RELIGION, PACIFISM, AND THE DOCTRINE OF RESTRAINT

The doctrine of restraint is the claim that citizens and legislators ought to restrain themselves from making political decisions solely on religious grounds. That doctrine is normally construed as a general constraint on religious arguments: an exclusively religious rationale as such is an inappropriate basis for a political decision, particularly a coercive political decision. However, the most common arguments for the doctrine of restraint fail to show that citizens and legislators ought to obey the doctrine of restraint, as we can see by reflecting on those arguments as they bear on the Agapic Pacifist's rationale for denying that even legitimate political authorities may use lethal military force.     

When History Seems to Repeat Itself: Exposure to Perceived Lessons of the Past Influences Predictions About Current Political Events

The idea that the past holds lessons for the present, under the guise of historical analogies, is prevalent in political and public discourse. Those analogies are often accompanied by dire warnings befalling those who “forget” or otherwise neglect the powerful lessons of History—and would then be “doomed to repeat it”, as the saying goes. So, Would remembering history make it seem more OR LESS likely to repeat itself in the future? In other words, does exposure to specific lessons about past events, especially ones involving causal claims, affect how people expect real-life events to turn out? Four studies (three preregistered) tested this experimentally. In Studies 1 and 2, participants expected the same behavior (the US adopting a harsh stance against Iran in the Nuclear Treaty) to result in a more negative outcome when this current stance seemed to match a “lesson” they had read about the break-out of World War II (European leaders adopting a harsh approach against Germany in the 1919 Versailles Treaty vs. a conciliatory approach in the 1938 Munich Agreement). Studies 3 and 4 attempted to eliminate some confounds present in the first two studies and to generalize the effect to different events. While results varied across studies, an internal meta-analysis indicated that the analogical effect on predictions (d = –.08) tended to become stronger as participants’ knowledge about the target situation decreased (d-1SD = –.24). These findings support the possibility of analogical-based predictive effects for real-life political events, and are discussed in light of their research and political implications.     

Lessons from the Transition to Relational Teletherapy During COVID-19

When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, clinicians were challenged to maintain continuity of care. Teletherapy became the primary means of service delivery for many who had never or only sparingly used it. The Family Institute at Northwestern University, in response to encouraging findings with respect to the effectiveness of teletherapy and recognizing advantages with respect to access to care, launched our teletherapy services in 2018. As a relationship-based organization, we were keen to exploit the opportunity that teletherapy provides to integrate additional members of the client system into the treatment. Over these two plus years, we have learned a great deal. Our learning was greatly accelerated by our transition to a 100% teletherapy practice in the wake of the pandemic. Teletherapy is a different context. Intentionally managing the context’s constraints and exploiting its strengths is key to providing high-quality couple and family therapy. This step is often overlooked or resisted when teletherapy is an occasional add-on to a face-to-face practice.     

Organizational silence,organizational commitment and creativity: The case of directors of Islamic Azad University of Khorasan Razavi

IntroductionToday, one issue that arose in human resource discussions is the phenomenon of organizational silence (OS).ObjectiveSince it has not been carried extensive research out on this phenomenon in Iran, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between OS and Organizational Commitment (OC) and Organizational Creativity (OCR) among managers of the Islamic Azad University of Khorasan Razavi.MethodsWe based the theoretical framework of this study on the OS scale of Morrison and Milliken (2003) and the Allen and Myers’ (1990) Three-Component OC Scale and OCR questionnaire of Randsip (1979). The questionnaire's internal reliability by Cronbach's alpha for OS, OC, and OCR was 0.81, 0.89, and 0.84 respectively. Also, 200 executives, deputies, managerial and administrative directors were tested. The Pearson correlation coefficient and structural equations were used to analyze the data.ResultsThe findings illustrate that in this organization, there is a significant and an inverse relationship between OS and OC and OCR. So, the more is the OS, the greater is the lack of OCR and OC.ConclusionThe results show that OCR is moderate and downward. OCR can be because of different factors, but is more affected by the dimensions of OC. OCR and continuous commitment could explain 0.84 of the variance of dependent variables. Also, all the research hypotheses were approved and 0.89 of the total variance of the dependent variable was illustrated in terms of effective factors.     

Heidegger,Communal Being,and Politics

There are two critical, but opposite interpretations of Heidegger’s understanding of being as a social ontology. One charges Heidegger with adhering to an anti-social “private irony,” while the other charges him with promoting a “self-canceling” totality. The current essay replies to these two charges with a discussion of Heidegger’s understanding of being as “communal being,” which is implicated both in the early Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world-with-others” and in the later Heidegger’s keyword of Ereignis. It argues that Heidegger’s understanding of being as communal being is neither identical with totalitizing publicness nor the same as voluntaristic egotism. According to Heidegger, both the publicness of das Man and voluntaristic egotism are the real threats to humanity at present. Because of them, we human beings are in danger of being uprooted from the earth upon which we—as communal beings—have already and always dwelled and lived with others from the very beginning of human history.     

西方政治伦理思想的历史流变及其启示

自古至今,西哲们紧跟时代的脚步,不断把西方的政治伦理观推陈出新:美德政治伦理、神性政治伦理、非道德主义的政治伦理、权利政治伦理。全面、系统地梳理和展现西方政治伦理思想的演变及其价值诉求,对于理解和把握政治伦理学中的一些重要理论问题具有重大的启迪意义。     

L’anxiété liée à la COVID-19 : une analyse de ses effets en milieu de travail

The anxiety engendered by the sanitary crisis of the COVID-19 is a novel emotional phenomenon. Due to its recency and novelty, this form of anxiety and its effects are largely unknown. To explore this issue, we conducted a study among 650 civil agents of the Quebec government during the first wave of the pandemic that examined the effects of COVID-19-triggered anxiety on four indicators of work adjustment: job engagement, organizational commitment, psychological empowerment, and ego depletion. While controlling for the effect of relevant contextual factors, our analyses indicate that COVID-19-triggered anxiety is positively related to organizational commitment and ego depletion and negatively related to psychological empowerment. In contrast, COVID-19-triggered anxiety was not significantly related to job engagement.     

Religion and politics in post-1991 Ethiopia: making sense of Bryan S. Turner’s ‘Managing Religions’

Bryan S. Turner’s concept of managing religion postulates that it is the modern state’s prerogative to exert some degree of control over religions. For Turner, this is important because of increasing religious revival and the challenges it poses to public order and security. Turner describes two main approaches to managing religion, namely upgrading and enclavement. The former refers to modernising or ‘partial secularisation’ of a given religious institution or group while the latter is a tactic of isolating a certain community of believers. Turner’s two approaches are developed to analyse contexts affected by recent migration. While concurring with the efficacy of upgrading and enclavement, in this article, I argue that states adapt different mechanisms depending on the context that necessitates their intervention. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Ethiopia, I introduce cooptation and repression as two additional approaches used by authoritarian states in countries that are less affected by migration.     

Are Muslims a Distinctive Minority? An Empirical Analysis of Religiosity,Social Attitudes,and Islam

Scholarly and public discourses on Muslim immigrants in Europe have questioned if Islam is an impediment to sociocultural adaptation and whether Muslims are a distinctive group in their religiosity and social values. We use a new survey of 480 British Muslims in conjunction with the British Social Attitudes Survey to examine differences between Muslim and non‐Muslim Britons on religiosity (practice, belief, salience) and moral and social issues regarding gender, abortion, and homosexuality. Muslims are more religious than other Britons, including both British Christians and religious “nones.” Muslims also are more conservative than other Britons across the range of social and moral attitudes. Multivariate analysis shows, however, that much of the difference on moral issues is due to socioeconomic disadvantage and high religiosity among Muslims. Although being a highly religious group in an otherwise secular country renders Muslims distinctive, factors that predict social conservatism among all Britons—high religiosity and low SES—apply similarly to Muslims.     

Investigation concerning the possibility of rational ethics

Ethical behavior such as self‐sacrifice and striving for juistice—the natural striving for a general prosperity for humans—is not mainly learned but is carried by a natural altruism from one generation to the next. It is based on group (rather than individual) altruism which has concentrated on protection of the aged (as preservers of knowledge) and the young (as preservers of future generations).

It is proposed that the strongest possible nature form of community is the “amorisation community"—in effect, one in which love produces more love. A case is presented for the creation of a world scientific and cultural transformation based on the ethics of the “amorisation community.”