Islamic Legal and Ethical Views on Organ Transplantation and Donation

In Islam, one of the core beliefs is in the life of the hereafter. At the end of time and all that exists, all human beings will be resurrected (in their bodies and souls) and will face the Day of Judgment. Even their body parts or organs will stand witness against them. Furthermore, in Islamic law, every action or thing is categorized either as legitimate or prohibited. This article explores ethico‐legal opinions on the issues of organ donation and transplantation in the light of these essential Islamic beliefs.     

Embedding social networks: How guanxi ties reinforce Chinese employees’ retention

Going beyond traditional inquiry into social support from local organizational constituents, this project examined how diverse resources from mutually affiliated contacts within and beyond local work environs boost propensity to stay in firms. We deployed Burt’s (1992) name generator and network closure index to more fully assess guanxi networks in China, which comprise strong, dense, and multiplex ties. Specifically, we tested how closed guanxi networks promote job loyalty among Chinese nationals, while investigating how high-commitment human resource management (HRM) systems moderate network effects. We collected egonet data from 417 employees in four high tech firms in China. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that guanxi network closure increases propensity to stay, whose effects high-commitment HRM reinforce.     

Emotion Priming and Attributions for Terrorism: Americans' Reactions in a National Field Experiment

The terrorist attacks of September 11 elicited many forms of negative affect, including anger and sadness. They also elicited a search for explanations. A national field study that experimentally primed emotion evaluated how priming anger and sadness differentially evoked causal judgments about the attacks. It found that priming anger triggered more causal attributions than did priming sadness. Thus, specific emotions, rather than general negativity, shaped citizens' attributions regarding September 11. In addition to its theoretical implications, the study demonstrates a method for studying ecologically valid emotions, under conditions of experimental control, with a nationally representative sample.     

大学生择业心理归因结构研究

为了解大学生择业心理,根据归因理论编制了“大学生择业心理归因问卷”。该问卷包括原因源与可控性两个分量表。通过对596名大学生进行问卷调查,对该问卷的项目进行了筛选和修订,最后共保留了20个项目。研究结果表明:(1)分量表一可抽取负性情绪与择业目标两个因子,分量表二可抽取自身努力与社会支持两个因子;(2)问卷的信度与效度都达到了测量学的基本要求。     

LIMITATIONS ON THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF DRUG‐ENABLED MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES

Scientific interest in drug‐induced mystical experiences reemerged in the 1990s. This warrants reexamining the philosophical issues surrounding such studies: Do psychedelic drugs cause mystical experiences? Are drug‐induced experiences the same in nature as other mystical experiences? Does the fact that mystical experiences can be induced by drugs invalidate or validate mystical cognitive claims? Those questions will be examined here. An overview of the scientific examination of drug‐induced mystical experiences is included, as is a brief overview of the history of the use of psychedelic drugs in religion.     

Sustainable Masculinity in Ecumenical Perspective

Gender is an important topic of the WCC's Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace. It is the result of both theological anthropological concerns and the ongoing search for justice and peace. In other words, it is a typical area where traditional Faith and Order and Life and Work concerns coincide. Yet, gender is often taken to mean concerns of the role, rights, and treatment of women primarily, with some attention to the position and treatment of transgender persons and sexual minorities. This article argues that, precisely from the point of view of these ecumenical theological concerns, attention for masculinity as a gender is also required. The reason for this is that although many different forms of masculinity are supported with an appeal to the Christian tradition, not all forms of masculinity are compatible with a desire for safeguarding human dignity and a sustainable journey into the future.     

Pretreatment Correlates of the Therapeutic Alliance in the Chronically Depressed

We examined the relationship between patient characteristics and the working alliance in a multisite trial for chronic depression. Patients treated with the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP), alone (n = 169) or combined with nefazodone (n = 198), completed the Working Alliance Inventory during the 2nd week of treatment. Within the CBASP alone group, a history of drug abuse/dependence, lower peak social adjustment over the past five years, and lower current social adjustment predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Within the combination group, male gender and a distancing coping style predicted a significantly poorer alliance. Results should be interpreted with caution since they did not replicate across treatment groups, and the number of significant findings were not much greater than chance expectations.     

Spontaneous Trait Associations and the Case of the Superstitious Banana

We explored whether spontaneous trait transference (STT) occurs in cases where inanimate objects, rather than human bystanders, are presented in the context of trait-implicative behavior. The results provide a vivid demonstration of the associability of primed trait constructs by demonstrating STT to inanimate objects to which one does not normally attribute traits (e.g., superstitious being associated with a banana). This finding is consistent with the notion that the trait associations involved in STT are formed independent of person perception processes. The implications of this finding for the types of associative processes exposed by the popular savings in relearning methodology are discussed.     

Pragmatic Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Intersection of Human Interests

This paper elicits a twentieth-century American story that is deeply rooted in the legacy of American philosophical pragmatism, its impact on a particular school, and its reconstruction of American theology. The paper focuses on three generations of American theologians, and it centers on how these theologians reconstruct theology in light of the science of their day and how they maintain a true plurality of insights about human life in the world. The pragmatic theologian regards the creative exchange between theology and natural science as an opportunity for renewing our understanding of religious life and appreciating the various commitments of scientists and theologians as they meet at the juncture of human interests. The first voice is that of the early Chicago School of Theology represented by Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and George Burman Foster. The second voice is that of Henry Nelson Wieman, a second-generation theologian at Chicago. The final theologian discussed is James M. Gustafson, former Professor of Theological Ethics at Chicago.