pas partie des listes traditionnelles d’athées en circulation dans l’Antiquité, mais on lui attribue pourtant la formule athée d’après laquelle « il n’y a pas de dieux » (Diogène Laërce, IV, 55). L’examen des témoignages montre qu’il pouvait être qualifié d’athée à deux niveaux. Tout d’abord, aussi bien au niveau théorique que pratique, il adoptait une attitude très critique à l’égard des pratiques religieuses et (...) des récits mythiques traditionnels dont il mettait en valeur les contradictions et plus largement contestait la partition du réel entre sacré et profane (Sénèque, Des bienfaits, VII 7, 1-2). Par ailleurs, Bion s’est également opposé à la théologie philosophique épicurienne et, en particulier, à son anthropomorphisme. Il s’appuyait, entre autres, sur une thèse (« chaque genre de vivants a une forme particulière dans son genre particulier », Démétrius Lacon, De la forme du dieu, XIX, 13), compatible avec l’épicurisme. Pour cette raison, Démétrius Lacon entreprit d’y répondre en montrant que cette prémisse, pouvant aussi servir à contester les théologies astrales (platoniciennes ou stoïciennes), ne vaut que pour les êtres accessibles par la sensation, ce qui n’est pas le cas des dieux. Cette polémique, dont l’enjeu est la limite de l’application du principe d’isonomie, a laissé des traces jusque dans le De signis de Philodème. (shrink)

(1997). Philosophie au masculin? Georg Simmel et les images de la virilité à l'aube de l'ère nazie. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 1011-1030.

La tension entre le non-dualisme et le dualisme domine toute l’histoire du Vedanta. En face de l’advaita de Śaṅkara, le système de Madhva, auquel cette étude est consacrée, représente l’extrême dualisme, dvaita. Cependant Madhva, après avoir posé la réalité irréductible de la différence entre Dieu et le monde, a comme compensé cette scission de l’être par l’affirmation que tout être autre que l’Être absolu est dépendant de celui-ci, seul Dieu ne dépendant que de lui-même. L’originalité du système de Madhva est (...) d’inventer une relation nouvelle entre l’Être et les êtres. Seul l’Être est capable de faire exister des êtres différents de lui et totalement dépendants de lui ; Dieu permet à toute réalité d’être, et d’être ce qu’elle est. (shrink)

Œnomaus of Gadara, in his work Detection of Deceivers, of which long fragments are preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, contests Apollo’s oracles in name of the human action contingency. His targets are not only the Democritean and Stoic determinism, but also the Middle Platonic view of conditional fate. In a fictional address to Apollo, he demonstrates the contingency of the action, in an original way, which he extends to the field of the animal action. The examination of his argument shows (...) that the Stoic conceptions of what depends on us and of consciousness are cannibalized against determinism. (shrink)

In this paper the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company’s decision to continue rubber production during Liberia’s chaotic civil war is critically discussed. Evaluating whether this decision, in intent or execution, violated ethical norms for MNEs operating internationally is complicated by the fact that such norms seem not to exist. If as Windsor suggests such norms are only likely to be established through an evolutionary path then it should be asked whether Firestone’s experiences, and discussion thereof, have informed the development of (...) norms in any meaningful way. It is argued here that conflicting conclusions about the meaning and morality of Firestone’s decisions have meant that the case study has contributed little in the way of meaningful norms for future decisions made by MNEs in conflict zones. Further it is argued that the underlying chaos of broad, violent conflict may make consensus around specific norms—and progress along the path to the development of norms—more laborious and fraught with difficulty than other policy arenas such as labor and environmental standards. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de L. Giovannetti (G.) est composé de trois parties : la première porte sur la notion d’εἶδος dans les dialogues de maturité, et les deux suivantes proposent une analyse détaillée de trois sections du Théétète (151-157, 181-183, 184-187) et de deux sections du Sophiste (251-254, 259-263) — analyse qui montre de quelle manière les caractéristiques de l’ εἶδος déployées dans la première partie continuent de jouer un rôle central au sein de ces dialogues. L’auteur cherche à montrer, co...

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes with the hope that the history of knowledge approach may instead open up new avenues for conversation and collaboration between historians (...) of science and garden variety historians. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.3 (2000) 73-89 [Access article in PDF] Phantom Rights Conversations Across the Abyss (Hugo, Blanchot) Suzanne Guerlac —"The writer must save the world and be the abyss, justify existence and give speech to what does not exist...."1—Who is speaking?—Maurice Blanchot.—But this was already revealed to me by the Tables. How are what you call the "two sides [deux versants]" of literature to be distinguished from the "double (...) ray [double rayon]" or the "double face" of the work of art, revealed to me by the voice of Death through the table—through the Winds of the Tomb—and which I recognized as the double furrow of the real and the ideal I had always inscribed through my writing?—What is in question at this point is not merely approaches to literature, or the mechanisms of what you call "genius," but literature itself, and with it, the very operations of the human mind. I asked the question "how is literature possible?" in response to Paulhan in 1942.2 A few years later the question returned differently: is literature possible... after Auschwitz?I have responded to the discourse of the death of art with a notion of writing as an art of death. Is this somehow the same as what the Winds of the Tomb revealed to you? Who knows? You have been dead for more than a century, I have been dying for what seems like ages. 1 "I wrote a book... of the cut off head... I stopped at the point where only you can continue."3 Victor Hugo is speaking, alluding to Le dernier jour d'un condamné, a novel written in a first-person voice which cuts off just before the guillotine drops. His remark acknowledges the commonplace that one cannot speak one's own death, not only because one does not live to tell it, but because one never really experiences it. Another literary figure to have given this matter a lot of thought (along with his friend Georges Bataille) is Maurice Blanchot, whose meditations on writing insist on questions of death and voice.In Hugo's remark, however, it is above all the address that arrests our attention and tempts us to engage Hugo in conversation with Blanchot. Hugo is speaking to André [End Page 73] Chénier, or rather to the spirit of Chénier, which ostensibly communicates to participants in séances conducted in Jersey in 1853-54 under the guidance of the celebrated psychic Mme. de Girardin. He addresses the voice of a dead poet, an absent voice that can only speak through a peculiar form of writing that spells out letters one by one through the tappings of a table. It is a voice that writes since it can no longer speak, having lost its head to the guillotine during the French Revolution. During the séances, Hugo asks Chénier to recount the experience of his death. Is it because Chénier is in the unusual position of speaking from beyond the grave that Hugo expects him to do the impossible, to go beyond the silenced voice of the condemned man, that is, beyond the reach of fiction? How are we to read this writing of the Tables, and what does it have to do with "literature"?The transcript dramatizes fundamental notions concerning writing, death, and relations between the two that Blanchot will theorize a century later in his critical writings. Here, Hugo demands Chénier's impossible account of his own death specifically in response to a demand of writing. What is at stake is not only the continuation of the narrative necessarily aborted in Hugo's novel —"I stopped at the point where only you can continue"—but also the continuation of the poetry of Chénier, interrupted by the poet's untimely death. Responding to Chénier's expressed concern, Hugo and his companions offer to assist Chénier in the completion of his poems. "André," Hugo begins:You desire, and we also desire, to see your oeuvre completed. We will gather piously, and with the respect due your... (shrink)

Moral distress forms a major threat to the well-being of healthcare professionals, and is argued to negatively impact patient care. It is associated with emotions such as anger, frustration, guilt, and anxiety. In order to effectively deal with moral distress, the concept of moral resilience is introduced as the positive capacity of an individual to sustain or restore their integrity in response to moral adversity. Interventions are needed that foster moral resilience among healthcare professionals. Ethics consultation has been proposed as (...) such an intervention. In this paper, we add to this proposition by discussing Moral Case Deliberation (MCD) as a specific form of clinical ethics support that promotes moral resilience. We argue that MCD in general may contribute to the moral resilience of healthcare professionals as it promotes moral agency. In addition, we focus on three specific MCD reflection methods: the Dilemma Method, the Aristotelian moral inquiry into emotions, and CURA, a method consisting of four main steps: Concentrate, Unrush, Reflect, and Act. In practice, all three methods are used by nurse ethicists or by nurses who received training to facilitate reflection sessions with these methods. We maintain that these methods also have specific elements that promote moral resilience. However, the Dilemma Method fosters dealing well with tragedy, the latter two promote moral resilience by including attention to emotions as part of the reflection process. We will end with discussing the importance of future empirical research on the impact of MCD on moral resilience, and of comparing MCD with other interventions that seek to mitigate moral distress and promote moral resilience. (shrink)

In this essay Suzanne Rice examines Aristotle's ideas about virtue, character, and education as elements in an Aristotelian conception of good listening. Rice begins by surveying of several different contexts in which listening typically occurs, using this information to introduce the argument that what should count as “good listening” must be determined in relation to the situation in which listening actually occurs. On this view, Rice concludes, there are no “essential” listening virtues, but rather ways of listening that may (...) be regarded as virtuous in the context of particular concrete circumstances. (shrink)

Arrêtée comme prostituée en mars 1794, Marie Anne Renaud rétorque au commissaire de police qu’elle « aimait mieux faire ce métier que de voler » (p. 65). Quelques mois plus tard, Sophie Conard se justifie en expliquant qu’elle a simplement fait « comme toutes les femmes » (p. 68). Ces termes donnent une idée des questions posées par cet ouvrage bienvenu. Clyde Plumauzille ne se contente pas de se pencher sur les expériences vécues par les prostituées durant la Révolution française (...) ; elle mont... (shrink)

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual''s attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person''s ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An (...) ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy. (shrink)

Peut-on s'entendre en matière d'esthétique? Y a-t-il une objectivité possible des jugements dans ce domaine marginal de la philosophie? La question du sens commun dans la Critique de la faculté de juger, semble, aux dires de certains, mener directement à cette problématique contemporaine. Nous ne reprendrons pas ici les multiples articles et ouvrages sur le sensus communis parus dans la dernière décennie à la suite de l'impact conceptuel du thème de la rationalité communicationnelle. Notre intention est plutôt, au-delà de la (...) “dérive” du célèbre paragraphe 40 vers une idée plus actuelle de “consensus”, de repérer les tensions entre le versant transcendantal et le versant empirique du sens commun qui surgissent significativement à l'occasion de cette dérive. Avant d'aborder le sens esthétique défini dans la troisième Critique et de le confronter aux interprétations qui nous semblent plus déterminantes comme celles de L. Ferry de J.-F. Lyotard ou de J. Habermas nous voudrions d'abord examiner l'usage général de cette notion dans l'histoire de la philosophie précritique pour vérifier ensuite la spécificitÉ qu'elle acquiert chez Kant. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to evaluate if use of a patient decision aid, when choosing between a repeat cesarean or a trial of labor after a cesarean, reduces medical liability exposure. The authors conclude that use of a PDA conferred liability protection when potential jurors were presented with a hypothetical malpractice claim against an obstetrician following a TOLAC.

Perhaps we fail to understand the mimetic nature of desire because we rarely refer to the first stages of human development. Every child has appetites, instincts and a given cultural milieu in which he learns by imitating adults or peers. Imitation and learning are inseparable. It may be said that we acquire knowledge by using our minds; but the child absorbs knowledge directly into his psychic life. . . . Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They (...) incarnate themselves in him. . . . We have named this type of mentality, The Absorbent Mind. The Montessori Method of early childhood education offers mimetic theory an avenue to explore healthy patterns of desire in children. Such an .. (shrink)

Catholic Relief Services , the international humanitarian agency of the U.S. Catholic community, has worked in Rwanda since 1963. The 1994 Rwandan genocide killed five of its staff, countless co-workers, friends and relatives; its offices were looted and operations destroyed. The genocide marked a turning point in the agency’s history. Since then CRS has made justice, peacebuilding, and solidarity agency priorities, and has committed itself to fully integrate them into all of its partnerships and programming. The focus of this study (...) is an innovative microfinance methodology, Savings and Internal Lending Communities , which CRS recently introduced in Rwanda. While the purpose of CRS’ SILC programming in Rwanda is to promote greater economic security, particularly for Orphans and other Vulnerable Children , and women’s empowerment, this essay explores its peacebuilding potential in the country. It raises the question of whether it is possible to conceive of Rwanda’s SILC groups as social spaces for peace where a culture of peace and peacebuilding skills may already be being generated. It suggests that if identified as such and developed more intentionally, CRS’ SILC programming in Rwanda could play a more significant and integral role in securing the peace Rwandans long for.In July 2008 five Villanova University faculty members and I traveled to Rwanda, spending a total of eight days in country.1 The purpose of the trip was to learn more about the 1994 genocide, the effort to rebuild the country, and in particular, the U.S. Catholic community’s contribution to that effort through Catholic Relief Services . In addition to visiting memorials to the victims of the genocide and meeting with representatives from the Rwandan Catholic Church, the University of Rwanda, and the Rwandan government, we had the opportunity to observe some of CRS’ programming and meet with CRS’ small U.S. staff and its much larger Rwandan staff working with its Rwandan partner agencies. We visited a field hospital where patients were being treated for HIV/AIDS; agricultural projects aimed at containing cassava blight and improving yield; projects to teach orphans and other vulnerable children and the blind trades to enable them to earn income to support themselves and their families; elementary school classrooms; a retreat center where diocesan justice and peace animators were being trained in grassroots peacebuilding skills; and a Savings and Internal Lending Community group. In this article, I would like to focus on CRS’ SILC programming, and in particular, what I believe to be its potential to contribute to peacebuilding in Rwanda. (shrink)

This article goes beyond the debate over whether culture competes with politics in the women's movement to explore the complex relationship between cultural and political action. A case study of the local women's movement in Bloomington, Indiana, provides little evidence that cultural feminism led to a decline in political activity in the women's movement. Rather, the attractiveness of cultural and political activities changes with shifts in political opportunities. During periods of opportunity or threat that stimulate extensive action, activists are energized (...) for both cultural and political projects. During “slow” periods when there are few opportunities to make political gains, cultural projects are particularly attractive to feminists and may compete with political activities. However, cultural activities also help to maintain a feminist collective identity and provide networks to political groups. Ongoing political action is provoked by countermovement actions and other critical events and supported by “outsiders” who bring new ideas to a local community, national feminist organizations, and feminists within local institutions. (shrink)