Rethinking the Educational Practices of Biblical Doctoral Studies

The paper explores the impact of the change in populations, the impact of electronic communication, and the multiplicity of methodological approaches on the ethos and practices of biblical studies. It proposes a rhetorical emancipatory educational paradigm and explores its possibilities for the professional education of biblical scholars on the doctoral level. Since both college and seminary teachers are shaped in and through their doctoral studies, it is necessary to focus on doctoral education in order to address the growing recognition that the discipline of biblical studies in its present form needs to cultivate transformative intellectuals who are not only at home in the academy but also can critically intervene in the public discourses and uses of the Bible in religious communities, democratic publics, or global inter‐religious relations.     

Underachievement and Attributions Among Students Attending Schools Stratified by Student Ability

Underachievement among students tends to be a social product. In this case, schools stratified to admit students of lower academic ability might be more likely to produce underachievers. A reason for this is the encouragement of external attribution and the discouragement of internal attribution among students in these schools. These hypotheses get support from a study of 2720 junior high school students in Hong Kong. This study shows that the hypothesized relationships generally held for six alternative methods of identifying underachievers.     

“The House of Hannover”: Gezeirot Tah in Modern Jewish Historical Writing

This essay traces the development of modern Jewish historiography on the events of 1648–1649. It focuses mainly on treatments of the events in single-volume and multi-volume general histories of the Jews, and on entries in encyclopedias. Immediate historical memory, as exemplified by the Hebrew chronicles and liturgical poetry composed soon after the events, was transformed into history in the writings of the modern Jewish historians of the 19th and 20th centuries. In the process, the chronicle of Nathan Hannover dominated modern perceptions, for the most part uncritically accepted, albeit not on all counts. The major features of the modern historiography of the Gezeirot Tah ve'Tat are surveyed by discussing the causes of the attacks, their results, the number of victims, and the ways in which all three were incorporated in the larger Jewish historical scheme. Recently, some long-held approaches and conclusions have been revised, which suggests directions for future research. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response

Forty college students were taught facilitated communication via a commercially available training videotape. They were then asked to facilitate the communication of a confederate, who was described as developmentally disabled and unable to speak. All 40 participants produced responses that they attributed at least partially to the confederate, and most attributed all of the communication entirely to her. Eighty-nine percent produced responses corresponding to information they had received, most of which was unknown to the confederate. Responding was significantly correlated with simple ideomotor responses with a pendulum and was not affected by information about the controversy surrounding facilitated communication. These data support the hypothesis that facilitated communication is an instance of automatic writing, akin to that observed in hypothesis and with Ouija boards, and that the ability to produce automatic writing is more common than previously thought.