Ask any Civil War historian about the cost of the Civil War and they will recite a host of well-known assessments, from military casualties and government expenditures to various measures of direct and indirect costs. But those numbers are not likely to include an appraisal of the humanitarian crisis and suffering caused by the wartime destruction of slavery. Peace-time emancipation in other regions and in other societies certainly presented dangers and difficulties for the formerly enslaved, but wartime emancipation chained the (...) new opportunities and possibilities for freedom to war’s violence, civil chaos, destruction and deprivation. The resulting health crisis, including illness, injury, and trauma, had immediate and lasting consequences for black civilians and soldiers. Although historians are more accustomed to thinking of enslaved people as the beneficiaries of this war, rather than its victims, we cannot assess the cost of this war until we answer two important questions: first, what price did enslaved people have to pay because their freedom was achieved through warfare rather than a peacetime process; and secondly, in this war in which so many Americans paid such a high cost, to what extent did racism inflate the cost paid by people of African descent? In answering these questions, we reconsider this specific war, but we must also tie the U.S. Civil War to a larger scholarship on how wars impact civilians, create refugee populations, and accelerate harsh treatment of people regarded as racial, religious, or ethnic outsiders. We are reminded that war is not an equal-opportunity killer. (shrink)

Children’s digital playgrounds have evolved from commercialized digital spaces such as websites and games to include an array of convergent digital media consisting of social media platforms, mobile apps, and the internet of toys. In these digital spaces, children’s data is shared with companies for analytics, personalization, and advertising. This article describes children’s digital playgrounds as a data assemblage involving commercial surveillance of children, ages 3–12. The privacy sweep is used as a method to follow the personal information traces that (...) can be expected to be disclosed through typical use of two children’s digital playgrounds: the YouTube Kids app and Fisher-Price Smart Toy plush animal and companion app. To trace the data flows, privacy policies and other publicly available documents were analyzed using political economy and privacy informed indicators. This article concludes by reflecting upon the dataveillance and commercialization practices that trouble the privacy rights of the child and parent when data assemblages in children’s digital playgrounds are surveillant. (shrink)

This study invited curates and training incumbents attending a 3-day residential programme to function as a hermeneutical community engaging conversation between the Lucan post-resurrection narrative concerning the Road to Emmaus and the learning relationship in which they were engaged. Building on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics the participants were invited to work in type-alike groups, structured first on the basis of the perceiving process and second on the basis of the judging process. This approach facilitated rich and varied insights (...) into the Emmaus Road narrative and into the theme of learning relationships. (shrink)

Force strengths, particle masses, etcetera, appear "fine tuned" for intelligent life. There may be many very diverse universes, observational selection explaining why we see a life-permitting one. The alternative is divine selection. The God hypothesis can explain how one and the same force strength or particle mass satisfies life’s many different requirements, and why there are life-encouraging laws of relativity and of quantum theory. It could also answer why any universe exists. God’s existence could be accounted for Platonically, by its (...) ethical requiredness. The most plausible world-view would then be Spinozistic, on lines explored in my recent book "Infinite Minds". (shrink)

In his thoughtful paper, “The Liberal Tradition, Kant, and the Pox”, Rolf George joins the venerable argument about whether Kant should be accounted friend or foe of liberals. But this is not just a rehearsal of the debate over the compatibility of the Old Jacobin's defense of civil liberties and government by consent with his notoriously unpleasant doctrines of the absolute duty to obey the law or his ruthlessly retributive view of punishment. George advances the debate by suggesting that elements (...) of Kant's moral theory are deeply incompatible with liberalism. And this is particularly striking when liberals like John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and Robert Nozick are quick to invoke Kant's name in defense of their own views. The attraction of Kant for these modern liberals is clear, for they hold individualistic moral theories and they reject utilitarianism. But, if George is right, there are aspects of Kant's thought which make him an unsuitable mascot. (shrink)

Peterson, Karlawish and Largent offer a defense of supported decision making in health care for people with dynamic and diminishing capacity. They are to be warmly commended for bringing sup...

During the Easter Season Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary invites participating churches to draw on early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles as the guiding reading for the principal Sunday service. This study employs the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics to engage a group of 24 Anglican clergy serving in Eastern Newfoundland to reflect on the Easter message within the mysterious case of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8: 26-40. By inviting these clergy to work in type-alike (...) groups this study draws attention to the distinctive voices of sensing types, intuitive types, feeling types, and thinking types, as defined by psychological type theory. Sensing types gave close attention to the details within the text. Intuitive types identified the big themes arising from the text. Feeling types focused on the characters, the relationships and the values within the narrative. Thinking types analysed the issues and problems arising from the narrative. These data supported the hermeneutical theory proposed by the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics and illustrated the value of drawing on all four psychological functions in order to enrich the process and content of liturgical preaching. (shrink)

In this very readable and challenging work, Armour's approach is three-sided: to examine Hegel's objections to elements of Spinoza's accounts of knowledge and reality, to analyze the problems in Hegel's own system, and to propose a system that resolves some of these questions. Throughout, Armour is clear and thorough in his analysis, and his proposed system should engender valuable discussion among scholars. It is a treat to see metaphysics still being practiced, in spite of recent claims by many analytic philosophers (...) that this particular area of philosophical thought is dead. (shrink)

The thesis that enquiries into the nature and existence of God and enquiries into nature itself should be kept separate has gained new life from disputes about biology, but the development of physics and its relation to mathematics gives force to the idea that nature is more like a book to be read than it is like a collection of objects with no intrinsic meaning. The more one sees nature as a book to be read the more one sees it (...) as intrinsically intelligible. Intelligibility need not imply intelligence but the relation between the two is nonetheless a legitimate subject for investigation. (shrink)

Green believed that, underlying the structure of human experience, there is an immanent God, gradually realised in the world through the processes of history. He believed in progress, and he sometimes spoke of it as “moral progress.” Talk of the history of moral progress came easily to him. No less than Rané Rapin, the seventeenth century Jesuit who told us that we should read history in a way which showed us its capacity for moral enlightenment, Green believed in hope.

The shapes of neurons and glial cells dictate many important aspects of their functions. In olfactory systems, certain architectural features are characteristics of these two cell types across a wide variety of species. The accumulated evidence suggests that these common features may play fundamental roles in olfactoryinformation processing. For instance, the primary olfactory neuropil in most vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems is organized into discrete modules called glomeruli. Inside each glomerulus, sensory axons and CNS neurons branch and synapse in patterns (...) that are repeated across species. In many species, moreover, the glomeruli are enveloped by a thin and ordered layer of glial processes. Theglomerular arrangement reflects the processing of odor information in modules that encode the discrete molecular attributes of odorant stimuli being processed. Recent studies of the mechanisms that guide the development of olfactory neurons and glial cells have revealed complex reciprocal interactions between these two cell types, which may be necessary for the establishment of modular compartments. Collectively, the findings reviewed here suggest that specialized cellular architecture plays key functional roles in the detection, analysis, and discrimination of odors at early steps in olfactory processing. (shrink)

Can a country with a free press and a robust political debate provide its citizens with actionable information so that they can protect themselves from a threat to their health or safety? By actionable information, I mean accurate facts and reasonable interpretations of those facts upon which an individual should rely in making reason-based decisions. In the context of public health, this includes information that allows an individual to weigh the risk to one’s self, family, and community before deciding to (...) act in an uncertain environment under threatening conditions. The recent H1N1 pandemic, and in particular the government’s campaign for public acceptance of the vaccine, highlights the challenges in ensuring that individuals receive accurate information and perceive that such information should be the basis on which to make potential life-saving decisions. (shrink)

JOHN E. MURDOCH AND EDITH DUDLEY SYLLA INTRODUCTION Conferences and colloquia are held and their results often published, but very rarely is any account ...

Histone acetylation is an important regulatory mechanism that controls transcription and diverse nuclear processes. While great progress has been made in understanding how localized acetylation and deacetylation control promoter activity, virtually nothing is known about the consequences of acetylation throughout entire chromosomal regions. An increasing number of genes have been found to reside in large chromatin domains that are controlled by regulatory elements many kilobases away. Recent studies have shown that broad histone acetylation patterns are hallmarks of chromatin domains. The (...) purpose of this review is to discuss how such patterns are established and their implications for regulating gene expression. BioEssays 23:820–830, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This study forms part of a research project designed to test the sensing, intuition, feeling and thinking (SIFT) approach to biblical hermeneutics in respect of a wide range of biblical passages. On this occasion, two contrasting approaches to perceiving (a group of eight sensing types and a group of nine intuitive types) were invited to address two questions to John 21:1–12a: What do you see in this passage? What sparks your imagination in this passage? These two contrasting groups generated characteristically (...) different readings of the same text. Contribution: The SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics is rooted in the reader-perspective school of interpretation and is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type profile of the reader on the interpretation of text. The present study adds to a developing body of evidence validating the theory underpinning the SIFT approach and does so by focusing for the first time on the resurrection appearance at the lakeside in John 21. (shrink)

In Kierkegaard's Livingroom David Mercer weaves his way through the Philosophical Fragments, bringing the reader a new understanding of Kierkegaard's work.

Working within the sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking (SIFT) approach to biblical hermeneutics, the present study invited a hermeneutical community of 23 type-aware participants to explore the account of the Death of Lazarus as reported in John 11: 1–17 within type-alike groups differentiated according to the participants’ dominant function-orientation. Five groups were constituted differentiating: introverted sensing, introverted intuition, extraverted intuition, introverted and extraverted feeling and introverted and extraverted thinking. These five groups generated distinctive readings of the narrative that were characteristic of (...) the individual type preference. Contribution: The SIFT method, situated within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, is concerned with attending to the influence exerted by the psychological type profile of the reader on interpreting the text. The present study goes beyond previous work by comparing the responses of five hermeneutical communities (each distinguished by a different dominant function-orientation) to the same passage of scripture. (shrink)