Church and Culture: Protestant and CatholicModernities

This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity.     

An evaluation of methylphenidate as a potential establishing operation for some common classroom reinforcers.

We conducted reinforcer assessments for 3 boys with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder who alternately received either placebo or previously prescribed methylphenidate. Our purpose was to evaluate whether methylphenidate altered the relative reinforcing effectiveness of various stimuli that are often used in classroom-based behavioral treatment programs (e.g., activities, tangible items). Results showed clear differences for some stimuli between reinforcer assessments conducted when participants had received methylphenidate compared to placebo. Results suggest that methylphenidate might act as an establishing operation for some common classroom reinforcers. Implications for the development and evaluation of behavioral treatments are discussed.     

Hemispheric specialization in learning disabled readers' recall as a function of age and level of processing

This study was designed to test the inadequacy of two theoretical accounts of learning disabled readers' memory deficiencies. Two age groups of learning disabled and nondisabled readers were compared on diotic and dichotic listening recall tasks for semantically organized, phonemically organized, and categorically unrelated word lists presented in either the left, right, or both ears. Dependent measures were free recall, serial recall, recall organization, and hierarchical organization. As expected, recall increases were a function of age, group, and level of word processing. However, the results clearly demonstrated that age and group recall differences were an interaction of both mode of presentation and level of processing. The recall differences between reading groups were attributed to word knowledge (superordinate categorization) rather than recall organization within cerebral hemispheres or differences in hemispheric capacity, per se.     

Encoding of logical connective rules in learning-disabled children

Using a modified reception paradigm, normal and learning-disabled children were required to solve unidimensional, disjunctive, or conditional connectives under standard attending or enforced attending instructions. The major result was that enforced attending procedures facilitated solution of disjunctive and conditional concepts for normal children, while having minimal effects on rule attainment for the disabled. Within Sternberg's (1979) model, a number of subcomponent analyses were made on attribute combinations (e.g., TT, TF...), but only in the FF instance was there a difference between instructional conditions. Disabled were deficient in TT, TF, FF instances regardless of attending instructions. Results support a “reductive coding deficiency” in that learning-disabled children were unable to effectively utilize attentional instructions to encode certain attribute combinations.     

An interactive,interdisciplinary, on-line graphics system for presenting and manipulating directed graphs

An interactive graphics system has been implemented for tutorial purposes and for research in man-machine communication of structural digraphs. An IMLAC intelligent terminal with lightpen input is used in conjunction with a NOVA minicomputer. Successful applications in linguistics and engineering problem solving will be discussed, the latter one in detail.