The Lost Millennium: Psychology During the Middle Ages

The Psychological Record - The medieval period—roughly the 1,000 years from the classical Greco-Roman age to the Renaissance and modern era—has long been neglected in the history of...     

Knowledge management in strategic planning: The case of the dutch fourth report

This article examines the management and use of knowledge in a relatively complex planning and policy process, i.e., the preparation and implementation of the Fourth Report on Physical Planning in the Netherlands. Attention is given to the organization of this process; the manner in which research, policy design and plan negotiation were intertwined in the various phases of the process; and the solutions developed for the problem of obtaining sufficient knowledge without losing the impetus essential to policy-making. General conclusions are derived especially concerning the interrelationship between policy-making and the accretion and depletion of knowledge stocks. While his earlier publications were primarily concerned with the application of demographic research in spatial policy, he has more recently shifted his attention to knowledge utilization problems in general.     

Imagination and History Converge: The Danites in the Middle Ages

Jewish History - During the Middle Ages people identifying themselves as Danites, that is, members of the tribe of Dan, periodically appeared in the Jewish diaspora, mainly in the Mediterranean...     

Blasphemy and Protection of the Faith: Legal Perspectives from the Middle Ages

ABSTRACT

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim legal traditions have all attempted to define and prohibit blasphemy: insult or verbal attack against their religion, against its rites and symbols, against God and his human representatives. Such laws could be internal (prohibiting blasphemy by members of the faith group) or external (prohibiting insult by those outside the faith). This article will first briefly trace the former, looking at how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim legal traditions from Antiquity and the Middle Ages define and prohibit blasphemy. The second part of the article will then focus on the second issue, looking at how Christian and Muslim legal traditions attempted to prohibit insults to the faith by adherents of other religions. We shall look, for example, at various Christian laws dealing with what was perceived as Jewish mockery of Christian ritual and sacred objects: from mock crucifixions allegedly practiced by Jews as part of Purim celebrations in the fifth-century Roman Empire to Jews who supposedly derided the Eucharist during thirteenth-century Corpus Christi processions. We shall in parallel examine prohibitions in Muslim legal texts (including the so-called Pact of ?‘Umar) of dhimmīs insulting the Prophet Muhammad or the Qur'an. This comparison will show that, while blasphemy was illegal and could be harshly sanctioned and there were lines that religious minorities must not cross, these lines were often not clearly delimited, and became the object of conflict and negotiation.     

Competing interests: The need to control conflict of interests in biomedical research

Individual and institutional conflict of interests in biomedical research have becomes matters of increasing concern in recent years. In the United States, the growth in relationships — sponsored research agreements, consultancies, memberships on boards, licensing agreements, and equity ownership — between for-profit corporations and research universities and their scientists has made the problem of conflicts, particularly financial conflicts, more acute. Conflicts can interfere with or compromise important principles and obligations of researchers and their institutions, e.g., adherence to accepted research norms, duty of care to patients, and open exchange of information. Disclosure is a key component of a successful conflict policy. Commitments which conflict with a faculty member's primary obligations to teaching, research, administrative responsibilities, or patient care also need attention. Institutional conflict of interests present different problems, some of which are discussed in an analysis of an actual problem posed by two proposed clinical trials. This paper is adapted from a lecture presented to a Symposium on Scientific Integrity, Warsaw, Poland, 23 November 1995. Daniel Steiner was Vice-President and General Counsel of Harvard University (1972–92) and in that capacity became familiar with conflict of interest issues. He is currently Counsel to the Boston law firm. Ropes and Gray, and is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University.     

Lay Appropriation of the Sacraments in the later Middle Ages

Perhaps the most crucial single utterance of the Second Vatican Council, at least in terms of impact on our shared experience as Catholics, occurs at paragraph 14 of the Council's constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. This was the first of the conciliar documents to be promulgated, and in many ways its most bloodily contested production. The paragraph in question runs like this:     

中世纪医学教育与经院哲学——兼论医学生人文精神培育的内涵

中世纪正规医学教育的诞生与经院哲学的发展有着十分紧密的联系,它们两者共同受惠于东西方文化的交融,经院哲学重视理性思维,重视人的身体的理论取向对医学教育的发展起到了积极的推动作用,大学体制和“经院主义方法”也促进了大学医学教育的发展。回顾这一史实可以深刻认识到,兼容并包的学术态度,缜密的逻辑思维方法,对生命意义的尊重,博雅的素质修养,理论与实际相联系的能力,应成为当今医学生人文素质教育所追求的基本目标。     

Language,politics and dreams: the challenges of building resilience in refugees

This paper describes a case study of a 60-year-old Peruvian refugee in some detail, focusing on the importance of building emotional resilience in a patient in Spanish in order to create a space for learning the English language – the patient did not speak English after 20 years of living in Britain. The work was carried out with an interpreter and some of the literature on working with interpreters is referred to. The paper also briefly outlines the refugee journey in broad terms, which is a journey from the culturally known to the culturally unknown. The question of how well the literature on resilience, which sits firmly within a Western developmental perspective, can be applied to refugees, most of whom come from group and family-based cultures dominated by ideas of honour and shame, is discussed. The paper also touches on the importance of the receiving country enabling or not, as the case may be, a transitional space for refugees who have lost their home and are seeking to find a safe haven in a strange culture.