Evil Thoughts But Angelic Actions: Responses to Overweight Job Applicants

Quantitative and content analyses were performed to test the hypothesis that the lack-of-fit model (Heilman, 1983) could provide the needed theoretical framework for organizational obesity discrimination. A computer morphing program allowed for the same stimulus applicant to be used in both the average-weight and the overweight conditions. Results of the quantitative analysis show that undergraduate participants perceived overweight (vs. average-weight) applicants as having more negative work-related attributes, but did not discriminate against them in the hiring process. A content analysis provided some evidence for the lack-of-fit model (Heilman, 1983) as an explanatory model for obesity discrimination.     

The Devil's Envy: On Christ as Angelic Justifier and Demonic Stumbling Block

At least since Augustine, Christian theology, especially but not only in the Latin West, has been dominated by an account of angelic origins in which the Incarnation was a response to humanity’s fall, itself occasioned by the prior angelic fall, whose cause in turn was the proud desire to be like God. (We’ll call this the ‘pride-account’). Nonetheless, that Augustinian view has been balanced from the beginning by an ‘envy-account’, which stresses instead Wisdom’s claim, ‘Through the Devil’s envy, death entered the world’ (Wisd. 2:24). The earliest extra-biblical versions of the envy-account – developed in the Latin, Syriac, and Arabic ‘Life of Adam and Eve’ traditions – take the object of Satan’s envy to have been Adam in particular. In the thirteenth century, however, Robert Grosseteste, as part of his extended defense of the idea that the Son would have been incarnate even without sin, argued instead that the Devil and his angels fell in rejecting the to-be-incarnate Christ, whose merits serve to ‘justify’ not only unfallen humanity, but even the holy angels. On this view, which arguably has biblical roots in Hebrews 1 and Revelation 12, and which reached its apogee in Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Devil’s envy’ was directed at the God-man in particular.     

Introduction: Alexander Luria's Continuing Influence on Worldwide Neuropsychology

As an introduction to this special issue, this article provides an overview of the worldwide influence of the work of Alexander R. Luria. a noted Russian neuropsychologist. Major themes and issues that he studied are reviewed, and the reasons for his strong worldwide influence are discussed. An overview of subsequent articles in this issue is provided.     

Alexander Lowen: An Energetic Man

Alexander Lowen, a prominent psychotherapist, discusses his personal and professional development, as well as the evolution of bioenergetic analysis.