Books reviewed in this article: The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman with Gary A. Herion, David F. Graf, John David Pleins. The Gospel of Matthew. By Daniel J. Harrington. Paul: An Introduction to his Thought. By C. K. Barrett. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identiy. By Daniel Boyarin. New Testament Theology. By G. B. Caird, completed and edited by L. D. Hurst. The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius. By Peter Widdicombe. Dieu et (...) le Christ selon Grégoire de Nysse. By Bernard Pottier. Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure. By Robert Sokolowski. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. By Werner Jeanrond. Theologie aus Efahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner: Edited by Mariano Delgado and Mathias‐Lutz Bachmann. Bernhard Welte's Fundamental Theological Approach to Christology.. By Anthony J. Godzieba. Sacred Identity: Exploring a Theology of the Person. By Jane Kopas. A Salvation Audit. By Colin Grant. Medical Ezhics: Sources Of Catholic Teachings, Second Edition. Edited by Kevin O'Rourke and Philip Boyle. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. By Martin Goodman. Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Edited by Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf. St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Its History, Theology and Texts. By John A. McGuckin. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. By Neil B. McLynn. Basil of Cuesareu. By Philip Rousseau. Augustine. By Mary T. Clark. Irenaeus. By Dennis Minns. Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople. By Vasiliki Limberis. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. By Charles D. Wright. Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceils of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes. Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth‐Centuy Jurist. By Wolfgang P. Müller. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, Volume II: The Growth of Mysticism. By Bernard McGinn. Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century. By Christoph T. Maier. Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation. By Henriette Peters. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. Edited by Thomas M. King and Mary Wood Gilbert. Pseudo‐Marry: By John Donne. Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Anthony Raspa. Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England. By M. L. Brown. The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles 1 and the Remoulding of Anglicanism. By Julian Davies. Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles. By Bruno Neveu. Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet and Missionary. By François Renault. Dom Columba Marmion: A Biography By Mark Tierney. Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century. By Timothy Yates. Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. Edited by Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek and Dennis Thomson. (shrink)

Eye gaze is a ubiquitous cue in child–caregiver interactions, and infants are highly attentive to eye gaze from very early on. However, the question of why infants show gaze-sensitive behavior, and what role this sensitivity to gaze plays in their language development, is not yet well-understood. To gain a better understanding of the role of eye gaze in infants' language learning, we conducted a broad systematic review of the developmental literature for all studies that investigate the role of eye gaze (...) in infants' language development. Across 77 peer-reviewed articles containing data from typically developing human infants in the domain of language development, we identified two broad themes. The first tracked the effect of eye gaze on four developmental domains: vocabulary development, word–object mapping, object processing, and speech processing. Overall, there is considerable evidence that infants learn more about objects and are more likely to form word–object mappings in the presence of eye gaze cues, both of which are necessary for learning words. In addition, there is good evidence for longitudinal relationships between infants' gaze following abilities and later receptive and expressive vocabulary. However, many domains are understudied; further work is needed to decide whether gaze effects are specific to tasks, such as word–object mapping or whether they reflect a general learning enhancement mechanism. The second theme explored the reasons why eye gaze might be facilitative for learning, addressing the question of whether eye gaze is treated by infants as a specialized socio-cognitive cue. We concluded that the balance of evidence supports the idea that eye gaze facilitates infants' learning by enhancing their arousal, memory, and attentional capacities to a greater extent than other low-level attentional cues. However, as yet, there are too few studies that directly compare the effect of eye gaze cues and non-social, attentional cues for strong conclusions to be drawn. We also suggest that there might be a developmental effect, with eye gaze, over the course of the first 2 years of life, developing into a truly ostensive cue that enhances language learning across the board. (shrink)

In recent years, several countries have enacted guidelines and/or mandatory laws to increase the presence of women on the boards of companies. Through these regulatory interventions, the aim is to eradicate the social and labor grievances that women have traditionally experienced and which has relegated them to smaller-scale jobs. Nevertheless, and despite the advances achieved, the female representation in the boardroom remains far from the desired levels. In this context, it is now necessary to enhance the advantages of board gender (...) diversity from both ethical and economic points of view. This article examines the relation between board gender diversity and economic results in Spain: the second country in the world to legally require gender quotas in boardrooms and historically characterized by a minimal female participation in the workforce. Based on a sample of 125 non-financial firms listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2009, our findings show that in the period analyzed the increase of the number of women on boards was over 98 %. This suggests that compulsory legislation offers an efficient framework to execute the recommendation of Spanish codes of good governance by means of the increase in the number of women in the boards of firms. Furthermore, we find that the increase in the number of women on the boards is positively related to higher economic results. Therefore, both results suggest that gender diversity in boardrooms should be incremented, mandatory laws being a key factor to do so. (shrink)

Some theories of personal identity allow some variation in what it takes for a person to survive from context to context; and sometimes this is determined by the desires of person-stages or the practices of communities.This leads to problems for decision making in contexts where what is chosen will affect personal identity.‘Temporal Phase Pluralism’ solves such problems by allowing that there can be a plurality of persons constituted by a sequence of person stages. This illuminates difficult decision making problems when (...) persons have to choose between different life-altering choices. (shrink)

We present two prudent semantics within Dung's theory of argumentation. They are based on two new notions of extension, referred to as p-extension and c-extension. Two arguments cannot belong to the same p-extension whenever one of them attacks indirectly the other one. Two arguments cannot belong to the same c-extension whenever one of them indirectly attacks a third argument while the other one indirectly defends the third. We argue that our semantics lead to a better handling of controversial arguments than (...) Dung's ones. We compare the prudent inference relations induced by our semantics w.r.t. cautiousness; we also compare them with the inference relations induced by Dung's semantics. (shrink)

Arabidopsis thaliana (Thale cress, Arabidopsis) is an ideal model organism for the molecular genetic analysis of many plant processes. The availability of a complete physical map would greatly facilitate the gene cloning steps in these studies. The small genome size of Arabidopsis makes the construction of such a map a feasible goal. One of the approaches to construct an overlapping library of the Arabidopsis genome takes advantage of the many mapped markers and the availability of Arabidopsis yeast artificial chromosome (YAC) (...) libraries. Mapped molecular markers are used to identify corresponding YAC clones and thereby place them on the genetic map. Subsequently, these YAC clones provide the framework for directed walking experiments aimed at closing the gaps between the YAC contigs. Adopting this strategy, YAC clones comprising about 10% of the genome have been assigned to the top halves of Arabidopsis chromosomes 4 and 5. Extensive walking experiments in a 10 cM interval of chromosome 4 have resulted in two contiguous regions in the megabase size range. (shrink)

Op-ed written with historian Caroline Light about some of the ways that ideas of democratic citizenship can become perverted by the idea that personal safety required armed defense against attacks by strangers.

Corporations are spending a substantial and increasing amount of money on corporate social responsibility. However, little is known about the effects on key stakeholders of these activities. This study investigates if CSR activities have an effect on employees’ affective commitment. Two models test to what extent employees’ CSR perception, involvement in decision processes, and demographic variables are related to their AC relative to their perception of positive organizational support. The analysis is based on a sample of 512 employees from 4 (...) Scandinavian companies; 3 Norwegian and 1 Swedish, randomly selected from a population of 6,710 mostly Norwegian and Swedish employees in those 2 countries. The results indicate that CSR perception is a significant predictor of AC, although how employees feel that the company cares about them has stronger explanatory power on AC. Contrary to the few other studies addressing AC and CSR, gender was not found to be a significant variable in the model. (shrink)

In contemporary society, childhood is characterized as mediatized and commercialized. Media consumption worlds (MCWs) are a phenomenon that mirrors both aspects. They are narratives that are presented through various media platforms, games, and merchandising products. In this paper, the concept of children’s MCWs is developed theoretically and investigated empirically using the case of primary school children’s appropriation of MCWs as well as parental mediation and attitude in Austria and Germany. A mixed-methods design was applied, starting with qualitative interviews with children (...) and their parents and followed by an online survey for parents (N=327). The study revealed that children find individual ways to deal with MCWs, some of which foster creativity and self-expression but also consumerism. The parents’ attitude is ambivalent. They view MCWs as beneficial in terms of creativity, positive values, and as peer group experience. However, parents observe critically that MCWs lure children to the media and to consumption. (shrink)

Humans can follow different social learning strategies, sometimes oriented toward the models’ characteristics. The goal of the present study was to explore which who-strategy is preferentially followed in the technological context based on the models’ psychological characteristics. We identified three potential who-strategies: Copy the pedagogue, copy the engineer, and copy the friend. We developed a closed-group micro-society paradigm in which participants had to build the highest possible towers. Participants began with an individual building phase. Then, they were gathered to discuss (...) the best solutions to increase tower height. After this discussion phase, they had to make a new building attempt, followed by another discussion phase, and so forth for a total of six building phases and five discussion rounds. This methodology allowed us to create an attraction score for each participant. We also assessed participants’ theory-of-mind skills, technical-reasoning skills, and prosocialness to predict participants’ attraction scores based on these measures. Results show that we learn from engineers because they are the most successful. Their attraction power is not immediate, but after they have been identified as attractors, their technique is copied irrespective of their pedagogy or friendliness. These findings open avenues for the study of the cognitive bases of human technological culture. (shrink)

Plato’s constant reservations concerning art from the moral and political point of view have to some extent concealed the aesthetic dimension of his analyses of art and helped to consolidate the idea that there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a Platonic aesthetics. We wish to contest the latter view and to show that Plato, without considering aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical sphere, does develop a theory of sensibility and recognizes the specificity of aesthetic pleasure and judgement as well (...) as the specificity of the relation between art and reality. We will thus have proven that there is indeed a Platonic aesthetics. (shrink)

Wijdicks and colleagues1 recently presented the Full Outline of UnResponsiveness (FOUR) scale as an alternative to the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)2 in the evaluation of consciousness in severely brain-damaged patients. They studied 120 patients in an intensive care setting (mainly neuro-intensive care) and claimed that “the FOUR score detects a locked-in syndrome, as well as the presence of a vegetative state.”1 We fully agree that the FOUR is advantageous in identifying locked-in patients given that it specifically tests for eye movements (...) or blinking on command. This is welcomed given that misdiagnosis of the locked-in syndrome has been shown to occur in more than half of the cases (see Laureys and colleagues3 for review). As for the diagnosis of the vegetative state, the scale explicitly tests for visual pursuit, and hence can disentangle the vegetative state from the minimally conscious state (MCS). The diagnostic criteria for MCS have been proposed4 only recently, but Wijdicks and colleagues1 do not mention the existence of this clinical entity in their article. As for the vegetative state, MCS can be encountered in the acute or subacute setting as a transitional state on the way to further recovery, or it can be a more chronic or even permanent condition. The MCS refers to patients showing inconsistent, albeit clearly discernible, minimal behavioral evidence of consciousness (eg, localization of noxious stimuli, eye fixation or tracking, reproducible movement to command, or nonfunctional verbalization).4 The FOUR scale does not test for all of the behavioral criteria required to diagnose MCS.4 It is known from the literature (see Majerus and colleagues5 for review) that about a third of patients diagnosed with vegetative state are actually in MCS, and this misdiagnosis can lead to major clinical, therapeutic, and ethical consequences. We tested the ability of the newly proposed FOUR scale to correctly diagnose the vegetative state in an acute (intensive care and neurology ward) and chronic (neurorehabilitation) setting.. (shrink)

Nearly five centuries have elapsed since Apollonia von Freyberg departed from her convent in Mülhausen. Little is known about this Poor Clare nun who witnessed the dissolution of her conventual shelter in the midst of her community’s protracted financial struggles as well as spiritual conflict catalyzed by the emerging Reformation. It is fortuitous, however, that documents related to Apollonia are preserved at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and at the Archives de Mulhouse, in Mulhouse, France. Among these (...) are letters written to and on behalf of Apollonia as well as a detailed church inventory in which Apollonia’s many donations to her convent are recorded.... (shrink)

Background: Conducting video-research in birth settings raises challenges for ethics review boards to view birthing women and research-midwives as capable, autonomous decision-makers. Aim: This study aimed to gain an understanding of how the ethical approval process was experienced and to chronicle the perceived risks and benefits. Research design: The Birth Unit Design project was a 2012 Australian ethnographic study that used video recording to investigate the physical design features in the hospital birthing space that might influence both verbal and non-verbal (...) communication and the experiences of childbearing women, midwives and supporters. Participants and research context: Six women, 11 midwives and 11 childbirth supporters were filmed during the women’s labours in hospital birth units and interviewed 6 weeks later. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by an Australian Health Research Ethics Committee after a protracted process of negotiation. Findings: The ethics committee was influenced by a traditional view of research as based on scientific experiments resulting in a poor understanding of video-ethnographic research, a paradigmatic view of the politics and practicalities of modern childbirth processes, a desire to protect institutions from litigation, and what we perceived as a paternalistic approach towards protecting participants, one that was at odds with our aim to facilitate situations in which women could make flexible, autonomous decisions about how they might engage with the research process. Discussion: The perceived need for protection was overly burdensome and against the wishes of the participants themselves; ultimately, this limited the capacity of the study to improve care for women and babies. Conclusion: Recommendations are offered for those involved in ethical approval processes for qualitative research in childbirth settings. The complexity of issues within childbirth settings, as in most modern healthcare settings, should be analysed using a variety of research approaches, beyond efficacy-style randomised controlled trials, to expand and improve practice-based results. (shrink)

We can think about the use of controlled substances in the treatment of anxiety disorders in two simple but diametrically opposed ways. First, we can say that anxiety disorders are trivial and require only acts of willpower, or, if anxiety disorders do require treatment, they are better treated without the use of benzodiazepines. When BZs are used to treat anxiety, they pose grave risks of addiction to the patients to whom these medicines are prescribed; they relieve patients’ symptoms, but are (...) the equivalent of a pharmacological “roach motel,” a haven into which many unsuspecting patients enter, but from which few emerge without becoming addicted. Patients must then face terrible struggles to free themselves of dependence on BZs, and this compounds the problem for which they sought treatment. Furthermore, the large number of prescriptions for BZs are a threat to the public health because these drugs are widely abused by alcoholics and drug addicts. (shrink)

Le critère d’absence d’envie, introduit par J. Tinbergen et utilisé par certaines théories de la justice distributive, ne permet pas, dans tous les cas, d’identifier des allocations de biens respectant l’exigence de pareto-optimalité. Pour cette raison il a été, durant un temps, délaissé. Néanmoins, ce critère demeure utile dans certains contextes dont nous voudrions préciser les caractéristiques. En effet, plusieurs travaux récents d’économie normative ont montré que, sous certaines conditions et même dans un contexte de production, l’absence d’envie offre une (...) solution à la recherche d’allocations équitables. Ainsi, nous voudrions examiner, à partir de ces résultats, sous quelles conditions le champ d’application du critère d’absence d’envie peut être étendu, en vue d’identifier des allocations équitables, dans un contexte économique d’échange comme de production.The non envy criterium, introduced by Tinbergen and convoqued by some theories of justice, cannot always be used to identify allocations which also satisfy the requirement of Pareto-optimality. This is the reason why it had been neglected for a while. Nevertheless, it is still useful in some contexts we would like to describe. In fact, recent conclusions of normative economy demonstrated that, in some conditions and even in the framework of production, this criterium provide a solution for fair allocations. Precisely, we would like, on the basis of these results, to determine which extent has the implementation of non envy criterium in order to identify fair distributive allocations in a context of exchange and production as well. (shrink)

In this paper anorexia nervosa is examined through three lenses to determine its possible causes. This paper contains a clinical analysis of the anorexic personality, a psychoanalytic/religious interpretation of the demands of society, and· a feminist reinterpretationof the effects of those demands on the female body. The societal demands to renounce instincts, when examined through a feminist lens, reveals that these demands, in concert with the detrimental effects of feminine socialization and characteristics of the anorexic personality, may lead some women (...) to view their needs as not important, and cause a detachment from and turning against the body in the form of anorexia nervosa. It is concluded that anorexia is not just women taking a diet “too far.” There are other psychological, philosophical, and social factors leading to a prevalence of anorexia nervosa in Western culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Vagaries of Exemplarity: Distortion or Dismissal?Michel JeanneretExample is an uncertain looking-glass, all embracing, turning all ways.Montaigne 1Ancients and Moderns: Negotiating CoexistenceDo the Ancients provide the Renaissance with a repertoire of infallible examples? Do they have such absolute authority that their models, whether ethical or aesthetic, retain their relevance in every circumstance? The question is part and parcel of that thinking, which is fundamental to the sixteenth century, on (...) the status of Greco-Roman paradigms in the management of public and private life, or in the methods of science and the arts. Before analyzing two particular responses to classical exemplarity—by Erasmus and Montaigne—we shall set the problem in its general context.Whether lobbying for intense faithfulness to the models or recognizing the need for divergence, whether insisting on continuity or the need for change, on the possibility or impossibility of equaling the masters, everyone in the sixteenth century measured art, knowledge, and moral reflection according to the Greek and Roman norm. Scholars and artists together entered into this exchange on a daily basis and everybody, whatever the extent of their dependence, knew that their work could not be conceived or perceived as anything other than the more or less free modification of a particular vestige of classical heritage. To escape tradition was unthinkable, but to accept it resignedly was absurd. All room for maneuver was therefore in the shifting difference between [End Page 565] old and new, and in the extent of its transformation. 2 It is then predictable, given these conditions, that the transmission of classical examples should be subject to turbulence without, however, undergoing any violent break.The question was even more relevant given that the sense of history, the consciousness of time past being irrevocably lost took on a new resonance now. Recognizing and acknowledging the phenomenon of irreversible development—whether good or bad—counts as one of the most important intellectual acquisitions of the Renaissance. 3 The Middle Ages had been able to maintain the illusion of continuity and, by dressing Antiquity up in the manners and colors of feudal chivalry, had seen itself reflected in it as in a mirror. With the influx of new documents and the perfecting of more rigorous methods of interpretation—the techniques of philology—intellectuals had to acknowledge evident change. The past could no longer be modeled on the present; all imitation would henceforth be witness to the impossibility of any perfect match. At the same time as the classical world was coming to light, it was also getting further away, getting lost. This bereavement sometimes sparked off enough regressive nostalgia to provide matter for many an antiquarian project. In reaction to this loss, most humanists were motivated into salvaging the salvageable by injecting a dose of novelty into the rift created by their awareness of history. The intellectuals of the Renaissance would often have felt as if they were reenacting the famous encounter of the Romans and the Greeks; like the Romans they wanted to be both conquering and conquered, free and faithful, differing and deferring. For them also the antique model will be an ideal simultaneously present and lost, necessary and foreign.Two opposing solutions to this dilemma seemed to offer themselves: on the one hand an unconditional return to the sources minimizing the effects of history, and on the other an exploitation of the eclipses of the past, giving the present a chance to fight it out with the Ancients. We shall sketch out each of these two strategies: both the methods of respectful transmission and those of transformative intervention.Fine-tuned by the humanists, philology was closely linked to the advent of historical consciousness. Since classical civilization had definitively come to an end, the philologist devoted himself to reconstituting and preserving it, in all its original specificity. He removed the layers of interference accumulated over the centuries, reestablished the texts in their authentic versions, maybe even providing commentary on the meaning of the work within its context. Theoretically his intervention stopped there. Acknowledging the difference and [End Page 566] superiority of past authors, he did not touch their works except to restore them to their pristine selves. Soon... (shrink)

While 23andMe aspires to be “the world's trusted source of personal genetic information,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) believes that the company's advertising practices have been anything but trustworthy. Last November, a harshly worded FDA “warning letter” demanded that the direct‐to‐consumer genetic testing company immediately discontinue marketing its unapproved “medical device.” The tussle between 23andMe and the FDA has attracted more attention than a typical disagreement between a company and a government agency. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes identify (...) 23andMe as a “Big Bang Disruption”: an invention that revolutionizes the existing market, foiling both industry incumbents and unprepared regulators. The outcome of the FDA's current review to hold the answer to the million‐dollar question: how will DTC genetic testing be regulated in the future? Ideally, the FDA's regulations should not pose undue burdens on consumers seeking personal genetic information but, rather, help consumers make a transition out of the consumer setting and into the medical setting. (shrink)

The research aims to investigate the characteristics and risks associated with the handling of sensitive data in the implementation of public policies within the digital government model. To achieve this, a hypothetical-deductive method and bibliographic and documentary procedures are employed, proposing an interdisciplinary discussion on technological advancement, data protection, transparency, and public policies. The justification revolves around the importance of a comprehensive, cohesive system that genuinely protects sensitive personal data, considering the need to keep pace with technological developments and maintain (...) a minimum level of security in the digital age at both national and international levels. There is no doubt that the judicious and strategic use of data has the potential to drive substantial improvements in policy evaluation, decision-making, and the relationship between government and citizens. However, dealing with personal data also means addressing risks with responsibility, transparency, and respect for individual rights. (shrink)

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker’s (...) and the hearer’s perspective. (shrink)

The neutralization of contrasts in form or meaning that is sometimes observed in language production and comprehension is at odds with the classical view that language is a systematic one-to-one pairing of forms and meanings. This special issue is concerned with patterns of forms and meanings in language. The papers in this special issue arose from a series of workshops that were organized to explore variants of bidirectional Optimality Theory and Game Theory as models of the interplay between the speaker’s (...) and the hearer’s perspective. (shrink)

Introduction:The concept of mentalizing is nowadays widely used in research as well as in clinical practice. Despite its popularity, the development of an economic assessment is still challenging. The Mentalization Scale appears to be a promising measurement with good psychometric properties but lacking convergent validity with the Reflective Functioning Scale.Objective:This study aims to test the construct validity of the Mentalization Scale through correlations with the gold standard, the Reflective Functioning Scale, within a clinical sample. Furthermore, it was of interest to (...) replicate its internal consistency.Methods:Twenty-six inpatients of an acute psychiatric ward in Vienna were given the Mentalization Scale (MentS). They were interviewed with the Brief Reflective Function Interview, which was coded with the Reflective Functioning Scale. Correlations and internal consistency were calculated.Results:Concerning the primary aim of this study, the validity was satisfactory for the MentS whole-scale mentalizing as well as for the subscales self- and other-oriented mentalizing. Internal consistency was lower to the findings of the developer and close to the 0.70 threshold.Conclusion:Our findings could foster the psychometric properties of the MentS. Furthermore, the MentS seems to be a promising measurement tool for detecting different dimensions of reflective functioning. Limitations and further research are discussed. (shrink)