The paper opens by recounting the beginnings of Buddhism in Dawei as preserved in local chronicles and sustained in stupas marking the episodes of the chronicle narrative. The chronicles start with a visit of the Buddha whose arrival triggers a series of events bringing together pre-existing tutelary figures, weiza, a hermit and offspring born of a golden fish, culminating in the establishment of the first Buddhist kingdom circa the eighth to tenth century CE. The enshrinement of sacred hairs gifted by (...) the Buddha also includes patronage by a king of the ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ lineage. Associated with the monks Sona and Uttara from Sri Lanka sent by King Asoka's son Mahinda, ‘Suvaṇṇabhūmi’ literally can refer to the archaeology of Thaton, a walled site in the present day Mon State, or, as is the case here, more widely to the missionary tradition associated with Asoka (Sao Saimong Mengrai 1976). The third story in the establishment of the Buddhist king at Thagara is the longest of the chronicle, the tale of a royal hunter who failed to capture a golden peacock for the queen. The hunter became a hermit living by a pond with a golden fish and as he urinated in the pond, two children were born from the fish. The boy becomes the first Buddhist king of Thagara, 11 km north of Dawei, where artefacts from survey and excavation confirm the chronology of the chronicle, with the closest archaeological parallels found not at the ancient sites of the Mon State but to the first millennium CE Buddhist ‘Pyu’ heritage of Upper Myanmar which is notably absent in the chronicle compilation. (shrink)

Three approaches to intertextual writing are available to college instructors: mechanical, ethical, and rhetorical. The mechanical approach, a staple of writing instruction, teaches the use of citation styles such as MLA or APA; methods of citing sources; and the conventions of quotation. The ethical approach is primarily concerned with the character of individual writers and their adherence to community standards categorized as “academic integrity.” The great majority of source-based writing instruction attends to one or both of these approaches. A third (...) approach, rhetorical intertextuality, is overshadowed by the ethical concerns that currently permeate educational institutions. Rhetorical intertextuality does promote textual ethics, but in a positive way, through instruction in building meaning in a target text through collaboration with source texts. Rhetorical intertextuality brings the source texts themselves to life and aims to engage the audience in a conversation with target text and source texts. Drawing on Citation Project data, we advocate instruction in intertextual writing that hails students as authors, not transgressors. Rhetorical intertextuality can provide a positive frame for college instruction in intertextual writing, one that facilitates deep engagement with texts; intellectual approaches to paraphrasing and summarizing; and an emphasis on the rhetorical choices that writers make as they encounter and respond to the ideas of others. The objective of such instruction is a dialogic interface between writer, audience, and sources—a conversation. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

A goal of living as well as possible is central to practice and research with young adults living with home mechanical ventilation (HMV). Significant effort has been put into conceptualizing and measuring the quality of life (QOL) as a proxy for living well. Yet, dominant understandings of QOL have been influenced by normative, ableist, and biomedical discourses about what constitutes a good life that, when applied in practice and systems with those living with HMV, can contribute to exclusion and constrain (...) opportunities to live well. Inquiry into what certain understandings of living well can do is critical to opening up possibilities to reimagine living well with HMV. This paper draws on findings from a critical narrative inquiry that explored the experiences of five young adults (ages 18–40 years) living with HMV. Data were co‐constructed virtually through an initial interview and photo‐elicitation using participant‐generated photographs. A critical narrative analysis of participants' stories made visible the ideological effects of ableist, biomedical, and individualist discourses and how the young adults reproduced and resisted these dominant discourses. Their stories further opened up possibilities for nurses and other healthcare providers to see living well and QOL differently. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Single‐stranded DNA‐protein complex (T‐complex) is proposed to mediate T‐DNA transfer from Agrobacterium to plant cells. A novel model for transfer is presented which incorporates features of both bacterial conjugation and viral infection. Specific protein components of the T‐complex, its ultrastructure and possible functions in the plant cell are discussed.

Concerns about children's ability to fully comprehend and evaluate advertising messages has stimulated substantial research and heated debate among scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates, and public policy makers for more than three decades. During that time, some very fundamental questions about the fairness of marketing to children have been raised, yet many remain unresolved today. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated advertising media, promotional offers and creative appeals in recent years, new issues have also developed. This paper provides a basis (...) for further examination of some the key questions in this area, and suggests how children's advertising research can be employed to illuminate them. (shrink)

Morality can help guide behavior and facilitate relationships. Although moral judgments by autistic people are similar to neurotypical individuals, many researchers argue that subtle differences signify deficits in autistic individuals. Moral foundation theory describes moral judgments in terms of differences rather than deficits. The current research, aimed at assessing autistic individuals’ moral inclinations using Haidt’s framework, was co-designed with autistic community members. Our aim was to describe autistic moral thinking from a strengths-based perspective while acknowledging differences that may pose interpersonal (...) challenges among autistic youth. We assessed 25 autistic and 23 neurotypical children’s moral judgments using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for Kids. We used semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis with a subset of participants to describe children’s moral reasoning. Analyses suggested that autistic and neurotypical children make similar judgments about moral transgressions across all five moral foundations. General linear mixed modeling showed that the greatest predictor of recommending punishment was how bad children deemed moral transgressions to be. We also found a trend that autistic children were more likely to recommend punishment for harmless norms violations than were neurotypical children. Future research could use longitudinal methods to understand the development of moral judgments among autistic and neurotypical children. (shrink)

AbstrctSean Aas, Dana Howard, and Leslie Francis raise compelling and interesting objections to the definition of disability I defend in The Minority Body. In this paper, I reply to these objections and elaborate on my criticisms of the disability/impairment distinction.

Many authors, including Derek Parfit, T. M. Scanlon, and Mark Schroeder, favor a “reasons-first” ontology of normativity, which treats reasons as normatively fundamental. Others, most famously G. E. Moore, favor a “value-first” ontology, which treats value or goodness as normatively fundamental. Chapter 10 argues that both the reasons-first and value-first ontologies should be rejected because neither can account for all of the normative reasons that, intuitively, there are. It advances an ontology of normativity, originally suggested by Franz Brentano and (...) A. C. Ewing, according to which fittingness is normatively fundamental. The normative relation of fittingness is the relation in which a response stands to an object when the object merits—or is worthy of—that response. The author argues that his “fittingness-first” ontology is no less parsimonious than either the reasons- or the value-first ontology, but it can plausibly accommodate the existence of all the normative reasons there are. It therefore provides a superior ontology of normativity. (shrink)

In previous work, I have sought to show that the basic argument for epistemic relativism derives from the problem of the criterion that stems from ancient Pyrrhonian scepticism. Because epistemic relativism depends upon a sceptical strategy, it is possible to respond to relativism on the basis of an anti-sceptical strategy. I argue that the particularist response to scepticism proposed by Roderick Chisholm may be combined with a naturalistic and reliabilist conception of epistemic warrant as the basis for a satisfactory response (...) to epistemic relativism. In this paper, I outline this particularist response to relativism, and provide further commentary on the relationship between naturalism and particularism. In addition, I set the approach in contrast with reflective equilibrium approaches in epistemology. I also briefly explore the connection between the particularist response to relativism and G. E. Moore’s defense of an external world. (shrink)

In his short story “The Library of Babel” (1941), Argentinean writer Jorge LuisBorges (1899–1986) examines the nature of reality, in particular epistemologicalboundaries to knowing in the world and universe. In this tale Borges is concerned withepistemic certainty, whether the universe is decipherable by use of reason, philosophy,or scientific investigation. I examine Borges’ tale as an allegory of the dilemma modernsfind themselves in, in an age when the moorings which have anchored us, belief inGod, religious faith, moral absolutes, the idea of (...) progress, that language can mirrorreality, have all been subject to radical critique. In this regard, Borges stands at the cuspof postmodernism and can be seen as a precursor of this movement. Borges finds thesearch for meaning a noble yet frustrating human endeavor, underlain with a fear weare denied contact with the reality of things. The Library offers hope of revelation ofthe universe’s secrets, yet presents formidable barriers to understanding. In his visionBorges presents thought-provoking images of society, the search for knowledge, and ofhuman-imposed order on a chaotic reality. Keywords: Epistemology, knowledge, certainty, postmodernism, mathematics, North Carolina,USA. (shrink)

American Christian Zionism has recently become the subject of much publishing and discussion, most of which focuses on the idea that millenarian convictions are motivating Christian Zionists to attempt to hasten the apocalypse. This approach is neither entirely fair nor particularly beneficial for the purposes of challenging this influential movement, as it trades more in the easy dismissal of caricatures than in substantive theological engagement. This essay explores a narrow facet of such engagement through dialogue between the eschatologies of John (...) Howard Yoder and contemporary American Christian Zionism. An exposition of the connections between the cross, ecclesiology, social action, and apocalyptic in Yoder's eschatology will bring into relief particularly problematic aspects of traditional dispensationalist Christology and ecclesiology which leave continuing legacies in the system of convictions which sustains contemporary Christian Zionist activism. (shrink)

In The Minority Body, Elizabeth Barnes rejects prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability for two reasons. First, because they understand disability in terms of oppressive social responses to bodily impairment, they cannot make sense of disability pride. Second, they maintain a problematic distinction between impairment and disability. In response to these challenges, this paper defends a version of the social model of disability, which we call the Social Exclusion Model. On our account, to be disabled is to be in (...) a bodily or psychological state that is represented as an impairment in the prevailing ideology of one’s society, and to be excluded from valuable activities on the basis of this representation. While this model refers to a distinction between disability and impairment, it makes no presuppositions about which bodies function ‘normally’ and which do not. It is the ideology of impairment rather than impairment itself that does any work to determine whether a person is disabled. We argue that this model answers some of the important objections that Barnes raises against prevailing social constructionist accounts of disability, and that it’s focus on the oppressive social positioning of disabled people gives it explanatory power that Barnes’s own account lacks. (shrink)

I investigate the normative status of an unexamined category of emotions: ‘lyrical’ emotions about the transience of things. Lyrical emotions are often accused of sentimentality—a charge that expresses the idea that they are unfitting responses to their objects. However, when we test the merits of that charge using the standard model of emotion evaluation, a surprising problem emerges: it turns out that we cannot make normative distinctions between episodes of such feelings. Instead, it seems that lyrical emotions are always fitting. (...) Although this claim is counterintuitive, the price of denying it is to hold that such emotions are never fitting—an equally strange result. If this is correct, then the commonplace discourse of sentimentality surrounding lyrical emotions lacks normative moorings. (shrink)

We agree with Svirsky, Howard, and Berman that the US Food and Drug Administration plays various roles, only one of which is the technical review and evaluation of product safety and e...

Professor Eames explores the development of Russell’s own philosophy in interaction with ten of his contemporaries: Bradley, Joachim, Moore, Frege, Meinong, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Schiller, James, and Dewey. Her examination of these interactions affords a new historical perspective on 20th century analytic philosophy as well as a deeper understanding of Russell’s philosophy and its influence.