The Impact of Social Issue Television Programming on Attitudes Toward Rape

A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the impact of a television movie about acquaintance rape on subsequent attitudes about rape. To maximize external validity, a nationally representative sample of 1,038 male and female adults from three age groups was selected to participate in the study. These participants were then randomly assigned to view or not view the movie over a closed-circuit channel, prior to the network broadcast of the film. Afterward, acceptance of rape myths and perceptions of rape as a social problem were measured. The movie increased awareness of date rape as a social problem across all demographic groups. The movie also had a prosocial effect on older females who were less likely to attribute blame to women in date rape situations after exposure. However, the opposite effect tended to occur among older men. The findings suggest that emotional involvement with a movie and selective perception of movie events may mediate the impact of social issue television programming.     

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND TRINITARIAN DEATH: CROSS,KENOSIS, AND HIERARCHY IN THE THEO‐DRAMA

Hans Urs von Balthasar's “Theo‐Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory” exhibits a mutual funding of a hierarchical ordering of the relation between “man” and “woman” and a hierarchical ordering of the relation between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The two hierarchies explain, illustrate, and support one another. Von Balthasar's oscillation between hierarchy and equality, particularly in the divine case, results in a tortured understanding of personhood where being in relation means handing oneself over to another with the threat of death always present. Von Balthasar's understanding of personhood turns out to be fundamentally masochistic. Further, difference collapses into hierarchy and thus turns out to be no more than repetition in the mode of reception, which then poses a serious challenge to Balthasar's account of divine and human being. Since the point of connection between the two is found in his account of the way inner‐trinitarian relations of origin are extended into the world in the sending of the Son, this is the thesis which needs problematizing. For von Balthasar, the kenotic nature of the inner‐trinitarian processions explains what in the life of God makes the cross possible, but this move ascribes something like suffering and death to the inner life of God in a way that undercuts the fullness of divine love while undergirding a hierarchical understanding of divine relationality.