Effective Christian Education: A Synthesis of Recent Denominational Studies

In 1987, Search Institute launched an ambitious effort to research the educational effectiveness of seven Protestant denominations. The results identified a variety of factors related to mature faith and denominational loyalty.     

Minimizing Arbitrariness: Toward a Metaphysics of Infinitely Many Isolated Concrete Worlds

A particular fact or event often appears arbitrary and puzzling, until it is exhibited as the outcome of certain causal processes. Usually, though not always, such a causal explanation helps to relieve the feeling of arbitariness, at least for a while. But it is easy and natural for our feeling to reassert itself: We are moved to ask why just those causal processes governed the situation of that fact or event, rather than some others. To deal with this further, larger question, often we can exhibit those causal processes as being, themselves, the results of, or certain specific instances of, prior or more general causalities. Or, much the same, we can redescribe the initial particular fact, and perhaps the cited cause as well, and display the items thus described as an instance of some very general, fundamental law or phenomenon. But any of this will only push the question back one step more. For we can always press on and ask: Why is it that just that very general phenomenon, or law, should be so fundamental, or indeed obtain at all, in the world in which we have our being? Within the usual framework of explanation, law and causation, there seems no place for such curiosity to come to rest. There seems no way for us to deal adequately with the brute and ultimate specificity of the ways in which almost everything appears to happen. And what seems worse, the specific character of certain of these laws or ways, even of quite fundamental ones, often seems so quirky, the very height of arbitrariness.     

INVOLVEMENT IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AS A PREDICTOR OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT

This study examines the relationship between involvement in a job-related communication network and organizational commitment. The findings indicate a complex relationship that is moderated by the degree of job involvement. For employees who are not involved in their jobs, involvement in the job-related communication network functions to foster commitment to the organization. Two major conclusions are drawn: (1) the impact of involvement in communication networks on employee attitudes and behaviors may occur only for individuals with certain characteristics; and (2) previous studies that have reported main effects for individual variables on organizational commitment may need reinterpretation in light of the disordinal interaction obtained here. The possibility that different commitment processes operate for different kinds of employees is explored, with special emphasis on those employees for whom communication is a potent factor in determining attitudes. Implications for future research on the relationship between communication network involvement and other employee responses are discussed.     

The Principled Case for Employing Private Military and Security Companies in Interventions for Human Rights Purposes

The possibility of using private military and security companies to bolster the capacity to undertake intervention for human rights purposes (humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping) has been increasingly debated. The focus of such discussions has, however, largely been on practical issues and the contingent problems posed by private force. By contrast, this article considers the principled case for privatising humanitarian intervention. It focuses on two central issues. First, does outsourcing humanitarian intervention to private military and security companies pose some fundamental, deeper problems in this context, such as an abdication of a state's duties? Second, on the other hand, is there a case for preferring these firms to other, state‐based agents of humanitarian intervention? For instance, given a state's duties to their own military personnel, should the use of private military and security contractors be preferred to regular soldiers for humanitarian intervention?     

BAKHTIN ON HEARING GOD'S VOICE

Bakhtin's dialogical (not dialectical) philosophy of the everyday, double‐voiced prosaic and poetic discourse of asymmetrically interrelated, embodied selves, each answerable to others and the world, found liberating wisdom in modern novelizing texts, notably those of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, with the Chalcedonian Christ prototype as background. He suggests how language is used in Christian contexts by attending to different voices in confessional utterances that may include God's voice/an interlocutory infinite “third”—heard in and through others’ voices—without collapsing perspectival pluralism into relativism. Current work on comparative theology, contrasted with old‐style comparative religion, echoes his insights.     

An Empirical Comparison of Three Theories of Nonverbal Immediacy Exchange

This study provides a contrastive test of three immediacy-exchange theories: Burgeon's expectancy violations theory (EVT), Cappella and Greene's discrepancy-arousal theory (DAT), and Andersen's cognitive valence theory (CVT). EVT predicts that high immediacy, by rewarding communicators, leads to an orientation response and positive behavioral and affective outcomes. In contrast, DAT and CVT predict aversive arousal and compensatory responses in response to high immediacy increases. Findings from opposite-sex friend dyads failed to find unequivocal support for a single theory. Targets showed a mix of reciprocal and compensatory responses in the higher immediacy condition, indicating that existing immediacy-exchange theories should consider incorporating elements from all three theories and perhaps from dialectics theory to explain the complex reactions that occur in response to high immediacy changes from friends.     

Universals as Sense‐data*

This paper concerns the structure of appearances. I argue that to be appeared to in a certain way is to be aware of one or more universals. Universals therefore function like the sense‐data, once highly favoured but now out of fashion. For instance, to be appeared to treely, in a visual way, is to be aware of the complex relation, being tree‐shaped and tree‐coloured and being in front of, a relation of a kind which could be instantiated by a material object and a perceiver, which is thus instantiated in the veridical case but not in the non‐veridical.