Our Lady of Guadalupe: model of inculturation

This article discusses the significance of the Our Lady of Guadalupe phenomenon, with an examination of the historical context in which the apparition took place, the various interpretations of this event and the controversies surrounding it. It also attempts to demonstrate that the conquest of Mexico was just as tragic and brutal because the conquistadors not only tried to destroy the Aztec Empire physically, but its cultural and spiritual heritage as well. As a model of inculturation, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe symbolises a religious triumph of the indigenous people as they responded and adopted the conquistadors’ faith as their own, but with native characteristics. The name ‘Guadalupe’ was appropriated from a place in Extremadura, Spain, and though not part of the natives’ vocabulary, Guadalupe became an emblem that brought together the various disparate groups in Mexican society, forging a national identity that is cohesive and enduring.     

Portrait of Our Lady: Mary, Piero, and the Great Mother Archetype

Mary the God-bearer is explored symbolically from the perspective of the archetype of the Great Mother as described by Carl Jung and Erich Neumann. Drawing from primordial and collective origins, the dark and the chthonic as well as the light and spiritual aspects of the archetype are considered as represented in the work of fifteenth century Italian painter Piero della Francesca. Piero's images of Mary incorporate body as well as spirit, power as well as vulnerability, death, as well as life and rebirth. The feminine presence of the Great Mother archetype creates a powerful dynamic on an unconscious level in both men and women that culminates in radical transformation.     

The Poor Lady Immured

This essay offers cautionary considerations on what has come to be called “public philosophy.” A conception of philosophy is set forth using Socrates as the paradigm of relentless philosophical questioning. The essay then outlines three types of public philosophy: a philosophy situated in a public setting, a philosophy whose content is modified for a varied public, and a philosophy that functions as normative consensus. The most important of these three is the philosophy modified for the public. The discussion notes examples of public philosophy from the history of philosophy, and examines the contribution of eighteenth‐century philosophers (such as David Hume) to a version of public philosophy. The risks of public philosophy are noted—in particular, that a modified philosophy may substitute the inculcation of belief over the modeling of philosophy. The essay concludes by noting that the university classroom remains an important but forgotten venue of public philosophy.     

Sacred Places, Domestic Spaces: Material Culture, Church, and Home at Our Lady of the Assumption and St. Brigitta

The relationship between the material culture of public worship and congregants' homes is explored in a study of two Catholic parishes—theologically liberal St. Brigitta and conservative Our Lady of Assumption. At St. Brigitta, congregants' worship space is almost devoid of religious art and ritual objects are plain, but worshippers' homes are rich in decorative objects. By contrast, masses at Our Lady of the Assumption take place in a church filled with devotional art and ornate objects, but worshippers' homes are spare, neutrally furnished, and display few decorations. Distinct congregational logics surrounding the making of the self help to explain the material culture differences: St. Brigitta parishioners value individualized self-expression whereas Assumption's members subordinate individuality to family and church identities. Individuals use material objects not only for self-expression, but also to explicitly shape identities and make the self.     

Traces of spirituality in the Lady Gaga phenomenon

This paper will explore the type of spiritual expression of adolescents and young people in and through current popular music culture. In particular, the paper will propose the music and industry constructed by and around the popular singer and songwriter Lady Gaga as a test case. Her incessant use of religious language and religious symbolism has equally attracted praise and criticism. This paper will acknowledge that Lady Gaga is not simply an icon of this hypermodernity, but she is a complex phenomenon which brings together various elements as well as actors. It will explore if and to what extent the main spiritual elements are traceable in this phenomenon.     

Induction, Grue Emeralds and Lady Macbeth's Fallacy

This paper does not purport to offer yet another 'solution' to the much discussed 'new riddle' of induction. The focus, instead, is on the genesis of Goodman's paradox and its relation to the classic problem of induction. In the arguments which led Goodman from the dissolution of Hume's problem to the discovery of the new riddle, I reveal a fundamentally flawed assumption about the nature of inductive inference which undermines Goodman's contention that the genuine problem of induction consists in distinguishing between projectible and non-projectible regularities. I further show that if the same set of observations may indeed support an indefinitely large number of inductive predictions, then the rationale for dismissing the classic problem of induction disappears. Stripped of its erroneous assumptions, the new riddle becomes nothing more than a special case of Hume's problem.     

Tracing and heavenly freedom

A new version of the ontological argument for the existence of God is outlined and examined. After giving a brief account of some traditional ontological arguments for the existence of God, where their defects are identified, it is explained how this new argument is built upon their foundations and surmounts their defects. In particular, this version uses the resources of impossible worlds to plug the common escape route from standard modal versions of the ontological argument. After outlining the nature of impossible worlds, and motivating the need for positing them, the new argument is delineated and its premises justified. It is taken for granted that the argument cannot be sound, since it would prove too much. However, its premises are all plausible, and their denial promises to have significant ramifications. Several intuitive lines of objections are then explored in order to illuminate their shortcomings. The puzzle that the argument poses is therefore not whether the argument is sound, for it clearly cannot be. Rather, it is to place pressure on its plausible premises, so some plausible account of how the argument fails can be identified, and that the devising of such an account promises to be insightful. In the process, we should gain an improved understanding of how such ontological arguments work.     

Tracing Leadership in Gifted Children

The aim of this study was to determine whether characteristics of leadership identified among adults also exist among young gifted children. The study was conducted in Israel among 63 gifted children aged 10 to 14 who completed the Leadership Questionnaire, constructed especially for this study. The characteristics found to distinguish between high and low scorers on leadership were responsibility, desire to dominate, consistency, physical energy, achievement orientation, expressive and persuasive powers, cooperation, adaptability, daring, self-confidence, and emotional equilibrium. The results confirmed our hypothesis that the characteristics of leadership identified in adults do exist among gifted children.     

Learning By Tracing Worked Examples

Cognitive load theorists have only recently begun to test the role of the body in learning. Tracing the index finger over the surface of instructions while reading, an embodied pedagogy based on Montessori's sandpaper letters, may hold substantial promise for learning by reducing cognitive load. Two experiments tested whether students who traced their index fingers against paper‐based worked example instructions in triangle geometry (Experiment 1; N = 52) and order of operations (Experiment 2; N = 54) would perform better on a subsequent test than students who only studied the materials visually. Students in the tracing condition outperformed the non‐tracing condition on transfer problems in both Experiment 1 (d = .78) and Experiment 1 (d = .50), but hypotheses regarding self‐reports of cognitive load during testing were not supported. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

魏华存夫人信道原因考

勾稽有限的史料,我们能看到,高平陵政变以后血腥的杀戮,以及这一时节巫祝、道术禁令的松弛,是魏华存夫人走进道教的一个宏阔背景和潜在动因;而这一地域本身巫风的兴盛,则有力地强化了这种倾向;最终,魏舒"三娶妻"、子息不旺的家庭现实,充当了直接的诱因,促成了魏华存对道教的接受和走进。     

Tracing the evolution of knowledge structures

The goal of the research described here is to understand the evolution of knowledge structures as novices learn to use text editors. Two groups of individuals were trained to use one of two text editing systems: the IBM Displaywriter and UCSD-Pascal. Individuals rated the similarity among pairs of editing commands before and after training. Before training, subjects’ similarity ratings are characterized by heavy reliance on natural language denotations of command names. After training, subjects’ similarity ratings are explainable in terms of a small set of identifiable properties of underlying knowledge structures that are typical of experts’ knowledge about a text editor. These properties reflect functional features of command actions, and the psychological salience of a property for a given individual is related to editing performance.