BEFORE THE ORIGINAL POSITION: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community” (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism.     

Attentional deficit in learning-disabled children: evidence from visual half-field asymmetries

The structural theory of cerebral lateralization has been typically used to explain hemispheric asymmetries. However, the attentional model of brain functioning may help resolve some of the inconsistent findings with groups of learning-disabled children. To test this hypothesis, a visual half-field paradigm for word recognition was employed in a group of 26 learning-disabled and 26 normal children matched for sex, chronological age, and handedness. Three experimental conditions (unilateral, cued unilateral, and bilateral) and two word error types (visually and acoustically confusable words) were analyzed. The results indicated that normals produced the expected RVHF superiority under all experimental conditions, but the learning-disabled produced the expected RVHF superiority only under the cued unilateral condition. Learning-disabled children also made significantly more visually and acoustically confusable errors than normals and unlike normal children increased the number of acoustic errors in the RVF under bilateral stimulation. These results provide evidence that learning-disabled children may process information inefficiently and have brain activation patterns that are more susceptible to attentional effects.     

Believers and Their Disbelief

Several recent Roman Catholics who were known for their devotion have left accounts of their troubled faith. I consider three of these: St. Therese of Lisieux, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Then I tell of the troubled atheism of Jean‐Paul Sartre. Finally, I use texts of Sartre and Teilhard to understand the unsettled nature of belief.     

Cornell College: Program in Science and Religion

Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, has established a new interdisciplinary program in science and religion. One of the features of this program is an undergraduate major in science and religion that requires substantial course work in at least one of the natural sciences as well as course work in philosophy, religion, and history. As a result of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Cornell College will offer a special course, God and Physics: From Aquinas to Quantum Mechanics (April 1998), and will sponsor an international symposium on creation and contemporary cosmology (April 1999). Opportunities exist for interested scholars to come to Cornell as Templeton Visiting Fellows in order to participate in these activities.     

Retrieval of propositional information from long-term memory

Three experiments are reported in which subjects learn propositions like A hippie is in the park. The experiments manipulate the number of such propositions involving a particular person (e.g., hippie) or a particular location (e.g., park). After learning the material, subjects are asked to judge whether particular probe propositions are from the study set. Times to make these judgments about probe propositions increase with the number of study propositions involving the person or location used in the probe proposition. A model is presented which assumes a subject simultaneously accesses memory from all concepts in a probe proposition and serially searches through all study propositions involving each concept. Search of memory terminates as soon as one search process from a concept finds the probe proposition or exhausts the study propositions attached to that concept.     

Types produce types: An examination of personality development using Holland's theory

This study was designed to test Holland's hypothesis that parents encourage the development of their own personality types in their offspring. Data were collected by personal interviews from three freshmen classes at a large midwestern university. Parent's personality types (occupations) were compared to offsprings' personality types (expressed occupational choices) using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov one-sample test to determine whether or not the comparisons were due to chance. The results indicated that relationships existed between the personality types of fathers-sons, fathers-daughters and mothers-daughters while no relationship was confirmed between mothers-sons.     

Father identification,achievement, and occupational behavior of rural youth: One year follow-up

Rural economically deprived adolescent males, who had been previously surveyed as high school seniors concerning their post-high school plans, were surveyed again 1 yr later concerning their present occupational status and feelings of personal satisfaction. The Ss had been divided in an earlier study into two groups, low identification males (LIM) and high identification males (HIM) based upon independent evaluators' judgments of the adequacy of their fathers as identification models. Each group's responses to the survey were compared. The results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences between the two groups on the variables of satisfaction, having received counseling from others and optimism about the future. There are statistically significant differences between the current occupational status and future occupational plans of the two groups.     

Problems in the measurement of vocational maturity

Problems posed by the measurement of vocational maturity are discussed. One is the choice of an appropriate approach to the construction of vocational maturity measures, and another is how to demonstrate that a developmental variable has been measured. A combined rational-empirical methodology is proposed as a possible solution to these problems, and a model of vocational maturity is formulated which can be used as a conceptual frame of reference for constructing theoretically meaningful and psychometrically valid measures of the variables.     

Workers' central life interests and personality characteristics

Industrial workers who perceive work as their central life interest (CLI) also describe themselves as having a higher level of decisiveness, initiative, and supervisory ability than workers with other CLI orientations. Workers with CLI orientations in nonwork institutions have the lowest scores on decisiveness, need for occupational achievement, and initiative, and the highest need for job security, of the groups studied. Workers with no anchored CLI had the highest need for self-actualization and need for occupational achievement, of all groups. These personality characteristics are seen as consistent with the CLI orientations of individual workers, suggesting that the personality does “fit” some institutional setting, but not necessarily all those in which the individual functions.