Henry David Thoreau's Anti‐Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work

Although Henry David Thoreau stands outside the Christian canon, his outlook on the relations among spirituality, ecology, and economy highlights how Christian theologians can develop a theological work ethic in our era of economic and ecological precarity. He can furthermore help theologians counter the pro‐work bias in much Christian thought. In Walden, Thoreau shows that the best work is an ascetic practice that reveals and reaps the abundance of nature and connects the person to the immanent divine and thereby glimpsing eternity. Thoreau thus offers the outline of a transformed theology of work even as he challenges Protestant vocationalism in the early industrial era. He is therefore a fitting if challenging guide for formulating a theology of the self as agent and product of work, at a moment when the postindustrial ideal of work that is both meaningful and remunerative seems ever more unattainable while the negative impact of our work on nonhuman nature is ever more apparent.     

Blacks,Jews and the racial imagination in the writings of Sephardim in the long seventeenth century

This essay explores facets of the Sephardic racial imagination. Early Modern Catholic Iberian discourse generally scorned Jews and linked them, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, with denigrated Africans, or Blacks. Marginalized and often persecuted, conversos and Sephardim of the sixteenth through the eighteenth century resorted to hegemonic discourse about Blacks to construct their own identity. Central to Sephardic discourse about Blacks was its redemptive logic. In both Iberian Catholic and northwest-European Protestant colonial spheres, conversos and Sephardim sought through anti-Blackness to identity themselves (and hopefully for others to identify them) as members of the dominant White culture and ruling class, their religious otherness aside.Some of the material presented here comes from Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, for which I gratefully acknowledge the help of Hazel Gold, Viviana Grieco and Julia R. Lieberman. In order to convey the meaning of the often overwrought Baroque style of the Spanish originals, my translations are of necessity sometimes rather loose. I would also like to thank Yosef Kaplan, Lisa Moses Leff, Julia R. Lieberman and Kenneth Stow for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.     

Some men like it black,some women like it pink: consumer implications of differences in male and female website design

• The World Wide Web doubles in size roughly every 2–3 months and dramatic claims are made about the effectiveness of Web‐based commercial efforts. The centrality of non‐price mechanisms of differentiation to the perception, enjoyment and ease of use felt using websites is acknowledged but the only statistically rigorous studies of factors such as form and content have been conducted within a universalist paradigm of aesthetics. This paper reports on an interactionist approach to web aesthetics involving an analysis of 60 male‐ and female‐produced websites. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences between the male‐ and female‐produced websites on 13 out of the 23 factors analysed. These differences span issues of navigation as well as linguistic and visual content. The paper argues that the appeal of websites can be maximised if they mirror the needs and interests of their target populations and that websites targeted at male or female dominated markets need to reflect the aesthetic diversity found in the male‐ and female‐produced websites analysed here. It also presents information on the demographics of the IT profession, showing that there is a potential imbalance between the percentage of women involved online and those involved in the IT profession. This suggests that the male domination of the IT profession could be a barrier to the effective mirroring of female Website preferences.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

COMT genotype influences prefrontal response to emotional distraction

Early studies of genetic effects on brain activity have been conducted to investigate primarily either the influence of polymorphisms in dopaminergic genes, especially the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene, on prefrontal cognitive processes such as working memory, or that of polymorphisms in the serotonin transporter gene on the amygdala response to threatening stimuli. Here, we address genetic influences on the neural systems underlying cognitive-affective interactions. Specifically, we assess the effect of the COMT val¹⁵⁸met polymorphism on frontal regulation of attention under emotional distraction. Healthy volunteers were scanned while performing a house-matching task with affectively negative versus neutral distractors. Effects of val allele load were examined on frontal regions associated with attentional control and emotion regulation, and on parahippocampal regions associated with perception of houses. As we predicted, val load correlated positively with activity in control- and task-related regions during performance under emotional distraction. These findings provide an initial step toward identifying genetic contributions to interindividual variability in recruitment of mechanisms that regulate affective processing.