Survival of the Fittest: Rhetoric During the Course of an Election Campaign

Despite the tradition of studying campaign effects, we know little about the rhetorical strategies of candidates. This study speculates about the types of appeals that incumbents and challengers find most effective and that are, as a result, most likely to dominate an election campaign. Candidates have an incentive to use arguments that evoke emotions such as fear, anxiety, and anger. Emotional appeals allow candidates to emphasize consensual values, which makes it easier to mobilize their party's base while simultaneously attracting the support of the uncommitted. The use of emotional appeals is also consistent with the media's preference for drama and excitement in news reporting. Thus, emotional appeals will be more enduring than other types of appeals, and hence more likely to dominate the rhetorical landscape. A content analysis of newspaper coverage of the 1988 Canadian federal election campaign provides suggestive evidence in favor of this view.     

Group Attachment and the Reduction of Value-Driven Ambivalence

This article analyzes the effects of value-driven ambivalence and group attachment on response variability in public attitudes toward campaign finance reform. The analysis demonstrates that group attachment, when activated by affective cues, moderates the effects of ambivalence on response variability. By tipping the balance of considerations in one direction or the other, group attachments make it easier for ambivalent respondents to make tradeoffs between competing values during policy choices and, as a result, dampen response variability. Methodologically, the results offer an important cautionary note about the use of linear ambivalence scales by calling into question the assumption that indifference is an intermediate state between preference and ambivalence.     

Resisting the Devil: The Case of Edward Dynham (1626) and Options for English Protestant Dispossession

To the displeasure of many puritans, the Church of England canons of 1604 restricted the casting out of Devils to prayer and fasting. Yet after that date not all possession cases disappeared, nor were all dismissed as false. This article explores ways that long-standing general Protestant as well as puritan theology and practices (especially related to ‘resisting the Devil’) informed post-1604 anti-demonic activity. With a clear biblical basis, and primarily as an individual rather than collective practice, resisting the Devil was embraced by people from a wide range of religious positions and remained unrestricted by the religious establishment. There was variation; not everyone approved of how resisting the Devil was applied in particular cases. Yet ample evidence suggests that dispossessions led by lay people, and by means other than prayer and fasting, did in fact have a place within (and influenced the development of) Protestantism in early-modern England.     

Religiosity and well-being among older Jewish Israelis: Findings from SHARE

ABSTRACT

This study examined the correlates of religiosity among Jewish Israelis aged 50 and older. Based on the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, the findings show that almost half the Jewish respondents never pray and that, on average, prayer frequency is lower among Jewish Israelis than it is among most of their European counterparts. Multivariate logistic analyses revealed that those who pray more often have more health conditions, are less able to make ends meet financially, and have fewer years of education. However, when facing ill health those who pray more often display a relatively lesser decline in their sense of well-being.     

Spirituality and Health Outcomes in the Elderly

The purpose of this mail survey was to examine the relationship of attitudinal and behavioral measures of spirituality to physical and mental health outcomes in a sample of elderly community residents. Frequency of prayer, importance of faith, and reliance on religion for their coping were compared for their association with eight categories of physical and mental health. All three measures, prayer, faith and religious coping, correlated strongly with positive mental health, but not with the other seven physical health categories. Multiple regression analyses indicated importance of one's faith had the strongest association with positive mental health, even after controlling for the effect of other significant variables, age and education. The behavioral measure of prayer was a component of importance of faith to mental health, with no independent impact. This study highlights attitudes rather than practices, as the stronger spiritual variables related to mental health in the elderly.     

Close Ties,Intercessory Prayer,and Optimism Among American Adults: Locating God in the Social Support Network

Prayer is often an interpersonal phenomenon. It represents not only a form of social support shared between or among people, but also a means of embedding an unobservable actor (God) within a conventionally observable social network. This study considers whether the receipt of intercessory prayer from close network ties is associated with future‐oriented well‐being. Analyses use social network module data from the Portraits of American Life Study (PALS), a nationally representative study of American adults containing a breadth of information not available in prior studies of networks, prayer, and well‐being. Despite experiencing more instances of recent adversity (mental or physical health problem, financial trouble, and unemployment), prayed‐for PALS respondents report the highest levels of optimism. Furthermore, the association between network prayer and optimism is robust to inclusion of individual‐level indicators of religiosity. Finally, other forms of social support that an individual receives from his or her close ties do not explain the benefits of intercessory prayer.     

Personality and Spirituality: Christian Prayer and Eastern Meditation Are Not the Same

A random sample of 1,033 adults in an Australian community survey completed a form containing the abbreviated Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with questions about the practice of prayer and Eastern meditation. While prayer was associated with low psychoticism scores, Eastern meditation was associated with high psychoticism scores.     

Listening to People with Dementia: A Pastoral Care Perspective

SUMMARY

Pastoral and Spiritual Care approaches to the reduction of depression in residential aged care facilities are considered. They are examined through specific one-to-one pastoral care, through a pastoral care person in the team approach to care and through a one-to-many relationship for group spiritual and religious activities. The suggestions in this article are offered as extensions to a manual, Challenge Depression, on managing depression in residential aged care as a way of including pastoral and spiritual care as part of an integrated approach and as part of a stand alone approach of pastoral care.     

Toynbee's Frantic Quest for Survival

ABSTRACT

Data from life review interviews with elder Catholic women religious show that through prayer they are able to experience solitude and to feel connected with others. Their experience is not completely explained by either the disengagement theory nor by the newer theory of gerotranscendence. Because prayer connects them to others, they do not experience complete social withdrawal; rather, prayer functions as a modified social activity connecting them to their past, to God, to the community in which they live, as well as to the wider world. They also do not develop a new transcendent meta-perspective, but deepen into cherished life beliefs and practices, accepting and becoming more fully who they are as individuals and as older women.     

Prayer and the Theologian of the Cross: Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther

This article constructs a dialogue between Julian of Norwich and the concept of “theologian of the cross,” as found in Martin Luther and his recent interpreters. Since she is Catholic and medieval, one might begin by suspecting that her theology is not acceptable to someone who follows Luther's teaching in the Heidelberg Disputation. However a closer look will suggest that what she has to say is largely in accord with Luther's standard for a theologian of the cross. Put more positively, Julian is a theologian of the cross, in spite of her use of different language and concepts from those of Luther. The focus of the article is the subject of prayer: what Julian teaches about it, and what may be inferred about prayer from Luther's dramatic theses in his disputation.