The Evolving “D” in “BASIC ID”

The multimodal counseling model is based on the notion that a client's concerns can be dealt with most successfully when the counselor or therapist treats several aspects of a client's functioning. The multimodal model uses the acronym BASIC ID to identify the areas of client functioning that frequently need to be treated. These areas include behavior, affect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relations, and drugs. The D mode, which represents drugs, is a misunderstood aspect of the BASIC ID partly because it does not seem to parallel other aspects of the model. Over the past few years the D mode has been expanded to include more than drugs, in particular, to include diet and other physiological factors. This article describes the evolution of the D mode and attempts to show the importance of a physiological dimension to the multimodal counseling approach.     

Teaching Exodus as “Problem Text”

This essay explores how one might use the “problem” of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart as a learning opportunity in the classroom. The author identifies two pedagogical aims: (1) cultivating more sophisticated, critical readers of the Bible; and (2) helping students reflect on the contextual nature of interpretation. The essay discusses in some detail various ways of teaching the text, including an exercise in close reading, examination of sources, and a selective study of the history of interpretation. It also explores various lessons to be learned from these exercises, and addresses applicability of the approaches to other teaching contexts. An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the “Problem Texts” group of the consultation “Teaching the Bible in the 21st Century,” held at the Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, Indiana.     

“PURE” VERSUS “PRACTICAL” EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION

Abstract: In this article I distinguish a type of justification that is “epistemic” in pertaining to the grounds of one's belief, and “practical” in its connection to what act(s) one may undertake, based on that belief. Such justification, on the proposed account, depends mainly on the proportioning of “inner epistemic virtue” to the “outer risks” implied by one's act. The resulting conception strikes a balance between the unduly moralistic conception of William Clifford and contemporary naturalist virtue theories.     

“The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things”: Environmental Justice and Mission in Ecumenical Perspective

The ecumenical movement has produced many documents on issues of the environment and justice, but many churches do not know how to translate these documents into concrete actions. In this study I argue that social issues such as poverty and injustice cannot be separated from human responses toward the whole of creation. The ecumenical churches need to revitalize their mission and, as such, the churches need to revision their doctrines that centre on the human being by instead placing creation at the centre. Thus, nature is not just a background to the drama of redemption from sin, but that which God loves and preserves. This article elaborates this thesis in three main parts: the integrality of the problem of injustice and human responses toward all of creation, how churches should revision some major doctrines to be more sensitive to the environment, and how churches translate these documents into actions in their own contexts.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

Psychology and “The Babe”

Psychologists and baseball players were among those Americans who formed professional associations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Psychologists used laboratory tasks to quantify mental and behavioral processes while sportswriters and baseball organizers measured individual and team performance. The most popular baseball player of the 1920s, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, possessed superior batting skills that were evident in the statistical indices of baseball performance. In 1921, he was brought to the psychological laboratory at Columbia University to perform standard laboratory tasks in an effort to discover the basis for his success in hitting home runs and to suggest the potential of tests for identifying future baseball stars. Baseball's addiction to quantitative indices of performance was thus brought together with a new science devoted to quantitative assessment and a desire to make such assessments useful. The attempt to analyze the basis of Ruth's batting skills is part of the history of applied psychology, sport psychology, and popular interest in the science of psychology. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Discrimination of “W” and “V” shapes by goldfish

Goldfish were trained to discriminate between “W” and “V” shapes; different groups were trained with the shapes in different orientations. Transfer tests were given after training and the following conclusions were drawn. Animals learned to discriminate between the training shapes by detecting the difference in the number of points present in each; they learned the difference in the relative number of points rather than the absolute number present in each shape; the subjects transferred well to pairs of shapes bearing points facing in different directions from those on the training shapes; knobs were treated as practically equivalent to points; animals relied more heavily on differences at the tops of the shapes than on differences in the bottom halves.