In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 201-202 [Access article in PDF] Conference on Pure Land Buddhism in Dialogue with Christian Theology James Fredericks Loyola Marymount University As Charlie Parker devotees will attest, improvisation at its most thrilling, if not its most ingenious, is often the result of careful planning. Cannot something similar be said of interreligious dialogue? All our planning and study are best put to use when they suddenly (...) become mere prologue to an encounter that has forced us off the well-trodden path. A dialogue meeting at Loyola Marymount University, September 9-14, 2001, began with much planning and became highly improvisational on September 11th.The roots of this conference go back to discussions between Dennis Hirota and myself in Kyoto in 1998-1999. The two of us are interested in contributing to the future development of Shin Buddhism by placing it in dialogue with Christian theology. The focus here is on Christian theology as one aspect of Christianity's response to the modern world. We are both interested in investigating various theological methods as Christian responses to modernity, and the contributions these methods have made to the reform and renewal of Christian institutions. The ulterior purpose of these investigations is to think in new ways about how a Buddhist "theology" might contribute to the institutional reform and religious renewal of Shin Buddhism.A first dialogue meeting was held at Chikushi Jogakuen University (Dazaifu, Japan) in June of 2000. Participants included faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen, Charlie Hallisey (then of Harvard University), Peter McCormick (International Academy for Philosophy, Liechtenstein), and me (Loyola Marymount University). A second meeting was held at Loyola Marymount in September 2001. For one week, beginning September 6th, meetings were held at the Shin Buddhist temple and a neighboring Roman Catholic parish in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles, followed by an academic conference at Loyola Marymount starting on Monday, September 10th. These meetings brought together faculty from Chikushi Jogakuen and Loyola Marymount, Shin Buddhist specialists from the Eastern Buddhist Society in Tokyo, ministers from the Los Angeles Nishi and Higashi Honganji Temples, Charlie Hallisey (Wisconsin), and John Ross Carter (Colgate University). The visiting Buddhists had a chance to meet with the Buddhist-Catholic dialogue group in Los Angeles. Papers were presented on a number of subjects, including (1) Christian theology's [End Page 201] contribution to institutional reform and religious renewal in recent Roman Catholic history and its implications for Shin Buddhism in both the United States and Japan; (2) theological method and moral theology in relation to end of life issues from both a Shin and Christian perspective; (3) truth and history in interreligious understanding; (4) Shin Buddhism, Christianity and religious responses to social discrimination; and (5) Christian theology as a stimulus to the development of a Shin Buddhist theology.On the morning of September 11th, dialogue as formal academic presentations ended and dialogue as spontaneous improvisation began. With U.S. air transportation closed down by the federal government, prospects for return flights to Japan were indefinitely postponed. A planned outing to watch Ichiro Suzuki (of the Seattle Mariners) play the Angels had to be canceled (Anaheim stadium was also closed). Instead, Christians and Buddhists, Americans and Japanese suddenly were brought together in ways they could not have predicted and began to improvise. The campus ministry of Loyola Marymount organized an impromptu mass for the entire university on the evening of September 11th. The Buddhist visitors were given a place of honor at the liturgy and publicly welcomed as guests of the Catholic community. The psalm response for the mass was a musical setting of the words, "Shepherd me oh Lord, beyond my wants, beyond my fears, from death into life." In the days that followed, this text became the basis for very affecting conversations among the Buddhists and the Christians in response to the terrorist attacks. From the Shin perspective, Buddhists were able to bring a depth of meaning to these words even as they were interested in what the psalm might mean to Christians.Like improvisation in jazz, interreligious dialogue is sometimes at its... (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly common for authoritarian regimes to leverage digital technologies to surveil, repress and manipulate their citizens. Experts typically refer to this practice as “digital authoritarianism” (DA). Existing definitions of DA consistently presuppose a politically repressive agent intentionally exploiting digital technology in pursuit of authoritarian ends. I refer to this as the "intention-based definition." This paper argues that this definition is untenable as a general description of DA. I begin by illustrating the current predominance of the intention-based definition (...) (Section 1). Section 2 then presents four counterexamples to this definition: benign surveillance; digital sovereignty; attention-harvesting algorithms; and tech-induced loneliness. In each case, we witness authoritarianism being promoted by digital technologies without any evidence of this being intentionally caused by politically repressive agents. Based on these observations, I contend that the intention-based definition is underinclusive and therefore unsustainable. Section 3 then outlines an improved definition of DA – what I call the "promotion-based definition." Since this more expansive definition does not posit intentional, politically repressive agency as a precondition of DA, it can accommodate the counterexamples discussed in Section 2. Moreover, it enables us to catch a broader spectrum of cases of DA, such as tech-induced loneliness, which those adhering to the intention-based definition are prone to overlook. After outlining further practical benefits of the promotion-based definition, I argue that we still need to distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of DA since they call for distinct types of remedial action. (shrink)

Walter Glannon argues that our proposal for routine recovery of transplantable cadaveric organs is unacceptable After carefully reviewing his counterarguments, we conclude that, although some of them have merit, none are sufficiently strong to warrant abandoning this plan. Below we respond to each of Glannon's concerns.

Book reviewed in this article: Follies and Fallacies in Medicine. By Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick.

Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.

While Nietzsche's works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche's work. The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche's ontology of conflict; Nietzsche's conception of the agon; and Nietzsche's warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche's understanding of (...) resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict. Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche's thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice. (shrink)

An examination of the role of the scientist in the process of understanding the world, and a reexamination of scientific objectivity, model building, and the place of scientists in the hierarchy of natural systems.

Committing financial fraud is a serious breach of business ethics. However, there are few large scale studies of financial fraud, which involve ethical considerations. In this study, we investigate the pervasive financial scandals, which by the end of 2012 involved more than a third of the US-listed Chinese companies. Based on a sample of 262 US-listed Chinese companies, we analyze factors that differentiate between firms that commit financial fraud and those that do not. We find that firms more predisposed to (...) unethical behavior, due to their low regional social trust in the home country and low respect for regulations and laws as proxied by political connections, are more likely to commit accounting and financial fraud. They take advantage of low hurdles for listing via reverse mergers and avoid third-party monitoring through poor governance and auditors. Finally, we find evidence, after these scandals, of non-fraudulent firms differentiating themselves from the fraudulent firms by sending costly signals such as insiders purchasing shares, increasing dividends, and going private. (shrink)

Theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis occupy an unusual neighborhood in the realms of reverse mathematics and recursion-theoretic complexity. They lie above all the fixed iterations of the Turing jump but below ATR $_{0}$. There is a long history of proof-theoretic principles which are THAs. Until the papers reported on in this communication, there was only one mathematical example. Barnes, Goh, and Shore [1] analyze an array of ubiquity theorems in graph theory descended from Halin’s [9] work on rays in graphs. They (...) seem to be typical applications of ACA $_{0}$ but are actually THAs. These results answer Question 30 of Montalbán’s Open Questions in Reverse Mathematics [19] and supply several other natural principles of different and unusual levels of complexity.This work led in [25] to a new neighborhood of the reverse mathematical zoo: almost theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis. When combined with ACA $_{0}$ they are THAs but on their own are very weak. Denizens both mathematical and logical are provided. Generalizations of several conservativity classes are defined and these ATHAs as well as many other principles are shown to be conservative over RCA $_{0}$ in all these senses and weak in other recursion-theoretic ways as well. These results answer a question raised by Hirschfeldt and reported in [19] by providing a long list of pairs of principles one of which is very weak over RCA $_{0}$ but over ACA $_{0}$ is equivalent to the other which may be strong or very strong going up a standard hierarchy and at the end being stronger than full second-order arithmetic. (shrink)

We establish the decidability of the${{\rm{\Sigma }}_2}$theory of both the arithmetic and hyperarithmetic degrees in the language of uppersemilattices, i.e., the language with ≤, 0, and$\sqcup$. This is achieved by using Kumabe-Slaman forcing, along with other known results, to show given finite uppersemilattices${\cal M}$and${\cal N}$, where${\cal M}$is a subuppersemilattice of${\cal N}$, that every embedding of${\cal M}$into either degree structure extends to one of${\cal N}$iff${\cal N}$is an end-extension of${\cal M}$.

This article reflects on one potential relationship the anthropological study of religion might enjoy with a critical orientation to religion. To do so, I highlight a burgeoning dialog between anthropology and theology. Ultimately, I propose that a focus on religion and human flourishing provides one wavelength on which an anthropology–theology collaboration can thrive. I follow the observation that anthropologists and theologians are united by concern with shared problems. If human and social flourishing is one such problem, then what might a (...) collaborative configuration look like? The example I consider is how ethnographic evidence of religion in public life can be mobilized to advance prophetic theological critiques of injustice. (shrink)

Civic media literacy entails understanding complex topics and events that are increasingly mediated by digital sources of information and where it can be challenging to evaluate the reliability merits of these sources. The goal of this study was to discern the ways undergraduate preservice social studies teachers with different climate change beliefs read and evaluated the reliability of four diverse Web sources about the complex socioscientific topic of climate change. Findings highlight clear alignment between most participants with climate change beliefs (...) at either end of a beliefs continuum with less alignment for participants with climate change beliefs toward the middle of a continuum. Findings also point to the benefits of whole group deliberation to help participants more critically evaluate a Web source that opposed the scientific consensus about climate change. In an age of “alternative facts,” this study points to the importance of students and educators having opportunities to evaluate, discuss, and determine the credibility of a range of online sources. (shrink)

Halin in 1965 proved that if a graph has [Formula: see text] many pairwise disjoint rays for each [Formula: see text] then it has infinitely many pairwise disjoint rays. We analyze the complexity of this and other similar results in terms of computable and proof theoretic complexity. The statement of Halin’s theorem and the construction proving it seem very much like standard versions of compactness arguments such as König’s Lemma. Those results, while not computable, are relatively simple. They only use (...) arithmetic procedures or, equivalently, finitely many iterations of the Turing jump. We show that several Halin-type theorems are much more complicated. They are among the theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis. Such theorems imply the ability to iterate the Turing jump along any computable well ordering. Several important logical principles in this class have been extensively studied beginning with work of Kreisel, H. Friedman, Steel and others in the 1960s and 1970s. Until now, only one purely mathematical example was known. Our work provides many more and so answers Question 30 of Montalbán’s Open Questions in Reverse Mathematics in 2011. Some of these theorems including ones in Halin in 1965 are also shown to have unusual proof theoretic strength as well. (shrink)

In this widely acclaimed work, James Ackerman considers in detail the buildings designed by Michelangelo in Florence and Rome--including the Medici Chapel, the Farnese Palace, the Basilica of St. Peter, and the Capitoline Hill. He then turns to an examination of the artist's architectural drawings, theory, and practice. As Ackerman points out, Michelangelo worked on many projects started or completed by other architects. Consequently this study provides insights into the achievements of the whole profession during the sixteenth century. The (...) text is supplemented with 140 black-and-white illustrations and is followed by a scholarly catalog of Michelangelo's buildings that discusses chronology, authorship, and condition. For this second edition, Ackerman has made extensive revisions in the catalog to encompass new material that has been published on the subject since 1970. (shrink)

That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes. Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to creep out from under the (...) rug. If a student asks me why I think Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists—which most students are too well trained to do—and if I answer that judgments of value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of, for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn to make value discriminations of his own—even ones different from mine and from the so-called consensus of history—and ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding." James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America. "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

It may seem reasonable, even inevitable, that architectural practice should be based on an understanding that architects, like lawyers and doctors, should discover their clients' needs and accommodate them to the best of their abilities. But current discussion within the legal and medical professions of the conflict between service to private individuals who can pay, and to the public who cannot, suggest an expanded or altered definition of professional responsibility. Actually, the conflict between public and private interest may be more (...) acute in architecture than in other professions: the kind of buildings architects design are costly and are made possible only by the wealth of a small segment of the population or the state, yet every one raised affects the lives of people other than the one who makes the program and pays the architect for his services. Furthermore, the decisions of architects are embodied in buildings that last for generations, even for millennia, so that the overwhelming majority of people in our culture live and work in places designed not only for other people but for other times and conditions. For this reason, even the "private" practice of architecture involves responsibilities to a widespread constituency. James S. Ackerman is the author of The Architecture of Michelango, Art and Archaeology, The Cortille del Belvedere, Palladio and Palladio's Villas and is professor of fine arts at Harvard University. He has contributed "On Judging Art without Absolutes" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)