In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deep Listening and Virtuous Friendship:Spiritual Care in the Context of Religious MultiplicityDuane R. BidwellA monk asked Zen master Yunmen: “What is the teaching of the Buddha’s entire lifetime?” Yunmen answered:“An appropriate response.”1In a pivotal scene from the 1988 film A Fish Called Wanda, con artist Wanda Gershwitz is fed up—finally—with her partner, Otto West. When his jealousy and ersatz intellectualism repeatedly jeopardize their attempts to steal $20 million in (...) diamonds, Wanda yells: “Now let me correct you on a few things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘Every Man for Himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto, I looked them up.”2 It’s a funny moment, of course. But Otto’s (mis)understanding of Gautama’s teaching demonstrates a challenge in translating a spiritual-religious tradition from one cultural setting to another. Too often, and usually without intention, we are like Otto; we colonize and domesticate unfamiliar ideas, assimilating them into our existing worldview instead of experiencing and accommodating their challenging differences. Otto’s facile appropriation of Buddhism confirms rather than confronts his pre-critical, individualistic, and perhaps Darwinist worldview. A Buddhist caregiver might say that Otto was not “listening deeply” to the myriad voices that shaped his perspective.Similar hazards face someone writing about deep listening in relation to religious multiplicity.3 Deep listening, as a caring practice, “belongs” to the emerging field of Buddhist contemplative care,4 in which it has a technical (although perhaps undertheorized) usage richly informed by Buddhist thought and practice. But when I reflect as a pastoral theologian and spiritual caregiver trained in the Christian traditions of cura animarum, the cure or care of souls, deep listening can become unmoored from its origins. Someone marinated in the discourses and practices of Christian care can easily and perhaps unintentionally conflate deep listening with classic Christian [End Page 3] concepts of care such as the ministry of presence, the practice of unconditional positive regard,5 and the giving of oneself to God for the sake of the care seeker. Although I identify as a Buddhist Christian, habitual Christian views shape my thinking the way a canyon or streambed shapes the flow of water; unless I am attentive to the ways that Buddhist thought and practice seek fissures and carve new channels through the sediment of Christian spiritual care, I risk appropriating or erasing the practices that Buddhist caregivers call deep listening.Mindful of these waters, I want to immerse myself and readers in a particular question: In the context of spiritual care, what happens at the confluence of deep listening and a practitioner’s multiple religious voices? In responding to this question I have three aims: to describe deep listening, to provide a theoretical and experiential account of deep listening in the context of religious multiplicity, and to suggest an image from the Pāli canon that can help practitioners engage religious multiplicity in ways that minimize harm, increase compassion, and realize wisdom. A particular moment in spiritually integrative psychotherapy serves as a touchstone for my reflection; thus, I begin where the canyon creates a slender and fast-moving channel for deep listening: psychotherapy with Julie.6violence, karma, and compassionAt twenty-seven years of age, Julie was a soft-spoken, biracial graduate student who radiated mindful presence. She identifies as Asian American, and with her shaved head and tendency to wear dark colors and dramatic scarves, she might seem a typical LA hipster to other passengers on the commuter train she rode to and from our appointments. One year before our psychotherapeutic work, Julie had been beaten and raped by a boyfriend; subsequent thoughts of suicide led to a brief hospitalization. At that time she was assigned diagnoses of bipolar II and post-traumatic stress disorders. Daily, she swallowed a powerful mood stabilizer; monthly, she visited a psychiatrist. The symptoms of bipolar disorder, substance abuse, addiction, schizophrenia, depression, and suicide were present in her extended family. Julie sought counseling because of tension between what she called her “Buddhist identity” and the mental health diagnoses assigned to her. She said she... (shrink)

abstract: Despite the maturing and formalizing of Buddhist-Christian studies as an academic discipline, its practical and pastoral implications are insufficiently addressed. Most of the practical literature to date addresses spiritual care, broadly conceived, within a narrow range of sources and theories. This scoping study identifies three primary resources offered to providers of spiritual care by scholars of Buddhist-Christian studies: an expanded theoretical base for assessment and interpretation, practices for caregiver formation and cultivation, and guidance for care with spiritually fluid people. (...) Scholars of Buddhist-Christian studies could make at least four additional contributions to chaplaincy and spiritual care: a revised telos of care, attention to care as a site of spiritual practice, criteria for salutogenic spiritualities, and refined practices for interreligious and postcolonializing care. These potential contributions require the discipline to carefully consider methodological issues and broaden its range of sources. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Practicing the Religious Self: Buddhist-Christian Identity as Social ArtifactDuane R. BidwellIt is somewhat paradoxical to write or speak about identity formation in two religious traditions that ultimately deny the reality of any identity that we might claim or fashion for ourselves. In the Christian traditions, a person’s true (or ultimate) identity is received through God’s action and grace in baptism; to foreground any other facet of the self, or (...) to anchor identity in anything but baptism, could be considered a form of idolatry. In the Buddhist traditions human identity is empty, woven not from an inherent or externally granted essence but through the interdependent arising of all things; 1 to cling to self and to identity as independent, enduring, immutable, or autonomous signals a mistaken understanding of reality.2 Indeed, as religious scholar Alice Keefe has written, “belief in the self as independent and self-existent is our fundamental delusion and root poison.” 3Yet day by day most of us experience our identities, including our religious, cultural, and social identities, as neither empty nor erased. On the contrary: they seem to be inscribed with enduring meaning. Knowledge has been chiseled into them through our participation in the rituals and relationships of the world. At times the very fullness of our identities can feel on the verge of overflowing. This sense of dynamic presence and fullness causes our identities to serve as important (and perhaps essential) tools for negotiating the hurly-burly of experience and relationship in the mundane, finite, material world.4 From this perspective, our religious identities are social artifacts, entities and meanings formed in between, or on the margins of, biological selves that are related to one another through communities of practice.5 These communal artifacts may then be interiorized by individuals as resources that can be employed in or offered back to the world—performed, if you will—through particular (and sometimes disciplined) practices.6The primacy of social process in creating and maintaining religious identity implies that community remains central to the process of fashioning the religious self in contemporary Buddhist and Christian practice. If this is true, it raises, of course, important questions about our understandings of ecclesiology and the nature of the sangha, theological anthropology and Buddhist understandings of the person. These questions [End Page 3] deserve to be answered, but they are too broad to be addressed here. My more modest intention is to contribute to generative conversation about religious identity formation by illustrating how my own religious identities as Buddhist and Christian have been practiced and performed as social artifacts in two particular instances. In a secondary sense, this essay serves as a reflection on pastoral work in a multifaith context, something “much needed in the Buddhist-Christian studies milieu.” 7Given the diverse academic approaches to Buddhist-Christian studies, it seems wise to begin by describing my own background and approach. By training I am a pastoral theologian, someone who seeks to understand critically the richness and complexity of human experiences and then to respond with appropriate, faithful, and effective acts of care. The psychological meta-theory of social constructionism serves as a primary conversation partner for my work; it invites me to ask “not what goes on ‘inside’ people, but what people go on inside of.” 8 For pragmatic reasons I tend to utilize David Tracy’s mutual critical (or revised) correlational method,9 and in the dialectic between understanding human experience and responding to it, I privilege liberationist theologies and religio-ethical norms of justice, love, and wisdom. My practice as a spiritual director and pastoral counselor seeks to promote practices of freedom for all people.10As a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) I am accountable to the Reformed tradition of Christian theology. My formal theological education occurred in the ecumenical context of a divinity school affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and at a diocesan seminary affiliated with the contemplative Anglican tradition. My informal training in Buddhist philosophy and practice occurred in the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia, primarily through five years of participation in an immigrant congregation and weekly study with Thich Phap Nhan, a Vietnamese monk... (shrink)

With the publication of The Social Frameworks of Knowledge? the English speaking world has at last been given a serious opportunity to approach the complex sociological thought of Georges Gurvitch. However, as the author himself admits in the Preface, this book appears ?abstract and schematic particularly to the uninitiated?.1 The aim of this paper will be to try to relate this translated work to the main body of Gurvitch's writing and particularly to his stance in the sociology of knowledge. First (...) I will examine the intellectual origins of his sociology of knowledge and his attitude to his predecessors in the field. Secondly I will compare his approach to the sociology of knowledge to that of P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann. (shrink)

Privacy issues surrounding the use of social media sites have been apparent over the past ten years. Use of such sites, particularly Facebook, has been increasing and recently business organizations have begun using Facebook as a means of connecting with potential customers or clients. This paper presents an empirical study of perceived privacy violations to examine factors that influence the expectations of privacy on Facebook. Results of the study suggest that the more important Facebook is to users, the more likely (...) they are to perceive privacy violations and the more likely those violations are to be considered serious. Furthermore, how information is used is more important than the way this information is accessed. (shrink)

El propósito de esta investigación es hacer una relectura histórico-crítica de la Ética de la Liberación como ética de la vida. Este planteamiento se hace desde la memoria política crítica que permitirá ver la influencia que ella ha tenido con otras éticas que hoy pueden agruparse en torno al concepto de convivencia: la ética intercultural, la ética ecológica, la ética de la economía solidaria, la ética de una ciencia construida socialmente y de una tecnología al servicio de las personas, la (...) ética educativa como expresión de apertura y diálogo y no como adoctrinamiento, la ética religiosa separada de todo fanatismo, la ética civil más allá de todo militarismo, la ética del género más allá de toda exclusión. Lo que implica la necesidad de consolidar una ética de la convivencia, como eje central de la cultura y de la vida de los habitantes de América Latina que no es sólo necesario estudiar sino practicar. (shrink)

Its aim is to point out the role of the individual in the history and the role played by the personality in historical development and its influence. The individual chapters cover several past millennia of human history and show the multiplicity of historical processes and their relevance to the present world.--From Publisher's website.

This book is a study in philosophy of religion, which proposes a new inversion model of self-transcendence. At the same time, the study examines the relation between self-transcendence and prosociality in order to broaden our understanding of self-transcendence also as a moral concept relevant to human behavior and its ethical reflection. The inversion model of self-transcendence is based both on the intentionality analysis of consciousness and phenomenological analysis of self-transcendence conducted on examples of great figures of spirituality from the East (...) and the West - an anonymous medieval Christian author of «The Cloud of Unknowing», an Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, and a contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. (shrink)

Introduction Currently, The nature and scope of Clinical Ethics Protocols in Madrid are not well understood.Objectives The main objective is to describe the features of ‘guideline/recommendation’ type CEPs that have been or are being developed by existing Clinical Ethics Committees in Madrid. Secondary objectives include characterisation of those CECs that have been the most prolific in reference to CEP creation and implementation and identification of any trends in future CEP development.Methods We collected CEPs produced and in process by CECs accredited (...) in the public hospitals in Madrid, Spain, from 1996 to 2008.Results CECs developed 30 CEPs, with 10 more in process. The most common topic is refusal of treatment . If CEPs addressing terminal illness, Do-Not-Resuscitate orders and advance directives are placed into a separate ‘ethical problems at the end of life’ category, this CEP subject emerges as the most common . There is a relationship between the age of the CEC and the development of CEPs . CECs now seem to be more likely to engage in CEP development.Conclusions The CECs in Madrid, Spain, have developed a significant number of CEPs and there is a trend towards continued development. The most frequent topics are ethical problems at the end of life and refusal of treatment by the patient. (shrink)

Sympatric speciation illustrates how natural and sexual selection may create new species in isolation without geographic barriers. However, recent genomic reanalyses of classic examples of sympatric speciation reveal complex histories of secondary gene flow from outgroups into the radiation. In contrast, the rich theoretical literature on this process distinguishes among a diverse range of models based on simple genetic histories and different types of reproductive isolating barriers. Thus, there is a need to revisit how to connect theoretical models of sympatric (...) speciation and their predictions to empirical case studies in the face of widespread gene flow. Here, theoretical differences among different types of sympatric speciation and speciation‐with‐gene‐flow models are reviewed and summarized, and genomic analyses are proposed for distinguishing which models apply to case studies based on the timing and function of adaptive introgression. Investigating whether secondary gene flow contributed to reproductive isolation is necessary to test whether predictions of theory are ultimately borne out in nature. (shrink)

Orr and Dentith argue that a recurrent problem in much of the wider academic literature on conspiracy theories is either conceptual confusion or a refusal to put theory before practice. Orr and Dentith show that a naive empiricism pervades much of the social science literature when it comes to these things called ‘conspiracy theories’ which not only runs at odds with the philosophical literature but also the general tenor of the social sciences over the latter part of the 20th Century (...) and beyond. Orr and Dentith argue that central to these confusions or refusals is not just a lack of philosophical rigour when it comes to defining and presenting views, but an active disinterest in such conceptual work. (shrink)

The discrepancy between measures of preferred and actual participation in decision making was used as a measure of ecological dissonance for an organization and then used to assess its relationship to job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. Questionnaires were administered to 143 faculty and staff members of Mississippi State University. Correlational analyses indicated mild relationships between the measures of ecological dissonance and job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization, thus providing support for ecological dissonance theory (...) (see Miller, Topping, & Wells-Parker, 1989). It was concluded that ecological dissonance in participation in decision making was a predictor of workers’ job satisfaction, job involvement, job alienation, and job formalization. (shrink)

"Offering integrated coverage of both digital and computer design, this text offers well-organized, concise, yet comprehensive content, presented from a contemporary engineering viewpoint. Understanding of the material is supported by clear explanations and a progressive development of examples ranging from sample combinatorial applications to a CISC architecture built upon a RISC core. A thorough coverage of traditional topics is combined with increased attention to computer-aided design, problem formulation, solution verification, and the building of problem-solving skills."--BOOK JACKET.

We examined social facilitation and emotional convergence in amusement, sadness, and fear in dynamic interactions. Dyads of friends or strangers jointly watched emotion-eliciting films while they either could or could not communicate nonverbally. We assessed three components of each emotion (expressions, appraisals, and feelings), as well as attention to and social motives toward the co-participant. In Study 1, participants interacted through a mute videoconference. In Study 2, they sat next to each other and either were or were not separated by (...) a partition. Results revealed that facilitation and convergence are not uniform across different emotions and emotion components. Particularly strong supporting patterns emerged for the facilitation of and convergence in smiling. When direct interaction was possible (Study 2), friends showed a general tendency for strong convergence, with the exception of fear-related appraisals. This suggests that underlying processes of emotional contagion and social appraisal are differentially relevant for different emotions. (shrink)

While consensus exists among many practitioners of ethics consultation about the need for and identification of core competencies and standards, there has been virtually no attempt to determine how these competencies and standards are best taught and assessed. We believe that clinical ethics consultation has reached a state of sufficient maturity that expert practitioners can evaluate those who are new to the field. We will outline several steps that can facilitate the creation of a certification process for clinical ethics consultants, (...) assuring the competency and quality of consultation for the patients, families, and healthcare professionals who utilize ECSs. (shrink)

The principal task of the book series Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities is to promote those developments in philosophy that respect the tradition of great philosophical ideas, on the one hand, and the manner of philosophical thinking introduced by analytical philosophy, on the other. The aim is to contribute to practicing philosophy as deep as Marxism and as caring about justification as positivism.

Plagiarism is increasingly evident in business and academia. Though links between demographic, personality, and situational factors have been found, previous research has not used actual plagiarism behavior as a criterion variable. Previous research on academic dishonesty has consistently used self-report measures to establish prevalence of dishonest behavior. In this study we use actual plagiarism behavior to establish its prevalence, as well as relationships between integrity-related personal selection and workplace deviance measures. This research covers new ground in two respects: (a) That (...) the academic dishonesty literature is subject to revision using criterion variables to avoid self bias and social desirability issues and (b) we establish the relationship between actual academic dishonesty and potential workplace deviance/white-collar crime. (shrink)