Children and Spirituality in the Context of a Traditional Festival: Halloween

This paper examines some of the contemporary cultural practices associated with the traditional festival of Halloween as it is celebrated by children in Britain and the United States. Using ethnographic evidence from a variety of sources, the authors seek to explore the range of activities which constitute the modern Halloween, particularly as it is mediated to children through the forms of consumer culture. The paper analyses the changing social, historical and religious patterns which have displaced the celebration of Halloween onto children, and offers an account of them which points to the persistence of a coherent spirituality—what the authors term a ‘spirituality of boundaries‘—to be found in the symbolism of the festival and its interaction with the lives and representation of children.     

Understanding Gender and Culture Within the Context of Spirituality: Implications for Counselors

This article examines roles that gender, culture, and spirituality play in elements of therapeutic process. It presents an initial literature review of gender, culture, and spirituality as these factors relate to shaping identities and defining one's behavior. Discussions on how these 3 dimensions influence the level of understanding and effective responsiveness that competent counseling professionals should consider in a culturally and spiritually diverse society are presented. Three case studies provide a framework to illuminate the complexity that professionals face when counseling issues are viewed through unique gender, cultural, and spiritual worldviews. Implications for counselors and the counseling profession are provided.     

Nature and Nurturing: Parenting in the Context of Child Temperament

Accounting for both bidirectional and interactive effects between parenting and child temperament can fine-tune theoretical models of the role of parenting and temperament in children’s development of adjustment problems. Evidence for bidirectional and interactive effects between parenting and children’s characteristics of frustration, fear, self-regulation, and impulsivity was reviewed, and an overall model of children’s individual differences in response to parenting is proposed. In general, children high in frustration, impulsivity and low in effortful control are more vulnerable to the adverse effects of negative parenting, while in turn, many negative parenting behaviors predict increases in these characteristics. Frustration, fearfulness, and effortful control also appear to elicit parenting behaviors that can predict increases in these characteristics. Irritability renders children more susceptible to negative parenting behaviors. Fearfulness operates in a very complex manner, sometimes increasing children’s responses to parenting behaviors and sometimes mitigating them and apparently operating differently across gender. Important directions for future research include the use of study designs and analytic approaches that account for the direction of effects and for developmental changes in parenting and temperament over time.     

佛性论与儒家人性论比较

宋明理学在重建儒家人性论时,有两方面的思想资料可供借鉴。一是自先秦到唐末的传统的儒家人性论,二是佛道二教的心性论(这里只谈佛性论)。将儒家人性论与佛性论在价值取向、思想方法、修养途径、政治功能等几个主要方面做一比较,对于我们理解以后宋明理学对儒家人性论进行重新建构的必要性和可能性将不无裨益。     

The Origin and Differentiation of the Theories of Human Nature in Pre-Qin China

In early China, views concerning human nature underwent significant development, with philosophers moving from seeing it as desire or instinct to seeing it as virtue or essence. Before Confucius’s time, human beings’ xing, or nature, was construed as desire and instinct, i.e., as a physical nature. The key problem faced by theorists of human nature at that time was how to manage nature with virtue, i.e., how to use virtue to both control and enrich nature. A later, wide-reaching development was the use of qi to explain human nature. Laozi began, taking de or virtue to be the internal essence of the human being; Confucius took de or virtue to be xing or nature. Following this development, the main current of the theory of human nature in the pre-Qin period divided into two branches. One, created by the later Confucius, inherited in part by Zisi, and developed by Mencius, took virtue as nature and insisted on the a priority of internal morality. The other branch, inherited in part by Zisi and developed by the author of Xing Zi Ming Chu and Xunzi, featured the development of the old tradition which took yu, or desire, as nature.     

The Historical Character of Human Nature in Freud's Theories

In Freud’ theories of human development, human nature is described and analyzed as essentially historical. At the core of human history is the restructuring of the sexual instinct and the death instinct (or its unique form as destructive impulses). The conscious, asked-for shaping of these two instincts, under the rule of the “reality principle”, forms the basis of human society at all stages. This conscious restructuring has also unintended, unasked-for results, which are part of the historically developing human nature. The historical choice has been the building of human society as a social complex based on the de-eroticization of both the individual and society. Freud suggested that the historical process of changing human nature and maintaining the achieved new structure has mainly been an enterprise of enlightened political elite, which has imposed (in all societies) the various elements of the new nature upon the ordinary people. Human history is essentially a deed of the political sphere. In viewing human nature as consisting of both asked-for and unasked-for results of human conscious purposeful activity Freud belongs to the same historical school as Marx.     

Relational and Substantival Ontologies, and the Nature and the Role of Primitives in Ontological Theories

Several metaphysical debates have typically been modeled as oppositions between a relationist approach and a substantivalist approach. Such debates include the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory about ordinary material objects, the Bundle (Humean) Theory and the Substance (Cartesian) Theory of the Self, and Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In all three debates, the substantivalist side typically insists that in order to provide a good treatment of the subject-matter of the theory (time, Self, material objects), it is necessary to postulate the existence of a certain kind of substance, while the other side, the relationist one, characteristically feels that this is an unnecessary expense and that one can get the job done in an ontologically cheaper way just with inter-related properties or events. In this paper I shall defend the view that there is much less of a disagreement between relational ontologies and substantival ontologies than it is usually thought. I believe that, when carefully examined, the two sides of the debate are not that different from each other, in all three cases of pairs of views mentioned above. As we will see, both the relational side and the substantival side work in the same way, suffer from and answer the same objections, and are structurally extremely similar. It will be an important question—one that I shall discuss in detail, and that is indeed the main point of interest for me in this paper—whether this means that the two sides of the debate are somehow ‘equivalent’ or not, and what ‘equivalent’ could mean.     

Representations of Complexity: How Nature Appears in Our Theories

In science we study processes in the material world. The way these processes operate can be discovered by conducting experiments that activate them, and findings from such experiments can lead to functional complexity theories of how the material processes work. The results of a good functional theory will agree with experimental measurements, but the theory may not incorporate in its algorithmic workings a representation of the material processes themselves. Nevertheless, the algorithmic operation of a good functional theory may be said to make contact with material reality by incorporating the emergent computations the material processes carry out. These points are illustrated in the experimental analysis of behavior by considering an evolutionary theory of behavior dynamics, the algorithmic operation of which does not correspond to material features of the physical world, but the functional output of which agrees quantitatively and qualitatively with findings from a large body of research with live organisms.     

The Embodied Nature of Implicit Theories: The Consistency of Ideas About the Nature of Matter

Recent research has revealed the existence of intuitive representations strongly rooted in diverse knowledge domains and the difficulties of modifying those representations through instruction by means of conceptual change processes (Carey, 1995; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Vosniadou, 1994). According to some interpretations, these representations are organized in the form of intuitive or implicit theories, among whose features would be representational consistency across different contexts or tasks. Other authors, however, have argued in favor of the partial or situated nature of these representations so that we cannot talk about authentic theories (Caravita & Hallden, 1994; diSessa, 1993, 1994). In this research, we analyzed the consistency of the representations on the nature of matter held by people with diverse levels of instruction from adolescents aged 12 to students with advanced studies in chemistry. Our objective was to analyze the consistency of these representations with respect to the core concepts of chemistry, the intrinsic movement of particles, and the discontinuous nature of matter, which would be constituted by particles separated by empty space. However, these two core concepts would be in contradiction to our embodied representation of matter based on its macroscopic or sensorial properties according to which matter is static and continuous. The results confirm a majority and consistent use of intuitive representations as against scientific ones, confirming that at least from the point of view of consistency, these representations constitute authentic implicit theories. Moreover, it is those representations that correspond to the macroscopic properties of matter that are used in the most consistent way, which also supports the hypothesis of the embodied nature of these theories. Although the corpuscular theory of matter, when used appropriately, provides more consistent representations, our data show a quite limited use of this theory, even among students with advanced studies in science, which once more shows the difficulties of achieving, through instruction, a change in these implicit, embodied theories. In the article, we discuss the implications of these data for science teaching.     

Exploring the Role of Spirituality in the Context of the Five Factor Model of Personality in a South African Sample

The study explored the relationship between the Five Factor Model of personality and spirituality by using the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992) and the Spiritual Transcendence Scale (STS) (Piedmont, 1999) respectively. Participants were 94 psychology undergraduate students at a large South African university (mean age = 19.1 years; SD =1.43, males =19, females=75). Data were analyzed using both correlations as well as principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Evidence from both correlations and factor analysis suggest separate domains within the FFM as well as a separate factor for spirituality. These results provide support for claims that aspects of spirituality are not accounted for by the FFM as operationalised by the NEO-PI-R and by implication the FFM may not be a complete taxonomy of personality.     

灵修和性命双修——试比较基督宗教与道教内丹的内炼思想

本文认为,基督宗教凸显的是信仰和对教会的奉献;道教内丹则更多的关注人的生命内在体验层面.基督宗教灵修是以信仰耶稣基督为基础的宗教性修炼,以上帝为中心,灵修的目的旨在建立人与天主的关系,是以"爱"为纽带以团体的方式修行,其修行方式外在、被动,忽略了人的主动性地位.这跟道教内丹以人为中心的性命双修以及"我命在我不在天" 的主动修炼有很大差异.对命功的忽视使得基督宗教的灵修在理论上难以提升,在实践上可操作性不高.但事实上,在基督宗教那里,在人与上帝的共融中,很多类似道教内丹修炼的命功体验,可能自觉或不自觉的已经发生了.     

The Role of Empirical Research in Defining,Promoting, and Evaluating Professionalism in Context

Some are concerned about the possibility that offering money for research participation can constitute coercion or undue influence capable of distorting the judgment of potential research subjects and compromising the voluntariness of their informed consent. The author recognizes that more often than not there are multiple influences leading to decisions, including decisions about research participation. The concept of undue influence is explored, as well as the question of whether or not there is something uniquely distorting about money as opposed to a chance for treatment or medical care. An amount of money that is not excessive and is calculated on the basis of time or contribution may, rather than constitute an undue inducement, be an indication of respect for the time and contribution that research subjects make.     

A Mighty Fortress Is Our Atheism: Defining the Nature of Religiousness in the Elderly

SUMMARY

This article considers current trends in research on religion and aging. By considering the perspective of classical sociology, the author argues that we need to understand religion as a belief system with a particular function, rather than a belief system that necessarily contains certain specific beliefs or behaviors.     

浅议孔子和老子的人性论

不管是孔子还是老子,因对人性的看法各异,从而导致不同的治国主张,一个着眼于后天的“习”,主张用“仁内礼外”兼治的方法来达到政治清明;一个则认为人性素朴自然,统治者当效法天道“无为而治”。但二人有一个共同之处：都以各自的人性论作为其政治主张的理论基础。