Imago Dei

In Isaiah 6, the prophet is commissioned to speak so that people should not understand and thus be destroyed. The commission has parallels in other 8th century prophets, notably Amos and Hosea, for whom prophecy and history are a divine trap. I will proceed through a discussion of the ethical implications of the commission, using especially the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, to a reading of particular texts: Isaiah 6, 29:1–14, and the Immanuel prophecy in 7:14–25. I will end with a consideration of reading and meaning. Criticism is a process of bafflement, of realising that one will never fully understand, that there are doors in the text one will never open.     

Tatool: A Java-based open-source programming framework for psychological studies

Tatool (Training and Testing Tool) was developed to assist researchers with programming training software, experiments, and questionnaires. Tatool is Java-based, and thus is a platform-independent and object-oriented framework. The architecture was designed to meet the requirements of experimental designs and provides a large number of predefined functions that are useful in psychological studies. Tatool comprises features crucial for training studies (e.g., configurable training schedules, adaptive training algorithms, and individual training statistics) and allows for running studies online via Java Web Start. The accompanying “Tatool Online” platform provides the possibility to manage studies and participants’ data easily with a Web-based interface. Tatool is published open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and is available at www.tatool.ch.     

Youth Media Lifestyles

In this article, the concept of “media lifestyles” is adopted in order to develop a comprehensive approach toward youth engagement in communication media. We explore how 503 Dutch eighth grade students with full access to new technology combine a broad range of media by focusing on their engagement with media while taking various contexts of use into account. Four different media lifestyles of media omnivores, networkers, gamers, and low‐frequency users are described. Furthermore, we show how the methodology we used is able to provide more insight into how the distinguished media lifestyles were codetermined by particular media, functions and social contexts. Finally, the implications for the Uses & Gratifications theory are discussed.