Pattern as Inspiration and Mode of Communication in the Works of Van Gogh

A close study of specific patterning in Van Gogh's drawings (revelatory because of their absence of his celebratory color) provides new insight into pattern as a direct expression of nonverbal meaning. A study of his articulation of pattern through form, plus a close reading of his writings about difficulties he encountered because of his unique vision, show how Van Gogh's creativity reflects a need to express the inexpressible that derives from an idiosyncratic way of perceiving self and the world. We apply critical theories of modern art as a manifestation of unconsciously expressed meaning and explications of differences between the experience of color versus form, and indices of how nonverbal meanings are noted and anchored. We conclude that Van Gogh's unique and personal perceptual style both served his developmental needs and exacerbated his distress, contributing both to his mental instability and his artistic greatness.     

“God … has sent me to Germany”: Salomon Maimon,Friedrich Jacobi,and the Spinoza Quarrel

Salomon Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Transcendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks Kant's arguments in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the foundations of natural science and of Newtonian physics in particular. Kant himself was impressed both with Maimon's grasp of his critical project and also with the force of his challenge to it. While Maimon's significance on the later development of German Idealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of Maimon's Versuch has not been fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of the Spinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The Spinoza Quarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy's rational understanding of God needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experience. This paper is the first extended effort at placing Maimon's Versuch into the context of the Spinoza Quarrel. I argue that the Spinoza Quarrel and Maimon's self‐proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealed faith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch. I show how Maimon's Versuch can be read as not only a response to Kant, but also to Jacobi's defense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in David Hume über den Glauben (1787), the book in which Jacobi offers his own skeptical challenge to Kant's Kritik. Situating Maimon's Versuch as a response to Friedrich Jacobi's David Hume allows us to understand how one of Maimon's objectives in his Versuch is to keep Jacobian Glaube [faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised Kantian framework, the conditions of the impossibility of experiencing miracles.     

THE LITERAL SENSE OF SCRIPTURE ACCORDING TO HENRI DE LUBAC: INSIGHTS FROM PATRISTIC EXEGESIS OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

This essay explicates Henri de Lubac's account of Scripture's literal sense as illumined by three patristic interpretations of the Transfiguration. Origen's exegesis highlights de Lubac's deployment of the Incarnational analogy in which history contains, veils, and discloses divine mystery. Similar to Jerome, de Lubac distinguishes the realities of biblical history (as revelatory loci) from their textual articulation. Augustine illustrates the hermeneutical influence of the interpreter's presupposed account of history, to which de Lubac, following Blondel, attributes great importance in approaching the biblical letter. De Lubac's account of the literal sense is thoroughly theological and an underexplored resource for thinking about this topic.     

Dialectical Theology as Theology of Mission: Investigating the Origins of Karl Barth's Break with Liberalism

Based on a thorough investigation of Karl Barth's early writings, this article proposes a new interpretation of dialectical theology as fundamentally concerned with the issue of mission. Documents from 1914 and 1915 show that the turning point in Barth's thinking about mission – and about Christian theology in general – occurred, at least in part, in response to a largely forgotten manifesto published in September 1914. This manifesto appealed to Protestants around the world to support Germany's cause in the war on the grounds that they would be supporting the work of the Great Commission. Barth's reaction to this document sheds light on the missionary nature of dialectical theology, which pursues an understanding of God and God‐talk that does not conflate the mission of the church with the diffusion of culture.     

BEGINNING READERS' MOTIVATION FOR READING IN RELATION TO PARENTAL BELIEFS AND HOME READING EXPERIENCES

Sixty-five 6-year-olds (first graders) from different sociocultural backgrounds and their mothers participated in a study examining children's motivation for reading in relation to parental beliefs and home literacy experiences. Each child completed an individually administered Motivations for Reading Scale that assessed several theoretical dimensions of reading motivation, including enjoyment/interest in reading, perceived competence as a reader, and sense of the value of reading. Parents were interviewed regarding their beliefs about reasons for reading, their beliefs about their child's interest in learning to read, and their ratings of the frequency of their child's experiences with printed materials. Results revealed that the beginning readers had generally positive views about reading and that no differences in motivation were associated with income level, ethnicity, or gender. Empirical support was provided for the distinctness of the dimensions of value, enjoyment, and perceived competence. Parental identification of pleasure as a reason for reading predicted children's motivation for reading, as did parents' reports that their child took an active interest in learning to read. Children's motivation for reading was not associated with frequency of storybook reading or library visits, but frequent use of basic skills books (ABC books) was negatively associated with motivation. The study demonstrated the importance of looking beyond quantitative indices of home literacy experiences in accounting for the development of motivation for reading; parents who believe that reading is pleasurable convey a perspective that is appropriated by their children, either directly through their words or indirectly through the nature of the literacy experiences they provide.     

Ecclesiology and Missiology: Reflections on Two Recent Documents from the World Council of Churches

In 2013 the World Council of Churches published two important documents, one on the church and one on mission. Beginning with the conviction that ecclesiology has to be missiological and missiology ecclesiological, this article reads each document from the basic perspective of the other. This reading is followed by a constructive critique from the author's perspective as a Roman Catholic missionary ecclesiologist.     

A Catholic Missiological and Ecumenical Appreciation of Together towards Life

The new mission statement Together towards Life does not so much propose new teachings about mission as point out pertinent reminders and reconfirmations of some of our beliefs and convictions about God's mission (missio Dei) in and for the world. The author suggests that among the many challenges expressed in the statement, three merit special attention: (1) the proposal to shift the mission concept from “mission to the margins” to “mission from the margins”; (2) the necessity to underline the intrinsic link between humanity and creation; and (3) the temptation to consider “mission” as at the service of the interests and aggrandizement of individual churches instead of the contrary. He concludes that this statement is an invitation to walk “together towards life” for the benefit of both humanity and the whole of God's creation, and that the urgent challenge is to forge concrete means to make this dream a reality, even in the face of paying the “cost of discipleship.”     

God's Mission as Word Event in an Age of World Christianity: An Asian Linguistic‐Transcultural Model

Christian community lives according to the Word of God, inspiring the church to be in ecumenical fellowship and to be amenable to the act of God's speech in an age of world Christianity. The Word of God is able to be translated transculturally in different times and places, while keeping the transversal, irregular horizon of God's discourse. In view of the rise of world Christianity much has been said about the indigenization of the Christian narrative that challenges the western concept of missio Dei. To renew God's mission in an East Asian configuration, a linguistic‐transcultural model is proposed for a public theology of mission that promotes the full humanity of those on the underside of history and acknowledges religious outsiders. A public mission of God's narrative takes seriously the project of interculturation and emancipation in the post‐western Christian era.     

KNOWING ABOUT READING BEFORE READING: PRESCHOOL CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS OF READING

This paper reports findings from an investigation of preschool children's concepts about reading. Three tasks related to several basic ideas about reading were presented to 60 preschool children, ranging in age from three to five years. The first task assessed children's ability to identify oral and silent reading. The number of children who correctly identified both forms of reading increased with age, with almost all five‐year‐olds giving accurate responses. The second task was aimed at establishing children's perceptions of their own reading ability. Only four of the 60 children incorrectly evaluated their own reading ability. The third task investigated children's ability to recognize what it is on a page that is read. Three‐year‐olds were, on the whole, quite unaware of the salient information in books. Even among the five‐year‐olds, who performed significantly better than three‐ and four‐year‐olds on this task, some children's responses indicated an ambiguity about the role of print in reading. Suggestions for adults who guide young children through their early experiences with print are drawn from the findings of this investigation.     

Low-Income Parents’ Socialization of Their Preschoolers’ Early Reading and Math Skills

Children from low-income and Black and Latino families are often at risk for reading and math difficulties. We examined whether there were differences in Black and Latino Head Start parents' beliefs about reading and math socialization, frequency of children's engagement in reading and math, and children's reading and math skills. There were differences in parents' socialization beliefs, children's reading and math activities, and associations with children's reading and math outcomes. Although reading/math engagement was more limited than what is reported among middle-income families, findings show the importance of parental beliefs and practices for children's reading and math outcomes.     

Genocide,Diversity, and John Dewey's Progressive Education

This article discusses how John Dewey's “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” (published in 1924) and some of Dewey's related travel narratives reflect “civilizing mission” imperatives and involve multiple utopian operations that have not yet attracted political‐philosophical attention. Such critical attention would reveal Dewey's misjudgments concerning issues of diversity, geopolitics, and global justice. Based on an ethicopolitical reading of the relevant sources, the aim here is to expose developmentalist and colonial vestiges, to raise searching questions, and to obtain a heightened view on the stakes of Dewey's utopianism and progressive pragmatism. The article concludes that the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide constitutes a major challenge to Dewey scholarship.     

Sex differences in the effects of interest on boys' and girls' reading comprehension

This study compared the reading comprehension of groups of boys and girls (aged 10–11) on two tests, one of which was about the evacuation of children during the Second World War and the other of which was about spiders. These were the actual year 6 SATS reading tests administered in the UK in 1998 and 1999. The majority of the boys said that they would prefer to read the text about spiders, and the majority of the girls said they would prefer to read the text about leaving home in wartime. These patterns of preference were reflected in the children's performance on the actual tests. However, whereas the boys' comprehension was significantly affected by the content of the tests (they showed better performance on the test about spiders) the girls' performance was relatively little influenced by the content of the test. The implications of these results for testing reading, and for encouraging reading more generally, are discussed.     

J. L. Austin and Literal Meaning

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context‐invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning.     

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Heidegger Backwards: White's Time and Death ∗

In Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange hermeneutic strategy, reading Heidegger backwards by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger's own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this paper critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion reached is that White's creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger's early work, but remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger's thought as a whole. Most importantly, White helps us to understand the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger's philosophy.     

Anti-Realist Interpretations of Plato: Paul Natorp

The paper considers Paul Natorp's Kantian reading of Plato's theory of ideas, as developed in his monumental work, Platos Ideenlehre, eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1903, 1921). Central to Natrop's reading are, I argue, the following two claims: (1) Plato's ideas are laws, not things; and (2) Plato's theory of ideas in the first instance a theory about the possibility and nature of thought - in particular cognitive and indeed scientific or explanatory thought - and only as a consequence is it a theory about the nature of reality. Natrop thus argues that Plato's theory of ideas is at its heart a transcendental theory, and that Plato's metaphysics is built on this basis. The paper considers these claims - and their textual basis in Plato - in some detail, and attempts an initial evaluation of their plausibility as a reading of Plato. I am on the whole sympathetic to Natorp's reading, though a proper assessment goes beyond the present paper. The wider interest of this idealist or anti-realist reading of Plato ought to be obvious, especially in view of the commonly accepted assumption these days that both Plato and Aristotle, and indeed the Greeks in general, took realism entirely for granted (see e.g. M. Burnyeat). Natorp argues that this is true of Aristotle, but quite untrue of Plato. But he is quite clear that the idealism he ascribes to Plato is not Berkeleyan or metaphysical idealism, but a certain kind of transcendental or epistemological idealism. Natorp, however, is no uncritical follower of Kant, and the version of trascendental idealism that he ascribes to Plato is, I argue, very different from Kant's.     

‘We shall be like him,for we shall see him’: Augustine's De Trinitate and the Purification of the Mind

Contemporary re‐examinations of Augustine's De Trinitate have made the case for the coherence and consistency of the work based on the material content of its trinitarian theology. I propose that Augustine's understanding of De Trinitate's function also ties the work together as a whole. Rather than just talking about purification, De Trinitate attempts to participate in and correspond to God's economically grounded, eschatological purification of humanity. By undertaking a close reading of Book 1, followed by a brief overview of Books 2–15, I make the case that reading De Trinitate as a participation in purification holds all 15 books together.     

The polarising effect of female leaders: Interest in politics and perceived leadership capability after a reminder of Australia's first female prime minister

The current study examined the impact of observing successful women being attacked on gender lines through reactions to gender‐based criticism directed towards Australia's first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Australian undergraduate students completed a measure of conformity to gender norms and then read statements about either: (a) generic difficulties for leaders; or (b) statements about gender‐based difficulties experienced by Gillard. Results showed that, relative to those who read the generic article, female participants high on conformity to feminine norms displayed lower desire to be involved in politics after reading about Gillard's gender‐based difficulties, while low conformers showed greater desire to be involved in politics. For male participants, those high on conformity to masculine norms showed greater belief in their own leadership capabilities after reading about Gillard's gender‐based difficulties than when reading about generic difficulties, while low conforming men showed the opposite pattern. Implications for achieving gender equality are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aquinas and the Natural Law

Recent decades have seen a shift away from the traditional view that Aquinas's theory of the natural law is meant to supply us with normative guidance grounded in a substantive theory of human nature. In the present essay, I argue that this is a mistake. Expanding on the suggestions of Jean Porter and Ralph McInerny, I defend a derivationist reading of ST I‐II, Q. 94, A. 2 according to which Aquinas takes our knowledge of the genuine goods of human life and their proper ordering to one another to be self‐evident only to the wise who are able to discern the truth about our God‐given human nature. I then show that this reading provides a better account of Aquinas's view than two recent alternatives: John Finnis's brand of inclinationism and Daniel Mark Nelson's virtue‐based interpretation.