Gratuity,Embodiment, and Reciprocity

Protestant Christian ethicist Timothy Jackson and secular feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay each explore the relationship between love or care and justice through the lens of human dependency. Jackson sharply prioritizes agape over justice, whereas Kittay articulates a more complex and integrated understanding of the relationship of care and distributive justice. An account of Christian love and its relation to justice must account for the gratuity, mutuality, and reciprocity that pervade human existence. Such an account must integrate provision for another's basic needs, a feature of agape, with a distributive justice that fairly allocates the material prerequisites of care and the burden of caring labor. Kittay's treatment of care and justice is more adequate to the realities of human embodiment and the social organization of care than Jackson's, but neither offers a fully adequate ground for the moral personhood of all human beings, including deeply dependent persons.     

Characteristics of a French African Caribbean Epidemiological Psychiatric Sample with a History of Suicide Attempt

Research on vulnerability factors among ethnic groups, independent of primary psychiatric diagnosis, may help to identify groups at risk of suicidal behavior. French African Caribbean general psychiatric patients (N = 362) were recruited consecutively and independently of the primary psychiatric diagnosis. Demographic and clinical characteristics and lifetime history of suicide attempts were recorded. Sixty‐five patients (18%) had a history of at least one suicide attempt. Presence of professional qualifications, children, poor social contacts, treatment with benzodiazepine at inclusion, and poor treatment compliance were all associated with a lifetime history of suicide attempts.     

Beyond Political Theology and its Liquidation: From Theopolitical Monotheism to Trinitarianism

One of the central theological challenges facing Erik Peterson was to help the mid‐twentieth century Catholic Church define its relationship with the wider world. He responded by advancing a distinctive understanding of the ‘polis.’ In this essay, I critically analyze Peterson's central and perhaps best known proposal about how the Church ought to negotiate the modern world — encapsulated in his expression, the ‘liquidation of political theology.’ I contend that Peterson's proposal is not congruent with a right understanding of patristic trinitarian monarchy, although a view that stands in sharp contrast to that of Carl Schmitt. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of Peterson's critique of Schmitt's political theology, I argue that Peterson nonetheless fails in his exposition of the thought of Gregory of Nazianzus and therefore in his interpretation of the role of the Church in what we have learned to call the ‘political’ and the ‘social.’ I conclude by outlining several ways that the Church today might take up the challenge of regaining a truly political thought, a new ekklesioteia, nourished by the monarchy of the triune God.     

Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as “the big…,” listeners typically make anticipatory eye movements to an item in a contrast set, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. Recent studies have suggested that this rapid, contrastive interpretation of scalar adjectives is malleable and calibrated to the speaker's pragmatic competence. In a series of eye‐tracking experiments, we explore the nature of the evidence necessary for the modulation of pragmatic inferences in language comprehension, focusing on the complementary roles of top–down information ‐ (knowledge about the particular speaker's pragmatic competence)  and bottom‐up cues  (distributional information about the use of scalar adjectives in the environment). We find that bottom‐up evidence alone (e.g., the speaker says “the big dog” in a context with one dog), in large quantities, can be sufficient to trigger modulation of the listener's contrastive inferences, with or without top‐down cues to support this adaptation. Further, these findings suggest that listeners track and flexibly combine multiple sources of information in service of efficient pragmatic communication.     

The Role of Situational Interviews in Fostering Positive Reactions to Selection Decisions

We investigated the effect of interview format and employment equity program strength on perceptions of fairness. We used job seekers and vignettes to test the hypotheses. The participants reported lukewarm support for employment equity programs. The use of a situational interview in the selection process of an organisation that had adopted an employment equity program contributed to higher perceptions of fairness vis‐à‐vis the use of an unstructured interview. The results also showed that the inclusion of a situational interview in the selection process mitigated negative reactions to the selection decision when a strong employment equity program was in place as well as when a female visible minority was hired. Nous avons évalué l'impact sur la perception de justice du style d'entretien et de la rigueur d'une charte d'équité relative à l'emploi. On a fait appel à des demandeurs d'emploi et utilisé un test de jugement situationnel pour éprouver les hypothèses. Les répondants se sont montrés peu enthousiastes en ce qui concerne les chartes d'équité relatives à l'emploi. Le choix d'un entretien structuré dans le processus de sélection d'une organisation qui avait adopté une charte d'équité relative à l'emploi a amélioré la perception de justice portant sur un entretien ordinaire. Il apparaît aussi que la présence d'un entretien structuré dans le processus de sélection atténuait les réactions négatives consécutives au résultat de la sélection quand existait une sérieuse charte d'équité relative à l'emploi et quand était embauchée une minorité féminine non négligeable.     

MATRIX OF TENSIONS

Questions about how women integrate maternity into their sense of self have generated a quest for an heuristic model. We suggest that mothers struggle to balance themselves amid a set of polarities/tensions and that mothering can be situated within a phenomenological matrix of such tensions. We propose a model that includes the following developmental issues: loss of self/expansion of self; omnipotence/liability; life-destroying/life-promoting behavior; maternal isolation/maternal community; cognitive strategies/intuitive responses; maternal desexualization/maternal sexualization. Investigation and understanding of how mothers cope with these tensions could yield insights into both universal and particular aspects of mothering.     

The concept of the ‘Other’ in modern Arab thought: From Muhammad cAbdu to Abdallah Laroui

The primary condition for the progress, or indeed the survival, of human societies is their effective coalescence into one human society’ (Zurayk 1994, 96).