Infant media use: A harm reduction approach

There are a myriad of potentially harmful developmental outcomes associated with infant digital media use. Studies revealing risk associated with early media use have informed the current American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommendations that discourage most digital media use among children under 18 months of age. Recent research advances, however, suggest potential benefits of technology engagement in this age group. Additionally, surveys of parents reveal that most infants engage with digital media for at least 30 min a day, exceeding the AAP recommendations. In response to these discoveries and cultural trends, some scholars have made compelling cases to adapt the AAP guidelines for infants. A helpful model for developing infant digital media use guidelines for families may be the harm reduction approach. The intent of this review is to suggest adaptations to the AAP guidelines for infant media engagement using a harm reduction framework. This review describes the challenge of restrictive guidelines, briefly summarizes the harm reduction approach, provides a review of risks and benefits associated with infant media use in each developmental domain (physical, cognitive, and socioemotional), summarizes correlates of infant screen media use, and examines intervention strategies for reducing screen time. The paper concludes with examples of possible adaptations to current AAP infant media use recommendations using harm reduction and bioecological frameworks.     

Seeing connections: reason,faith, and education

The article explores some of the congruencies of thought and resonances in phrasing in the work of Janet Erskine Stuart, John Henry Newman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three writers have in common their resistance to philosophers of religion who are preoccupied with proposing arguments for the existence of God and grounds for believing in God. They also share a belief in the importance of assent and that reason and faith cannot be easily separated; that faith is always there in the background. The article is concerned primarily with the interrelationship between reason and faith across human practices and the relevance to education and how we live our lives.     

Belief, faith, and acceptance

Belief is a central focus of inquiry in the philosophy of religion and indeed in the field of religion itself. No one conception of belief is central in all these cases, and sometimes the term ‘belief’ is used where ‘faith’ or ‘acceptance’ would better express what is intended. This paper sketches the major concepts in the philosophy of religion that are expressed by these three terms. In doing so, it distinguishes propositional belief (belief that) from both objectual belief (believing something to have a property) and, more importantly, belief in (a trusting attitude that is illustrated by at least many paradigm cases of belief in God). Faith is shown to have a similar complexity, and even propositional faith divides into importantly different categories. Acceptance differs from both belief and faith in that at least one kind of acceptance is behavioral in a way neither of the other two elements is. Acceptance of a proposition, it is argued, does not entail believing it, nor does believing entail acceptance in any distinctive sense of the latter term. In characterizing these three notions (and related ones), the paper provides some basic materials important both for understanding a person’s religious position and for appraising its rationality. The nature of religious faith and some of the conditions for its rationality, including some deriving from elements of an ethics of belief, are explored in some detail.     

Fear,faith, and movement

This paper describes the intra-psychic dynamics associated with faith development. Using James Fowler's stages of faith theory, the author attempts to demonstrate that growth in faith requires courage in order to confront the loss of self experienced in faith development. Using the work of Hartmann, Mahler, and Kegan in conjunction with the thought of Tillich regarding fear and faith, the article presents a process for transition from Fowler's stage four to stage five which relies heavily upon the interaction of the self and others for successful movement.Beth Causey is a student in the Master of Divinity Program at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The author acknowledges with gratitude the cogent comments of Homer U. Ashby, Jr., Ph.D., in the preparation of this article.     

Belief, hope and faith

A case of hysteria is presented in order to create a frame of reference for the author's approach to the concepts of hope, belief and faith. A difference between hope as a 'sad passion' (which is here called regressive hope) and hope as a principle of mental functioning is established. The concept of hope will at fi rst always be based on beliefs-either beliefs organised in the paranoid-schizoid position (called here fragmented and delusional beliefs)-or those organised from the depressive position (complex systems of beliefs, which end up being dogmatic); the latter typically occur in neurotics. It is suggested here that there is another possibility for hope, which is based on faith. The meaning of faith is considered here externally to the religious sense. The solid establishment of hope as a principle-based on faith-can be viewed as responsible for the opening up of creative potentials and as one of the main aims of analysis. Such an aim, however, requires the establishment of a deep relationship, both in theory and in clinical practice, between the Kleinian question of the depressive position and the Freudian question of the Oedipus complex.     

Hatred,hostility, and faith: A theological perspective

This essay proffers a theological-ethical analysis of hate and hostility. More specifically the dynamics of protracted hate and hostility are explored utilizing Niebuhr's concept of evil imagination and his notion of the dialectical structures of human faith. There are two major claims in this article. First, evil imagination, which includes diverse forms of violence, hatred and hostility, is a response to the anxiety and fear associated with powerlessness and absolute dependence; it may be viewed as an attempt to secure one's personal and intersubjective identity and continuity against coming destruction and loss. Second, the protracted hate and hostility of evil imagination manifests a particular type of faith involving particular conscious and unconscious beliefs as well as objects of trust and distrust and loyalty and disloyalty.     

Belief,trust, and relationality: a Simmelian approach for the study of faith

Religion has been conceptualised as personal belief in the transcendent. Anthropologists of religion have critiqued such a construct for decades for being based on a Christian Protestant model and one that reflected subsequently modern rationalist Western culture. This construct has increasingly been shown to fail to account for the religiosity of contemporary Christians. Drawing on the sociology of Georg Simmel and based on ethnographic research in a Christian evangelical church, the article proposes a reconceptualisation of religious belief that is experiential and relational. Evangelicals in this case study show that propositional belief plays increasingly a secondary role to belief intended as trust in God and forming a relationship with God and others. Relationships mediate personal religious experience and are shown to be essential to the conversion process, the life of faith, and Christian identity. The study thus bridges the separation between theoretical and empirical works by operationalising Simmel’s sociology.     

Atheism,faith, and the social scientific study of religion

The social “scientific”; study of religion originated in atheism and the basic theses pursued today, especially by psychologists and anthropologists, are little changed since they were first proposed by militant opponents of religion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In this essay I trace these links from major scholar to major scholar across the centuries. I then examine the remarkable irony that the recent emergence of a truly scientific approach to religion was accomplished mainly by an influx of “believers”;. I sketch why and how this happened before turning to an assessment of the persistence of atheistic biases. I conclude with suggestions about how a truly scientific study of religion can be pursued by both believers and unbelievers, if not by fanatics of either stripe.