TECHNO‐SECULARISM,RELIGION, AND THE CREATED CO‐CREATOR

Abstract. I take up the challenge posed by John Caiazza (2005) to face down the religiously vacuous ethics of techno‐secularism. Techno‐secularism is not enough for human fulfillment let alone human flowering. Yet, communities of faith based on the Bible have a positive responsibility to employ science and technology toward divinely appointed ends. We should study God's world through science and press technology into the service of transforming our world and our selves in light of our vision of God's promised new creation. This warrants invocation of the concept of the human being as the created co‐creator developed in the theology of Philip Hefner.     

Predicting Self‐Confident Behaviour with Implicit and Explicit Self‐Esteem Measures

The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of self‐esteem in predicting self‐confident behaviour in different social situations. In line with behavioural dual‐process models, both implicit and explicit self‐esteem were hypothesized to be related to appearing self‐confident to unacquainted others. A total of 127 participants responded to the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self‐Esteem Scale, and an adjective scale for measuring explicit self‐esteem (ESE). Participants' implicit self‐esteem (ISE) was assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name‐letter task (NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction‐time affective priming task (RT‐APT) and the error‐based affective priming task (EB‐APT). Self‐confident behaviour was observed in four different social situations: (i) self‐introduction to a group; (ii) an ostracism experience; (iii) an interview about the ostracism experience; and (iv) an interview about one's personal life. In general, appearing self‐confident to unknown others was independently predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self‐esteem were, as expected, not correlated, and only the self‐esteem APTs—but not the self‐esteem IAT or the NLT—predicted self‐confident behaviours. It is important to note that in particular the predictive power of the self‐esteem EB‐APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the ESE measures. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Working in the borderland: early relational trauma and Fordham's analysis of ‘K’

This paper outlines a view of early relational trauma as underlying borderline states of mind, and argues that Knox's 1999 paper on internal working models and the complex provides a basis for understanding such states of mind. The author argues that in addition to internal working models, the complex also embodies and contains primitive defences of the core self. He outlines how these apply on the objective, subjective, transference and archetypal levels, and in direct and reversed forms and applies this to the account of Fordham's analysis of his patient ‘K’, which ended in impasse. The paper explores the dynamic that emerged in that analysis and suggests that it could be helpfully accounted for in terms of the co‐construction and re‐construction of early relational trauma in the analytic relationship.     

Malchish‐Kibalchish: cultural factors in a clinical case

In this paper, a Jungian understanding of cultural factors influencing individual analysis is illustrated with the case of a patient suffering from panic attacks. The analysis revealed that, in addition to the patient's personal background, the collectivistic attitudes of the Soviet culture, which had a moulding effect on the patient in his childhood and obstructed his individuation, should be taken into account. The concepts of the totalitarian object and the Russian cultural complex encompassing a grandiosity pole and an inferiority pole are used to explore the patient's condition, and the crucial role of creating mutual language with the patient is outlined.     

Forum: Crafting the Introductory Course in Religious Studies

This series of short essays considers the complex choices and decision‐making processes of instructors preparing to teach, and continuing to teach, introductory courses in religious studies. In a paper originally presented in the University of Chicago's “The Craft of Teaching in the Academic Study of Religion” series, Russell McCutcheon explores a “baker's dozen” of such choices and the larger pedagogical problems with which they are entwined, ranging from classic questions of skill development and content coverage to philosophical concerns around students' identification with their topics of study and institutional concerns around governance and assessment. Aaron Hollander provides a brief introduction and four doctoral students at the University of Chicago Divinity School respond to McCutcheon's essay, widening its scope, testing its applicability, and interrogating its undergirding suppositions from the perspective of early‐career educators in the field.     

Forum: Insiders,Outsiders, and Disclosure in the Undergraduate Classroom

In this set of essays, three authors provide different perspectives on whether personal religious sensibilities and identities affect the ways we teach religion. Elliott Bazzano discusses how, as a white Muslim convert teaching at a Catholic college, he incorporates selective autobiographical anecdotes into his classes as a way to problematize the meaning of “insider” and “outsider,” and pushes his students to recognize the many layers of identity that any given person embodies at a given time. In the second essay, Audrey Truschke explains why she makes no reference to her own religious beliefs or affiliations in class as part of her strategy to demonstrate how students can study any religion regardless of personal convictions. In the third essay, Jayme Yeo explores the benefits of discussing personal religious identity as a means to resist the categories of “inside” and “outside,” which she sees as heterogeneous concepts that do not always offer explanatory power upon close examination.     

EARLY MODERN PROTESTANT VIRTUOSOS AND SCIENTISTS: SOME COMMENTS

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the physico‐theology of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability.     

Enhancing the effects of extinction on attention-maintained behavior through noncontingent delivery of attention or stimuli identified via a competing stimulus assessment

Recent research has shown that the noncontingent delivery of competing stimuli can effectively reduce rates of destructive behavior maintained by social-positive reinforcement, even when the contingency for destructive behavior remains intact. It may be useful, therefore, to have a systematic means for predicting which reinforcers do and do not compete successfully with the reinforcer that is maintaining destructive behavior. In the present study, we conducted a brief competing stimulus assessment in which noncontingent access to a variety of tangible stimuli (one toy per trial) was superimposed on a fixed-ratio 1 schedule of attention for destructive behavior for individuals whose behavior was found to be reinforced by attention during a functional analysis. Tangible stimuli that resulted in the lowest rates of destructive behavior and highest percentages of engagement during the competing stimulus assessment were subsequently used in a noncontingent tangible items plus extinction treatment package and were compared to noncontingent attention plus extinction and extinction alone. Results indicated that both treatments resulted in greater reductions in the target behavior than did extinction alone and suggested that the competing stimulus assessment may be helpful in predicting stimuli that can enhance the effects of extinction when noncontingent attention is unavailable. DESCRIPTORS: Attention-maintained problem behavior, competing stimuli, extinction, functional analysis, noncontingent reinforcement     

Big Five personality traits: Are they really important for the subjective well‐being of Indians?

This study empirically examined the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and subjective well‐being (SWB) in India. SWB variables used were life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect. A total of 183 participants in the age range 30–40 years from Pune, India, completed the personality and SWB measures. Backward stepwise regression analysis showed that the Big Five traits accounted for 17% of the variance in life satisfaction, 35% variance in positive affect and 28% variance in negative affect. Conscientiousness emerged as the strongest predictor of life satisfaction. In line with the earlier research findings, neuroticism and extraversion were found to predict negative affect and positive affect, respectively. Neither openness to experience nor agreeableness contributed to SWB. The research emphasises the need to revisit the association between personality and SWB across different cultures, especially non‐western cultures.