Racial Diversity in U.S. Congregations, 1998–2019

Racially diverse congregations have become an important part of the American religious landscape. We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), notably including data from the fourth wave, collected in 2018–2019, to examine 20 years of racial diversity in congregations. We find that racial diversity within congregations has increased substantially between 1998 and 2019. There are more congregations in which no one racial or ethnic group comprises more than 80 percent of the people, congregations’ average diversity level has increased, and the percentage of all-white congregations has declined. Nearly a quarter of evangelical churches now have no one ethnic group constituting more than 80 percent of the people, a rate comparable to what we observe among Catholic churches. Moreover, congregations that meet this 80-percent threshold are more likely to be led by black clergy in 2019 than they were in 1998. We end with a note of caution about concluding that diverse congregations necessarily promote racial justice.     

Does grasping in patient D.F. depend on vision?

A recently published study of grasping in patient D.F. challenges the well-known dissociation between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action, suggesting instead that D.F.'s preserved grip scaling depends entirely on haptic feedback. We argue that the results of the study are in fact fully consistent with the perception-action account.     

Why wasn't O.J. convicted? Emotional coherence in legal inference

This paper evaluates four competing psychological explanations for why the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached the verdict they did: explanatory coherence, Bayesian probability theory, wishful thinking, and emotional coherence. It describes computational models that provide detailed simulations of juror reasoning for explanatory coherence, Bayesian networks, and emotional coherence, and argues that the latter account provides the most plausible explanation of the jury's decision.     

The messianic temporality of theatre in I. L. Peretz’s At Night in the Old Marketplace

Theatre, as an art form that unfolds through time and moulds temporal experience, engages with its surrounding culture’s temporal imagination, the ways in which society conceives time, its movement, structures, and meaning. I. L. Peretz’s enigmatic and avant-garde Yiddish drama, At Night in the Old Marketplace, utilizes this potential of the theatre to tackle the question of messianic time and the ways in which it can be realized on the stage. By evoking Jewish traditions regarding the Messiah, religious nocturnal rituals, and the dynamics of Carnival, Peretz reconfigures messianic time as a radical, recurring yet fleeting, temporal experience. Theatrical temporality has affinities with messianic time because both are transitory and charged, condensed and ephemeral, and disjointed from the experience of time in everyday life. Rather than imagining messianic time as an eternal future to be awaited, Peretz’s play invites us to ponder in the theatre about the possibility of a messianically charged, albeit always fleeting, present.     

Comment on ‘counselling in dyslexia’ by T. R. Miles

Using as examples, the problems encountered when counselling dyslexics and their families, Professor Miles has drawn attention to a number of interesting issues which are relevant not only in counselling dyslexics, but also in counselling in general and, indeed in all forms of intervention and the giving of advice. I propose to deal with just three of those, namely the relationship between the counsellor and clients, diagnostic labels and ‘brussel-sprout therapies’.     

Gender Differences in U.S. College Students�� Fear for Others

This study examines U.S. college students?? fear of crime for others and uses the ??doing gender?? perspective to help explain gender differences. A sample of 931 college students (421 male students/510 female students and 605 White students/326 Black students) under the age of 30 from a Southeastern public university provided information on fear of crime, fear for others, and other variables often associated with fear of crime. When splitting the sample by gender, results suggest that both male and female college students fear for others, but do so in very different ways. While male students?? fear for others was associated with their personal characteristics (race, age and parental status) and whether they lived with an intimate, female students?? fear for others was most influenced by constrained behaviors and personal fear of crime. Additionally, when testing race specific models, there were not enough minority men to split the sample for men. However, when separating the sample by race for women only, the model generally did not work for non-White women, while the model worked well for White women. Overall, the results suggest that younger individuals?? fear of crime for others is gendered, associated with living status for men and personal fear for women and that racial differences among men and women should be examined in the future.     

Perceptions of Female and Male Managers in the 1990s: Plus ça change . . .

Sex Roles - Despite an increase in the number of womenmanagers, women frequently have difficulty advancing toupper levels of management. Researchers such as V . E.Schein [(1973), “The...     

Are we ready for sexual reorientation therapy in the U.S. military? A response to David W. Lutz.

In his paper "The Catholic Church, the American Military, and Homosexual Reorientation Therapy," David W. Lutz ultimately concludes that it is "appropriate, and highly ethical" for the American military to offer reorientation therapy to help homosexuals overcome "the vice of sodomy." The major thrust of his paper, however, is to call for abandonment of the "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy currently in place in the military. Lutz's paper covers much ground, and this review begins by examining whether such a wide view is necessary for the ultimate conclusions. It goes on to ask whether Lutz has omitted to mention important considerations bearing on this issue, and whether Lutz's call for the introduction of reorientation therapy is a serious call or a symbolic response to homosexual activities. Lutz fails to address essential issues such as the actual experiences of other nations having homosexuals in the military, and issues regarding what constitutes "reorientation therapy," the latter leading to questions about how such a therapy would actually be implemented.     

A. “Verification” of statements in psychology

(1) In contradistinction to mathematics, physics and biology, psychology and psychiatry deal to a large extent with the verbal behaviour of their objects. They are faced with two kinds of sense-problems: those with which the observer has to do in his theory-construction, and those which are characteristic of the verbal behaviour of his subjects.(2) Apart from a schematic and simplified usage, as it occurs in filling-up exercises and other laboratory verbal behaviour, the psychologist has to do with statements the sense of which, on the one hand, is determined by the usage of his subjects and, on the other hand, so far as his records and theory are concerned, by his own language-sense.(3) This situation may give rise, and often gives rise, to all kinds of verbal confusions. If we call object-language the language used in verbal behaviour of people which psychology investigates and meta-language the language psychology uses in its discourse about the verbal behaviour of people, it becomes obvious that in present-day psychology the two languages are inextricably mixed together. The language of the subject is I-language, that of the observer, in relation to the subject, is he-language. Both, investigators and investigated, often use terms without referents or with only verbal associations. There can be a great dispersion between the sense of statements used by the subject and that of statements used by the observer.(4) The use of physical language is not a remedy against a confusing terminology. One can tell highly speculative stories in physical language. The empirical verification of statements used by the investigator would require naming the concrete operations involved in testing them.(5) Objective, in the sense of a class of responses yielding maximum reliability coefficients within or between individuals facing a common observational situation or situational element, refers to a criterion to which the protocol of the tester is subjected. An investigation into the way in which subjects verify their, often mainly emotive, statements requires other means (e.g. looking at the way in which they justify their behaviour or trying to break through the chain of their verbal associations (circular reasonings)).     

Feedback suppression in anesthesia. Is it reversible?

Information processing that subserves conscious cognitive functions is thought to involve recurrent signaling through feedforward and feedback loops among hierarchically arranged functional regions of the cerebral cortex. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Lee et al. report that loss of consciousness, as produced by a bolus injection of the general anesthetic propofol to human volunteers, was accompanied by a decrease in wide-band EEG feedback connectivity from frontal cortex to parietal cortex, confirming a prediction from previous experimental studies. Interestingly, frontoparietal feedback connectivity did not fully recover after the anesthetic effect wore off and the subjects first opened their eyes in response to a verbal command. Possible interpretations of the results and their implications with respect to the neural correlates of consciousness and unconsciousness are discussed.     

The Skolem-Löwenheim theorem in toposes. II

This paper is a continuation of the investigation from [13]. The main theorem states that the general and the existential quantifiers are (, -reducible in some Grothendieck toposes. Using this result and Theorems 4.1, 4.2 [13] we get the downward Skolem-Löwenheim theorem for semantics in these toposes.     

B. “Verification” of statements in psychiatry

(1) It remains to be seen if in the field of Psychiatry just as in that of Psychology the verbal output of a subject can be submitted to verification. Many statements of a highly emotional character being merely symptoms of certain dispositions have no direct communicative sense at all.(2) It being one of the characteristics of the mentally ill to loose contact and exchange of ideas with other people, the question naturally suggests itself if this symptom may be at the bottom of the phenomenon of these persons taking refuge in logical and ideological terminologies, their talk being a kind of verbal autism.(3) The expression verbal autism is used here for statements on a purely subjective level. This kind of statements prevailing with mental patients, the conversation between observer and subject tends to the monologue.(4) Here we can find too that statements of a purely subjective nature appear as indicative ones. Even physical and logical terms applied by the subject during the sittings do not have any physical or logical reference. This characteristic of the subject often baffles the observer. So confusion of verbal levels occurs frequently.(5) The introduction of a psychological term like verstehen does not solve the problem under consideration, but renders the mystery only the better camouflaged.     

“Non-Natural” Qualities in G.E. Moore: Inherent or Contingent?

G.E. Moore's theory of the nature of the quality referred to by the word good asserts that this quality is non-natural. If it is, further, supposed that this non-natural quality belongs necessarily and exclusively to those events, human acts, entities, etc., which possess certain strictly determined natural qualities, and those qualities only, then it becomes difficult to explain the relation and the supposed interdependence allegedly existing between the two so disparate categories of qualities. This paper purports to show that, in fact, any mutual dependence of natural and non-natural qualities, including the causal one, is unconceivable. To deny this would allow no less but the possibility of deriving an ought from an is. A final consequence of this is that a non-natural quality, denoted by the predicate good, does, in fact, attach to a strictly delineated and limited morally relevant behaviour (and whatever else we may consider morally relevant), and to it only. But it is attached there in randomly; it is contingent, not inherent; it is there without regard to, and not as a consequence of, the natural qualities of what is the subject of moral judgment ... whether we like it or not.     

V.A. Smirnov’s Results in the Field of Modern Formal Logic

This paper is a survey of V.A. Smirnovs main results in modern logic.     

“Timely” Methods: Examining Turnover Rates in the U.S. Military

Despite a long history of research on organizational turnover, questions still linger about relative contributions of different factors to the probability and timing of turnover. Complicating matters, civilian and military differences can moderate important relationships among the factors. In this study, several event history models for predicting voluntary turnover in the U.S. military were estimated. Turnover predictors included background variables, military satisfaction, organizational commitment, withdrawal intentions, job withdrawal, and comparisons of military and civilian work and lifestyles. Results showed that withdrawal intentions, job withdrawal, organizational commitment, and military tenure consistently predicted voluntary turnover. Inconsistent findings for job satisfaction and comparisons of military and civilian work and lifestyles raise questions as to their roles as predictors of military turnover.