An estimated 14 million children are parented by gay or lesbian couples. Research indicates that children of same-sex parents are as well adjusted as their peers of opposite-sex parents. However, previous research has yet to examine how these youth negotiate their own process of coming out about their families to others. We sought to identify the patterns, issues and themes that recur in the coming out process of these youth. Recommendations for school personnel are described.

This incisive book deals with the use of the criminal law to enforce morality, in particular sexual morality, a subject of particular interest and importance since the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957. Professor Hart first considers John Stuart Mill's famous declaration: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community is to prevent harm to others." During the last hundred years this doctrine has twice been sharply challenged by two (...) great lawyers: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the great Victorian judge and historian of the common law, and Lord Devlin, who both argue that the use of the criminal law to enforce morality is justified. The author examines their arguments in some detail, and sets out to demonstrate that they fail to recognize distinction of vital importance for legal and political theory, and that they espouse a conception of the function of legal punishment that few would now share. (shrink)

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open‐endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be learned. The article considers what these constraints might be and the different kinds of lessons one might learn from experience, which (...) the common way of taking the question ignores. Initially I attempt to distinguish between lessons that have to do with action and those that have to do with understanding, between lessons that are about the results of our actions and those that are about the meaning of actions and events. On closer examination, however, these distinctions are seen to break down, to represent a difference of degree rather than of kind. In the latter part of the article, therefore, I find the crucial distinction to be between lessons that we can apply, while being ourselves unchanged, and lessons which, by changing the way in which we see and respond to people and events, re‐constitute ourselves and thus express themselves through us willy‐nilly in our subsequent thoughts, words and actions. (shrink)

This essay seeks to understand the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the United States in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to (...) ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black activism that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity. (shrink)

Rechtsfilosofische studie over de Italiaanse denker (1668-1744).

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a speculative theology that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of God. Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God. Breaking out of the classical doctrine of divine persons, Hart reimagines Trinity as composed of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony an emerging Godhead in relation to origins, temporal creation, and human existence. The book s ultimate import is (...) that all of Being and Nonbeing emerges together in interrelation and interdependence. This divine reality, Hart explains, is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of a living-dying process that implicates all things, existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. Doctrinal closuresomething that every orthodox theology requiresthus becomes impossible, and rightly so. Hart confronts those orthodoxies by asking: How can thinking of God reach closure when the divine is itself unfinished and its appearance to us always amounts to new creation? Hart s insights open the potencies of the nothing to the actualization of freedomthe freedom to create. That is, the nothing is not for nothingit is procreative. In the domain of radical speculative theology, then, Hart offers a fully deconstructive revisioning of the Christian God as ever an emerging and self-transfiguring actuality. It is a work with which all serious students of theology will wish to contend.". (shrink)

Singular they has emerged as a key term in contemporary gender politics, reflecting growing usage of they/them as nonbinary personal pronouns. Drawing on interviews with 54 progressive gender activists, we consider how singular they can be used to resist and redo aspects of the prevailing gender structure. We identify three distinct usages of singular they: as a nonbinary personal pronoun, as a universal gender-neutral pronoun, and as an indefinite pronoun when a person’s self-identified gender is unknown. While previous research on (...) singular they as a gender-inclusive language practice has focused primarily on its usage as a nonbinary personal pronoun, our findings point to the relevance for gender politics of all three usages. Our analysis offers new insight into how nonbinary they challenges dominant gender norms and practices beyond incorporating additional gender categories. Given our findings, we propose further investigation of how using gender-neutral pronouns for everyone in specific contexts can advance progressive activists’ goals. Finally, we argue that the longstanding usage of singular they as an indefinite pronoun has new importance today in affirming gender as a self-determined identity. (shrink)

Explores Blanchot's philosophical meditation on three poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and René Char alongside his contribution to Jewish philosophy.

This chapter presents what people think about God and how one should act in this world. It discusses how people should pray, and that, if possible, one could pray through poetry. It also discusses why poetry is considered as sacrament, on how its writings reflect one's belief. It focuses on “Lachrimae”, a poem that exemplifies sacramental manner.

The Joyless Economy seeks to explain the paradox of rising consumption and pervasive dissatifaction, and is thus often cited as a critique of consumer society. Yet it is rather ambivalent as critique. A less ambivalent critique would be predicated on the existence of biases toward private consumption as against public consumption, savings, free time, and the environment. These biases result from two sources: the importance of social comparison and the non‐existence of a market in working hours. Because positional competitions occur (...) far more readily around visible private consumer goods, these take a privileged place in expenditures. This process is compounded by the fact that employers systematically deny opportunities to trade income for leisure. (shrink)

Cadherin‐mediated cell‐cell adhesion is perturbed in protein tyrosine kinase (PTK)‐transformed cells. While cadherins themselves appear to be poor PTK substrates, their cytoplasmic binding partners, the Arm catenins, are excellent PTK substrates and therefore good candidates for mediating PTK‐induced changes in cadherin behavior. These proteins, p120ctn, β‐catenin and plakoglobin, bind to the cytoplasmic region of classical cadherins and function to modulate adhesion and/or bridge cadherins to the actin cytoskeleton. In addition, as demonstrated recently for β‐catenin, these proteins also have crucial signaling (...) roles that may or may not be related to their effects on cell‐cell adhesion. Tyrosine phosphorylation of cadherin complexes is well documented and widely believed to modulate cell adhesiveness. The data to date, however, is largely correlative and the mechanism of action remains unresolved. In this review, we discuss the current literature and suggest models whereby tyrosine phosphorylation of Arm catenins contribute to regulation or perturbation of cadherin function. (shrink)

In recent years much has been said about how new democracies are backsliding or have regressed since the turn of the century when hope and optimism about the future spread of democracy was widespread. However, ideas that democracy would spread were based on institutional and governance indicators rather than from the perspective of everyday citizens. When we look at public attitudes towards democracy during this period, we can see that such optimism was perhaps misplaced or premature. Drawing on findings from (...) the AsiaBarometer and the World Values Survey, this research finds that public attitudes during this time were not overly convinced by democracy and certainly not yet satisfied with their government's performance in terms of providing basic democratic freedoms and independence. (shrink)

Solidarity-the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation between citizens that are essential for a thriving polity-is a basic goal of all political communities. Yet it is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in multiracial societies. In an era of increasing global migration and democratization, that issue is more pressing than perhaps ever before. In the past few decades, racial diversity and the problems of justice that often accompany it have risen dramatically throughout the world. It features prominently nearly everywhere: from the (...) United States, where it has been a perennial social and political problem, to Europe, which has experienced an unprecedented influx of Muslim and African immigrants, to Latin America, where the rise of vocal black and indigenous movements has brought the question to the fore. Political theorists have long wrestled with the topic of political solidarity, but they have not had much to say about the impact of race on such solidarity, except to claim that what is necessary is to move beyond race. The prevailing approach has been: How can a multicultural and multiracial polity, with all of the different allegiances inherent in it, be transformed into a unified, liberal one? Juliet Hooker flips this question around. In multiracial and multicultural societies, she argues, the practice of political solidarity has been indelibly shaped by the social fact of race. The starting point should thus be the existence of racialized solidarity itself: How can we create political solidarity when racial and cultural diversity are more or less permanent? Unlike the tendency to claim that the best way to deal with the problem of racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, Hooker stresses the importance of coming to terms with racial injustice, and explores the role that it plays in both the United States and Latin America. Coming to terms with the lasting power of racial identity, she contends, is the starting point for any political project attempting to achieve solidarity. (shrink)

In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, A. (...) R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world. (shrink)

Children's exposure to food marketing has exploded in recent years, along with rates of obesity and overweight. Children of color and low-income children are disproportionately at risk for both marketing exposure and becoming overweight.Comprehensive reviews of the literature show that advertising is effective in changing children's food preferences and diets.This paper surveys the scope and scale of current marketing practices, and focuses on the growing use of symbolic appeals that are central in food brands to themes such as finding an (...) identity and feeling powerful and in control.These themes are so potent because they are central to children in their development and constitution of self. The paper concludes that reduction of exposure to marketing will be a central part of any successfu anti-obesity strategy. (shrink)

It is now well recognized that the United States is a consumer-driven society. Private consumption comprises a rising fraction of GDP, advertising is proliferating, and consumerism, as an ideology and set of values, is widespread. Not surprisingly, those developments are not confined to adults; they also characterize what some have called “the commercialization of childhood.” Children are more involved than ever in media, celebrity, shopping, brand names, and other consumer practices. At the core of this change is children's growing role (...) as independent consumers. In recent years, children's access to income has risen markedly, and they have gone from being purchasers of cheap plastic goods and a few select food items to being a major market for a diverse set of goods and services, including foodstuffs. Unofficial estimates suggest that children aged four to twelve spent a reported $6.1 billion in purchases from their own money in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997, and $30 billion in 2002, for a total increase of four hundred percent. (shrink)

This study is an unusual contribution to the philosophy of mind in that it argues for the sometimes unfashionable view of dualism: that mind and matter are distinct and separate entities as Descartes believed. The author takes as his point of departure the imaginative hypothesis of disembodiment, which establishes the possibility of the mind's being a quite non-material thing. There are clear casual correlations between what is physical and what is mental, and the most serious issue confronting dualism since Descartes (...) has been how such an interaction is possible. Dr Hart sets out to answer this question by showing that the issue is as much about the nature of causation as it is about the natures of mind and matter. (shrink)

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh informeethe demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems.eeLaw's Cuteeon theeeBody of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, TortureeeandeeSacred Flesheeconsiders how such imageseecome to inform laweeand the investment of (...) advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic andeepostcolonialeetheory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recenteeinitiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination witheea consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.eeRogers argues that the modes ofeefascination and excitement that accompanyeesceneseeof torture and female circumcisioneebetray the fantasy of aeepolitical conditioneeagainst which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivityeein aeestate of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration.eeTo support the fantasy of this subject,eethe mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all. (shrink)

The two vegetative cell types of the acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum ‐ amoebae and plasmodia ‐ differ greatly in cellular organisation and behaviour as a result of differences in gene expression. The development of uninucleate amoebae into multinucleate, syncytial plasmodia is under the control of the mating‐type locus matA, which is a complex, multi‐functional locus. A key period during plasmodium development is the extended cell cycle, which occurs in the developing uninucleate cell. During this long cell cycle, many of (...) the changes in cellular organisation that accompany development into the multinucleate stage are initiated including, for example, alterations in microtubule organisation. Genes have been identified that show cell‐type specific expression in either amoebae or plasmodia and many of these genes alter their pattern of expression during the extended cell cycle. With the introduction of a DNA transformation system for P. polycephalum, it is now possible to investigate the functions of genes in the vegetative cell types and their roles in the cellular reorganisations accompanying development. (shrink)

Introduction: from grammatology to cultural graphology -- The psychopathology of writing -- Type ornament -- Sign tailoring -- Psychoanalytic graphology.

Trauma’s ubiquity in society leads to an acknowledgement that damaging experiences likely affect more students than they leave untouched. Dewey acknowledged the importance of the past throughout his theorizing of experience and simultaneously recognized that students need to draw upon past experiences in new learning encounters. In this paper, we argue that Dewey may have opened the door to account for the possibility of traumatic experience affecting learning. We acknowledge the potential of music to prompt a trauma response and seek (...) to explore ways that music education may also provide a mechanism for working through difficult and traumatic pasts. (shrink)