The AAR Teaching Series

The first seven volumes of the American Academy of Religion's “Teaching Religious Studies” series provide informative glimpses of how teachers in very different contexts understand the intellectual decisions, strategies, and actions that constitute their craft. Although individual volumes have different formats, the dominant image of good teaching that emerges is that it is founded on deep and sophisticated knowledge of the particular subject matter. Beyond that, many essays provide instructive anatomies of particular syllabi, moments in the classroom, or other aspects of teaching. Much of the material in the essays comes from reflective practitioners and there is relatively little sustained engagement with the contemporary literature on teaching and learning. Nonetheless, virtually any teacher can find in these volumes stimulating reflections on the intersections of substantive research and pedagogy in a variety of classroom contexts.     

Adventist Perspectives on Faith Integration: Subject Index for Christ in the Classroom,Volumes 21–40

Abstract

This article presents a bibliography of essays from the Christ in the Classroom collection, organized by subject. The essays focus on various aspects of the intersection of faith and academic fields of study. This article presents the subject index for volumes 21 through 40 of the collection, including volumes produced in the French, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. The index for volumes 1–20 was printed in 2017. All essays listed here are freely available for download at http://ChristInTheClassroom.org/.     

Focus Introduction: Taking the Measure of Jonathan Edwards for Contemporary Religious Ethics

The Journal of Religious Ethics marks the tercentenary of Edwards's birth with the following collection of essays. In keeping with the overall mission of the journal, this tribute takes the form of historical and constructive reflection, in which diverse perspectives on Edwards's work and diverse forms of engagement with it supplement and correct one another. Our hope is that these essays will serve both to generate interest in Edwards's work among those who are unfamiliar with him, and to advance the discussion of central issues in theological and religious ethics. In this introductory essay, we will offer some reflections on Edwards's general significance for contemporary ethics, followed by a closer examination of his main texts and a brief summary of the essays collected here.     

Some consequences ofThe New Rhetoric: A critical study

This review article examines some aspects of the legacy of Perelman'sThe New Rhetoric as reflected in two volumes of his collected essays in the new edition of his Works as well as in a memorial volume edited by Michel Meyer and the acts of a colloquium sponsored by Meyer's Center for Argumentation.     

Adventist Perspectives on Faith Integration: Subject Index for Christ in the Classroom,Volumes 1–20

This article presents a bibliography of essays focused on the integration of faith and learning (IFL) from the Christ in the Classroom collection. The contents of the first 20 (of a total of 40) volumes of this collection are organized here by subject area. An index for the remaining volumes will be published in 2018. All essays are available for free download at http://www.aiias.edu/ict/.     

INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUMPTIONS IN LIGHT OF COGNITIVE DISABILITY

Abstract: This Introduction to the collection of essays surveys the philosophical literature to date with respect to five central questions: justice, care, agency, metaphilosophical issues regarding the language and representation of cognitive disability, and personhood. These themes are discussed in relation to three specific conditions: intellectual and developmental disabilities, Alzheimer's disease, and autism, though the issues raised are relevant to a broad range of cognitive disabilities. The Introduction offers a brief historical overview of the treatment cognitive disability has received from philosophers, and explains the specific challenges that cognitive disability poses to philosophy. In briefly summarizing the essays in the collection, it highlights the distinctive contributions the collection makes to ethics, political philosophy, bioethics, and the philosophy of disability. We hope that the richness of the topics explored by these essays will be a spur to further investigation.     

Paths to Learning Ten-Structured Understandings of Teen Sums: Addition Solution Methods of Japanese Grade 1 Students

A group of 64 Israeli twelfth-grade students of two different ethnic backgrounds participated in an experiment exploring the effects of argumentative design and social identity on the learning of a charged, ethnicity-related historical controversy. Students were divided into two learning conditions: an argumentative-disciplinary condition and a conventional textbook-based control condition. Students wrote short essays about Israel's “Melting Pot” policy of immigration absorption, prior to and after evaluation of historical sources and discussion. In the argumentative-disciplinary condition the final argumentative level of writing and the frequencies of stand and plot change were higher than in the control essays. As for confirmation bias, primary plot, stand, and argumentative level of pre-essays predicted final outcomes in the conventional textbook-based learning condition; no such relation existed in the argumentative-disciplinary condition. Narratives from the different ethnic groups differed in the frequency, direction, and degree of change, all toward improved in-group image. The design decisions toward the facilitation of argumentative activity seemed to facilitate narrative change, while social identity needs seemed to motivate it.     

Appreciation,Analysis, and Critique: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion</Emphasis> and the Future of Conversion Studies

This article provides an introduction to the essays in this issue on the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, edited by Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian. After briefly discussing the origins of these essays in a session sponsored by the Religious Conversions Group at the 2015 American Academy of Religion annual meeting, as well as some of the broad historical trends and problems in the study of conversion(s), the essay provides a summary of each author’s contributions and suggests that one particular topic—healing—deserves more attention in the study of conversion than it has heretofore enjoyed.     

Time and Tradition as Reflected in the Etz Hayim Torah Commentary

At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the Conservative Movement in North America published a Torah commentary reflecting its historical and theological elucidation of Judaism. This commentary, Etz Hayim, evinces a number of features that the following essay subjects to critical comment and analysis. These include: the commentary’s emphasis on historical context as critical to deciphering the Torah narratives and its laws; the presupposition that Judaism functions as an organism constantly in flux, open to patterns of progress and decline, with an aptitude for rebirth and self‐renewal; and that the pivotal rubrics of belonging, believing, and behaving are quintessential features of Jewish identity. While these characteristics are relatively uncontroversial, the same cannot be said for the editorial decision to divide, on the same page, the commentary’s 'historical' and 'homiletical' segments – a feature which effectively drives underground the option to integrate spiritual values and lessons using the tools of modern critical scholarship. Another unfortunate feature of Etz Hayim is that its two essays on Jewish law (Halakha) offer contrasting, competitive interpretations of how the halakhic process actually works in the minds of Conservative decisors. Yet these alternate approaches are not sufficiently delineated for the lay reader. Finally, while Etz Hayim does highlight value concepts that function as goads to ritual observance, the various contributors to the commentary and to the appended essays never fully engage why Conservative Jews ought to become serious practitioners of Jewish tradition. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Etz Hayim does offer a template of hope and expectation: through its historical‐religious experiences, the Jewish people facilitates an ethical worldview of particular, and of universal, merit.     

The Influence of Author Visibility on High School Students Solving a Historical Problem

This study investigated the influence of a visible author (one who writes in the first person, revealing personal beliefs and self) on adolescent students engaged in a historical reading-to-write task. Thirty high school sophomores and juniors were divided into 2 groups: 1 that read a passage from a textbook that featured an anonymous author (one who writes in the third person, revealing little about personal beliefs or self) and another that read a similar text featuring a visible author. Both groups then wrote a 1- to 2-page essay using information from the introductory passage and 6 additional historical documents. A subgroup of 6 of these students (3 from each condition) "thought aloud" through the entire process. Data from student essays and think-aloud protocols were analyzed to determine the influence of various levels of authorial presence on the ways students read, thought, and wrote about history. Students whose task began by reading a visible author tended to hold mental conversations with text authors, making judgments about those authors and thinking more about the history under discussion. The essays they wrote were longer and showed greater personal agency and awareness of audience. The nature of these relations and effects, both for the visible-author group and the anonymous-author group, are discussed.     

The Bible and Religion in the Century of Genius

In these essays, the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century provides the proper historical context for understanding the emergence of both the study of the Bible and the study of religion as critical, historical and comparative enterprises. Since Benedict Spinoza and his circle are the central focus in this account, the first essay explores relevant aspects of context: Holland in its so-called ‘Golden Age’, and religious alienation and marginality, both Jewish and Christian. The approach taken here attempts to get behind the threadbare and distorted image of ‘warfare’ between abstractions such as science (or ‘scepticism’, or ‘rationalism’) and religion by examining the actual intellectual relations between Spinoza and his contemporaries.     

Double Gestures: Feminist Critiques and the Search for a Useable Practice

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucauk: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them—the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain—both attempt to think through and thus revisudize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how “feminism as critique” can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both.     

Comments on Sandra Lee Bartky's Femininity and Domination

To illustrate the strength of Bartky's clarity of insight I focus on her discussion of shame found in two essays in Femininity and Domination. J argue that these essays as well as the other in the collection identify and offer a clear analysis of many issues central to feminism and call for Bartky to write a sequel which offers constructive suggestions of ways out.     

How Deification Was Rediscovered in Modern Orthodox Theology: The Contribution of Ivan Popov

In contemporary scholarship, deification is so universally assumed to have been an abiding feature of the Eastern Orthodox tradition that it strains historical imagination to conceive of a time when the idea of deification would have been largely forgotten. This article demonstrates that the rediscovery of deification as a structurally indispensable concept of patristic thought was made by the Russian patristic scholar Ivan Popov in a trilogy of essays published in 1903-1909. The article considers different cultural registers within which the deification motif surfaced in the nineteenth century: the Greek Philokalia and its Slavonic and Russian editions, Dostoevsky’s prophecy about the self-divinization of humanity in revolutionary socialism, the Spiritual Diary of St. John of Krondstadt, and Vladimir Solovyov’s concept of Godmanhood. While these sources held a great potential for the theoretical development of deification, the importance of deification for Orthodox theology was not appreciated in nineteenth-century Orthodox academic theology. The situation changed dramatically after Popov (who briefly studied with Harnack in Germany) published his essays arguing for the centrality of deification in patristic thought, providing a detailed analysis of the concept in the fourth-century patristic authors (dwelling at length on Athanasius and the Macarian Homilies), and offering a taxonomy of the two main types of deification: realistic and idealistic. This article discusses Popov’s influence on Pavel Florensky, Sergei Epifanovich, Lev Karsavin, Georges Florovsky, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, and Vladimir Lossky.     

Women in Psychology: Biography and Autobiography

Biographical information on psychologists occurs in several forms and in a variety of sources. Some journals such as the American journal of Psychology, Science, and, more recently the American Psychologist, regularly publish obituaries of eminent psychologists. Other biographical materials can be found in association with award presentations such as those published in the American Psychologist and the fournal of Social Issues. Autobiographical material for psychologists has appeared chiefly in two outlets: A History of Psychology in Autobiography (6 volumes to 1979) and The Psychologists (3 volumes to 1979). In addition to these forms, there are memorial articles, historical papers, and biographical sketches accompanying the announcement of officers of professional societies. Further, more than 250 book-length biographies and autobiographies have been published about psychologists.     

Environmental influence on the writing of gifted high school girls

While the environment is recognized as having an influence on career choices of gifted adolescent girls, no attempt has been made to examine their writing from a historical perspective. Files in the Guidance Institute for the Talented (GIFTS), University of Wisconsin, Madison, contain essays on "Dominant forces that have directed my life" and "The future as I see it and my place in that future" written by most students who went through GIFTS. A comparison of essays by 21 gifted adolescent girls born in 1944 with 20 born in 1957 reflected changes in attitudes that occurred in the United States over that period. The danger of the environment influencing the thinking of gifted young women who have not established their own inner resources is stressed.     

Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy? Questions on Milbank's Aquinas

Focusing on two essays in John Milbank's The Word Made Strange , Lash argues that Milbank's claim that, for Aquinas, 'the domain of metaphysics is not simply subordinate to, but completely evacuated by theology' is unwarranted. First, Milbank's notion of metaphysics often lacks historical specificity. Second, Lash defends recent studies of Aquinas on analogy against Milbank's critique, and questions his construal of ens commune . Concluding sections challenge Milbank's reading of the Prologue to Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics , suggesting a more nuanced reading of the relations between philosophy (and, by implication, the whole sweep of the physical, moral and social sciences) and 'holy teaching'.     

Author Race, Essay Quality, and Reverse Discrimination

This study examines the interaction between author race and essay quality on evaluations of essays by experienced teachers and student teachers. Subjects ( n = 160) were told that they were reading essays written by high school seniors applying for university admission and that their evaluations would result in the authors' admission and class assignment to remedial, normal, or advanced composition classes. Four preselected and prerated essays: one poor, two moderate, and one excellent were presented to the subjects in a booklet, each with a bogus admissions form, an essay rating scale, and a class assignment form. The attribution of author race was accomplished surreptitiously. Results showed that both the essay quality manipulation and author race attribution were successful. Subjects easily discriminated the difference in quality among the essays. They also showed a significant tendency to use reverse discrimination in rating black authors higher than authors whose race was not indicated. An interesting finding was that reverse discrimination was greatest for the moderate essays. Class assignments showed a similar trend, but differences in assignment of black and non-black authors were not generally significant. Discussion focuses on the distinction between ambiguity and ambivalence as psychological constructs in explaining prejudice and discrimination. The significance of these findings for minority education is also examined.     

Syncategoremata in Arabic Logic,al-Fārābī and Avicenna

Presented here are translations of two essays of the Austrian logician, philosopher and experimental psychologist Ernst Mally, originally delivered at the Third International Congress of Philosophy in Heidelberg, Germany. Both essays conclude with discussion between Mally and Kurt Grelling. Mally was a student of Alexius Meinong and a contributor to logical investigations in the field of object theory (Gegenstandstheorie). In these essays, Mally introduces a vital distinction between formal and extra-formal ‘determinations’ (Bestimmungen), and he argues that formal determinations are not part of the identity conditions for intended objects, but provide the basis for a theory of pure logical and mathematical relations. Mally then proceeds to develop a formal logic of formal and extra-formal determinations, whose interrelations of ontic and modal predications provide an analysis of fundamental object theory concepts.