Shaping off-job life is becoming increasingly important for workers to increase and maintain their optimal functioning. Proactively shaping the job domain has been extensively studied, but crafting in the off-job domain has received markedly less research attention. Based on the Integrative Needs Model of Crafting, needs-based off-job crafting is defined as workers’ proactive and self-initiated changes in their off-job lives, which target psychological needs satisfaction. Off-job crafting is posited as a possible means for workers to fulfill their needs and enhance (...) well-being and performance over time. We developed a new scale to measure off-job crafting and examined its relationships to optimal functioning in different work contexts in different regions around the world. Furthermore, we examined the criterion, convergent, incremental, discriminant, and structural validity evidence of the Needs-based Off-job Crafting Scale using multiple methods. The results showed that off-job crafting was related to optimal functioning over time, especially in the off-job domain but also in the job domain. Moreover, the novel off-job crafting scale had good convergent and discriminant validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability. To conclude, our series of studies in various countries show that off-job crafting can enhance optimal functioning in different life domains and support people in performing their duties sustainably. Therefore, shaping off-job life may be beneficial in an intensified and continually changing and challenging working life. (shrink)

Unlimited paid time off policies are currently fashionable and widely discussed by HR professionals around the globe. While on the one hand, paid time off is considered a key benefit by employees and unlimited paid time off policies are seen as a major perk which may help in recruiting and retaining talented employees, on the other hand, early adopters reported that employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates. In this conceptual review, we discuss the (...) theoretical and empirical evidence regarding the potential effects of UPTO on leave utilization, well-being and performance outcomes. We start out by defining UPTO and placing it in a historical and international perspective. Next, we discuss the key role of leave utilization in translating UPTO into concrete actions. The core of our article constitutes the description of the effects of UPTO and the two pathways through which these effects are assumed to unfold: autonomy need satisfaction and detrimental social processes. We moreover discuss the boundary conditions which facilitate or inhibit the successful utilization of UPTO on individual, team, and organizational level. In reviewing the literature from different fields and integrating existing theories, we arrive at a conceptual model and five propositions, which can guide future research on UPTO. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and societal implications of UPTO. (shrink)

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...) -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions (...) des valeurs. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two accounts of the normativity of practical principles: the empiricist account and the rationalist or realist account. It argues against the empiricist view, focusing on the Humean texts that are usually taken to be its locus classicus. It then argues both against the dogmatic rationalist view, and for the Kantian view, through a discussion of Kant's own remarks about instrumental rationality in the second section of the Groundwork. It further argues that the instrumental principle cannot stand alone. (...) Unless there are normative principles directing us to the adoption of certain ends, there can be no requirement to take the means to our ends. The familiar view that the instrumental principle is the only requirement of practical reason is incoherent. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

The use of the English word “reason” in all of these contexts, and the way we translate equivalent terms from other languages, suggests a connection, but what exactly is it? Aristotle and Kant’s conception of what practical reasons are, I believe, can help us to answer this question, by bringing out what is distinctive, and distinctively active, about acting for a reason. That, at least, is what I am going to argue.

Accounts of human beings as essentially social have had a long history in philosophy as reflected in the Ancient Greeks; in African and Asian philosophy; in Modern European thinkers such as Mary Wo...

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 263-275, December 2013.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World ed. by Beatriz Ilari, Susan YoungAmy Christine BeegleBeatriz Ilari and Susan Young, eds., Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Historically, most studies of children’s musical learning have been informed by stage theories of developmental psychology and focused on school music or private instrumental lesson contexts. Over the past few decades, scholars have conducted research (...) that increasingly explores children’s involvement with music in contexts outside of formal learning settings, utilizing methods and models from ethnomusicology, sociology, social psychology, and/or cultural psychology. Nine individually authored chapters in the volume, Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World, edited by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young, convey results, applications, and extensions of one such project that reaches beyond the conventional ethnographic music education study.The bulk of this collection contains findings and interpretations from a collaborative project called MyPlace, MyMusic, followed by several additional chapters that provide descriptions and narratives from subsequent related projects. The original project included fourteen scholars from the International Society of Music Education-Early Childhood Commission, who conducted in-home observations and interviews with parents and children in order to examine the nature of, influences on, and meaning of musical activities that took place in the homes of middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations, including Brazil, Denmark, [End Page 105] Greece, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the U.K., and the United States.Importantly, the project’s designers attempted to avoid complications of transcultural developments by asking each researcher to select children whose families had not recently migrated to their country/locality. The seventeen participating children from twelve countries were also of the same ethnicity and lived in the same “locality” as each researcher in order to ease communication during in-home observations and interviews. Results shed light on issues of children’s family life, schooling, identity, gender, and social class.This project presents a unique contribution to the field of music education in a number of ways. First, most previous studies of music in the homes of children have centered around preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, whereas the present project focuses on seven-year-old children, whose age places them on the cusp of crossing from early to middle childhood. Second, most previous music education researchers have considered issues of social class, ethnicity, and race as independent variables, but the methodology for this project calls for observation and description of each child in his or her home first, followed by comparison of the “cases” to each other. Third, the researchers utilize a Wiki platform to share and collaboratively interpret data collected from home lives of children (photographs, video and audio recordings, texts, and pdf files) among researchers from different countries.The volume is organized into three major sections. Susan Young and Jèssica Pérez-Moreno set the scene in the first two chapters by describing the theoretical underpinnings and methodology for the MyPlace, MyMusic project. The second section of the book includes four chapters in which several individual researchers interpret the project’s data based upon the themes of children’s private musical worlds; belonging/identity/gendered meanings of children’s music making; perspectives and influences of parents; and the role of social class on children’s musical lives. The last three chapters of the book provide detailed descriptions of projects and extensions that developed after the MyPlace, MyMusic project.Following the introductory chapter, in which Ilari and Young explain the background, rationale, goals, and methods of the MyPlace, MyMusic project and provide a reader-friendly table that presents the cultural background and “sources of musical stimulation in the home” for each participating child,1 Susan Young outlines the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the project in the first chapter. Rather than viewing children’s learning as developing and socializing into adulthood, the project researchers were encouraged to look at children as being instead of becoming, as subjects, rather than objects of research, and as having opportunities for agency that are contextual. This theoretical framework stems from the field of Childhood Studies (as cultivated in Scandinavia [End Page 106] and... (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical conundrum between a hospital's ethos of relieving distress, investigation and treatment, and its concurrent duties under English law to administer tests of decision-making capacity and safeguarding protection where it believes the patient may lack this capacity. Delirium, characterised by a precipitous decline in mental functioning exhibiting the shared symptomology of recoverable depressive disorders and terminal dementia, is not uncommon after emergency admission of elderly patients into acute medical hospital wards. The use of functional capacity testing (...) as a benchmark for decision-making capacity for post-discharge residence has been criticised as outdated, conceptually floored, subjective, lacking central guidance, transparent process, and accountability. A study of patient experience demonstrates the potential for hospital misuse of capacity testing, the failure of functional testing to differentiate decision making capacity from the disability of partial cognitive impairment, and how hospital capacity processes can interact and amplify patient pathology thereby decreasing recovery prospects. Prioritisation of mental capacity obligations above thorough investigation of emergent mental pathology and relief of patient anguish, results in extended detention in medical wards lacking bespoke facilities. Further understanding of patient experience is needed to inform policy with interventions tailored to avoid harm and increase wellbeing. (shrink)

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western (...) liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This exploratory study assessed links among children’s moral concern and their ideas about the rights and protection of companion, farm, wild animals and ecosystems. Sixty-one children responded to three interview questions that were coded as either anthropocentric or biocentric in orientation. Results revealed unique links among children’s moral concern and their ideas about the rights and protection of different types of animals and ecosystems. Biocentric moral concern was associated with two protection strategies: 1) advocacy to protect companion animals and (...) ecosystems, and 2) the need for peer support to help protect wild animals. Overall, results revealed the nuanced diversity of children’s moral concern and ideas about the rights and protection of all types of animals and ecosystems. Implications for moral education programs include a balanced approach to foster compassion, environmental awareness, and social justice among youth. (shrink)

We explore an unsolved challenge in the era of evidence-based medicine (EBM): the recognition of the patient as an epistemic agent or ‘knower’. While patients are increasingly acknowledged as carriers of values and preferences, it seems more challenging to acknowledge them as carriers of important causal information. In contrast, the science of pharmacovigilance depends on patient testimonies as valuable sources of causal evidence. This incompatibility can give rise to cases of what has been called participatory epistemic injustice. We analyse the (...) testimony of a chronic pain patient and co-author of this article, Christine. Christine gives an auto-ethnographic account of her interactions with healthcare professionals trying to find the right pharmacological treatment for her condition. Through the analysis of her own story, she identifies some relevant themes for the epistemic interaction between healthcare professionals and chronic pain patients. We argue that such epistemic interactions are increasingly shaped by EBM and its conception of causality, which devalues patient subjective testimonies and emphasises statistical evidence. We conclude that outlier patients face an inherent risk of being left vulnerable to participatory epistemic injustice, particularly regarding the discovery of novel, rare adverse effects of medicines. (shrink)

At a time when neoliberalism and financial austerity are together encouraging academic scientists to seek market alternatives to state funding, this essay investigates why, a century ago, their predecessors explicitly rejected private enterprise and the private ownership of ideas and inventions available to them through the patent system. The early twentieth century witnessed the success of a long campaign by British scientists to persuade the state to assume responsibility for the funding of basic research : their findings would enter the (...) intellectual commons; their rewards would be primarily reputational . The essay summarizes recent research in three separate fields of British technoscience—electricity, aviation, and agricultural botany—all of which were laying claim, at this time, to a heightened commercial or military importance that raised new questions about the ownership of scientific ideas. It suggests that each of the three established an idiosyncratic relationship with the patent system or with other forms of “intellectual property,” which would both influence their emergent disciplines and affect the extent to which commercial enterprise could remain a viable funding strategy. (shrink)

This paper starts off from what seems to be a difficulty of ethics in African Business today. For several years now Transparency International has placed some African countries high on its list of most corrupt countries of the world. The conclusion one draws from this assessment is that either African culture has no regard or concern for ethics, or that there has been a gradual loss of the concept of the ethical and the moral in contemporary African society. Equally problematic (...) is the teaching and promotion of Business ethics in organizations. Western philosophical theories and systems alone have not succeeded in providing access to ethical life of people in modern Africa. This paper is an attempt to inject an orientation that takes into account African manners and customs, their religious convictions and their understanding of the world as a whole, in the teaching of Business Ethics. East and Central Africa have been selected due to their common lingua franca, Kiswahili, and the fact that the author has more teaching experience within that region. (shrink)

Over the past decades, anti-cancer treatments have evolved rapidly from cytotoxic chemotherapies to targeted therapies including oral targeted medications and injectable immunooncology and cell therapies. New anti-cancer medications come to markets at increasingly high prices, and health insurance coverage is crucial for patient access to these therapies. State laws are intended to facilitate insurance coverage of anti-cancer therapies.Using Massachusetts as a case study, we identified five current cancer coverage state laws and interviewed experts on their perceptions of the relevance of (...) the laws and how well they meet the current needs of cancer care given rapid changes in therapies. Interviewees emphasized that cancer therapies, as compared to many other therapeutic areas, are unique because insurance legislation targets their coverage. They identified the oral chemotherapy parity law as contributing to increasing treatment costs in commercial insurance. For commercial insurers, coverage mandates combined with the realities of new cancer medications — including high prices and often limited evidence of efficacy at approval — compound a difficult situation. Respondents recommended policy approaches to address this challenging coverage environment, including the implementation of closed formularies, the use of cost-effectiveness studies to guide coverage decisions, and the application of value-based pricing concepts. Given the evolution of cancer therapeutics, it may be time to evaluate the benefits and challenges of cancer coverage mandates. (shrink)

: On the Aristotelian picture of virtue, moral virtue has at its core intellectual virtue. An interesting challenge for this orthodoxy is provided by the case of universal love and its associated virtues, such as the dispositions to exhibit grace, or to forgive, where appropriate. It is difficult to find a property in the object of such love, in virtue of which grace, for example, ought to be bestowed. Perhaps, then, love in general, including universal love, is not necessarily exhibited (...) for reasons. This is the view that, with the help of Heidegger's notion of a fundamental emotional attunement, I defend. The problem is to show how universal love, and its manifestation in the virtues of universal love, can then be seen as rational. Showing this is the task of the essay. (shrink)

Wild horses are becoming dependent on transitional environments between domesticity and wildness. In Dutch new nature areas they are learning to perform roles as ecological surrogates for their extinct ancestors. In the U.S. wild horses are 'feral' and exist in numbers deemed to be in excess of the carrying capacity of semi-arid public range lands. The federal government is removing and relocating thousands to long-term holding pastures. The capabilities approach of Nussbaum (2006) allows us to evaluate this transitional environment against (...) a threshold of opportunities to exercise capabilities judged to be central to their flourishing as wild horses. (shrink)

No country has yet implemented a pilot to ensure access to or the innovation of new antibiotics for multi-drug infections. A team from national health agencies in Norway, with the support of the Innovative Medicine Initiative-funded project DRIVE-AB, designed a model suitable for the national context, including the selection of the antibiotics, the potential value, and the operational model.

The novelty-seeking model suggests that curiosity and creativity originate from novelty processes. However, different types of novelty exist, each with distinctive relationships with memory, which potentially influence curiosity and creativity in distinct ways. We thus propose expanding the NSM model to consider these different novelty types and their specific involvement in creativity.

Radiobiology assesses the biological hazards of exposure to radioactive substances and nuclear radiation. This article explores the history of radiobiology in twentieth-century China by examining the overlapping of radium research and biophysics, from roughly the 1920s Nationalist period to the 1960s Communist period; from the foreign purchase of radium by the Rockefeller Foundation’s China Medical Board during the Republican era, to the institutional establishment of radiobiology as a subset of biophysics in the People’s Republic. Western historiography of radiobiology highlights the (...) connection between the military development of nuclear weapons and the civilian use of radiation in biology, as well as the international export of radioisotopes and nuclear reactors. Considering the exclusion of China from Western atomic diplomacy, I argue that the study of the Chinese history of bomb-making and radiobiology is necessary not just to fill an existing knowledge gap, but more importantly to elucidate the influence of the Chinese nuclear weapons program and Cold War atomic politics on Chinese life-science enterprises. Through examining the formational history of the radiobiology program in China, I hope to shed light on the implications of the atomic age for Chinese biology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

We address two main issues: the distinction between time-constrained and spatially constrained tasks, and the separable A and W effects on movement time (MT) in spatially-constrained tasks. We consider MT and 3-D kinematic data from human adults pointing to targets in human-computer interaction. These are better fit by Welford's (1968) two-part model, than Fitts' (1954; Fitts & Peterson 1964) ID model. We identify theoretical and practical implications.

The question of education for democratic ‘empowerment and liberation’, and how this might guide pedagogic practice is seldom raised and extremely challenging for social work education today. This chapter takes up the proposition that social work, through its educational practices, ‘can’ deliver on its promise of ‘democratic practice’ if democracy is understood as a process and not a predefined product. We argue that such a process and its embodiment in institutions cannot exist without the formation of radically democratic subjects, people (...) (including social workers) capable of questioning dominant social forms and of creating new forms and practices. Accordingly, this chapter explores the educational implications for social work of the work of the revolutionary theorist, Cornelius Castoriadis (1921–1997). Castoriadis’ philosophy accords a crucial role to democratic pedagogy (paideía) as an essential form of praxis in the creation of a radically democratic, egalitarian and sustainable society. In particular, we examine his idea (against (neo)liberal individualisation) that ‘autonomy’ is simultaneously an individual and social project that begins in, and is always dependent upon, individual and collective self-reflection. This argument is illustrated by examples from the authors’ classroom experiences of teaching both critical reflection and critical social theory to social work students in Australian universities, on the premise that both are indispensable in social work education as a democratic practice for ‘empowerment and liberation’. The chapter outlines a brief discussion of Castoriadis, his main ideas and the pedagogic dimensions of his philosophy before bringing the latter to bear on the authors’ teaching experiences. (shrink)

Wittgensteins Aufzeichnungen zur Mathematik erscheinen fragmentarisch, sind jedoch erstaunlich tiefgründig, präzise und kohärent. Sie erlauben daher weitreichende Einblicke in seine grundlegende philosophische Denkweise. Ausgehend von Wittgensteins Kritik an Cantors Diagonalbeweis und seiner Einschätzung reeller Zahlen wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit Wittgensteins Philosophie der Mathematik einer Neubewertung zugeführt. Es wird dargelegt, dass seine Einwände gegen den Diagonalbeweis weder so unbegründet sind, wie ihm seine Gegner vorwerfen, noch so diplomatisch, wie seinen Verteidigern lieb wäre. Vielmehr illustrieren sie die konstruktivistischen, konventionalistischen und revisionistischen (...) Züge seiner Philosophie der Mathematik. (shrink)

L’article propose de mettre en évidence les déterminants des trajectoires scolaires exceptionnelles de huit filles, d’une même famille protestante de la petite bourgeoisie rurale, nées à l’aube du XXe siècle.

William Molyneux's friendship with John Locke helped make Locke's ideas well known in early eighteenth-century Dublin. TheEssay Concerning Human Understandingwas placed on the curriculum of Trinity College in 1692, soon after its publication. Yet there has been very little discussion of whether Irish women from this period read or knew Locke's work, or engaged more generally in contemporary philosophical debate. This essay focuses on the work of Laetitia Pilkington (1709–1750) and Mary Barber (1685–1755), two of the Dublin women writers of (...) the so-called ‘Triumfeminate’, a literary and intellectual circle connected to Jonathan Swift which met and discussed ideas at the home of Patrick Delaney. Pilkington and Barber were particularly influenced by Locke's ideas on obstetrics and childhood in hisSome Thoughts Concerning Educationand especially by his discussion of memory in theEssay Concerning Human Understanding. Both authors engage playfully and imaginatively with Locke's theories, especially in a domestic context. Not all philosophical debates took place in the public male spaces of school, coffee house and university. This essay attempts to recreate the contexts in which intellectually curious women of the ‘middling sort’ encountered and engaged with philosophical ideas, especially those of Locke, and how these shaped their writing. (shrink)

Platón y Kant plantean un modelo “constitucional” del alma, en el que la razón y el apetito o la pasión tienen diferentes roles estructurales y funcionales en la generación de la motivación, en contraposición al común “modelo combativo,” en el que son mostrados como fuentes de motivación independientes que luchan por el control. Desde el punto de vista del modelo constitucional, podemos explicar qué hace que una acción sea diferente de un evento. Lo que hace que una acción sea atribuible (...) a una persona y, por lo tanto, lo que la hace una acción, es que surge desde la constitución de la persona y, por lo tanto, desde la persona como un todo, y no desde una fuerza que actúa sobre o en ella. Esto, a su vez, implica una explicación de lo que hace buena a una acción: lo que hace que una acción sea buena es que se delibere sobre ella y se la elija de una manera que unifique a la persona en un sistema constitucional. A través de la acción deliberativa nos constituimos como agentes unificados. La justicia platónica y el imperativo categórico de Kant se muestran como estándares normativos para la acción porque son principios de autoconstitución. (shrink)

Anlässlich des Jubiläumsjahres 2008 werden Strukturanalogien zwischen der Musik des französischen Komponisten Olivier Messiaen und der Mystik des Flamen Jan van Ruusbroec anhand des X. Satzes aus den „Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus" aufgezeigt, der dem „Blick des Geistes der Freude" gewidmet ist. Wie in Ruusbroecs „Zierde der geistlichen Hochzeit" finden sich in der Musik pneumatologische Bildmetaphern wie die des Tanzes, der Jagd, aber auch Übereinstimmung im Ausdruck der Freude und der Einigkeit des Geistes mit dem Vater und dem Sohn. Über (...) seine charakteristischen Farbklänge ist es Messiaen gelungen, sogar die ruusbroecsche Rede vom Minnebrand des Geistes in der Seele musikalisch umzusetzen und dem Geist der Weisheit und der Wahrheit musikalisch Ausdruck zu verleihen. Auf diese Weise trägt zeitgenössische Musik bei, das Geheimnis des Heiligen Geistes tiefer zu erfassen.On the occasion of the Messiaen jubilee 2008, this article shows analogue structures between the Music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen and the mysticism of the Flemish theologian Jan van Ruusbroec . My examination is based on the X. movement of Messiaen's "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus", which is dedicated to the "Vision of the Spirit of Joy". Like Ruusbroec's "Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage", the music of Messiaen contains pneumatological metaphors like the dance and the hunt, but is also accords with Ruusbroec's work in expressing the joy and unity of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. Through his characteristic sound-colours, Messiaen even succeeds in musically expressing what Ruusbroec describes as the Spirit's "firebrand of love" within the soul and in giving the Spirit of wisdom and truth a musical form. This demonstrates how contemporaneous music can contribute to a deeper understanding of the mystery of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

The historic Christian tradition of offering hospitality to strangers provides moral, theological and practical insights for contemporary responses to the needs of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. Ancient writers were explicit about the difficulties, blessings, and necessity of welcoming strangers. In this paper, specific components of the tradition, especially as they are evident in the writings of Chrysostom, Calvin and Wesley, are discussed. Suggestions are offered for points of intersection with contemporary concerns related to asylum and immigration.