Ishmael as Abraham's Sacrifice: Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathīr on the Intended Victim

This article examines how Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathīr shift the Islamic exegetical tradition towards accepting Ishmael as Abraham's intended sacrifice. Earlier exegetes, such as al-?abarī, maintained that Isaac was the intended sacrifice through a philological analysis of the qur'anic text. Contrary to expectations, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Kathīr do not only use Prophetic reports (Hadith) to make their case but also employ biblical and philological arguments. The modern dominance of Ibn Taymiyya's qur'anic hermeneutic and the popularity of Ibn Kathīr's qur'anic exegesis have influenced Islamic orthodoxy to hold that Ishmael was the sacrificial son and to be more skeptical of biblical sources.     

Practice Talks Back to Theory: A Critical Reflection on Teaching

The article is a reflection on what I perceive to be a confusion about the relation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy. My interest in the issue originated with my own confusion over persistent student resistance to certain assigned texts that I had initially felt confident would prove valuable in the classroom. The essay unfolds in three segments. In the first, I recount how this concern about the relation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy evolved out of my own teaching. I next list three tentative conclusions about the correlation or lack of correlation between theoretical judgments and judgments of pedagogical efficacy. In the concluding segment, I call for concerted resistance to the tendency of pure rationality to colonize the aesthetic and dramatic components of experience so essential to transformative teaching and learning.     

Depression-related differences in learning and forgetting responses to unrelated cues

Using the think/no-think paradigm, we examined the effect of a meaningful connection between emotionally neutral cues and targets on initial learning and later recall by students in dysphoric or nondysphoric mood states. Compared to meaningfully connected cue-target pairs, unrelated pairs were less easily learned and more easily forgotten, even when initial learning was controlled. Depressive deficits were obtained in initial learning (only marginally) and final recall. When examined separately within each cuing condition, the recall deficit associated with depressed mood was restricted to the unrelated condition, but when initial learning differences were controlled this deficit was only marginally significant. Results are discussed in relation to other recent findings concerning depression-related performance in this paradigm and to findings of depression and memory more generally.     

The Rumsfeld effect: the unknown unknown

A set of studies tested whether people can use awareness of ignorance to provide enhanced test consistency over time if they are allowed to place uncertain items into a "don't know" category. For factual knowledge this did occur, but for a range of other forms of knowledge relating to conceptual knowledge and personal identity, no such effect was seen. Known unknowns would appear to be largely restricted to factual kinds of knowledge.     

An explanation for the low-temperature H evolution peak in hydrogenated amorphous silicon films deposited 'on the edge of crystallinity'

The puzzling existence of a sharp low-temperature (T = 400°C) H evolution peak in compact hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si : H) films deposited 'on the edge of crystallinity' is examined. From infrared absorption and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements, we show that none of the standard methods used to explain the existence of this peak in a-Si : H materials is applicable to the present films. From the Si-H wag-mode peak frequency, we postulate the existence of very small Si crystallites contained within the amorphous matrix. While the crystallite volume fraction is too small to be detected by XRD in the as-grown films, crystallization is observed for this material at anneal temperatures as low as 500°C. It is proposed that these crystallites catalyse the crystallization of the remainder of the amorphous matrix upon moderate annealing, enabling H surface desorption and H₂ out-diffusion to the sample surface along newly formed grain boundaries at low anneal temperatures.     

The Ethics of Ambition: A Pedagogy of the Spirit

This article presents an overview of a course entitled ‘The Ethics of Ambition’ which over the period of the last fifteen years the author has taught to undergraduates and seminarians, as well as in church-sponsored adult education programs. It summarizes and describes a number of pedagogical strategies that have evolved over time in response to the exigencies of these varying educational environments. More topically, the article offers a brief criticism of certain ‘neo-conservative’ assumptions regarding the pedagogical efficacy of the Christian narrative as these impinge upon the actual teaching situation.