Children's Loss of Agency under Extreme Adversity

This study explores the notion of children's agency in situations of extreme adversity. The child participants (n=117) live in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic; extreme poverty; and systemic educational malfunction. Four focus group interviews were conducted with the children to explore their experiences of potential barriers to education. The findings indicated that contextual factors had a profoundly negative impact on the children, with their agentive capacity being severely compromised through their exposure to multiple, complex layers of risk. There was very little evidence to suggest that children retain any sense of their own agency in such adversity. This has implications for their resilience and for the development of policy and intervention strategies that may meet these children's needs.     

Robert Singleton's Sermon at Paul's Cross in 1535: The ‘True Church’ and the Royal Supremacy

Abstract

On 2 April 1535, Robert Singleton, chaplain to Queen Anne Boleyn, preached a sermon at Paul's Cross. The unique, surviving printed copy of the sermon is housed in the Wren Library of Lincoln Cathedral. From 1533, Singleton had been a member of the circle of avant-garde evangelicals gathered at the margins of the Tudor court under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell. His sermon at Paul's Cross contributed to an orchestrated campaign in support of Cromwell's legislative programme, then proceding through Parliament, to sever all links of ecclesiastical jurisdiction with Rome and to confirm Henry's headship of the Church of England. The sermon interprets Paul's allegory of the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem in the Epistle to the Galatians as a model for thinking about the distinction between the invisible and visible Church. Singleton harnesses Pauline ecclesiology in an apology for the royal supremacy. Presented here is a transcribed copy of the original printed version.     

Christianity in Iran: A Brief Survey

This article reviews the long and varied history of Christianity in the country now known as Iran. The historical emphasis is on the Assyrian Church of the East, although other churches are also mentioned. The relationship, successively, with Zoroastrianism and with Islam, as the dominant religious traditions, is discussed, as are its implications for the wider Islamic world. Western contacts with Iran, and, in particular, those of western churches, are also examined. In the light of this historical analysis, and from discussion of the situation since the Islamic Revolution, some conclusions are advanced about the prospects for Christianity in the new contemporary context.     

Community without memory? In search of an ecclesiology of liberation in the company of people with dementia

The increasing prevalence of dementia among members of the Christian Churches prompts a re-evaluation of Christian ecclesiology. This is particularly true for the ecclesiology born of the theologies of liberation, because of the emphasis it places upon conscious participation in the historical life of the community. The present article draws on stories of people with dementia as recorded by themselves and those close to them; by reflection upon these stories, it seeks to re-think the character of the Church in the face of this challenge, and so to offer a richer interpretation of its identity as a community of liberation.     

The interior and the abject: uses and abuses of the female in the middle ages

In this paper I argue that during the High Middle Ages definitions of the female as distinct from the life led by women played a crucial role in defining social boundaries and solidifying new systems of power. I suggest that there were two female figures that were crucial to these definitions: the mother and the virgin. While the mother image was invoked to describe the internal functioning of the Christian community, the virgin metaphor drew the external boundaries and defined the Christian community's relation to the non‐Christian other.     

Religious Research in Gerontology, 1980–1994: A Systematic Review

ABSTRACT

This article presents results of an NIA-funded systematic review of research on religion and aging published from 1980–1994 in mainstream gerontology and religion journals, including the Journal of Religious Gerontology. Findings are summarized from 73 empirical studies, a subset of the 115 articles included in NIA's bibliography on this topic. In general, these studies use multiethnic samples, include multiple religious dimensions, and focus on age comparative analyses and on analyses of religious effects on life satisfaction, health, and well-being. Also summarized is gerontological research on patterns, predictors, outcomes, and measures of religious involvement, and an agenda for future research is proposed.     

An observation on Carnapʼs Continuum and stochastic independencies

We characterize those identities and independencies which hold for all probability functions on a unary language satisfying the Principle of Atom Exchangeability. We then show that if this is strengthen to the requirement that Johnson?s Sufficientness Principle holds, thus giving Carnap?s Continuum of inductive methods for languages with at least two predicates, then new and somewhat inexplicable identities and independencies emerge, the latter even in the case of Carnap?s Continuum for the language with just a single predicate.     

Cognitive-behavioural Treatment of a Patient Suffering from Menière's Disease

Abstract

Vertigo and dizziness may cause considerable discomfort and feelings of uncertainty. It is no surprise that vertigo is the most disabling symptom in Menière's disease, an inner ear disorder. The other two cardinal symptoms are tinnitus and hearing impairment. In this study, one severely disabled woman was treated with a cognitive-behavioural treatment comprising, among other components, relaxation training, stabilization of gaze, cognitive restructuring and behavioural task setting. The patient responded well to the treatment, during which her vertigo attacks disappeared. During the follow-up period, she experienced vertigo attacks again, but after two booster sessions the vertigo attacks vanished for the rest of the follow-up period. The results are further discussed.     

协作抑制的认知机制

协作抑制是指当人们在一个记忆小组中一起提取信息的时候,小组提取的信息总量比等量个体提取的信息总量要少.心理学研究者致力于从认知角度对该现象进行解释,主要的理论解释有提取策略破坏假说和提取抑制假说.前者认为小组成员的提取结果对组内其他成员的信息组织策略产生了干扰,导致小组的提取成绩低.而后者认为小组内成员的提取结果会抑制其他成员对非提取项目的表征,降低小组协作提取能力,出现协作抑制.本文对两种理论假说的提出背景,基本观点,证据支持及现有争论进行了介绍,同时指出了未来的研究应关注于对两种机制的关键矛盾点进行区别性检验、对不同认知机制在不同条件下成立可靠性的检验以及通过对编码阶段进行操控来进一步考察协作抑制的认知机制.