Relational Spirituality,Mature Alterity,and Spiritual Service among Ministry Leaders: An Empirical Study

Christian communities in the United States increasingly are debating sociopolitical issues and the relevance of social justice and cultural diversity to Christian spirituality. The present study investigated connections between spiritual maturity, mature alterity, spiritual service, and spiritual leadership in a predominantly female and ethnically diverse sample of Christian ministry leaders (N = 115) in the United States. Spiritual maturity was operationalized based on a relational spirituality model using measures representing dwelling- and seeking-oriented dimensions. Spiritual service was assessed through (a) sanctification of service and (b) a differentiated posture of listening to the struggles of others. Results showed both measures of spiritual maturity were significantly and positively related to social justice commitment, differentiated listing, and intercultural competence (the latter among female but not male ministry leaders) over and above effects for age and spiritual impression management. A dwelling-oriented measure of spiritual maturity was positively associated with the sanctification of leadership service, whereas a seeking-oriented measure of spiritual maturity showed a modest positive association with spiritual leadership. Spiritual leadership was unrelated to measures of mature alterity. Findings are discussed with respect to limitations, future psychological research, and theological implications for postcolonial pastoral leadership and spirituality.

     

Educating Semiosis: Foundational Concepts for an Ecological Edusemiotic

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Many edusemiotic writers have begun to closely align edusemitoics to biosemiotics; the basic logic being that, if the life process can be defined through the...     

Psychopathic traits,gender, and motivations for sex: Putative paths to sexual coercion

Evidence suggests that both men and women perpetrate sexual coercion. Psychological factors, including psychopathic traits and power motivations, have been proposed to characterize male-perpetrated sexual coercion; however, it is unclear whether these factors play a similar role in female-perpetrated coercion or whether other motivations (e.g., intimacy, affect regulation) should be considered. To improve our understanding in this area, the current study first examined relationships between psychopathic traits and sexual coercion in a sample of 1199 undergraduate students (756 women), with gender as a potential moderator of these relationships. Second, the role of motivations for sex (e.g., power, affect regulation) in accounting for the psychopathy-coercion relationship was examined in men and women. Data were collected using an online survey and analyzed using multigroup path analysis. Results implicated impulsive-antisocial traits as particularly important to male-perpetrated verbal (e.g., manipulative) and nonverbal (e.g., physical) coercion, and that this relationship was partially explained by motives for sex involving power. In contrast, psychopathic traits did not appear to play a major role in female perpetrated coercion; instead, emotional value (i.e., intimacy-related) motivations for sex were associated with verbal (e.g., manipulation) coercion in women. In sum, our results support a conceptual model of male perpetration where men who are high in impulsive-antisocial traits may engage in sexual coercion in an attempt to feel powerful. Further, the findings in the female sample suggest that factors other than psychopathy, such as gender role beliefs in regard to sexual encounters, may be particularly important to female perpetrated sexually coercive behavior.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION AS LANGUAGES: UNDERSTANDING THE SCIENCE–RELIGION RELATIONSHIP USING METAPHORS,ANALOGIES, AND MODELS

Many scholars often use the terms “metaphors,” “analogies,” and “models” interchangeably and inadvertently overlook the uniqueness of each word. According to recent cognitive studies, the three terms involve distinct cognitive processes using features from a familiar concept and applying them to an abstract, complicated concept. In the field of science and religion, there have been various objects or ideas used as metaphors, analogies, or models to describe the science–religion relationship. Although these heuristic tools provided some understanding of the complex interaction, they failed to address the broad nature of science and religion as well as the multifarious relationship between the two in a sociocultural context. Unlike the previous candidates, the concept of language, including the notions of linguistic worldview, linguistic identity, dialects, power, and bilingualism, offers a unique and comprehensive window through which science, religion, and the relationship between the two are seen with clarity.     

Brief report: Attentional Control Moderates the Relationship Between Attentional Bias and Anxiety in Children

This current study tested whether attentional control moderates the relationship between attentional bias to threat and anxiety in children. Children completed a self-report measure of attentional control and anxiety and an attentional bias task. Attentional control was examined as a moderator in the relationship between attentional bias and different dimensions of anxiety. The interaction between attentional control and attentional bias was significant for total and generalized anxiety. Although attentional control significantly moderated the relationship between attentional bias and anxiety, the direction of the interaction was not consistent with existing literature. Study implications and explanations for the study results are discussed.     

Groundwork for Transfeminist Care Ethics: Sara Ruddick,Trans Children,and Solidarity in Dependency

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly.     

Flickering admissibility: neuroimaging evidence in the U.S. courts

This article explores the admissibility of neuroimaging evidence in U.S. courts, recognizing various trends in decisions about such evidence.While courts have routinely admitted some neuroimages, such as CT scans and MRI, as proof of trauma and disease, they have been more circumspect about admitting the PET and SPECT scans and fMRI evidence. With the latter technologies, courts have often expressed reservations about what can be inferred from the images. Moreover, courts seem unwilling to find neuroimaging sufficient to prove either insanity or incompetency, but are relatively lenient about admitting neuroimages in death penalty hearings. Some claim that fMRI and "brain fingerprinting" are able to detect deception. Other scholars argue that brain fingerprinting is a dubious concept and that fMRI is not yet sufficiently reliable. Moreover, there are substantial concerns about privacy and the perils of mind reading implicit in such technology. Yet, there is a movement to try to make these new technologies "courtroom ready" in the near future, raising a host of legal, policy, and ethical questions to be answered.     

A dual-process approach to health risk decision making: The prototype willingness model

Although dual-process models in cognitive, personality, and social psychology have stimulated a large body of research about analytic and heuristic modes of decision making, these models have seldom been applied to the study of adolescent risk behaviors. In addition, the developmental course of these two kinds of information processing, and their relation to the development of self-regulation are not well understood at this time. The current paper reviews what leading dual-process models have to say about the development of analytic and heuristic decision making, and their implications for adolescent risk behavior. In addition, it reviews research on the prototype willingness model of adolescent decision making—a dual-process model designed specifically to address non-intentional, but volitional adolescent risk behavior. It also discusses the implications of dual-process models for intervention research.     

Learning rule-described and non-rule-described categories: a comparison of children and adults

Three experiments investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-old children as well as adults to learn sets of perceptual categories. Adults and children performed comparably on categories that could be learned by either a single-dimensional rule or by associative learning mechanisms. However, children showed poorer performance relative to adults in learning categories defined by a disjunctive rule and categories that were nonlinearly separable. Increasing the task demands for adults resulted in child-like performance on the disjunctive categories. Decreasing the task demands for children resulted in more adult-like performance on the disjunctive categories. The authors interpret these results within a multiple-systems approach to category learning and suggest that children have not fully developed the same explicit category learning system as adults.