What Can the Systems Community Contribute to Ensure the Survival of Civilization

Much of what we need to plan for our survival is already known, but what we know, how we know, and who knows is divided up between disciplines. Thus much of the problem of ensuring our survival is a matter of learning across the disciplines. We identify four modes through which we bring disciplinary knowledge together: the unity of science, integrated assessment, heuristic models, and distributed learning networks. Although none of them are perfect, we can learn how to put our knowledge together across the disciplines much better than we do.     

Career Indecision: A Summary of the Research and Implications for Counselling

The vocationally-indecisive individual presents a major counselling problem. The theory and research behind career indecision is discussed and a counselling approach based on identity formation is outlined. Four identity statuses — Identity Achievements, Foreclosures, Identity Diffusions, and Moratoriums — are described and counselling approaches for each are explored.     

Prophetic visions in 1988: A critical reappraisal

This paper reviews the research into a specific aspect of neardeath experiences (NDEs): the prophetic vision (PV). PVs are subjectively compelling flashforwards of planetary-wide cataclysms and eventual regeneration that sometimes occur during or in the immediate aftermath of an NDE. Previous research has shown that the most frequently mentioned year for the culmination of the geophysical calamities foreseen in PVs was 1988. I argue that PVs should be understood as manifestations of a collective prophetic impulse that historically tends to arise during periods of cultural crisis. PVs are thus expressions of the felt need for cultural renewal and therefore should not be taken literally as prognostic of drastic physical changes on Earth.     

A return to the roots: Conversion and the culture of the Mexican-descent Catholic

Conversion within the Mexican-descent, Catholic community of the United States is a reinforcement of existing values through a recommitment to the worldview of this people by means of an explicit, personal and public retrieval of its kinetics achieved by an innovative adaptation of its formal themes. Three rites of this community's popular spirituality are analyzed in order to discern the crisis in each context of culture, Christianity, and the world which may occasion conversion.Kenneth Davis is working with the Hispanic team of the staff of the International Office of RENEW. He has recently been inducted into the Academy of Hispanic Catholic Theologians of the United States (AHCTUS).     

Some Legal Issues in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Although substantial legal difficulties can face anyone trying to recover compensation from counsellors for breach of their legal duties, such claims can in principle succeed. Counsellors ought to take particular care to provide a physically safe setting for the counselling session. Advice given to the client can lead to liability both to the client and to third parties who may be affected. The impact of the client's actions on third parties can justify, and less often compel, departures from confidentiality. The importance of keeping client records has to be balanced against legal obligations imposed on counsellors in various situations to make such records available for inspection by the client or third parties.     

Theory change in immunology part II: The clonal selection theory

This two-part article examines the competition between the clonal selection theory and the instructive theory of the immune response from 1957–1967. In Part I the concept of a temporally extended theory is introduced, which requires attention to the hitherto largely ignored issue of theory individuation. Factors which influence the acceptability of such an extended theory at different temporal points are also embedded in a Bayesian framework, which is shown to provide a rational account of belief change in science. In Part II these factors, as elaborated in the Bayesian framework, are applied to the case of the success of the clonal selection theory and the failure of the instructive theory.