Spiritual practices children understand: an analysis of Madeleine L’Engle’s fantasy,A Wind in the Door

The following essay is a close reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s science fantasy novel, A Wind in the Door, in which young Meg Murry travels first to outer space and then into her younger brother’s ailing cells. The novel is a fine example of high fantasy (also known as heroic fantasy) wherein a humble protagonist is called to a quest to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil. The essay analyzes specific expressions of evil in the novel: impersonality, narcissism, despair and blind empiricism. Meg’s quest demonstrates particular spiritual practices that promote spiritual maturation and the ability to overcome evil: ‘kything’, Naming, deepening and holding. L’Engle portrays these practices in a fresh way that can help both children and adults incorporate them into their day‐to‐day lives. Moreover, there are links between kything and holding and the metta and tonglen, two types of Buddhist meditation. L’Engle affirms children’s innate relational consciousness and presents spiritual practices that are relational, non‐sectarian, practical, and eminently hopeful.     

REDUCTIONISM AND HOLISM,CHANCE AND SELECTION,MECHANISM AND MIND

Abstract. Despite its rich and deepening panoply of empirical support, evolutionary theory continues to generate widespread concern. Some of this concern can be attributed to misunderstandings of the original concept, some to unfamiliarity with its current trajectories, and some to strongly held fears that it strips the human of cherished attributes. In this essay I seek to deconstruct such misunderstandings, lift up current concepts of what evolution entails, and address some of the existential issues it generates.     

Digital play as a spiritually formative activity

The ubiquitous presence of technology in children’s lives and the likelihood that technology will remain a significant part of young people’s culture means that scholars and practitioners need to ask how digital play may exert a positive spiritual influence on children and youth. This essay therefore explores four spiritually nurturing aspects of digital participation: (1) connections between the polyphonic nature of digital identity and the ideal of a spiritual disciple open to divine influence and change through new experiences and habituating practices; (2) ways in which young people’s empowerment as producers of the self and communities may transfer to ‘real’-world transformation efforts; (3) theories suggesting that the relational nature of social networking and gaming encourages and reinforces relational consciousness and increases young people’s conscious participation in relationship building; and (4) links between the imaginative elements of digital play and the facilitation of ritual experience and spiritual self-knowledge. The essay also attends to some of the dangers that lurk in the digital world and suggests how we might discern when young people’s digital play is spiritually healthy and when it veers into spiritual desolation.     

The Sayings of Jesus in Family Guy: A Pastoral Reading of “I Dream of Jesus”

This essay offers a pastoral reading of an episode of the cartoon Family Guy. The episode is titled ??I Dream of Jesus.?? In doing so, I explore six sayings of Jesus in this episode, and I identify nine theological themes that are raised by these sayings. On the basis of this pastoral reading of ??I Dream of Jesus,?? I argue that Family Guy can be used as a source for theological reflection, and I suggest, in closing, that the show might be a practical way for combating biblical and theological illiteracy among youth and young adults. This article also contains a table that can be useful for creating Sunday School or youth group lessons based on this episode. It is worth pointing out that this essay was written for the ??Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology.?? The ??group?? was formed to celebrate the career of Donald Capps on the occasion of his retirement from Princeton Theological Seminary. The theme for the conference this year was the sayings of Jesus. While the choice of focusing on a contemporary cartoon for such an occasion may seem odd or quirky, the author does so to demonstrate the unique freedom that pastoral theologians enjoy with regard to what Robert Dykstra calls ??the acceptable latitude of inquiry?? in pastoral theology. Another way of putting this is to say that both the Apostle Peter and the animated Peter can serve as resources for theological reflection.     

Toward an Anatomy of Mourning: Discipline,Devotion and Liberation in a Freudian-Buddhist Framework

In this essay I first articulate what I take to be an influential and for the most part persuasive model in the western psychoanalytic tradition that is a response to tragic loss, namely, the one that we find in Freud’s little essay entitled ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). I then use a well-known Buddhist folk tale about the plight of a young woman named Kisagotami to underscore central elements from Buddhist psychology on the subject of suffering that is a consequence of the loss of a young mother’s only child. Fortified by both traditions, I gather together the ingredients for a cross-cultural mental model that serves to explain and to justify as healthy a specific kind of response to a specific form of suffering, namely, the loss of ones’ loved one. I arrive at this model by asking a number of specific questions of both traditions. For instance, what constitutes a non-pathological response to this kind of suffering? What state of mind represents the cessation of such suffering? Is preoccupation with the dead beloved a way of escaping the fact that the person is dead? Is this a form of ignorance that needs to be removed? Is it a form of moral deficiency? Might certain forms and contexts of ignorance, in effect, put one on a path to enlightenment?     

Conflict and Aggression in Couples Therapy: A Self Psychological Vantge Point

The intent of the present essay is to correct the misconception that self psychology fails to deal with conflict and aggression. Self psychology does, in fact, have a definite view of conflict and aggression that leads to clear implications for treatment. I will focus upon the applicability of these ideas to psychoanalytic work with couples. Clinical material will be presented in order to illustrate the application of these concepts. Conflict and aggression are not seen as an interference or resistance to be handled or removed. Instead, the occurrence of conflict and aggression may be viewed as an opportunity to address underlying issues. The aim of technique thus becomes the deepening of therapeutic process. The key issue is not the management of conflict and rage. It is the strengthening of functions of affect regulation, containment, and self-cohesion. The emphasis is on the underlying narcissistic vulnerability of both members of the couple, especially during times of conflict. The therapist's attunement to underlying vulnerability is an important aspect of a self psychological approach.     

Transformations: The World Religions Survey through an Adjunct Feminist Lens

This essay describes a transformation in my experience as an adjunct teaching underprepared students from one of shame toward a desire to assert the value of this work. Insights from my feminist theological training helped me to affirm the importance of encouraging transformative learning in teaching the academically marginalized and prompted my analysis of student writing in an introductory World Religions course, in order to determine whether or not the course was a site of transformative learning. I argue that despite many contextual limitations, the movement toward deepening self‐awareness and increasing openness to religious diversity seen in student writing demonstrates that transformative learning began in this course, and that is valuable for students' lives whether or not they are academically successful.     

Lower level encoding: Holistic or nonselective?

Two experimental procedures, discriminative learning and classification, reveal a monotonic increase between early childhood and young adulthood in the disposition to encode visual input selectively. This paper compares the capacity of two theories to explain this ontogeny. One theory cites perceptual differentiation as a major mechanism; the other cites transfer of control from a lower, analytic, nonselective encoding level to a higher, selective level. This essay supports the levels theory by showing how a model that assumes young children are disposed to encode analytically and nonselectively can (1) explain data heretofore considered as supporting the perceptual differentiation theory and (2) predict the outcome of two new critical experiments.     

Feminism's Third Wave

Summary

“Third wave” feminists, raised in the wake of an established feminist movement as well as a strong anti-feminist backlash, are beginning to define their own feminist agenda. “Third wave” feminists are exploring the contradictions in their lived experience as feminists, and examining the inter section of feminism with their other identities. Young feminists' self-expression has been characterized (by feminists and non-feminists) as “self-obsessed” and “divorced from matters of public purpose” (Bellafante, 1998, p. 57 & 60). In this essay, we provide an alternative view of “third wave” expression, seeing young feminists' honesty in their struggles with various identities as a resurgence of grass roots activism; a return to “the personal.” In this essay, we call for an intergenerational dialogue between second and third wave feminists, and encourage feminist therapists to support and validate young feminists.     

Bernard Williams on the Human Prejudice

In “The Human Prejudice”, Bernard Williams discusses our treating human beings differently in our moral thinking from the ways we treat other creatures. He criticises the idea that this expresses a prejudice, speciesism, analogous to racism and sexism. His essay has been misunderstood by some of its critics, including Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan. My essay sets out several questions one may have about Williams's essay, and explains how they can be answered. I make clear the connections between “The Human Prejudice” and some main elements in Williams's thinking about ethics, including his criticisms of moral theory.     

„Innerer Richter“ und „Herzenskündiger“ im Wandel der Zeit

The last few years have seen a deepening of the understanding of the role of metaphor and metaphorical processes first in the cognitive sciences, more recently also in psychoanalysis. What had for a long time been viewed as an imprecise way of understanding turned out to be central for a comprehension of how the mind functions. Most important was the step of distinguishing metaphorical processes as a fundamental way how the mind works from the linguistic form of metaphor. The essay deals with a number of core metaphors for superego conflicts and for interpersonal relations; In particular, the differentiation between people who focus more on things versus those who stress inner life and emotions.     

Executive-process interactive control: A unified computational theory for answering 20 questions (and more) about cognitive ageing

Although the effects of ageing on human information processing and performance have been studied extensively, many fundamental questions about cognitive ageing remain to be answered definitively. For example, what are the sources of age-related slowing? How much is working-memory capacity reduced in older adults? Is time-sharing ability lost with age? Answering such questions requires a unified computational theory that characterises the interactive operations of many component mental processes and integrates diverse data on cognitive ageing. Toward fulfilling this requirement, an executive-process interactive control (EPIC) architecture has been extended to model performance of both young and older adults. EPIC models yield accurate accounts of ageing effects on reaction times and accuracy in basic dual-task and working-memory paradigms. From these accounts, it appears that time-sharing ability and working-memory capacity decrease relatively little until after 70 years of age. Before age 70, at least some apparent performance decrements may be attributable to conservative executive processes and inefficient task procedures rather than decreased "hardware" functionality. By clarifying and deepening such insights, unified computational theories like EPIC will help answer many questions about cognitive ageing.     

Leon Trotsky’s Contribution to the Marxist Theory of History

Trotsky’s contribution to historical materialism has been subject to two broadly defined critical assessments. Detractors have tended to dismiss his interpretation of Marxism as a form of productive force determinism, while admirers have tended to defend his Marxism as a voluntarist negation of the same. In this essay I argue that both of these opinions share an equally caricatured interpretation of Second International Marxism against which Trotsky is compared. By contrast, I argue that Trotsky’s Marxism can best be understood as a powerful application and deepening of the strongest elements of Second International methodology to a novel set of problems. Thus, against Trotsky’s admirers, I locate his Marxism as both emerging out of, in addition to breaking with, Second International Marxism; while, against his critics, I argue that it was precisely the strengths of this earlier interpretation of Marxism that informed Trotsky’s powerful contributions to historical materialism: his concept of combined and uneven development and his discussion of the role of individual agents within the Marxist interpretation of history.     

Pedagogy Beyond Piracy: Un‐Learning the White Body to Recreate a Body of Learning

This essay highlights a range of questions that arise when white suburban students engage urban neighborhoods of poverty and color in the United States. How can involvement in an “other” context move beyond “educational tourism”? The essay presents a pedagogical style that raises questions of the kind of socialized body one inhabits: either one shaped by presumptions of control and rights of academic observation, or one mobilized to risk involvement in a differently communalized episteme. And while the pedagogy described may not be replicable by faculty who do not share the author's background or cross‐cultural orientation, the rhetorical style of the essay itself enacts the tensions that this pedagogy contends with: the efforts of a white male educator – altered by decades of inner city involvement – to open “white” space in the classroom to other norms of embodiment and other modes of learning. Here is the necessity and impossibility of moving beyond “educational tourism.”     

Making IBM's Computer, Watson, Human

This essay uses the recent victory of an IBM computer (Watson) in the TV game, Jeopardy, to speculate on the abilities Watson would need, in addition to those it has, to be human. The essay's basic premise is that to be human is to behave as humans behave and to function in society as humans function. Alternatives to this premise are considered and rejected. The viewpoint of the essay is that of teleological behaviorism. Mental states are defined as temporally extended patterns of overt behavior. From this viewpoint (although Watson does not currently have them), essential human attributes such as consciousness, the ability to love, to feel pain, to sense, to perceive, and to imagine may all be possessed by a computer. Most crucially, a computer may possess self-control and may act altruistically. However, the computer's appearance, its ability to make specific movements, its possession of particular internal structures (e.g., whether those structures are organic or inorganic), and the presence of any nonmaterial "self," are all incidental to its humanity.     

As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

On the development of color naming in young children: data and theory

Among the semantics of different common attributes of the environment, consistent and correct color naming seems to develop paradoxically late in children, for even young infants discriminate and categorize colors well, color is a salient feature of the child's world, and children are aware of color as a separate domain, know color terms, and respond to color questions with color names. Several specific anomalies characterize early linguistic development in this domain: Errors in beginning color naming are perseverative or random, there seems to be a minimum age for correct and consistent color naming, developmental rate shows wide individual differences, and acquisition among girls is generally faster than among boys. This essay reviews data that support these observations, and evaluates three traditional explanations for them--including the perceptual salience of color for children, experience and learning in the child, and cognitive development--against a fourth new possibility. It is hypothesized that appropriate color naming may depend on the maturation and integration of specific cortical neurological structures; among several interpretations, the neurological one accounts best for diverse characteristics of early color naming.     

Athletes as heroes and role models: an ancient model

A common argument for the social value of sport is that athletes serve as heroes who inspire people – especially young people – to strive for excellence. This argument has been questioned by sport philosophers at a variety of levels. Not only do athletes seem unsuited to be heroes or role models in the conventional sense, it is unclear more generally what the social and educational value of athletic excellence could be. In this essay, I construct an argument for the social and educational value of sport built upon the relationship between athletes, heroes, and the song culture that celebrated them in ancient Greece. On this model, athletes are neither heroes nor role models in the conventional sense. Rather, athletes, athletics, and the poets who extolled them were part of a cultural conspiracy to celebrate and inspire virtue (aretē) by connecting a community with its heroic past. Festivals such as the Olympic Games, but also local events such as funeral games, educated and unified communities by cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for virtue and by inspiring youth to strive for it. Ancient athletes were not heroes, rather they re-enacted heroic struggles, thereby experiencing heroic virtues, and inspiring both artists and spectators to bond with the higher ideals implied by their shared belief in divine ancestry. In this way, athletes, athletics, and the media that celebrated them played important social and educational roles. Insofar as modern sport performs a similar service, its association with heroism and with moral education may ultimately be justified.     

Underground railroads: citizen entitlements and unauthorized mobility in the antebellum period and today

In recent years, some scholars and prominent political figures have advocated the deepening of North American integration on roughly the European Union model, including the creation of new political institutions and the free movement of workers across borders. The construction of such a North American Union, if it included even a very thin trans-state citizenship regime, could represent the most significant expansion of individual entitlements in the region since citizenship was extended to former slaves in the United States. With such a possibility as its starting point, this article explores some striking parallels between the mass, legally prohibited movement across boundaries by fugitive slaves in the pre-Civil War period, and that by current unauthorized migrants to the United States. Both were, or are, met on their journeys by historically parallel groups of would-be helpers and hinderers. Their unauthorized movements in both periods serve as important signals of incomplete entitlements or institutional protections. Most crucially, moral arguments for extending fuller entitlements to both groups are shown here to be less distinct than may be prima facie evident, reinforcing the case for expanding and deepening the regional membership regime.