Focused on the impact of stringent intellectual property mechanisms over the uses of plant agricultural biodiversity in crop improvement, the article delves into a systematic analysis of the relationship between institutional paradigms and their technological contexts of application, identified as mass selection, controlled hybridisation, molecular breeding tools and transgenics. While the strong property paradigm has proven effective in the context of major leaps forward in genetic engineering, it faces a systematic breakdown when extended to mass selection, where innovation often displays (...) a collective nature. However, it also creates partial blockages in those innovation schemes rested between on-farm observation and genetic modification, i.e. conventional plant breeding and upstream molecular biology research tools. Neither overly strong intellectual property rights, nor the absence of well delineated protection have proven an optimal fit for these two intermediary socio-technological systems of cumulative incremental innovation. To address these challenges, the authors look at appropriate institutional alternatives which can create effective incentives for in situ agrobiodiversity conservation and the equitable distribution of technologies in plant improvement, using the flexibilities of the TRIPS Agreement, the liability rules set forth in patents or plant variety rights themselves, and other ad hoc reward regimes. (shrink)

The paper examines the impact of the Nigerian education and the extent to which it contributes towards the promotion of peace and justice with specific reference to Catholic schools. The paper argues that the role of Catholic Church in providing education has immensely contributed to the growth and development of education in Nigeria. Due to the church‟s focused intervention, approximately 649 elementary schools, 384 secondary schools and 16 tertiary institutions have been established in Nigeria. Relying on documentary method of data (...) collection and descriptive analytic approach, this study explains that Catholic schools have a significant role towards achieving a peaceful and equitable society in Nigeria. The article recommends more engaged efforts by other non-state institutions towards the building of developed educational institutions that will help in promoting peace and justice in Nigeria. (shrink)

Bali island’s beautiful nature in Indonesia are the result of volcanic activity under the sea, more than 23 million years ago. The geology of Bali island lies in the Sunda mountains arc, part of the volcanic rings of Pacific ring of fire. This causes the condition of Bali island is often unstable in ancient times, due to the shocks of volcanic eruptions. One of the beautiful areas caused by ancient volcanic activity is the Caldera of Mount Batur. On the (...) northwestern side of the caldera of the ancient Mount Batur, the archaeological traces of statues in sacred venues have been found since the prehistoric Balinese civilization. The holy place built on the hill at the highest peak of this ancient Batur Mountain caldera, often called Pura Penulisan. This holy place is designed in accordance with local wisdom, the concept of punden berundak, a concept of the original architectural space of Indonesia since prehistoric times. The shape of the architectural space design follows the topography of the hills, in form of leveled terrace and equipped with plaza. Archaelogical of Pura Penulisan merges with the caldera of Mount Batur, which was formed due to eruption 5,500 years ago. Therefore, Pura Penulisan architecture and the ancient Batur Mountain caldera, are both a valuable heritage, containing knowledge, and can knit memories. (shrink)

In _Discrimination Against the Dying_, Philip Reed argues, among other things, that ‘right to die laws (euthanasia and assisted suicide) also exhibit terminalism when they restrict eligibility to the terminally ill’. 1 Additionally, he suggests ‘the availability of the option of assisted death only for the terminally ill negatively influences the terminally ill who wish to live by causing them to doubt their choice’. 1 I argue that on scrutiny, neither of these two points hold. First, we routinely limit a (...) course of treatment to only those for whom we believe the treatment might provide a benefit. Typically, we do not think hastening death provides benefit when an individual is not experiencing a terminal illness. Thus, I conclude, either all treatments are discriminatory, or medical aid in dying is not. Second, I argue that permitting individuals to refuse or remove life sustaining care may very well cause... (shrink)

A growing body of literature has engaged with mass incarceration as a public health problem. This article reviews some of that literature, illustrating why and how bioethicists can and should engage with the problem of mass incarceration as a remediable cause of health inequities. “Mass incarceration” refers to a phenomenon that emerged in the United States fifty years ago: imprisoning a vastly larger proportion of the population than peer countries do, with a greatly disproportionate number of incarcerated people being members (...) of marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Bioethicists have long engaged with questions of health justice for incarcerated people, including consent issues for those participating in research and access to health care. This article provides an overview of the individual and public health impacts of mass incarceration. The article argues that mass incarceration is a bioethics issue that should be addressed in medical education, identifies opportunities for bioethicists to guide hospitals’ interactions with law enforcement officials, and calls on bioethicists to be in conversation with medical and nursing students and health care professionals about these groups’ advocacy efforts concerning structural racism, police violence, and mass incarceration. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren neu aufgefundene und publizierte Briefe, Gedichte und private Notizen von Marilyn Monroe verändern das Bild ihrer Biographie, ihrer psychischen Entwicklung und ihrer Analysen. Unter Berücksichtigung dieser Informationen kann Marilyn Monroes Analyse bei Ralph Greenson auf der einen Seite als eine intensive Idealisierung und eine tiefe Vertrauensbeziehung zu ihrem Analytiker interpretiert werden. Auf der anderen Seite wird klar, in welchem Ausmaß der Behandlungsprozess Schritt für Schritt entgleiste und zu vielfältigem Agieren aller beteiligten Personen in Marilyn Monroes Umfeld (...) führte. Monroe hatte sich entschieden, Unbeabsichtigt zerstörte Greenson einen Übertragungsprozess, der hoffnungsvoll begonnen hatte. Nach Monroes Tod entwickelte Greenson sein Konzept eines unverzichtbaren Arbeitsbündnisses zwischen Patient und Analytiker, das allen Psychoanalytikern gut bekannt ist. Aus heutiger Sicht stellt sich dieses Arbeitsbündnis als ein abgespaltener Teil eines ichpsychologischen Übertragungsbegriffs dar. (shrink)

This study concerns the ideas of one particular philosopher, Henri Bergson, whose views of time, intuition, and creativity have had a significant impact on art, literature, and the humanities, both in his time and in our own. Although it is generally recognized that Bergson's ideas have significantly impacted the arts and the humanities, it has not been recognized how they have also had a creative influence on the sciences as well. Nor has it been realized that this was one of (...) his most basic contentions. Bergson's conception of intuition--his fundamental insight into reality--was not limited to fugitive insights into human existence. By realizing previously unsuspected possibilities for research and discovery, his endeavors were also meant to make possible new advances in the sciences. If it enabled his cousin by marriage, Marcel Proust, to explore human memory in depth, it also inspired psychologists like Daniel Schachter to use Bergson's ideas to make real contributions to contemporary memory science. If his notion of creative evolution brought many thinkers to a belief in human creative freedom, it brought others (notably Alexis Carrel and Pierre Lecomte de Noüy) to a scientific study of biological time. Among his successful speculations was the theory of the Big Bang cosmology. 'Getting Bergson Straight' shows many points at which Bergson's ideas anticipated future developments in the sciences. This was seen clearly by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis de Broglie who viewed Bergson's physics as presaging quantum physics. Thus, the text is well situated for arts, humanities, social science, and natural science classrooms studying creative thinking and/or intellectual history. (shrink)

International Mindedness (IM) has become an underpinning philosophy of the International Baccalaureate and schools which adopt its programmes. However, the concept of IM is relevant to any school that offers international education given its potential and importance to drive the school’s mindset and mission. The international school market has grown significantly in terms of the number of schools and their diversity. Increasing in popularity are schools that follow the British-based International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and A-level programmes. Moreover, (...) the dgreatest expansion of international schools is now occurring in local markets, in which students are no longer predominantly expatriates but come from the host countries. This study explores the concept of international mindedness in six international schools in Cyprus. Based on data collected from headteachers and teachers, we argue that international mindedness is applicable in various contexts of international schooling and that factors other than the curriculum can affect its development within a school. (shrink)

The issue of human sexuality has many negative implications in African society. These arose in a number of contexts – legal, religious, cultural and societal – and were significantly divisive. This article examines these responses in terms of critical solidarity, critical engagement and critical distance, and attempts to find a way of considering them in the perspective of achieving justice and solidarity. The focus is on one mainline denomination, the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa (UPCSA). Contribution: This article has (...) implications that link subjects within the theological encyclopaedia of History of Christianity, Church Polity, Systematic Theology and Practical Theology, and other disciplines including Social Sciences such as Political Science. (shrink)

Explores intellectual and philosophical evolution of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, focusing on period after World War II. Analyzes how Heidegger s ideas, particularly his notion of being, influenced and were influenced by postwar context, including confrontation with Nazism and emergence of new philosophical currents. Argues that Heidegger s work offers relevant insights for contemporary philosophical debates and calls for a critical dialogue with his legacy. Discusses Heidegger s philosophy in the context of French and German philosophical schools, highlighting relevance of (...) his ideas and impact they had on contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Social suffering commands increasing public attention in the wake of several historical processes that have changed the ways victims are perceived. In making suffering eloquent by rendering it in conceptual form, philosophy runs the risk of muting suffering, thereby neutralizing its ability to mobilize responses. In the experience of suffering philosophy finds a limit it must recognize as its own. Yet only by fulfilling its duty towards suffering - only by having the abolition of suffering as its ultimate goal - (...) can philosophical thinking withstand a tacit complicity with injustice. (shrink)

The conflict in Gaza and Israel that ignited on October 7, 2023 signals a catastrophic breakdown in the possibility of ethical dialogue in the region. The actions on both sides have revealed a dissolution of ethical restraints, with unimaginably cruel attacks on civilians, murder of children, destruction of health facilities, and denial of basic needs such as water, food, and shelter. There is a need both to understand the nature of the ethical singularity represented by this conflict and what, if (...) any, options are available to allow the reconstruction of communication between the warring parties. This article seeks to address these tasks by analysing the conflict as inherently an ethical one, in the sense that it exposes a rupture in the fabric of communicative relationships that has evolved systematically out of the deep cultural structures from which all protagonists have emerged. Drawing on the work of Levinas, Habermas, Arendt, and others, and referring to the specific circumstances in the region, it examines the ethical sources of the crisis and tries to identify conditions for its resolution. The possibility of reconciliation—that is, of refiguring relationships to open up a space for dialogue to create pathways to heal the ruptures—is examined. The dark legacy of the Holocaust is identified as an abiding cultural vulnerability for both societies. It is concluded, however, that the rich history of partnerships and collaborations between Jews and Palestinians provides a robust infrastructure on the basis of which a sustainable peace might be built, providing a much-needed source of hope. (shrink)

Some individuals facing dementia contemplate hastening their own death: weighing the possibility of living longer with dementia against the alternative of dying sooner but avoiding the later stages of cognitive and functional impairment. This weighing resonates with an ethical and legal consensus in the United States that individuals can voluntarily choose to forgo life‐sustaining interventions and also that medical professionals can support these choices even when they will result in an earlier death. For these reasons, whether and how a terminally (...) ill individual can choose to control the timing of their death is a topic that cannot be avoided when considering the dementia trajectory. With a focus on the U.S. context, this landscape review considers the status of provisions that would legally permit people facing dementia to hasten death with appropriate support from medical professionals. This review can be used to plan and guide clinical and legal practitioner discussion and policy development concerning evolving questions not fully covered by existing medical decision‐making provisions. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be (...) understood as properties of public languages. (shrink)

The constitutional monarchy of present-day Britain hardly seems the same sort of institution as fourteenth-century feudal kingdoms, but Dante’s Monarchia (c. 1313) and Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1872) share fundamental assumptions about what the purpose and strengths of monarchy are. In the Monarchia, Dante lays out the essential attributes of monarchy that endure even today: authority, impartiality, and unity. Dante values and promotes monarchy as final arbiter of conflicts, sole just judge without cupidity, and unifying will. More than 550 (...) years later, Bagehot, despite his distrust concerning the Crown’s actual effectiveness, conceives of monarchy in surprisingly similar terms. The monarch is ‘the regulating wheel of our Constitution’, an authority outside and above partisan politics, and the ‘dignified’, ‘intelligible’, unifying element of government. In both cases, the monarch functions as the government’s source of impartial, unifying authority – whether monarch or Parliament ultimately wields that authority. The broad outlines of monarchy are surprisingly similar for both writers, suggesting a basic continuity in the conceptualization of monarchy from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century (and beyond) and an abiding store of reserve symbolism within the monarchic concept that writers, thinkers, and politicians throughout those centuries are able to tap at will. (shrink)

En una época de éxodo masivo global, se explora el documental De Nadie (2005) de Tin Dirdamal, el cual, a través de una variedad de instancias narrativas, presenta la experiencia y condición migrante, aún actual, de centroamericanos en su tránsito por México en su camino hacia EE.UU. Frente a la exclusión en el pasado de personajes migrantes femeninos, el cine y la narrativa literaria contemporánea despliegan significados culturales y sociales que avivan la presencia de mujeres como protagonistas en el vertiginoso (...) cruce entre fronteras, bajo los regímenes de movilidad. Estas narrativas ponen en evidencia la trascendencia identitaria de las mujeres migrantes a partir del desplazamiento. En específico, en este trabajo se examina el documental De Nadie (2005) bajo la lupa de la performatividad de género de la hondureña María, antes y durante su recorrido migratorio. (shrink)

Ray and Cooper (2024) make a very compelling argument for vastly increasing bioethicists’ engagement with environmental justice. I strongly support this proposal and agree with their arguments. Yet...

This study examines the outcomes of a four-year faculty learning community (FLC) that aimed to transform departmental ethics curriculum by supporting Earth Sciences faculty members as they ethically inquired into their teaching of ethics and refined existing courses in alignment with an Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (ICELER) framework. We present ethnographic case studies that unpack processes through which three faculty members transformed undergraduate courses. We assembled case studies by triangulating interview data, course artifacts, and faculty reflections. We examine (...) how faculty (1) built awareness around teaching ethics, (2) took responsibility for and made judgments about teaching ethics, (3) experimented by designing and implementing ICELER-inspired courses, and (4) interrogated the outcomes of their ethics teaching, utilizing findings to enhance awareness and revise courses. The paper closes by introducing a model detailing how instructors inquire into ethics teaching and how model components might inspire future educational practice and research. (shrink)

Background Scientific and technological advancements in mapping and understanding the interrelated pathways through which biological and environmental exposures affect disease development create new possibilities for detecting disease risk factors. Early detection of such risk factors may help prevent disease onset or moderate the disease course, thereby decreasing associated disease burden, morbidity, and mortality. However, the ethical implications of screening for disease risk factors are unclear and the current literature provides a fragmented and case-by-case picture. Methods To identify key ethical considerations (...) arising from the early detection of disease risk factors, we performed a systematic scoping review. The Scopus, Embase, and Philosopher’s Index databases were searched for peer-reviewed, academic records, which were included if they were written in English or Dutch and concerned the ethics of (1) early detection of (2) disease risk factors for (3) disease caused by environmental factors or gene-environment interactions. All records were reviewed independently by at least two researchers. Results After screening 2034 titles and abstracts, and 112 full papers, 55 articles were included in the thematic synthesis of the results. We identified eight common ethical themes: (1) Reliability and uncertainty in early detection, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) beneficence and non-maleficence, (5) downstream burdens on others, (6) responsibility, (7) justice, and (8) medicalization and conceptual disruption. We identified several gaps in the literature, including a relative scarcity of research on ethical considerations associated with environmental preventive health interventions, a dearth of practical suggestions on how to address expressed concerns about overestimating health capacities, and a lack of insights into preventing undue attribution of health responsibility to individuals. Conclusions The ethical concerns arising with the early detection of risk factors are often interrelated and complex. Comprehensive ethical analyses are needed that are better embedded in normative frameworks and also assess and weigh the expected benefits of early risk factor detection. Such research is necessary for developing and implementing responsible and fair preventive health policies. (shrink)

Jewish Agrarian Movements (JAM hereafter) in North America express the many different shapes and iterations of Jewish farming on the continent, grounded in historical perspectives that influence current practices and activities. From within this diversity, common threads emerge with much to contribute to agrarian social movements and scholarship. Jewish values of returning (_t_’_shuvah_), releasing (_shmitah_), and repairing (_tikkun_), along with theories of _doikayt_ (an anti-zionist movement around “hereness”) and radical diasporism, animate JAM’s critical engagement with agri-food systems. As researchers who (...) have both studied and participated in Jewish agrarianism in a variety of U.S. and Canadian contexts, we solidify a series of themes and tensions that emerge from JAM: diaspora and indigeneity, modernity and tradition, Jewish agroecological knowledge production, and lived religion. We argue that, while JAM has not yet been examined thoroughly within critical food scholarship, it has the potential to contribute to broader debates and frameworks within sub-fields such as radical food geographies, critical agrarianism, and decoloniality. Without consideration of JAM as a part the study of food and agriculture, there are risks of marginalization of farmers, activists and researchers of Jewish identity. (shrink)

In a challenge to Basic Emotion theories, Ortony suggested in a recent article that the existence of affect-free surprise means that surprise is not necessarily valenced and therefore arguably not an emotion. In an article in response, Neta and Kim argued that surprise is always valenced and therefore is an emotion, with apparent cases of affect-free surprise actually being cases of the cognitive state of unexpectedness rather than surprise. We view Neta and Kim's position as resting on an idiosyncratic stipulation (...) of word usage. We further suggest that rejecting affect-free surprise by appealing to examples of affect-laden surprise has no bearing on whether surprise is always valenced, and propose that when surprise appears to be affect-laden the locus of the experienced valence is a co-occurring emotion. (shrink)

The grammatical manipulation and production of language is a great deceiver. We have become habituated to accept the use of well-constructed language to indicate intelligence, understanding and, consequently, intention, whether conscious or unconscious. But we are not always right to do so, and certainly not in the case of large language models (LLMs) like ChapGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA, and Google Bard. This is a perennial problem, but when one understands why it occurs, it ceases to be surprising that it so stubbornly (...) persists. This paper will have three main sections. In the Introduction I will say a little about language, its aetiology, and useful sub-divisions into natural and cultural. In the second section I will explain the current situation with regard to large language models and fill in the background debates which set the problem up as one of increased complexity rather than one of a qualitatively different kind from narrow or specific AI. In the third section I will present the case for the missing phenomenological background and why it is necessary for the co-creation of shared meaning in both natural and cultural language, and I will conclude this section by presenting a rationale for why this situation arises and will continue to arise. Before we do any of this, I need to clarify one point: I do not wish to challenge the ascription of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to LLMs, indeed I think agnosticism is best in this respect, but I do challenge the more serious, and erroneous, ascription of understanding, intention, reason, and consciousness to them. And so, I am making two points: an epistemological one about why we fall into error in our ascription of a mental life to LLMs, and an ontological one about the impossibility of LLMs being or becoming conscious. (shrink)

We propose a reformulation of the ideal $\mathcal {N}$ of Lebesgue measure zero sets of reals modulo an ideal J on $\omega $, which we denote by $\mathcal {N}_J$. In the same way, we reformulate the ideal $\mathcal {E}$ generated by $F_\sigma $ measure zero sets of reals modulo J, which we denote by $\mathcal {N}^*_J$. We show that these are $\sigma $ -ideals and that $\mathcal {N}_J=\mathcal {N}$ iff J has the Baire property, which in turn is equivalent to (...) $\mathcal {N}^*_J=\mathcal {E}$. Moreover, we prove that $\mathcal {N}_J$ does not contain co-meager sets and $\mathcal {N}^*_J$ contains non-meager sets when J does not have the Baire property. We also prove a deep connection between these ideals modulo J and the notion of nearly coherence of filters (or ideals). We also study the cardinal characteristics associated with $\mathcal {N}_J$ and $\mathcal {N}^*_J$. We show their position with respect to Cichoń’s diagram and prove consistency results in connection with other very classical cardinal characteristics of the continuum, leaving just very few open questions. To achieve this, we discovered a new characterization of $\mathrm {add}(\mathcal {N})$ and $\mathrm {cof}(\mathcal {N})$. We also show that, in Cohen model, we can obtain many different values to the cardinal characteristics associated with our new ideals. (shrink)

Remhof contends that Nietzsche is a metaphysician. According to his Meta-Metaphysical Argument, Nietzsche’s texts satisfy the criteria for an adequate conception of metaphysics. According to his Constructivist Argument, Nietzsche adopts a metaphysical position on which concepts’ application conditions constitute the identity conditions of their objects. This article critically appraises these arguments. I maintain that the criteria advanced in the Meta-Metaphysical Argument are collectively insufficient for delineating metaphysics as a distinct field of inquiry and that the Constructivist Argument attributes a position (...) to Nietzsche that remains vulnerable to his evaluative and psychological indictments of two-world metaphysics. I conclude by discussing how these objections might help non-metaphysical readers of Nietzsche resist Remhof’s interpretation. (shrink)

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on Contemporary Issues in Religious and Spiritual Development in Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Beyond. First, we give an account of the history of research on religious and spiritual development in adolescence and beyond. Although religion and spirituality have a long history in psychology, it is still an emerging area of research. Second, we summarize the current body of work on religious and spiritual development in adolescence and beyond. Most research in (...) this area has focused on outcomes, particularly religion and spirituality as a protective factor against negative youth outcomes. Some work has also looked at individual and contextual predictors of religion and spirituality. Less is known about processes and trajectories of religious development, particularly in terms of changes in religious identification. Third, we recommend directions for future research in this area. We focus on the need for research to look at the role of religion and spirituality in positive youth development, the religious and spiritual experiences of religious minority youth, religious and spiritual challenges faced by sexual minority youth, and processes and predictors of religious deconversion. Fourth, we outline the four review papers on contemporary issues in religious and spiritual development featured in the special issue. These papers provide literature reviews on four important directions for future research. (shrink)

Background Machine learning (ML) is utilized increasingly in health care, and can pose harms to patients, clinicians, health systems, and the public. In response, regulators have proposed an approach that would shift more responsibility to ML developers for mitigating potential harms. To be effective, this approach requires ML developers to recognize, accept, and act on responsibility for mitigating harms. However, little is known regarding the perspectives of developers themselves regarding their obligations to mitigate harms.Methods We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with (...) developers of ML predictive analytics applications for health care in the United States.Results Participants varied widely in their perspectives on personal responsibility and included examples of both moral engagement and disengagement, albeit in a variety of forms. While most (70%) of participants made a statement indicative of moral engagement, most of these statements reflected an awareness of moral issues, while only a subset of these included additional elements of engagement such as recognizing responsibility, alignment with personal values, addressing conflicts of interests, and opportunities for action. Further, we identified eight distinct categories of moral disengagement reflecting efforts to minimize potential harms or deflect personal responsibility for preventing or mitigating harms.Conclusions These findings suggest possible facilitators and barriers to the development of ethical ML that could act by encouraging moral engagement or discouraging moral disengagement. Regulatory approaches that depend on the ability of ML developers to recognize, accept, and act on responsibility for mitigating harms might have limited success without education and guidance for ML developers about the extent of their responsibilities and how to implement them. (shrink)

Pollution results from humankind’s failure to be good stewards of creation. Guided by Catholic environmental bioethics, Catholic health care organizations have reduced their contribution to this pollution, but they also encounter its human cost. Catholic hospitals treat countless patients sickened by pollution, which most strongly impacts the poor and disenfranchised—those whom the Church expresses a preferential responsibility to care for, in part via the charity care that Catholic health care provides. The poor encounter another cost of pollution: the financial cost (...) of seeking health care, particularly in the US. The authors argue that Catholic health care institutions should take the moral harm of pollution seriously by reducing the financial burden on those sickened by pollution. As an example, they highlight the situation of those sickened by lead exposure in the US and outline how Catholic health care institutions could consider lessening the financial burden of treating this sickness. (shrink)

The suffering of womanhood and maltreatment are apparent when reading ancient writings. In Luke 13:10–17, it is possible to see how a number of women who suffered illnesses were treated in the hands of religious elites of the ancient world. However, the woman in Luke’s encounter with the Lukan Jesus during her illness redefined how religious leaders should deal with the suffering of womanhood. The woman was healed and treated with dignity by the Lukan Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. (...) Using socio-historical interpretation, the Lukan Jesus in the Gospel of Luke demonstrated that religion should be used to alleviate the suffering of women, not to exacerbate it. The lesson derived from the Lukan Jesus’ action and words on the suffering woman in Luke 13:12 is significant for the African religious setting in an endeavour to alleviate women’s suffering in Africa in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic era.Contribution: This article adds to the ongoing discussion in biblical studies about gender equality, specifically in Africa where diseases such as COVID-19 have highlighted the need for change. It argues that African women should resist negative male dominance in society, similar to the woman in Luke, and work towards empowering women in Africa to achieve freedom and equality. (shrink)

Using relevant encyclicals issued over the last 100 years, the author extracts those principles that constitute the underpinnings of Catholic Social Teaching about the employment relationship and contemplates implications of their incorporation into human resource policy. Respect for worker dignity, for his or her family's economic security, and for the common good of society clearly emerge as the primary guidelines for responsible human resource management. Dovetailing these three Church mandates with the economic objectives of the firm could, in essence, alter (...) the firm's nature because profit motivations would be constrained by consideration for worker and societal welfare. Integration of Church teaching with current corporate goals should therefore impact greatly on a variety of human resource policies. (shrink)

A study of a group of elementary school students learning to control a computer‐implemented Newtonian object reveals a surprisingly uniform and detailed collection of strategies, at the core of which is a robust “Aristotelian” expectation that things should move in the direction they are last pushed. A protocol of an undergraduate dealing with the same situation shows a large overlap with the set of strategies used by the elementary school children and thus a marked lack of influence of classroom physics (...) training on this student's naive physics. The data from these two studies are pooled and elaborated into a “genetic task analysis” of how one might come to understand Newtonian dynamics as a more or less natural evolution from the naive state. (shrink)

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)