Inclusivism and the spiritual journey of Marie de Souza Canavarro (1849–1933)

Every age has its share of religious seekers, but during some periods of spiritual crisis greater numbers of seekers seem to appear. Marie de Souza Canavarro, an American advocate and interpreter of Asian traditions, was a paradigmatic seeker in an age of religious wandering. Along the way, she embraced Catholicism, Theosophy, Buddhism, Bahá'í, and Hinduism. In this article I offer an interpretation of her life and work, drawing on her novels, poems, letters, lectures, articles, and autobiography. I argue that amidst the diversity of views she affirmed, there was some continuity. Canavarro longed for rest from her ceaseless wandering, and she hoped that religious and gender inclusivism might bring it. She, like others of her age, yearned for a tradition that elevated women and reconciled religions.     

Categorical perception along the happy–angry and happy–sad continua in the first year of life

The current study investigated 6-, 9- and 12-month old infants’ ability to categorically perceive facial emotional expressions depicting faces from two continua: happy–sad and happy–angry. In a between-subject design, infants were tested on their ability to discriminate faces that were between-category (across the category boundary) or within-category (within emotion category). Results suggest that 9- and 12 month-olds can discriminate between but not within categories, for the happy–angry continuum. Infants could not discriminate between cross-boundary facial expressions in the happy–sad continuum at any age. We suggest a functional account; categorical perception may develop in conjunction with the emotion's relevance to the infant.     

Be-ing (you 有) and non-be-ing (wu 無) in the Dao De Jing

This essay questions the meaning of be-ing (you 有) and non-be-ing (wu 無) in the DDJ with regard to the root-source (benyuan 本源) meaning of dao. I first explore the meaning of dao as the dark non-be-ing, revealing the connotations of the distinction between dao and things (daowuqufen 道物區分) by comparison with some forms of Western metaphysics. The meaning of non-be-ing is elaborated in terms of the dynamic meanings of xu 虚 and chong 沖; The play between be-ing and non-be-ing is explored through the lens of yin and yang qi thinking. Qi thinking determines the mutually manifest and mutually interpretive characteristic of be-ing and non-be-ing. Be-ing and non-be-ing thus understood is an ever-flowing and mutually transforming process that penetrates the different levels of dao, things and humans. In the last part I investigate the meaning of “Be-ing comes from non-be-ing”.     

Practices of Looking and the Medical Humanities: Imagining the Unborn in France, 1550–1800

Visuality is a concept used to study vision as an historically and culturally specific activity. Curriculum in the medical humanities could address visuality by stressing how different kinds of practitioners and peoples learn how to see. This paper introduces the visual training promoted by the discipline of art history, analysing early modern French medical images of the unborn as a case study. The goal is to encourage medical practitioners to reflect on their own visual skills, comparing and contrasting them with the visual methodologies of art history.     

Robert Persons’s Resolution(1582) and the issue of textual piracy in Protestant editions of Catholic devotional literature

Abstract

Despite current attention to continuing crypto-Catholics in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic culture may have affected the Protestant mainstream. This study demonstrates the general neglect of this subject, and examines the role played, then and now, by the attack of Robert Persons SJ on Edmund Bunny, a Church of England minister, for publishing a Protestant adaptation of Persons’s work. This study argues that Bunny had a more serious intent than the ‘piracy’ he is widely credited with, and that his editorial practices resembled those employed by Roman Catholics, including Persons himself. While more serious cases of textual piracy have been largely overlooked, conventional condemnation of Bunny’s edition has done little more than contribute to a general misunderstanding of (and a paucity of interest in) the reception of Catholic literature in whatever format by Protestants.     

Introducing psychology as an academic discipline in France: Théodule Ribot and the Collège de France (1888-1901)

This paper describes the context in which the teaching of psychology as an autonomous discipline was introduced in France, and reproduces the first psychology lecture given in France by Théodule Ribot on 9 April 1888 at The Collège de France. In France, this recognition was delayed because of the negative influence of spiritualist philosophy. It took both the acknowledged status of a man (Ribot) and a minister's decision for this new type of teaching to be accepted in France. After describing the events that took place at the Collège de France and at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, we reproduce in full Ribot's inaugural lecture at the Collège, an important document for the history of French psychology. We conclude by describing the circumstances in which this teaching came to its end in 1901.     

Blessed be the Children: A Case–Control Study of Sexual Abusers in the Catholic Church

Individuals working in churches and other youth-serving institutions have a unique level of access to children, yet the problem of sexual abuse in institutional settings has received scant research attention. To address this gap, we analyzed data from a large sample of clergy (N = 1,121) and applied a social–ecological model of offending to identify risk factors for sexual abuse perpetration. Using a case–control study design that compared clergy sexual abusers with three control groups of clergy, this study focuses specifically on individual-, relationship-, and community-level factors associated with a higher risk of abuse in professional populations. Findings revealed that clergy sexual abusers tended to have more truncated pre-seminary dating histories, and that their dating and sexual partners were more likely to have been male than female. Self-reported sexual abuse history was associated with a greater likelihood of sexual abuse perpetration among clergy. Clergy abusers tended to be more involved with youth and adolescents in their ministries; however, they were observed to relate less well to youth and adolescents than their clergy counterparts. Given widespread changes in our cultural understanding of abuse as well as more specific changes in the organizational approach to seminary education, these differences underscore the role that youth-serving institutions and society can have in the primary prevention of child sexual abuse. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development and Validation of the Affect in Play Scale–Brief Rating Version (APS–BR)

The concurrence of psychiatric and MMPI based diagnoses for 78 consecutively admitted patients was examined. The results suggest diagnostic coincidence for only 21 of the admitted patients, with the majority being in the differentiation of psychoneurosis from psychosis. Patient sex and chronological age did not appear to be factors in either form of diagnosis.     

The Polish Catholic Church’s perception of the processes of EU integration and Europeanisation in the context of traditional norms and values

The Catholic Church has historically played a significant role in the sociocultural and political life of Poland. Its activity was particularly evident and significant during the process of political transformation. Since 1989, however, the sociopolitical conditions have remarkably changed, thereby placing the church in a new, challenging context. Poland’s post-1989 political aspirations (opening to the West in particular) have come to the fore of the public debate, in which the church has actively participated. In this article I aim to analyse the church’s position on the process of EU integration and the Europeanisation of Polish law and culture. The main questions concern the direction of argumentation used by the church’s internal wings and the politicisation of the discourse on the axiological shape of Polish culture and tradition. My analysis embraces the debate surrounding the process of European integration, with special consideration of the church’s internal divisions (between the ‘centre-right’ and ‘radical-right’ in particular) and ideological discrepancies concerning the very idea of integration and the debates on the draft Constitution of the European Union (Constitutional Treaty) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the European Union.     

Development of a Brief Form of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (B–IRI)

The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) is a standardized self-report measure of disposition to empathic responsiveness for the general adult population (the domain for which it was developed), and for the general adolescent population. The IRI has a number of problems, however, including some uncertainty about its factor structure, low reliabilities, and poor readability of some items for people with limited literacy skills. To address these issues, we constructed an abbreviated form of the index, the Brief IRI (B–IRI). Three studies demonstrated that this 16-item B–IRI has a clear and coherent factor structure, adequate internal consistency, measurement invariance across gender and age, and theoretically meaningful associations with a range of external criteria that support its construct validity. The B–IRI substantially preserves the psychometric properties of the long form, and we recommend its use in all research settings.     

Looking for happiness in all the wrong places: The moderating role of gratitude and affect in the materialism–life satisfaction relationship

We propose a model that explains the negative relationship between materialism and life satisfaction. We test negative affect as a mediator of the relationship between materialism and dissatisfaction with life, and gratitude and positive affect as moderators of this effect. Self-report data collected from 246 (129 female) undergraduate students generally supported our predictions. The negative relationship between materialism and life satisfaction was mediated in part by an increase in negative affect. Additionally, gratitude – and to a lesser extent, positive affect – functioned as moderators of the effect of materialism on life satisfaction. Individuals high in gratitude showed less of a relationship between materialism and negative affect. Additionally, individuals high in materialism showed decreased life satisfaction when either gratitude or positive affect was low. Thus, negative affect, positive affect, and gratitude seem to be important variables in the relationship between materialism and dissatisfaction with life.     

Trait Variance and Response Style Variance in the Scales of the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5)

Using self- and observer reports on the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID–5) and the HEXACO Personality Inventory–Revised (HEXACO–PI–R), we identified for each inventory several trait dimensions (each defined by both self- and observer reports on the facet-level scales belonging to the same domain) and 2 source dimensions (each defined by self-reports or by observer reports, respectively, on all facet-level scales). Results (N = 217) showed that the source dimensions of the PID–5 were very large (much larger than those of the HEXACO–PI–R), and suggest that self-report (or observer report) response styles substantially inflate the intercorrelations and the alpha reliabilities of the PID–5 scales. We discuss the meaning and the implications of the large PID–5 source components, and we suggest some methods of controlling their influence.     

Nietzsche and l’élan technique: Technics,life, and the production of time

Abstract In this paper we examine Nietzsche’s relation to the life sciences of his time and to Darwinism in particular, arguing that his account of the will to power in terms of technics eschews three metaphysical prejudices, hylemorphism, utilitarianism, and teleological thinking. Telescoping some of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the will to power with a Bergsonian lens, our reading of the will to power, as an operation productive of time, the future or life, offers an alternative to Heidegger’s. Rather than being reducible to a technics of domination or mastery, the will to power, we argue, is best interpreted as a technics of material forces that recasts all things past and future, near and far, moment by moment.     

Is the Catholic Church in America Experiencing Internal Secularization? Priests’ Assessments of Pope Francis and the Condition of the Church

This study addressed internal secularization in the Catholic Church by testing the role of several factors in priests’ assessments of the state of the Church in the United States, priests’ views of whether the Church's situation is getting better or worse, and their attitudes toward Pope Francis. Comparisons with identical questions fielded in 2002 revealed a striking pessimistic turn among priests over the last two decades. In addition, regression analyses using the 2021 Survey of American Catholic Priests revealed that “in-house” factors—namely, attitudes toward Pope Francis and perceptions of how well bishops have restored confidence in the Catholic Church following the sexual abuse crisis—most powerfully predicted priests’ current pessimism. On top of this, politically conservative priests and priests ordained more recently tended to be most critical of how Francis is handling his duties, signaling a pronounced tension inside the Catholic Church over religious authority, a defining feature of internal secularization.     

Jivacide,Zombies and Jivanmuktas: the meaning of life in the Bhagavad Gitā

In discussing the meaning of life in the Bhagavad Gitā two obvious questions arise: first, what is the meaning of ‘the meaning of life'?, and second, how does that meaning apply to the Bhagavad Gitā? In Part I of this brief paper I will attempt to answer the first question by focusing on one of the common meanings of that phrase; in Part II, I will apply that very common meaning to the Bhagavad Gitā; and in the third and final part, I will point to a puzzle, the paradox of the jivanmukta, that would seem to follow from the discussion in the first two parts of this paper.

My own feeling is that the concept of ‘the meaning of life’ is a Western invention [1]. This being so, perhaps it would be wise to probe for that concept and its meaning among Western authors. We turn first, then, to one ancient writer, Aristotle of Stagira, and conclude Part I with a modern writer also concerned with the meaning of life, Albert Camus.     

Relief and rehabilitation of Jewish DPs after the Shoah: the Hachsharot in Italy (1945–48)

In the aftermath of the Second World War, thousands of Jewish DPs reached Italy on their way to Palestine or other countries and received assistance by UNRRA and other organizations. Many joined the hachsharot that were established all over the country between 1945 and 1948. This article analyses the differences between UNRRA and the Joint in providing relief and rehabilitation to the DPs and the role of hachsharot, discussing to what extent they provided better opportunities for rehabilitation compared to DP camps.