The global digital divide represents one of the most significant examples of international inequality. In North America and Western Europe, nearly 70% of citizens use the Internet on a regular basis, whereas in Africa less than 4% do so. Such inequality impacts business and trade, online education and libraries, telemedicine and health resources, and political information and e-government. In response, a group of educators and community leaders in South Africa and the United States have used various information technologies to create (...) a ―global classroom‖ that connects people in the two countries. University students, high school students, and other citizens communicate via Internet exchanges, video conferencing, and digital photo essays. The project has produced a number of tangible benefits and it has developed a model for reducing inequality in global education, at least for those institutions with the technological resources to participate. We also present several recommendations for how to expand the initiative and thereby increase the number of people who can benefit from it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:704 BOOK REVIEWS The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy. By PAUL F. BRADSHAW. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 217. $35.00 (cloth). Despite broad and general acceptance of the study of liturgy as an academic discipline comprising (among other things) historical, theological, anthropological, aesthetic, and ritual aspects, liturgical scholars themselves are still engaged (...) in refining the contours of this discipline. With regard to historical perspectives on liturgy, for example, contemporary liturgical scholars have both relied upon the ground-breaking work of authors such as Anton Baumstark, Jean Danielou, Gregory Dix, and Josef Jungmann and urged caution in appropriating their insights too facilely or uncritically. More precisely, the kind of research such scholars were able to do on the sources they examined, the editing of new editions of those same sources, the fact of the discovery of additional sources, and the crucial issue of how to interpret what historical sources have to say require that contemporary liturgiologists revisit the early sources of the liturgy ever more carefully and precisely. Paul Bradshaw's contribution in The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship is nothing short of ground-breaking for the contribution it makes to contemporary liturgical method in general and to the study of liturgical sources in particular. With admirable clarity and modesty in tone Bradshaw accomplishes his aim: " to offer a guide or handbook for the journey through the field of liturgical origins" (x). He makes no claim that even a careful study of liturgical origins or liturgical history comprises the discipline and craft of liturgiology. What he does claim and exemplify in this remarkable hook is that the study of the sources of liturgy requires careful contextualization as well as precise textual and source criticism of the documents so that what can he legitimately gleaned from historical investigation continues to be a major factor in liturgical study. Bradshaw published some of the material in this carefully constructed monograph in an article in Studia Liturgica 17 (1987): 26-34 and in his contributions to The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship (1991) and Fountain of Life (1991). Among the author's noteworthy accomplishments is the way he has incorporated this material into a new synthesis here. The first three chapters deal with the Jewish background of Christian worship, worship in the New Testament, and principles for interpreting early Christian liturgical evidence. Bradshaw states and exemplifies one of his chief theses here: that any sense BOOK REVIEWS 705 of a linear progression from Jewish liturgical forms at the time of Jesus through the early Christian centuries is impossible to sustain for at least two reasons. First, the Jewish sources themselves at the time of Christ were not uniform, as exemplified by the fact that some manuscripts presumably attesting to the Jewish practices at the time of Jesus were not compiled until centuries later. And even then the normativity of such texts was not universally held. Second, the pluriformity in church life customarily derived from the scientific study of the scriptures should also be expected to derive from the scientific study of liturgical sources, for example, because of the difference between and evolution within the liturgy both East and West. With regard to what are customarily more precisely termed " liturgical sources " Bradshaw offers significant insights in chapter four about individual documents (e.g., the Didache, the Apostolic Tradition, and the Apostolic Constitutions) and, even more importantly, their interrelationship. The modesty in tone of the whole book is nowhere more evident than when he observes that one needs to be cautious in determining whether these documents describe or prescribe what should be done liturgically and when he muses about why some of the evidence in these texts should have appeared there at all. This caution is sustained in chapter five describing "other major liturgical sources," namely, the apostolic fathers, patristic texts, and the diary of Egeria. Here again the descriptive/prescriptive issue resurfaces especially regarding Justin's accounts of liturgy in his First Apology, insights about initiation rites in patristic homilies and catecheses, and the ceremonies of the Easter triduum recounted by Egeria. In chapters six through eight... (shrink)

I address the question: “What is fixed on the boundary in the action principles of general relativity?” Four forms of the action are considered: the Einstein action, the Hilbert action, the first order action, and what may be called the cosmological action. The relationships and boundary data of these actions are described geometrically. Formal passage to the “Euclidean” forms of these actions is effected in detail.

The reader of Juvenal's fifth satire, making his way through the new Oxford text edited by W. V. Clausen, finds the sweep of the poet's indignant rhetoric interrupted by the obeli of 104. Reference to Clausen's paper which he quotes in support of his proposed reading glaucis sparsus reveals that he proceeds from the assumption that the line is corrupt, and evidence that this is the case must be sought elsewhere.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"ALL EXISTING IS THE ACTION OF GOD": THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY OF DAVID BRAINE DAVID BRADSHAW University ofTexas at Austin Austin, Texas Thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldest thou have made any thing, if thou hadst hated il And how could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will? or been preserved, if not called (...) by thee? But thou sparest all: for they are thine, 0 Lord, thou lover of souls. Wisdom 11:24-26 He is not far from every one of us; for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. Acts 17:27-28 I T HAS long been traditional to regard God as upholding all things in existence. This belief is known as the doctrine of continuous creation; it is a doctrine widely shared by Jews, Christians, and Moslems, and was first clearly articulated by St. Augustine.1 The phrase "continuous creation" can be misleading, for there is more to the doctrine than simply the extension of God's creative act through time. If that were all that is at stake, we would not need to revise our ordinary notion of the creator as craftsman or artist; we might think of God as like a painter who 1 Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram iv.12. The history of the development of this doctrine has yet to be written, but important sources include Timaeus 4lab; Philo of Alexandria, De Providentia i.7; Colossians 1:17, Hebrews 1:3; John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa i.3; Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 104, a. 1. See also David Winston, Philo of Alexandria (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 14-17; G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: S.P.C.K., 1964), 31-36; Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation,-and the Continuum (Ithaca: Cornell, 1983), 303-304. 379 380 DAVID BRADSHAW never stops adding new scenes, or a writer continually elaborating his story. That picture will not do. Ifthe painter were to cease painting, what he has made up to that point would remain in existence, whereas it is precisely the ability to stand on its own that the doctrine of continuous creation seeks to deny of what is made. Nor does anything in the relation of artisan to artifact properly convey the special intimacy and presence that the act of continuous creation is supposed to establish between God and creatures. A painting or a story does not "live and move and have its being" in the one who fashions it-nor would even a living and thinking creature, if the manner of its making were solely that of an artisan. These shortcomings raise the question of whether we should seek to replace the image of artisan and artifact with one that is more dynamic. We might think of God as like a singer and of what is made as His song, or of God as like a dancer and of what is made as His dance. By envisioning the act of creation as a "doing" rather than a "making," analogies of this type more adequately indicate the continuing ontological dependence ofcreation on Creator. They also draw our attention to a mode of presence radically different from that of one body to another, the presence of an agent "within" his own actions. They may thus bring us closer to what St. Paul presumably has in mind in the passage quoted from Acts. On the other hand, they have faults of their own, for they are hard to reconcile with creaturely freedom and the reality of secondary causation. How could any kind of "doing" act contrary to the will of its doer? Indeed, how could it act at all? Actions are not causal agents; a song does not act in its own right, but is at best an instrument of the one who sings it. So it would seem that, taken to their logical conclusion, analogies such as that of the singer and his song lead to the denial of both creatures' freedom and their causal efficacy. There have been thinkers in each of the religious traditions mentioned who have been willing to accept these... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, and: The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and PalamasDavid BradshawSaint Gregory Palamas. Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite. Translated by Rein Ferweda with Introduction by Sara J. Denning-Bolle. Binghamton, NY: Global Publications/CEMERS, 1999. Pp. 108. Paper, $17.00.A. N. Williams. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 222. (...) Cloth, $49.95.Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) was a Byzantine monk who rose to become Archbishop of Thessalonica and a leading theologian of the Orthodox Church. He is best known for his role in the hesychast controversy. The hesychasts (from hesychia, silence) were monks of Mount Athos who claimed that through prayer and ascetic struggle they had been enabled to see God with their bodily eyes. More precisely, they claimed to see a kind of divine radiance permeating all things, including their own bodies. They insisted that this light was not a created reality but was God himself as he manifested himself to them.When the hesychasts were attacked by an Italian monk named Barlaam, Palamas rose to their defense. The challenge he faced was that of explaining how the transcendent God could be visible to human eyes. His answer was to adapt two terms long in use in other areas of theology, ousia (substance, essence) and energeia (activity, operation). He held that whereas the ousia of God is unknowable to any created intellect, the divine energeiai can be shared in by creatures, who are thereby deified. The "uncreated light" of the monks is simply the divine energeia as it had become visible to the monks through the purification of the heart achieved by prayer, asceticism, and obedience to the divine commandments. Gregory's defense of the hesychasts was endorsed by a series of synods at Constantinople, and to this day he is commemorated in Orthodox churches on the second Sunday in Lent.The importance of Palamas for the history of philosophy lies in the fact that he presents a version of Christian thought that is deeply rooted in tradition, and by most standards fully orthodox, yet owes nothing to western scholasticism. A quick comparison [End Page 586] with Aquinas reveals several points of divergence. (1) Whereas Aquinas holds that all the divine attributes and activities are identical with the divine essence, the distinctions among them being merely quoad nos, Palamas holds that the distinction between the divine ousia and energeia is not just imposed by our perspective but is truly present in God. (2) Whereas Aquinas says little about deification and explicitly reserves the vision of the divine essence to the afterlife, Palamas insists that deification is possible in this life and that the condition of those who experience it is similar (though of course not identical) to that of the blessed after the resurrection. (3) Whereas Aquinas allows that the blessed ultimately do attain a vision of the divine essence, Palamas holds that the divine ousia is intrinsically unknowable to creatures.Whether these differences are as sharp as they seem is a matter that requires careful investigation. The first of the two works under review, Palamas's Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, is to be welcomed for the clarification it provides of Palamas's views. It is the third of his major works to be translated into English, the others being Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. I confess to finding it less engaging than the other two; it lacks the freshness and vigor of the Triads (Palamas's earliest work) and the wide-ranging systematic character of the Chapters. Nonetheless, it does provide a helpful elaboration of the ousia -energeia distinction, particularly in the argument (88-90) that such a distinction does not compromise divine simplicity.The second work, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas by A. N. Williams, is the first book-length comparison of these two pivotal figures. It is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, and has a certain plodding dryness characteristic of the genre; nonetheless, it is clear and well-informed, and Williams is... (shrink)