Preaching and political debate on refugees

The article investigates how preaching relates to political debate on refugees through a study of sermons in Church of Norway in 2015/2016. The sermons are analysed in the context of the “refugee crisis” as it was mediated by national media and treated in public debate. The debate revolved around refugee politics, but included an exchange over the church’s role in the debate. The article investigates sermons as contributions to political debate on refugees and as negotiating the church’s role in political debate. A distinct finding is that most sermons collapse the historical distance to the biblical texts and employ them directly as instructions for moral and political action. The article identifies three homiletic strategies connected with three different ways of relating to public debate: A sentimental, a moralistic, and a heroic style of preaching.     

International and Domestic Altruism: A Study Among the Adult Population in Norway

Instead of targeting charity to countries where the human needs are most precarious, donors tend to direct their helping to victims within their own country. Despite being important for human welfare, the question why it is so has heretofore not been raised scientifically. In this survey study (N = 3849 respondents) a suggested distinction between international and domestic altruism was validated by examining to which extent the 2 concepts showed differing patterns of associations with a range of relevant variables. When controlling for demography, international orientation, trust in people, and less xenophobia predicted international altruism, while patriotism and fear predicted domestic altruism. Research on how national boundaries stem altruism should be intensified and refined.     

Democracy,Education and the Need for Politics

Even though the interrelationship between education and democratic politics is as old as democracy itself, it is seldom explicitly formulated in the literature. Most of the time, the political system is taken as a given, and education conceptualized as an instrument for stability and social integration. Many contemporary discussions about citizenship education and democracy in the Western world mirror this tendency. In the paper, I argue that, in order to conceptualise the socio-political potential of education we need to understand democracy in more political terms. This means that democracy can neither be seen primarily as a mode of associated living (Dewey), nor a model for handling different life-views (political liberalism à la Rawls and Gutmann). A third alternative is Gert Biesta’s notion of democratic subjectification. Even though Biesta identifies depoliticising trends in citizenship education policies, I argue that his alternative still fails to be a sufficiently political alternative. What is lacking in Biesta is the explicit attention to political causes and the kind of collective activities that define a democracy: the creation of one’s own laws, norms and institutions. This capacity of the collective to question and govern itself is put in relief by Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of “the project of autonomy”.     

Driving skills after whiplash

Previous studies have shown that some persons with longlasting problems after whiplash have changed eye movements. These changes have been related to disturbance of the posture control system. The question raised in the present study is whether such disturbances can influence daily life functions connected with balance, position and external movements, such as car driving. A group of 23 persons with disturbed eye movements due to whiplash injury, was tested in a driving simulator, together with a closely matched control group. The results revealed significant differences between the two groups with respect to response times to the traffic signs presented, identification of type of sign, as well as steering precision while the subjects’ attention was directed to the process of identifying the signs. Alternative explanations such as driving experience, pain, medication or malingering are at least partly controlled for, but cannot completely be ruled out. A distorted posture control system leading to disturbance of eye movements seems to be the most likely primary causative factor, but these disturbances are most certainly complexly determined. Reduced attention capacity is considered to be a mediating secondary factor. Registration of eye movements may be a useful diagnostic tool to evaluate driving skill after whiplash.