Exemplars have the power to help people navigate various levels of moral struggle, from the relatively straightforward problem of lacking motivation to the much deeper problem of failing to see the moral realities that surround us. But there are also serious moral risks in the appeal to exemplars: we romanticize them, we make use of them in authoritarian ways, and we tend to forget how our choice of exemplars is conditioned by oppressive cultural formations. I argue that we need to (...) develop a social model of exemplarity, attuned to social contexts of our exemplars themselves as well as the social processes of constructing and appealing to exemplars. More particularly, I argue that we need to develop space for thinking about exemplary groups, not just exemplary individuals, in order to develop the strengths and avoid the weaknesses in exemplarist moral theories. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the medieval practice of evangelical poverty as a resource for contemporary political theology. Francis of Assisi and his predecessors committed themselves to a form of voluntary poverty that directly contested the distribution of social power in twelfth-century Europe. Evangelical poverty was for them a critical and liberating practice. Yet they disagreed about how this practice was related to standing norms of ecclesial authority. Francis broke with the earlier movements by defining evangelical poverty as a posture of humility (...) and obedience rather than as a counterclaim on apostolic authority. These movements are worth retrieving both for their shared commitment to a liberating poverty and for the questions they raise about the relationship between poverty and authority. (shrink)

The two aims of the paper were to systematically review and critique social science and linguistic text analyses of nursing records in order to inform future research in this emerging area of research. Systematic searches in reference databases and in citation indexes identified 12 articles that included analyses of the social and linguistic features of records and recording. Two reviewers extracted data using established criteria for the evaluation of qualitative research papers. A common characteristic of nursing records was the economical (...) use of language with local meanings that conveyed little information to the uninitiated reader. Records were dominated by technocratic‐medical discourse focused on patients’ bodies, and they depicted only very limited aspects of nursing practice. Nurses made moral evaluations in their categorisation of patients, which reflected detailed surveillance of patients’ disturbing behaviour. The text analysis methods were rarely transparent in the articles, which could suggest research quality problems. For most articles, the significance of the findings was substantiated more by theoretical readings of the institutional settings than by the analysis of textual data. More probing empirical research of nurses’ records and a wider range of theoretical perspectives has the potential to expose the situated meanings of nursing work in healthcare organisations. (shrink)

The power of routine and special observations: producing civility in a public acute psychiatric unit This study directly addresses controlling aspects of psychiatric nursing practice, which are currently marginalised in practice and research. We first consider the discursive tensions surrounding the mandated goal of social control in public acute psychiatric units, particularly referring to those units located within medical hospitals. We attest to the enduring social control mandate in psychiatric nursing and explore ways in which it is enacted.Specific nursing practices (...) of ‘doing the obs’ while scanning the ward and ‘special observations’ are investigated as important activities of social control, based on findings from an ethnographic study in one acute psychiatric unit in Australia. These practices are acknowledged as key modes of nursing surveillance. Contrary to past work, they are regarded as productive for engendering civil conduct among patients in acute psychiatric settings. We reframe these activities of surveillance as liberal therapeutic practices in themselves, to the extent that they assist patients to achieve treatment goals and promote self‐surveillance and self‐control. Instead of effacing practices of control, we encourage nurses to discriminate between more and less liberal modes of control in everyday practice and to build their skills in liberal controlling strategies. (shrink)

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used in war and the military. Animals and War contributes significantly to the fields of social justice, animal rights, and anti-war/peace activist communities. This book also will be read by peace, conflict, social justice, and critical animal studies scholars, students, and practitioners.

The language of structural sin is most often used to describe sin that inheres in laws, institutions, or social roles—in short, in the objective social architecture of our everyday lives. This article argues that structural sin should also be understood as including a subjective dimension, describing the determinate habits or dispositions instilled by sharing in the life of a particular society. Part of what is structured by structural sin, in other words, is agency itself. The reason that many theologians have (...) resisted this idea is that it seems to undermine the conditions of moral responsibility. If our capacities for knowing and loving the good are always already concretely misshapen, can we rightly be held accountable for what we do? This article argues further that we can, drawing on the work of Judith Butler to sketch a fresh account of personal responsibility in the face of structural sin. (shrink)

SummaryAn account is given of one of the most heated controversies in nineteenth-century British geology—the battle between Archibald Geikie and John Judd concerning the interpretation of the Palaeogene igneous rocks of the Inner Hebrides, particularly those of the Cuillins and the Red Hills of Skye. The controversy erupted in the first instance over the question of the respective ‘territories’ of the two geologists, then developed into disagreement as to the origin of the plateau lavas of Skye: were they formed from (...) fissure eruptions (Geikie's view) or from the outpourings of great volcanoes (Judd's view)? Debate then focused on the question of the relative age of the gabbro of the Cuillins and the granite (granophyre) of the Red Hills. A certain locality at Druim Hain (Druim an Eihdne) at the junction between the two rock-types became crucial for the dispute. Following earlier observers, Judd held that the granite was older and had been intruded by the gabbro. Geikie took the opposite view. Geikie's work relied particularly on field observations, for which he was assisted by several other geologists. Judd, who worked by himself, rested his argument more on the evidence furnished by petrology, using thin sections. Both geologists were influenced by Ferdinand von Richthofen. Geikie's work appeared to be vindicated in his own lifetime by the map work of Alfred Harker, which effectively closed the controversy. But later commentators such as Walker hold that in a sense both were correct. There were indeed great volcanoes active in the Inner Hebrides in the Palaeogene, as well as fissure eruptions. Moreover, recent mapping does not support all the observations of Geikie and Harker. The controversy illustrates different styles in nineteenth-century geology, with petrological arguments, based on the examination of thin sections, pitted against field observations. It may also be seen as being linked with the ongoing rivalry in the nineteenth century between the members of the Geological Survey (particularly the Directors General) and the ‘amateur’ university geologists. Geikie prevailed in the debate in part because he was able to draw on more resources for its prosecution, being helped by various friends and members of the Geological Survey. The study draws on the newly discovered Geikie archive at Haslemere, which contains his complete outgoing official correspondence, and 27 of his field notebooks, previously missing. With the help of this material, it is possible to gain a clearer insight into the methods deployed by Geikie in his fieldwork, and his ways of working and thinking. (shrink)

Whereas boson coherent states with complex parametrization provide an elegant, and intuitive representation, there is no counterpart for fermions using complex parametrization. However, a complex parametrization provides a valuable way to describe amplitude and phase of a coherent beam. Thus we pose the question of whether a fermionic beam can be described, even approximately, by a complex-parametrized coherent state and define, in a natural way, approximate complex-parametrized fermion coherent states. Then we identify four appealing properties of boson coherent states (eigenstate (...) of annihilation operator, displaced vacuum state, preservation of product states under linear coupling, and factorization of correlators) and show that these approximate complex fermion coherent states fail all four criteria. The inapplicability of complex parametrization supports the use of Grassman algebras as an appropriate alternative. (shrink)

Whereas boson coherent states with complex parametrization provide an elegant, and intuitive representation, there is no counterpart for fermions using complex parametrization. However, a complex parametrization provides a valuable way to describe amplitude and phase of a coherent beam. Thus we pose the question of whether a fermionic beam can be described, even approximately, by a complex-parametrized coherent state and define, in a natural way, approximate complex-parametrized fermion coherent states. Then we identify four appealing properties of boson coherent states and (...) show that these approximate complex fermion coherent states fail all four criteria. The inapplicability of complex parametrization supports the use of Grassman algebras as an appropriate alternative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Moral Dynamics of Economic Life: An Extension and Critique of Caritas in Veritate ed. by Daniel K. Finn, and: Rethinking Poverty: Income, Assets, and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition by James P. BaileyBrian HamiltonReview of The Moral Dynamics of Economic Life: An Extension and Critique of Caritas in Veritate EDITED BY DANIEL K. FINN New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 166 pp. $85.35Review of Rethinking Poverty: Income, (...) Assets, and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition JAMES P. BAILEY Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 176 pp. $30.00The academic study of Catholic social teaching has flowered in recent years. The moral vision elaborated over a century of official Catholic documents on social and political issues has proven attractive to a wide variety of scholars, providing a point of reference for interdisciplinary conversation. By bringing that vision into conversation with their respective disciplines, such scholars have gone a long way toward addressing one of the most common complaints about Catholic social teaching: that its proposals are too general and abstract. Two recent books, both working at the intersection of theology and economics, are a case in point.The Moral Dynamics of Economic Life, edited by Daniel Finn, synthesizes a conversation held in Rome in 2010 under the aegis of the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Theologians, philosophers, public policy experts, lawyers, businesspeople, and Church leaders gathered to discuss the significance of Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in veritate, for the US context. Rather than simply reprinting the papers they discussed, the participants’ contributions were split up and reorganized along thematic lines. There are eleven chapters—on topics like reciprocity, development, and polarization in US political discourse—each composed of a series of two- to four-page essays from different scholars. It is a creative and surprisingly effective structure. No single argument is developed at any length, of course. But the essays, punchy and provocative, accomplish far more than one would think possible in so short a space. Taken together, they define the contours of a much richer conversation than a series of independent papers could have done. [End Page 205]James Bailey’s Rethinking Poverty provides a more sustained argument. Working within the moral framework provided by Catholic social teaching, Bailey argues that US public policy regarding poverty needs to focus less on income relief and more on asset ownership and development. He lays out his basic case for the “asset paradigm” in chapter 1. In the current system, asset-building assistance is provided almost exclusively to the nonpoor rather than to the poor since it is mediated primarily through the federal income tax—which the poor do not pay. Income assistance to the poor, though crucial in the short term, does nothing to address the root causes of endemic poverty in the United States. In fact, the regressive structure of asset-building assistance has itself played an important role in perpetuating and exacerbating the wealth gap in this country. In the next two chapters, Bailey lays out two complementary moral frameworks that support a policy shift toward an asset paradigm: Catholic social teaching and the “capabilities approach” developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. In the fourth chapter, Bailey surveys the history of racialized asset discrimination in US policy, demonstrating that the denial of asset-based assistance has been instrumental in creating enduring wealth disparities between white and black communities. In the fifth chapter, Bailey concludes by suggesting that an older, neglected American policy tradition did privilege an assets-based approach to poverty relief, and that tradition continues to be a viable option.Both books succeed, in my judgment, in rendering the principles and priorities of Catholic social teaching more concrete. Bailey’s main goal, obviously, is to recommend a specific policy orientation, and Moral Dynamics is full of practical suggestions: we should encourage conversations between theology and business schools at Catholic universities (89, 135); we should give more attention to empirical measures of well-being and development beyond narrowly economic ones like the gross domestic product (92–98); we should work to redefine the standard of “reasonableness” in the common... (shrink)