Faith in Christ today: An engagement with Klaus Nürnberger

Today's Lutheran theologian must retrieve his or her particular Christian tradition while articulating the faith for our globalized twenty‐first‐century context. South African Klaus Nürnberger's new two‐volume systematic theology, Faith in Christ Today, adds heat to the current creative flurry of red‐hot systematic theologies. Nürnberger, who is oriented both to God's future and the world's future, places the theological articulation of the faith within the context of the worldwide and multi‐cultural Christian church. We all can learn from Nürnberger.     

The Cyborg as an Interpretation of Culture-Nature

The idea of "nature" performs an important cultural work. The cyborg-nature is an attempt to free ourselves from the features of the culturally authorized concepts of nature. The cyborg offers new metaphors to both academic and popular theorizing for comprehending the different ways that sciences and technologies affect our lives, subjectivities, and concepts. The cyborg is a lived reality and a metaphor. Paul Tillich deemed it necessary to have a mythos of technology to explain our technologies and ourselves. He offered "The Technical City" as a symbol for his age. Donna Haraway's cy-borg-figure could function as a symbol to interpret our time and technologies and ourselves.     

The Death of a Child and the Birth of Practical Wisdom

This paper explores the notion of practical wisdom asan alternative to current formulations of criticalthinking. The practical realm is that ofill-structured problems that emerge from life aslived; it is a realm of legitimate uncertainty andambiguity that requires an ethical responsiveness orpractical wisdom. The death of a child is a case inpoint. The author identifies and examines threeaspects of practical wisdom – the ethical claims ofpartiality, a yielding responsiveness and the play ofthought – and juxtaposes them with aspects of criticalthinking. The work of Martha Nussbaum and RichardPaul are interwoven throughout the discussion. Theauthor concludes that the discourse of criticalthinking is in danger of lapsing into a form of moralescapism wherein all we are rationally responsible foris thinking correctly. Practical wisdom, on theother hand, recognizes that thinking is not simply anintellectual cognitive act of an individual but adance between the life of a child and the love of anelder, a conversation between what is and what couldbe, an openness to passionate sorrow and surprise, aplay between understanding and perception. As such,practical wisdom provides a more likely account ofliving in good faith with oneself and others.     

Experimenter effects on responses to explicitly sexual stimuli

Experimenter effects on responses to explicitly sexual stimuli were investigated in 63 single undergraduate males and 89 single undergraduate females. A completely factorial design with sex of subject, sex of experimenter, and experimenter's style of interacting (informal vs formal) as the independent factors was employed. While the variables under investigation did not have an overriding effect on the outcome measures, at least one experimenter attribute was discovered to significantly influence a large percentage of the variables assessed: The data suggest that informal experimenters permit less socially desirable responses and more generalized arousal than formal experimenters. In addition to replicating earlier work on experimenter effects, the present study serves to delineate a possible set of cues by which experimenters may influence their subjects' arousal to explicitly sexual stimuli.     

Cognitive tuning and receptivity to novel information

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that cognitive tuning would cause receivers to be more receptive to novel than to familiar information, compared to transmitters. The information receptivity of transmitters and receivers was contrasted against a control group. The influence of the source and audience, possible limits on the influence of the tuning set, was also explored. Finally, amount of variance controlled by cognitive tuning, personality variables and information utility were examined.While the results strongly support the prediction that transmitters prefer familiar information, receivers and control group subjects did not significantly differ in preferences for novel information. The anticipated expertise of source or audience had no influence on information receptivity. Among the three sets of variables used, the greatest amount of variance was explained by information utility, followed by cognitive tuning and personality measures, though all three variables controlled a significant amount of variance.     

Cardiac-somatic changes during a simple reaction time task: A developmental study

The relationship during a simple reaction time task between heart rate and four measures of task irrelevant somatic activity was evaluated in four age groups of children, i.e., 4-, 5-, 8-, and 10-year-olds and young adults, in order to evaluate further a hypothesized coupling of cardiac and somatic activity. At all age levels, phasic decreases in both heart rate and somatic activity coincident with performance were found with the magnitude of the effect increasing with age only on three somatic measures. However, tonic levels of both heart rate and somatic activity decreased with age. Performance on the reaction task was found to be inversely related to the age-related phasic somatic effects as well as age-related tonic heart rate and somatic activity.     

Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal

Two lines of research—one in psycholinguistics and one in linguistics—are combined to deal with a long-standing problem in both fields: why the “performance structures” of sentences (structures based on experimental data, such as pausing and parsing values) are not fully accountable for by linguistic theories of phrase structure. Two psycholinguistic algorithms that have been used to predict these structures are described and their limitations are examined. A third algorithm, based on the prosodic structures of sentences is then proposed and shown to be a far better predictor of performance structures. It is argued that the experimental data reflect aspects of the linguistic cognitive capacity, and that, in turn, linguistic theory can offer an illuminating account of the data. The prosodic model is shown to have a wider domain of application than temporal organization per se, accounting for parsing judgments as well as pausing performance, and reflecting aspects of syntactic and semantic structure as well as purely prosodic structure. Finally, the algorithm is discussed in light of language processing.     

Conservation or conversation? Contextual facilitation of inappropriate conservation judgments

Recent studies have shown that children who fail Piagetian conservation tasks may succeed if the transformation of materials is made to seem accidental, or incidental to some other activity. In the present study, 46 children, mean age 6 years, were randomly assigned to either a standard or a modified testing condition. In both, the child first made a judgment as to the equality in area of two square fields, each made up from eight interlinked fence sections. Then the child saw one of the fields transformed into a rectangle, without the fences being disconnected, and was asked for a second judgment as to the equality of the fields. In the modified condition the transformation made sense in terms of creating a space for the farmhouse. Significantly higher levels of “conserving” judgments were obtained in the modified than in the standard condition. However, it should be noted that area is not in fact conserved in this case. The implications of this for the status of precociously correct conservation judgments are discussed.     

A multidisciplinary model of voluntary employee turnover

This paper proposes a model of employee turnover based upon the existing literature from psychological, sociological, and economic perspectives. Voluntary turnover is posited to have three major classes of determinants: characteristics of the individual employee, work-related factors, and the states of certain economic variables. The model proposes that economic factors serve to control the degree to which individual and work-related factors can explain variation in turnover. It is hypothesized that individual and work-related variables will be more predictive of turnover under prosperous economic conditions than when the economy is strained. The model also proposes four classes of consequences of turnover: individual, organizational-social, organizational-economic, and societal. Recommendations for future turnover research are discussed.     

Age at onset of blindness and the development of the semantics of color names

The relationship between multiple measures of response inhibition and variations in young (age 5–7 years) children's short-term learning history was examined in a laboratory setting. Exposure to experimenter-directed delay periods (of either increasing, decreasing, or fixed durations) and to various rules for behavior management during the delay intervals was manipulated. Subsequent measures of resistance to temptation, an index of conceptual tempo (the Matching Familiar Figures Test), children's preference for delay vs immediate reward, and a test of motor control was obtained. Results indicated: (a) that the effects of rule provision extended to all resistance measures and to MFFT latency, while delay experiences significantly influenced only the latency to first transgression in the resistance task; (b) that a general and positive rationale for response inhibition was superior to an arbitrary rule or no rule structure; (c) that experience with gradually increasing delay of reward assisted children in inhibiting their first transgression significantly longer than the other delay patterns or no treatment; and (d) that experimental effects showed temporal stability over one week.