Curriculum reform in death education: The modern resurrection ofArs Moriendi

... The purpose of death education, therefore, must be to teach medical personnel how to assist their patients to achieve their private needs. Philosophically and religiously, the good death is purposeful and meaningful. It may or may not entail relief of suffering. Medically, the experience of death may be manipulated in a number of different directions. Whether sentience is worth preserving at the expense of pain, or vice versa, for example, is not the physician's decision: it is the patient's. One cannot guarantee that death will be easy for anyone: but because medical personnel must generally turn from the dying to attend to the living, thoughtful educational curricula can improve the lot of all three.     

Professional help use among Black Americans: Implications for unmet need

Previous findings on black utilization have been largely obtained from racial comparison studies. Little attention has been paid to sociodemographic differences or the social psychological processes that affect help-seeking behavior within the black group. The present study analyzed data obtained from a national probability sample of the black population. A multidimensional contingency table analysis revealed that problems experienced by the lower income group were more serious than those experienced by the upper income group. Low-income respondents were also more likely to state that their personal distress was caused by a physical health problem. Income, however, was not related to the decision to seek professional help. The implications of these findings for understanding black illness behavior and the underutilization of services was discussed.     

Presence and Abstraction. Interpreting the practice of Eucharistic Adoration online

Abstract: This paper takes as its point of departure the rise of online Adoration of the Reserved Sacrament during the widespread suspension of worship in response to COVID-19. Taking the phenomenon seriously as an instance of the sensus fidelium exposes limitations in the Tridentine formulation of the mode of sacramental presence. Alternative approaches may be developed with reference to the thinking of two post-Heideggerian philosophers, Marion and Nancy, who in different ways explore the subject's encounter with the divine in the phenomenal world as a double kenosis, without reference to an abstract concept of Being. These accounts together suggest an account of adoration as a kenotic response to divine kenosis and so suggest understandings of Eucharistic Adoration that are not bounded by the constraints of physical materiality. The paper concludes by considering the wider applicability of this approach in a world that is, increasingly, a hybrid of physical and ‘virtual’ phenomena and at a time when US Catholics are believed to be losing their faith in the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements.     

Faith without Dogmatism: Karl Jaspers’ Critique of Bultmann's and Barth's Dogmatic Theologies

In his mature philosophical writings, Karl Jaspers juxtaposes his own theory of reason with what he considers irrational and dogmatising tendencies in the works of Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth. On Jaspers's view, both Bultmann and Barth construct theologies that serve as a priori frameworks through which to understand all the contingencies of existence. In opposition to such dogmatisms, Jaspers advances a hermeneutics that forbids, in advance, any permanent conclusions by proposing that we understand religious, artistic, and other approaches to transcendence as ciphers. Such ciphers, Jaspers holds, offer no fixed and final interpretation of transcendence but offer a way to remain non-dogmatically open to a wide range of possible understandings of it. As opening up a non-dogmatic form of communication, cipher-reading is guided by reason's will to openness and communication. However, as I ultimately point out, Jaspers's own effort to develop a non-dogmatic hermeneutics is beset by some of the very difficulties he identifies in the theologies of Barth and Bultmann.     

Spirituality in Physical Health and Aging

A variety of research has documented the association between various measures of religion/spirituality and physical health outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on this topic. The paper also discusses the mechanisms that are thought to underlie the associations found in the literature. Further, the paper presents several avenues along which future research might proceed in order to advance our understanding of these issues. The paper concludes by making a case for the need for empirical examinations of these issues in countries other than the United States. Particular focus is paid here to religion among older adults in Japan.     

Children’s coding of human action: cognitive factors influencing imitaation in 3‐year‐old

We used imitation as a tool for investigating how young children code action. The study was designed to examine the errors children make in re‐enacting manual gestures they see. Thirty‐two 3‐year‐old children served as subjects. Each child was shown 24 gestures, generated by systematically crossing four factors: visual monitoring, spatial endpoint, movement path, and number of hands. The results showed no difference as a function of whether the children could visually monitor their own responses. Interestingly, children made significantly more errors when the adult's action terminated on a body part than they did when the same movement terminated near the body part. There were also significantly more errors when the demonstrated act involved crossing midline than when it did not, and more errors when it involved one hand rather than two hands. Our hypothesis is that human acts are coded in terms of goals. The goals are hierarchically organized, and because young children have difficulty simultaneously integrating multiple goals into one act they often re‐enact the goals that are ranked higher, which leads to the errors observed. We argue that imitation is an active reconstruction of perceived events and taps cognitive processing. We suggest that the goal‐based imitation in 3‐year‐olds is a natural developmental outgrowth of the perceptual–motor mapping and goal‐directed coding of human acts found in infancy.     

Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis

The authors performed a meta-analysis of the distributed practice effect to illuminate the effects of temporal variables that have been neglected in previous reviews. This review found 839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments located in 184 articles. Effects of spacing (consecutive massed presentations vs. spaced learning episodes) and lag (less spaced vs. more spaced learning episodes) were examined, as were expanding interstudy interval (ISI) effects. Analyses suggest that ISI and retention interval operate jointly to affect final-test retention; specifically, the ISI producing maximal retention increased as retention interval increased. Areas needing future research and theoretical implications are discussed.