Islam and the Sermon on the Mount

The theme of Islam and the Sermon on the Mount belongs to a lively, controversial field of discourse, in which representatives of the major monotheistic religions conflict in their claims to truth, and it has formed a central point in their encounters. For example, representatives of the Salafiyya saw in the Sermon a barrier to the secular order. Through their criticisms, they tended even to appropriate the Sermon for the purposes of Islam. However, the ethical message of the Sermon has usually not been interrogated as such. Form-critical, symbolic, structural and intentional similarities in Muslim remarks point to this appreciation. Nevertheless, Muslims seem much more concerned with the specific contextual meaning of the Sermon and its historicity rather than considering its principle of love for enemies or its legislative nature. Thus, positive receptions of the Sermon, such as al-Ghazzālī's or the recognition discourse of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, if not forgotten, have fallen into the background. In the atmosphere of Christian missionary and colonial experience and the post-colonial aftermath, this reception history and its semantic transformations are certainly understandable. However, they first offer a fertile ground for inter-religious dialogue when the mutual understanding processes are revealed and the discursively produced internal and external allocations, so rich with meaning, are exposed.     

Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy: A Reconsideration

Nicholas Malebranche's Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God (1707) has long been characterized as being at best a thinly veiled attack on Spinozism and at worst a deeply flawed, Eurocentric misunderstanding of a foreign philosophy. However, a consideration of the context of the work's production and an analysis of Malebranche's argumentative strategy open up a way to understand the dialogue as an historically important, genuine engagement with Chinese philosophy.     

Simulation as a Method for Theological and Philosophical Inquiry

Abstract

In this paper we make the case that simulation provides an important and relatively novel tool for confronting and possibly even surmounting various epistemological hurdles. To support the claim that simulation has particular merit for approaching certain theological and philosophical problems, we suggest a number of advantages, evaluate possible objections, and make the case in a specific domain by illustrating how an actual simulation system can be used to this end.     

A Critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Scientific Theology

Abstract

In Theology and the Philosophy of Science, Wolfhart Pannenberg argues that theology is on a par with the natural sciences, insofar as theological statements are hypotheses subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by experience. He defends his thesis by claiming that theology makes truth-claims about reality; and, second, that these are verifiable in the same sense that scientific statements are. I will argue that this thesis is wrong; and that the first claim could be right in a sense that has yet to be made clear; the second is not defensible even if fleshed out by some conceivable scientific scenario.     

Focusing on Educational Outcomes

National education goals, content standards, and national tests are the hot topics of the day in educational reform. Special services personnel eventually will be faced with these issues, and can either be part of the discussion from the beginning, or wait and have to deal with someone else's decisions. In this article, we highlight some recent national and state educational reform activities and their probable implications for students with disabilities. We explain in brief the impetus behind the thrust toward an outcomesbased approach to education, and summarize the response of the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities to this push. Possible ways in which special service providers can act to influence the focus on outcomes are described.     

Queering “Straight” Preaching

Abstract

Well-meaning straight preachers may approach the issue of LGBTQ equality in the church from a standpoint of compassion, but queer theorists such as Lee Edelman have critiqued “compassion-compulsion” as a subconscious selfprojection, requiring that others become just like us. This article presses straight preachers to go further than simply preaching to include “others,” instead challenging such preachers to open themselves and their congregations to the risk of transformation. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, this article suggests that preachers move towards others in a gesture of “recognition” that resembles gratitude, and by such a gesture to receive the risky gifts others have to offer. This gratitude for the gifts of others becomes a motive for engaging in queer theory and queer theology, but this motive also puts us at risk. The risk of preaching that seriously engages the gifts of others includes queering ourselves, allowing ourselves to be scandalized by the risk of transformation asked of us by the gospel we preach.     

The rehabilitation of the case-study method

The controversy surrounding the scientific nature of the case-study research method in psychotherapy is not new and can be traced to the time when Freud started publishing his works. Traditional, quantitative researchers have argued thatthe case-study method is anecdotal and non-scientific, dismissing the results and findings obtained by this method on the grounds that they lack validity and reliability.This article seeks to dispel the traditional misconceptions about case study.It conclusively argues that the case study,perceived from the postmodern perspective, is a completely legitimate research method and, moreover, better suited to a holistic, democratic psychotherapy as a discipline dealing with the understanding and change of interwoven complexities of intrapsychic and interpersonal processes that emerge and unfold within a wider socio-historical context.     

TREM-1与肿瘤关系的研究进展

有关炎症与肿瘤相互关系的研究已成为目前肿瘤研究的热点之一.髓样细胞表达触发受体-1(TREM-1)作为一种免疫球蛋白超家族激活型受体,在炎症反应发生、级联放大中具有重要作用,可影响肿瘤微环境中各种相关细胞因子(如IL-8、MCP-1、TNF-α)水平,通过损伤、抑制修复等机制参与肿瘤发生、浸润和转移等病理性过程,影响患者预后.本文主要就TREM-1在肿瘤方面的相关研究进展进行综述.     

Interference Control in Children with First Episode Major Depression: A Brief Report

The ability to deal with sources of conflict, that is, interference control, was evaluated in a group of 11 children with first episode Major Depression and a peer control group. To this end, the Eriksen and Schultz (1979 Eriksen, C. W. and Schulz, D. W. 1979. Information processing in visual search: A continuous flow conception and experimental results. Perception and Psychophysics, 25: 249–263. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) task was used. Here, the participant is presented with a stimulus that simultaneously activates two conflicting response channels: One response is activated by the instructions, whereas the other response is activated by elements in the array that strongly invite an alternative — yet incorrect — response. Findings provided no evidence for an undisturbed interference control nor impaired overall processing speed in children with first episode Major Depression.