Teaching Religion Religiously: A Dialogue

Two theologians teaching religion at the same college engage in a dialogue about differences in their understandings of teaching religion in order to explore serious pedagogical and theological issues. Their reflections on their teaching touch on issues of learning goals, institutional identity, student freedom, faculty self‐revelation, and the liberal arts that most teachers of religion face. Along the way, they explore the relation of pedagogy to theological topics like grace and ecclesiology. We invite readers to join the conversation begun in this article by engaging Webb, Placher, and one another through the public discussion list we've created for this article on the Wabash Center Discussion Forum at http://ntweb.wabash.edu/wcdiscus/.     

Pub and community: The views of Birmingham untreated heavy drinkers

This paper reports the results of a qualitative analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 79 members of the Birmingham Untreated Heavy Drinkers Cohort. The cohort was recruited in 1997 when all participants were drinking 50 or more standard units of alcohol (men) or 35 or more units (women) most weeks. Present interviews were carried out as part of the fourth wave of interviews, held in 2003. The topic was the participants' places of drinking in the community and the functions those places served. The present analysis focused on the relationship between pubs and community. The strongest theme to emerge was that the pub provided for many participants a real sense of community in itself. It did so by enabling participants to meet with like‐minded others, in a setting distinct from home or work, where conversing and confiding could take place in a relaxed atmosphere, with a range of other activities and forms of social support available to many. At the same time, participants were discriminating about which pubs they used, and when, and with whom they chose to interact. There was less consensus about whether the pub served a wider function by contributing to a positive sense of community in the local neighbourhood. It is suggested that English pubs, at least in a large conurbation such as the West Midlands, are very varied, sometimes continuing to serve as ‘the local’ for a community, sometimes being part of a variety of drinking places which between them provide people with a diversity of social niches to meet their increasingly diverse choices and preferences, and sometimes reflecting and even contributing to local community disorganisation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ethical psychiatry in an uncertain world: conversations and parallel truths

Psychiatric practice is often faced with complex situations that seem to pose serious moral dilemmas for practitioners. Methods for solving these dilemmas have included the development of more objective rules to guide the practitioner such as utilitarianism and deontology. A more modern variant on this objective model has been 'Principlism' where 4 mid level rules are used to help solve these complex problems. In opposition to this, there has recently been a focus on more subjective criteria for resolving complex moral dilemmas. In particular, virtue ethics has been posited as a more sensitive method for helping doctors to reason their way through difficult ethical issues. Here the focus is on the character traits of the practitioner. Bloch and Green advocated another way whereby more objective methods such as Principlism and virtue ethics are combined to produce what they considered sound moral reasoning in psychiatrists. This paper points out some difficulties with this approach and instead suggests that a better model of ethical judgment could be developed through the use of narratives or stories. This idea puts equal prima facie value on the patient's and the psychiatrist's version of the dilemma they are faced with. It has the potential to lead to a more genuine empathy and reflective decision-making.     

An Eliminativist Theory of Religion

A philosophical theory of religion ought to meet four criteria: it should be extensionally accurate, neutral, phenomenological, and non-circular. I argue that none of the popular theories of religion meet all these criteria, and that, in particular, the extensional accuracy criterion and the non-circularity criterion can’t be met without sacrificing extensional accuracy. I conclude that, therefore, religions do not form a kind, and so, there is no such thing as religion.

Multimodal access to verbal name codes

Congruent information conveyed over different sensory modalities often facilitates a variety of cognitive processes, including speech perception (Sumby & Pollack, 1954). Since auditory processing is substantially faster than visual processing, auditory-visual integration can occur over a surprisingly wide temporal window (Stein, 1998). We investigated the processing architecture mediating the integration of acoustic digit names with corresponding symbolic visual forms. The digits "1" or "2" were presented in auditory, visual, or bimodal format at several stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 0, 75, 150, and 225 msec). The reaction times (RTs) for echoing unimodal auditory stimuli were approximately 100 msec faster than the RTs for naming their visual forms. Correspondingly, bimodal facilitation violated race model predictions, but only at SOA values greater than 75 msec. These results indicate that the acoustic and visual information are pooled prior to verbal response programming. However, full expression of this bimodal summation is dependent on the central coincidence of the visual and auditory inputs. These results are considered in the context of studies demonstrating multimodal activation of regions involved in speech production.     

Comparisons of children with delayed and normal language at 24 months of age on measures of behavioral difficulties,social and cognitive development

This investigation compared a group of expressive language-delayed children with language-normal children of the same age (M = 25.7 months; SD = 0.8 months) on various measures of development and behavioral difficulties. Data were obtained through language sampling, direct developmental assessment, and maternal reports of children's development and behavior. Scores on measures of social and cognitive development for children with language delay were found to be significantly lower than normals. Further, maternal reports indicated that these children displayed significantly more behavioral difficulties overall than did the language-normal children. Specifically, the language-delayed children exhibited more symptoms of anxiety and depression, withdrawal, sleep problems, and other behavioral disturbances. In addition, children evaluated as expressive language delayed scored significantly lower on measures of receptive language, maternal ratings of communicative competency, and other indices of language proficiency. The results point to the centrality of expressive and receptive language development in relation to early-appearing behavior problems and other developmental milestones. With these findings in mind, early language intervention may not only promote language development, but also prevent the development or exacerbation of socioemotional problems. © 1998 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health