Blood, Race, and National Identity: Scientific and Popular Discourses

This essay examines the symbolic significance of blood in the twentieth century and its role in determining the composition of a national community along racial lines. By drawing parallels between Nazi notions of blood and racial purity and historically contemporaneous U.S. policies regarding blood and blood products, Polsky reveals a disturbing proximity in discourse and policy. While the Nazis attempted to locate Jewish racial essence and inferiority in blood and instituted eugenic measures and laws forbidding racial admixture, similar policies existed in the U.S. based on the so-called “one drop rule” that systematically discriminated against African Americans.     

The book of Job as a resource for counseling

The book of Job is commonly considered an exemplary study in the dynamics of suffering and the problem of theodicy. This article considers the book of Job for its insights into the challenge of providing pastoral care to persons in spiritual pain. The dialog between Job and his friends illustrates how spiritual distress challenges the theological assumptions of both sufferer and caregiver. In an effort to maintain one's own spiritual equilibrium, and no doubt out of good faith efforts to comfort the afflicted, the pastoral caregiver may be tempted to cling to theological formulas and religious perspectives which disallow the sufferer's experience of anger and despair. The story of Job affirms the value of authenticity over piety, speaks of the transformative power of suffering, and provides the counselor/pastoral caregiver insights into the pitfalls and promise of caring for persons in spiritual pain.     

Potential performance theory (PPT): a general theory of task performance applied to morality

People can use a variety of different strategies to perform tasks and these strategies all have two characteristics in common. First, they can be evaluated in comparison with either an absolute or a relative standard. Second, they can be used at varying levels of consistency. In the present article, the authors develop a general theory of task performance called potential performance theory (PPT) that distinguishes between observed scores and true scores that are corrected for inconsistency (i.e., potential scores). In addition, they argue that any kind of improvement to task performance, whatever it may be, works by influencing either task strategies, which comprise all nonrandom components that are relevant to the task, or the consistency with which strategies are used. In the current study, PPT is used to demonstrate how task strategies and the consistencies with which they are used impact actual performance in the domain of morality. These conclusions are extended to other domains of task performance.     

The impurity of “pure” indexicals

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense.     

Development of a Defense Mechanisms Manual for Children’s Doll Play (DMCP)

Researchers have long recognized the richness of children’s fantasy play and the ability of such play to reveal children’s inner worlds and defensive structures. This article describes the development of The Defense Mechanisms Manual for Children’s Doll Play (DMCP), a detailed and comprehensive manual that codes for 32 defense mechanisms in children’s play. The levels of narrative coherence, creativity, and aggression in play narratives are also assessed. The manual draws on contemporary dream theory using the premise that the child narrator will disguise anxiety-provoking impulses through a number of defenses that can be discerned through the choices the child makes in creating the plot of the story. The manual was developed through the analysis of 30 sets of 10 story stems collected from 5- and 6-year-old children using the MacArthur Story Stem Battery, a structured story-completion task. Inter-rater reliability varied with the frequency of occurrence for each defense, ranging from excellent reliability for some measures to too few cases to assess for others. Cluster analyses of measures suggested four main clusters, loosely conceptualized as connecting to others, channeling aggression, avoidance, and symbolization.     

Patriotism in Early China

This paper considers the difference between the values attached to love of country in early China and in today’s world, through exploration of a series of concept clusters centered on “loyalty,” “glory,” “honor,” and “identity.” Using a wide array of sources, including legends about exemplary figures in antiquity, it assesses the extent to which patriotism or something like patriotism was a normative value in the distant past. It also outlines the appropriate limits of patriotism which the early thinkers insisted upon, thinking them useful guidelines for today.     

全球生命伦理学:共识的瓦解(上)——对全球性道德的探求:生命伦理学,文化战争和道德多样性

探究道德差异的核心问题以及哪种道德意见被我们采纳,比如为了建立医疗保健伦理模式与决策方法比较传统与后传统、家族本位与个人本位之间的关系。考虑到以道德多元化定义当代人类处境,关于卫生保健政策和生命法则的反思是明智的。这个反思强调了俗世伦理学的道德多元化和为对自由和责任进行俗世化思考的结论之间分歧的意义。     

The influence of androgynous identification on heterosexual relations

The responses of androgynous and sex-typed students to a questionnaire were compared to explore the impact of sex typing on attitudes and behavior relevant to dating, marital and parental roles, and sexual intercourse. Extent of sex typing was associated with students' attitudes toward sharing dating expenses, sexual intercourse, full-time employment for wives, and wives taking primary responsibility for childrearing. Sex typing was also associated with students' behavior regarding the number of female-initiated dates, proportion of male and female initiation of sexual intercourse, and the frequency of sexual intercourse for males. Gender was more consistently related to the variables under investigation than was sex typing, however, and results are discussed with respect to possible limitations of the influence of androgyny on heterosexual relations.This research was part of a doctoral dissertation submitted to Purdue University. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Art Fogel in data analyses, and Rick Allgeier, Donn Byrne, Don Lehr, and Winnie Shepard for their helpful suggestions regarding an earlier draft of this article.