Selling fair-trade products can be problematic because of their higher price when compared with conventional alternatives. We propose that one way to solve this problem is to make consumers aware of the benefits of fair-trade. To this end, we perform three experimental studies to show that partitioned pricing (PP), which explicitly displays fair-trade as a separate price component, increases consumers’ purchase intention toward the fair-trade product. This effect can be explained by increased perceptions of price fairness, which itself is mediated (...) through transparency (but only if an additional verbal justification of the fair-trade price component is present). In the absence of such a verbal justification, recalled prices instead of transparency explain the positive effect of PP on consumers’ purchase intentions. Interestingly, boundary conditions of this effect barely exist. Our incentive-aligned study illustrates that PP is associated with a 20% increase in purchases of fair-trade products. The results demonstrate an opportunity to increase the market share of fair-trade products, which increases social welfare and sustainability. (shrink)

The ethical and social implications of data mining, algorithmic curation and automation in the context of social media have been of heightened concern for a range of researchers with interests in digital media in recent years, with particular concerns about privacy arising in the context of mobile and locative media. Despite their wide adoption and economic importance, mobile dating apps have received little scholarly attention from this perspective – but they are intense sites of data generation, algorithmic processing, and cross-platform (...) data-sharing; bound up with competing cultures of production, exploitation and use. In this paper, we describe the ways various forms of data are incorporated into, and emerge from, hook-up apps’ business logics, socio-technical arrangements, and cultures of use to produce multiple and intersecting data cultures. We propose a multi-layered research agenda for critical and empirical inquiry into this field, and suggest appropriate conceptual and methodological frameworks for exploring the social and political challenges of data cultures. (shrink)

_From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke_ In the ancient world Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build. Chronicling the history of the struggle (...) for religious freedom from the early Christian movement through the seventeenth century, Robert Louis Wilken shows that the origins of religious freedom and liberty of conscience are religious, not political, in origin. They took form before the Enlightenment through the labors of men and women of faith who believed there could be no justice in society without liberty in the things of God. This provocative book, drawing on writings from the early Church as well as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reminds us of how “the meditations of the past were fitted to affairs of a later day.”. (shrink)

Early Christians understood that not every way to God is sound or elevating, that some forms of religion set our hearts on lesser goods, some teach us to honor and venerate improper objects, some abase rather than uplift.

This paper is concerned with tracing how the notion of place circulates and is understood in literature from the 1980s and 1990s on computer-mediated information and communications technologies. It provides a brief account of at least two ways that the notion of place circulates in the discourse of the virtual. The first is that these technologies enable 'new' spaces that are claimed to be separate from conventional spaces and places. The second, contradictorily, is that the metaphor of place is crucial (...) as a setting for online social interaction. The paper also explores how we might understand the 'place' of place in the discourse of the virtual. It does this by drawing parallels from Jacques Derrida's critique of spatial metaphor in the text of philosophy with the use of place-based metaphors in the discourse of the virtual. This examination reveals that the reduction of place to metaphor in writing on virtual technologies belies the persistent and subtle force that is exerted by metaphor in general. Furthermore, the prevalence of place-based metaphors in the discourse of the virtual points to the ongoing importance of place as a wider concept. In particular, the notion of place is in fact fundamental to how virtual technologies are framed and understood. The paper concludes by sketching some of the possibilities and potential implications that emerge from this argument. (shrink)

Depuis la publication des Sources chrétiennes et les travaux d'H. de Lubac, l'herméneutique biblique a fait de grand progrès. Une lecture purement littérale ou historique doit être dépassée. La tradition chrétienne appliquait l'allégorie à l'Ancien Testament, conformément à la pratique de s. Paul, non pas au Nouveau. Certes, les textes ont un sens littéral propre, mais les conditions nouvelles d'existence en Christ imposent de les entendre de manière neuve, surtout dans la liturgie et la catéchèse. Par ailleurs, ils offrent de (...) quoi ouvrir à la compréhension du mystère chrétien. L'allégorie résiste ainsi à la tyrannie de l'historicisme, sans manquer pour autant de réalisme. (shrink)