bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Serial Learning: Cognition and Behavior
Authors: Crowder Robert G , Greene Robert L
Published: November 2023

Probably no concept has been studied as long in the experimental study of memory as that of serial learning-that is, learning a series of items in order. Clearly, recalling things in the proper order is crucial in limited situations, such as remembering telephone numbers or word spellings. More generally, however, any skilled behavior critically depends on the mastery of order. Consider the most distinctively human skill-that of language. At least among adults, information is generally carried not by the use of novel stimuli but by the ordering of long-familiar words and phrases.
Metamemory: Theory and Data
Authors: Metcalfe Janet
Published: November 2023

In his search for “The First Principle,” Descartes (1911) questioned all of what we might now call his basic object-level cognitive processes (Nelson & Narens, 1990, 1994; Moscovitch, 1994), allowing that he could imagine that things were different than they seemed or that they might not exist at all. It was not so much thinking that was indisputable to Descartes, but rather thinking about thinking.
Nonconscious Forms of Human Memory
Authors: Toth Jeffrey P
Published: November 2023

The relationship between memory and consciousness is one of the most fascinating aspects of cognitive research. However, it is only recently that students of psychology have truly appreciated the intimate connection between these two aspects of mental life.
The Light that Shines Straight
Authors: Townes Charles H
Published: November 2023

On July 21, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin setup an array of small reflectors on the moon and faced them toward Earth. At the same time, two teams of astrophysicists on Earth-240,000 miles away-at the University of California’s Lick Observatory and at the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory, prepared small instruments on two big telescopes. They took careful note of the location of that first manned landing on the moon. About ten days later, the Lick team pointed the telescope at that precise location and sent a small pulse of power into the tiny piece of hardware they had added to the telescope.
On Moon Dust, and Other Science Advice
Authors: Townes Charles H
Published: November 2023

Late in the summer of 19 51, I was a member of a party headed for a dry lake bed in the Southern California high desert, west of Death Valley and east of the sharp-edged peaks of the southern Sierra. We were to visit an installation at China Lake, born as a rocket-testing site and run by Caltech during World War II. The Navy ran it after that. We found a cluster of radar tracking sites, hangars, barracks, and laboratories set on an alkaline flat, amid lava flows and cinder cones. The smooth and wide extent of the dry lake bed, like an aircraft carrier without edges, and the isolation from any dense human settlements made it a perfect place for testing rockets, missiles, or experimental airplanes.
Dreams of Interpretation in Early Chinese Historical and Philosophical Writings
Authors: Li Wai-yee
Published: November 2023

In the Zuo zhuan1 (Zuo Commentary Tradition, ca. fifth to fourth centuries B.c.?), the earliest narrative history in China, the representation of dreams emerges as one way to structure events and to impose order on human experience. Dreams establish causality-on the symbolic level, as a sign that is fulfilled, unravelled, or betrayed; on the literal level, as advice or warning heeded or defied. The representation of dreams is motivated by the need to interpret and define causes and consequences. In this sense it asserts or questions the “readability” of the world and shapes our understanding of causality, human agency, and possible “reason in history” (be it a moral scheme rewarding good and punishing evil, or a certain vision of order or teleology). I suggest that themes of control and order, or lack thereof, are dominant. Thus with dreams that realize ritual disorder or improper relations between the human world and the realm of the spirits, interpretation restores ritual equilibrium. Even when the message of the dream, often about the dreamer’s death, is implacable, the struggle of control over its meaning is evident in the dream itself and/or its interpretation. Arbitrary injunctions in dreams and equivocal dreams that invite different decoding augur moments of loss of control, which are often overcome with interpretive ingenuity, but which nevertheless lead us to consider the scope and meaning of skepticism.
Dreaming the Self in South India
Authors: Shulman David
Published: November 2023

Once there was a city that was swallowed up by the sea. The disaster was not entirely unexpected, for a conditional curse had long before been laid upon the place, a curse connected to the dependable human potential for forgetting: if the king were ever to forget to celebrate the festival of the god Indra, the city would be flooded and destroyed. Close to the event, there were signs-dreamlike announcements and prophecies-that the condition was about to be fulfilled. But in the end it was, as usual, a matter of too much loving, and longing, and the inevitable sorrow that they entail.
Mythic Dreams and Double Voicing
Authors: Tedlock Dennis
Published: November 2023

When we interpret the dreams of others, the process of interpretation has always already begun before we get there. At the simplest level, this means that we begin our interpretation when the dreamer has already formulated a narrative, one which may have been reformulated through successive retellings. But there is more to it than that. Before the narrative comes the rethinking of the dream by the awakening dreamer, and before the dream is even over comes the dreamer’s interpretation of its ongoing events, an interpretation that may even include the realization that what is happening is a dream. But instead of treating prior interpretation as an obstacle to be overcome, I want to take it seriously as a phenomenon in its own right. And instead of trying to capture the dreams of others as they are told immediately afterward by the same individuals who dreamed them, as if to minimize prior interpretation, I want to attend to the ways in which others tell dreams that happened long ago to dreamers long gone.
Dream Interpretation in a Prosperous Age? Artemidorus, the Greek Interpreter of Dreams
Authors: Waide Christine
Published: November 2023

In contrast to modem society and culture, in Greco-Roman antiquity dreaming and dream interpretation played a central role in a wide range of contexts. In the Asclepian cult practice of incubation, the dream was considered a sphere of communication shared by the god and the dreamer. The topic of the discourse was almost exclusively disease. While sleeping in the temple, ill people were spontaneously restored to health by the god in their dreams, or received sometimes clear, sometimes encoded instructions for furthering the healing process. The dream was perceived in this particular function but was not the object of systematic research, although cases of healing that the priests recorded in praise of the god, always comprising the dream experience, might have allowed for this, too.
Divine Selection Epiphany and Politics in Archaic Greece
Authors: Sinos Rebecca H
Published: November 2023

After Peisistratos was driven from Athens, he formed an alliance with Megakles, to be sealed by his marriage to Megakles’ daughter, and the two of them devised a plan to ensure Peisistratos’ acceptance among the Athenians. Herodotus describes their scheme as follows (r .60): In the village Paiania there was a woman named Phye, who was nearly six feet tall, and quite beautiful as well. They fitted this woman out in full armor and had her mount a chariot and pose in a most striking attitude, and then drove into the city, preceded by messengers who said, as they had been instructed, when they reached the city, “Athenians! Receive and welcome Peisistratos, since Athena herself has honored him especially of all men, and is bringing him back to her own acropolis.’’ They spread these things throughout the city, and soon the story had reached the outlying districts that Athena was bringing Peisistratos back, and the city’s inhabitants, convinced that the woman was the goddess herself, offered prayers to this mortal woman and welcomed Peisistratos back.
Hero Cult and Politics in Herodotus
Authors: Boedeker Deborah
Published: November 2023

RECENT studies of Greek hero cult have concentrated on two new emphases: on the one hand, the variety and multiplicity of phenomena that have been grouped under this rubric (a particular focus of Carla Antonaccio, Chapter 3, this volume), and on the other, their complex connections to the development of the polis. Several kinds of hero cults emerged together with the archaic city-state and contributed much to the expression of its identity and institutions. In addition to helping define a polis at an early stage of its existence, hero cults could also reflect its nature as it developed, geographically, politically, and ideologically in later periods. As Claude Berard writes: “The city forms itself in a slow evolution, periodically marked by a series of ideological foundations.’’3 In addition to cults of the “city founders,” in whom Berard is especially interested, new cults of heroes from the distant past were sometimes introduced in association with political changes; perhaps most familiar are the ten new Attic phyle heroes incorporated as part of the Kleisthenic reforms (Hdt. 5.66).Assuming these two perspectives - the variety of hero cults and their relationship to political identity - this essay offers an expanded interpretation of a much-discussed passage in Herodotus: the translation of the bones of Orestes from Tegea to Sparta (1.66-8).
The Nature of Myth
Authors: Wilk Stephen R
Published: November 2023

Recently, There Has Been A resurgence of interest in mythology as the baby boom generation reaches middle age and begins to ponder its place in the universe. Robert Bly’s Iron john and Clarissa Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves use myths to help modern men and women orient themselves. Mythologist Joseph Campbell has undergone an apocolocyntosis and has, like many of his subjects, become deified. His monumental series The Masks of God and The Hero with a Thousand Faces dominate the mythology shelves at libraries and bookstores. His lectures are available on audiotape, and Bill Moyers interviews him on video. The television series Northern Exposure adapted classic myths in new and interesting forms. Disney studios released an animated (and highly modified) version of the Hercules story for the motion picture screen. Director Sam Raimi has produced television series based on Hercules and Sinbad, using his characteristic smash-cut editing style, mixed with jarringly modern plots and dialogue and leavened with dollops of stunning computer animation. In today’s world, myths are important-or at least interesting.
The Face on the Shield
Authors: Wilk Stephen R
Published: November 2023

Thus Does Homer Describe The New shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles, to replace the one that was lost when Achilles let his protege Patroclus bear his arms and armor against the Trojans. After killing the young warrior, Hector stripped him and took Achilles’s armor for himself. The new shield is described in great and loving detail. It provides justification for bringing up other stories as asides, and it recalls the long-gone days when each piece of armament was a lovingly wrought work of art. The fragment called “The Shield of Hercules” was undoubtedly written in imitation of this passage from The Iliad, in which the lines quoted above are only the introduction to a much longer description.
Synthesis
Authors: Wilk Stephen R
Published: November 2023

In This Chapter, I Intend To sum up my observations and draw everything together into a tidy package. But here, too, I plan to take the bits that wouldn’t fit tidily in that package and lay them out for you, the readers, to see-disordered remnants that I couldn’t put elsewhere without disrupting the flow. I also want to mention, briefly, the research philosophy behind this book, which may help explain why I have arrived at different conclusions from everyone else.
Deus Trinitas
Authors: Coffey David
Published: November 2023

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the doctrine of the Trinity, following a long period in which it was considered irrelevant to the rest of theology and to the challenge of Christian life. In this book, David Coffey claims that this resurgence is caused by a renewed appreciation of the fact that salvation itself has a Trinitarian structure. He argues that we cannot understand salvation without a solid understanding of the Trinity. Coffey considers the full range of issues surrounding this central doctrine of Christian faith. Viewing the doctrine of the Trinity in its historical and ecumenical context, he seeks to arrive at a balanced vision that incorporates the insights of both the Western and the Eastern Churches. In particular, he wants to keep in sight both the immanent Trinity (the Godhead considered in itself) and the economic Trinity (that is, its role within the economy of salvation). In Coffeys own model of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is seen as the objectivization of the mutual love of the Father and the Son. This idea is most closely associated with St. Augustine and Richard of St. Victor. Coffey, however, takes it much further, presenting it as an explanation of the origin of the Son and the Holy Spirit and of the manner of operation of the Trinity in the economy. From this model, he is also able to derive a suggestion for resolving the ecumenical problem of Filioquism vs. Monopatrism (concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit)--the issue that has divided East from West for nearly a millennium. Presenting a new perspective on a topic of renewed theological interest, this comprehensive study has important implications for ecumenical discussions of the Trinity.
Models of the Immanent Trinity
Authors: Coffey David
Published: November 2023

My reflections thus far have resulted in two biblical models of the Trinity, which I have called the mission model and the return model. These in turn have led us to two corresponding models of the immanent Trinity, the procession or distinction model and the return or union model. In this chapter I reflect further on these models of the immanent Trinity in the hope that by continued comparison and contrast I shall be able in some measure to clarify certain issues that in the past have proved difficult and controversial. While doing this I bear in mind that, while the exercise is in a sense an end in itself, it does have a further and arguably more important end, namely, to enable us to return to the biblical data to appropriate them in a new way, a way that will be ontological rather than merely functional, and reflective rather than simplistic or fundamentalist. In what follows, for the sake of convenience certain words will be used that of themselves indicate a time sequence, for example, “then,” “next,” and so on. In every case, as so often elsewhere in this book, it will be a sequence of logical order, not of time, that is meant.
Change in God
Authors: Coffey David
Published: November 2023

In this chapter 1 propose to examine the question of “change” or “mutability” in God. As we proceed, we shall see that the important religious question for us is one that depends directly on the possibility of a relational and loving, truly personal, God. 1 say “possibility” because the perfection and transcendence of God, taught in Scripture, safeguarded by the teaching of the Church and expounded by a continuous theological tradition, are increasingly being perceived as incompatible with the God of traditional Christian piety, with a God, that is, who truly loves us, is affected by our suffering and responds to our prayers. In this confused situation there are some who, feeling faced with a choice, prefer to sacrifice the divine transcendence rather than risk losing this God of piety, not realizing, however, that they thereby abandon the God of revelation in favor of a human creation. My task therefore will be to show how these two conceptions of God can be held together without contradiction. Because mutability in God is a key proposition of Process theology, a movement that has been conspicuously successful, particularly in the English-speaking world, I shall critically examine what this school has to say on this subject. I shall then look quite briefly but critically at what the Eastern Orthodox Palamite tradition contributes to the discussion. This critical work will favorably position me to argue more positively for a view of my own, one that 1 hope will give due place to all the relevant elements of the tradition.
Jesus
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

In this highly accessible discussion, Bart Ehrman examines the most recent textual and archaeological sources for the life of Jesus, along with the history of first-century Palestine, drawing a fascinating portrait of the man and his teachings. Ehrman shows us what historians have long known about the Gospels and the man who stands behind them. Through a careful evaluation of the New Testament (and other surviving sources, including the more recently discovered Gospels of Thomas and Peter), Ehrman proposes that Jesus can be best understood as an apocalyptic prophet--a man convinced that the world would end dramatically within the lifetime of his apostles and that a new kingdom would be created on earth. According to Ehrman, Jesus' belief in a coming apocalypse and his expectation of an utter reversal in the world's social organization not only underscores the radicalism of his teachings but also sheds light on both the appeal of his message to society's outcasts and the threat he posed to Jerusalem's established leadership.
the end of history as we know it
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

For nearly two thousand years there have been christians who have thought that the world was going to end in their own lifetimes. The thesis of this book is that this belief is as ancient as the Christian religion itself, that it can he traced all the way back to the beginning, to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God ’ould intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a co mica act of judgment, and establish his utopian Kingdom here on earth. And this watt happen within Jesus’ own generation.
looking about a bit: non-christian sources for the historical jesus
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

The gospels of the new testament have always been cherished by christians wanting to know what to believe and how to live. as we have seen, though, they are somewhat problematic for historians who want to know what really happened during the life of Jesus. We will need to consider carefully how to make appropriate use of these documents, if we want to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus. That will be a task we undertake later. Before moving there, we should look around a bit to see if there are other sources outside of the New Testament Gospels for knowing what Jesus said and did—other accounts of his life that might provide us with independent information that is either less theologically motivated or, at the least, motivated by different concerns. Such sources might provide a kind of point of comparison for us, a check on the theological tendencies of the more familiar books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In this chapter we’ll consider accounts of Jesus produced by authors who did not believe in him.
finding a fit: jesus in context
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

As I intimated at the end of the previous chapter, we can’t simply jump into a consideration of jesus’ words and deeds, even based on a careful application of the criteria I’ve spelled out, without first considering something about their historical context. For if we don’t situate Jesus in his own context, we take him out of context, and almost certainly, then, we’ll misunderstand him. Before moving forward, let me emphasize this point.
jesus the apocalyptic prophet
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

Few authors in modern times can be said to have redirected the course of an entire field of study. In 1906, albert schweitzer did, with his brilliant monograph, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (original German title: Von Reimarus zu Wrede). Although not the first scholar to take the view of Jesus that was to become prevalent in the academy, Schweitzer was certainly the most forceful Like a handful of historians before him and a myriad since, Schweitzer was convinced that Jesus was an apocalypticist.
the apocalyptic teachings of jesus
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

So, jesus was evidently an apocalypticist. What, though, did he actually say and do? These are the key questions, the goals towards which we’ve been driving since word one. And now that we’ve passed through the preliminaries we can put the pedal to the floor. In this chapter and the one that follows we’ll consider teachings of Jesus that appear to go directly back to him (as opposed to those that his later followers put on his lips—for example, many of the ones found in the Gospel of Thomas). In this chapter, we’ll consider teachings that are most obviously apocalyptic in nature; in chapter io we’ll look at other teachings, for example, those involving Jesus’ “ethics,” that are rooted in this apocalyptic context. In subsequent chapters we’ll go on to consider Jesus’ deeds, controversies, and experiences in a similar light. Throughout these discussions you should recall that we are trying to reconstruct what the historical Jesus himself actually said, based on the various criteria that I mapped out in Chapter 6 and in light of the context of his life as discussed in Chapter 7.
Monastic Theology
Authors: Evans G R
Published: November 2023

‘Where shall I turn, so that I may turn to thee, my Lord God? If l ascend into the heaven, you are there. If I descend into hell, you are there too’ (Psalm 138.8). Am I to turn up or down, to left or right? Bernard’s answer to himself in this dilemma is that he must turn into a different person. He must change himself into a ‘little one,’ so as to learn from him who is meek and lowly ofheart. The text Bernard is discussing is Joel 2.12-13: Convertimini adme in toto corde vestro, ‘turn to me with all your heart.’ If the Lord had said only ‘turn’ and added nothing more, it would be different, argues Bernard. But the additional words require us to take a long-term view. We are to turn to God. That kind of conversion is not achieved in a day; it takes a lifetime. A merely bodily and therefore outward conversion is a form and not the truth (forma... non veritas). We are told to deny our bodies their sensual pleasures, but that is not enough. Wretched is the man who deals only outwardly and does not understand his inner self. But at the same time, it is not enough to be converted only in spirit. The whole person must turn to God.
Exegesis and Theology
Authors: Evans G R
Published: November 2023

‘Your Word goes out from you irrevocably, Lord, and it will not come back to you empty, but it will do that which you sent it to do.’1 Bernard is speaking of Christ here, but the Bible, too, is God’s Word, and he is confident that the advice in the Bible is salvific: scriptura salubriter monet.2 What, then, does Scripture do? Scripture is a ‘witness’,3 testifying to God’s will. Bernard commonly uses scriptura as shorthand for scriptura sacra. The terms divina Scriptura and divina pagina are also to be found in his writings. The key ideas, never far separated and communicated by sacra and divina in this context, are the holiness and divine inspiration of this special text. Scripture, for Bernard, is the Word of salvation (verbum salutis},4 and, for him, the Bible was consequently the most important thing he read.
Positive Theology
Authors: Evans G R
Published: November 2023

Bernard did not want theology to be novel. He wanted it to be right, that is, true to the faith, helpful to the salvation of the faithful. He was not a ‘reformer’ in any sense which involved seeking improved clarity and exactitude in the official formulation of statements of the faith, nor in seeking to challenge at any point what the Church had been teaching. His is the theology of ‘damage limitation’; he strove to place a check on what others had done and said, which he feared would injure the confidence of the faithful, their simple trust in what the Church taught them.
Morbidity in Primary Care
Authors: Starfield Barbara
Published: November 2023

Most approaches to characterizing health status in clinical practice are based on the frequency of individual diagnoses or on individual diagnoses grouped by organ system. This may not be the best approach for primary care practice. Many individuals have more than one diagnosis, and some diseases predispose to others. Thus, disease-by-disease approaches fail to capture morbidity experiences of individual patients or of populations of patients. Since primary care is focused on patients and on patient populations rather than on their diseases, approaches that characterize morbidity according to the different manifestations of health and illness would be more useful in primary care. This chapter discusses the challenges to characterizing morbidity patterns in these different ways.
Duns Scotus, Philosophy, And Theology
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

Duns Scotus is, along with Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest of the medieval theologians and certainly the one who inspired the most interest in the centuries after his death. But we know nothing of his life other than a few bare facts. Scotus was a Franciscan friar and, thus, a member of one of the two most intellectually active orders of the time (the other, of course, being the Dominicans). One of the few definite dates we have for Scotus’s life is his ordination: 17 March 1291, at St. Andrew’s Priory, Northampton, which like Oxford was in the diocese of Lincoln. But this date allows us to hazard reasonably secure estimates for other dates, too. The minimum canonical age for ordination was twenty-five, so Scotus must have been born before 17 March 1266. And we know that the bishop of Lincoln conducted an ordination on 23 December 1290, at Wycombe. Assuming that Scotus would have been ordained at the earliest opportunity allowed by canon law, he must have not yet turned twenty-five by the time of the December ordination. This places his birth late in 1265 or early in 1266. We learn from John Major’sHistory of Greater Britain that Duns, just north of the border into Scotland, was the place of his birth.
God: Existence, Unicity, And Simplicity
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

The philosophical discipline responsible for proving God’s existence is metaphysics. God’s existence is the goal of metaphysics; so there is a crucial sense in which someone doing metaphysics is, for Scotus, doing natural theology. Scotus’s natural theology-what we can know of God without revelation, and consequently outside theological science-is sophisticated and of considerable complexity. Scotus clearly holds that God’s existence can be rationally proved. In some ways, Scotus’s natural theology is not unlike that of Aquinas. Like Aquinas, Scotus first attempts to show that there is some kind of entity that is prior to everything else; he then attempts to show that this entity has certain attributes in virtue of which we can label it ‘God’.
God: Perfection, Infinity, And Religious Language
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

We customarily talk about God in terms derived from our talk about creatures. In this chapter, I discuss Scotus’s account of religious language. Scotus claims that some words, when applied to God and creatures, have exactly the same meaning or sense in both cases. Such a word is univocal when applied to God and creatures. The view that Scotus opposes holds that words applied to God and creatures have at best analogical senses. Scotus’s view has some quite striking consequences for his account of divine simplicity. But before I discuss these questions, I shall look briefly at the sorts of attributes that Scotus thinks God has.
Humanity: Body, Soul, And Immortality
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

The medievals, following Aristotle, analyze substances into two components: matter and form. Like Aristotle, they believe that an analysis of this sort is necessary to explain change. When one substance changes through some process-into another, something remains constant over the change. This ‘‘something’’ is ‘matter’. But matter is arranged in different ways-perhaps very different ways-before and after any change. The arrangement of matter is known as ‘form’, or more properly ‘substantial form’, though, as we shall see, not all forms are simply ways in which matter is arranged. Form is supposed to explain why a given substance is the sort of thing it is. The medieval again following Aristotle-label the forms of living things ‘souls’. Thus, the form of Felix the cat could be called Felix’s ‘soul’, for example. A soul is the sort of form in virtue of which a substance is alive.
Humanity: Freedom, Ethics, And Sin
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I want to look at Scotus’s account of human freedom, ethics, and sin (actual and original). Scotus’s ethics lays great stress on the range of human actions that could be commanded by God. And his account of freedom is similarly voluntaristic: the will is radically indetermined, free to make its own choices. Scotus’s account of freedom allows place for genuine wrong-doing or sin; not all of our bad actions are just mistakes. Scotus’s account of original sin, however, is in every respect weaker than the standard Augustinian one accepted by most of his contemporaries. The supernatural gifts of unfallen humanity were minimal, and their loss has only the smallest effect on human existence.
Humanity: Predestination, Merit, And Grace
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

The Christian tradition has consistently held that God predestines some people to salvation: the enjoyment of everlasting life and the vision of God. Why does God predestine some people in this way? One answer is that God foresees the good works these people perform, and decides on this basis to save them. This answer allows God to differentiate justly between people, and does clear justice to the possibility of God’s depriving some people of salvation. Scotus believes, however, that this answer is demonstrably false. As we saw in chapter 4, God knows future contingents merely on the basis of the free determinations of his will. So his knowledge of our free actions derives solely from the fact that he has decided that we will act in certain ways. So our actions have no casual role in the genesis of God’s knowledge of how we will act. Thus his decision about our salvation cannot in any sense be caused by our actions.
Sacraments
Authors: Cross Richard
Published: November 2023

According to Scotus, humanity has always needed signs of God’s activity. In the time of the New Covenant, sealed in Jesus’ blood, wayfaring humanity is in its closest state to beatitude. In this state, it consequently requires the most perfect signs of God’s salvific activity. The sacraments are such signs. They signify most appropriately the grace God confers through them. And the seven sacraments-baptism, Eucharist, confirmation, confession, unction, marriage, and ordination-correspond supernaturally to the seven requirements of natural life, individual and social: birth, nutrition, physical exercise, healing after illness, preparation for death, procreation, and the creation of spiritual leaders. According to Scotus, citing the standard scriptural texts, these seven sacraments were instituted by Christ himself.
The Building Blocks of Lean Retailing
Authors: Abernathy Frederick H , Dunlop John T , Hammond Janice H , Weil David
Published: November 2023

Let’s reconsider the keys to effective retailing: providing customers with a variety of desirable products, procuring those products at a low enough cost to make a profit, marketing them well, and charging prices that reflect customers’ willingness to pay. Lean retailers still adhere to these principles-offering a variety of products, good marketing, and merchandising-just as a traditional player like Wanamaker did. But, as the opening quote indicates, today’s retail powerhouses have added a new twist: They also focus on continuously adjusting the supply of products offered to consumers at each retail outlet to match actual levels of market demand, thereby reducing their exposure to the risks of selling perishable goods. Lean retailers now incorporate into their total cost functions for sourcing both direct product costs (as reflected in the wholesale prices charged by suppliers plus transportation costs) and the indirect costs associated with demand uncertainty-including stock-out costs, costs of markdowns and write offs, and inventory carrying costs.
The Impact of Lean Retailing
Authors: Abernathy Frederick H , Dunlop John T , Hammond Janice H , Weil David
Published: November 2023

So said one of Wal-Mart’s apparel suppliers in the early 1990s. If anything, even more suppliers at the close of the decade have found they must deal with lean retailers. An increasing number of manufacturers have adopted technologies that support the information exchange and distribution practices discussed in the previous chapters. Consider KGR, a New England supplier of women’s fashion clothing to major department stores. One executive noted in 1996, Three years ago, KGR had a problem. One of our largest accounts announced that we had only four months to implement EDI invoices with U.P.C.-level detail. Non-compliance meant losing business Implementing U.P.C.s seemed impossible, because over 90 percent of the company’s products are custom-made to order and have a life cycle of a single shipment.
Human Resources in Apparel
Authors: Abernathy Frederick H , Dunlop John T , Hammond Janice H , Weil David
Published: November 2023

Throughout the early 1990s, a major American shirtmaker faced steady erosion of its markets and profits. Like many other apparel manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s, the company had sought to improve its competitive performance by reducing the direct labor content of its shirts. Specifically, it had perfected its system of apparel assembly to minimize the labor content in each step of the assembly process, but that left little room for further productivity improvements when the company faced a new crisis. For one thing, the small size of this shirt manufacturer compared with its textile suppliers meant it did not have the necessary clout to reduce the costs of materials; for another, the growing power of its retail customers, combined with the presence of offshore competitors, provided almost no leeway in terms of the prices it charged for products. To reduce the time it took to produce a specific item, the company turned to team-based assembly, but this also proved costly and time consuming. The shirtmaker confronted the very real possibility of bankruptcy.
The End of the Golden Age
Authors: Rojstaczer Stuart
Published: November 2023

Every year in the fall, the president of my university gives a speech to the faculty. It is telling of modern university life that few faculty members attend these speeches. With the growth of the university, there has been a good deal of decentralization, and the importance to the faculty of the opinions or actions of a university president are usually not all that great. There is also a significant level of apathy concerning the activities of the administration amongst faculty. Besides, a synopsis of the speech is dutifully printed in the weekly university paper and the full text can be found on the Web. At Duke, the speech is given in the same 150-seat lecture hall where I taught my first undergraduate class.
Progenitors of the Information Age The Development of Chips and Computers
Authors: Cortada James W
Published: November 2023

Ground zero and the first minute of the Computer Revolution occurred at 9:00 A.M., April 21, 1952, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Representatives from more than thirty companies gathered for a six-day seminar on the transistor, learning about what would become the heart of the computer. The companies had paid a $25,000 fee for their representatives to attend, and with that attendance to sign up for the right to manufacture the transistor. If one had to pick the one time, place, and item that heralded the arrival of the computer, this event is as good as any because the key to understanding why the computer was such an American story depended more on appreciating how this machine was diffused than on how it was invented. The initial development of the computer for primarily military purposes occurred simultaneously in Great Britain and the United States, with smaller projects underway in Germany and in Poland, but the transistor was clearly a U.S. invention that we can precisely document as having been created at Bell Labs in the 1940s. It was the decision of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) to license this technology to other firms that made it possible for the transistor to work its way out of one company into many, and therefore to be used in ways unanticipated in the beginning. One of those unanticipated uses would be as the heart of this new machine we call the computer.
Introduction
Authors: Carey Dennis C , Ogden Dayton , Roland Judith A
Published: November 2023

In late March of 1996, Richard Swift, CEO of Foster Wheeler Corporation, a $4.5 billion New Jersey-based engineering and construction giant, was invited by then secretary of commerce Ron Brown to participate in a U.S. trade mission to Bosnia. Because of other demands on his time, Swift had to decline. But Robert A. Whittaker, vice president of Foster Wheeler’s Energy Equipment Group and president of Foster Wheeler Energy International, believed it was important for the company to be represented and volunteered to participate. As the world now knows, the plane carrying Brown, Whittaker, and eleven other corporate executives crashed in the Bosnian mountains, killing all of them.
The Purge of the Forties
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

I would ... have done with this business of judicially examining other people’s faiths. Justice Robert Jackson by 1940, war threats had made Arnerlcan authorities particularly sensitive to possible threats from any movements seen as active or tacit supporters of enemy powers. Prominent among these potential subversives were some major organizations on the religious periphery, which naturally included the Silver Shirts, with all their overt fascist trappings, but also some other conspicuous groups. Charges of disloyalty raised the stakes in the struggle against cult ex cesses, and serious official sanctions were imposed in the early 1940s. Because the courts were initially less supportive of minority religious rights than they would be later on, they permitted a broad purge of various unorthodox movements: by 1943/44, a newspaper headline about “Cult Arrests” or “Cult Leaders Held” might refer to any one of a dozen groups, in any part of the country. The chillier climate for religious tolerance was reflected in an outpouring of books and articles that attacked the fringe religions as part of a sinister cult phenomenon. This alarmist message was carried to the general public through films, magazines, and other popular culture outlets.
The New Boom 1960-1980
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

Millions of people are searching desperately for a true Father-Magician, especially at a time when the clergy and the psychiatrists are raking rather a poor show, and do not seem to have the courage of their convictions, or of the1r fantasies. Alan Watts, “The Trickster Guru,” in The Essential Alan Watts though acknowledged as a menace during the 1940s, popular concern about cults faded dung the next decade, to the point of near invisibility in the media. The hiatus of public interest during the 1950s had important implications for later perceptions of cults, as many once-thriving occult and sectarian traditions were consigned to historical oblivion. With few acknowledged precedents, scholars and journalists assumed, wrongly, that the new spirituality of the 1960s and 1970s was an entirely new phenomenon. Observers scarcely knew how to explain this apparently unprecedented situation in which young people were drawn into odd or alien movements, seduced by fashion able gurus, and proclaiming a new miscall Age of Aquarius.
Devil Cults and Doomsday Cults 1980-2000
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

If the 1970s were characterized by a generalized panic over cults, later decides would be more specifically concerned over particular aspects of the religious fringe, namely satanic movements m the 1980s and doomsday cults in more recent years. Both targets differed widely from earlier movements like the Unification Church or ISK CON; the newly conceived threats wen” for less obvious than their predecessors. As in the 1930s, a period of Reaction moved inexorablyinto one of Speculation. While it was easy to document misdeeds by the controversial cults of the 1970s, the careers of later satanic groups were much more shadowy, and many observers would now accept that the whole satanic nightmare of the 1980s was based upon bogus claims and fabrications. The doomsday cults are harder to dismiss in that many assuredly did die in the confrontation at Waco and in movements like the Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate, although the interpretation of tows deaths is still open to debate. The whole notion of “cult miss suicide” must be treated with scepticism, and at least some incident of mass fatalities were not the snidest they initially seemed. As in the case of devil worship, the mas media interpreted the c events through the eyes of anticultcrincs, who have a vested interest in presenting their enemies as more threatening and sinister than the available evidence would suggest.
Teeming with Faith
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

The escalating charges against religious cults make it ever more difficult to arrive at a commas about their overall impact, but at least some groups have had long-term effects that are by no means as harmful as we might imagine from all the polemic about doomsday cult . Some fringe religious movements succeed in become mainstream churches or denominations, while others diffuse their ideas through the better established churches and sometimes through society at large. In either case, cults should be seen as the laboratories or proving grounds for religious innovation, out of which can come much creativity, in addition to some harm. The religious fringe has left a heritage far more substantial-and significant-than just Shaker furniture. This diverse contribution must be taken into account when weformulate responses to emerging religious movements.
Reason, Freedom, & Democracy in Islam
Authors: Sadri Mahmoud Sadri Ahmad
Published: November 2023

In recent years Abdolkarim Soroush has emerged as one of the leading revisionist thinkers of the Muslim world. Translated into English for the first time, this book features a critical introduction by the editors and an original interview that reveals the intellectual biography of the author. It sets forth Soroush's views on such matters as the inevitablity of change in religion, the necessity of freedom of belief, and the compatibility of Islam with democracy.
Life and Virtue The Relationship between Socioeconomic Development and Ethics
Authors: Sadri Mahmoud Sadri Ahmad
Published: November 2023

Values are of two kinds: those for the sake of which we live (the guiding values) and those that exist for the sake of living (the serving values.) Such guiding values as goodness, justice, generosity, and courage transcend social life, nationality, and history; they are eternal. By contrast, the serving values are life’s auxiliaries: woven into the fabric of the social life and evolving with its evolution, their function is to make life easier, more desirable and pleasant. All of the rules of etiquette, pleasantries, and moral regulations belong to this category. Examples abound: sociality, affability, frugality, fairness, visiting relatives, keeping secrets, respecting the law, and so on.
Doctrine and Justification
Authors: Sadri Mahmoud Sadri Ahmad
Published: November 2023

The New Challenges of the Philosophy of Religion Fortunately, the philosophy of religion has received some attention since the revolution and has turned into a relatively familiar subject matter. For those who are unfamiliar with the issue, let me just state that the philosophy of religion means “religiology.” It is concerned both with the inner and the outer domains of religion. Both are likely to become problematic for a philosopher of religion: on the one hand, extrareligious schools of thought project new patterns of thought and propose new insights, questions, and doubts that guide believers and thinkers in particular directions and plant new images of religion in their minds. On the other hand, every religion has its own principles and teachings that form a constellation of methodologically and epistemologically coherent and interlocking beliefs that have practical implications. Issues such as the nature of miracles, prayers, revelation, Satan, religious values, and faith are among intrareligious issues, while the questions of free will, human rights, meaningfulness ofreligions propositions, and practical verification of religion are extrareligious problems. Thus it is not surprising that the introduction of Aristotelian philosophy to the Islamic world has presented the Islamic philosophers with certain religious problems. Nor is it unusual that the twentieth-century world and its new philosophies such as existentialism and analytic philosophy have posed new problems for the philosophers of religion.
Pausanias and His Guides
Authors: C. P. Ewen
Published: November 2023

Who was Pausanias? And what was Pausanias? The first question, concerning Pausanias as a person, has become much clearer in recent years. He was from western Asia Minor, probably from Magnesia ad Sipylum. and was not a sophist from Cappadocia or a geographical writer from Damascus; he was independent and thoughtful. a reliable witness to the objects he described. and a keen connoisseur of Archaic and Classical Greek art. What he was, as a question of social taxonomy. is not so clear. The customary epithet. “the Periegete,,, conveys little more than that he is the author of the extant work called by Stephanus of Byzantium, and perhaps by Pausanias himself, Periegesis tes Heffados (Description of Greece). In recent years, he has also been classified as a “pilgrim,” and a recent addition to the Entretiens Hardt under the title Pa11sanias historien avoids the tenn “periegete” altogether.
The Peculiar Book IV and the Problem of the Messenian Past
Authors: Alcock Susan E
Published: November 2023

The most remarkable, and most remarked. teature of Book IV is its imbalance. Pausanias’s accoWlt ofthe “many sutlhings of the Messenians” is followed by a description of “the cowitry and cities” he sees as he travels from Lakonia to Elis. Pausanias’s exploration here of both logoi and theoremata is obviously not unusual, but the relative emphasis is: some 80 percent of the book recounts the history of the Messenians, in particular their struggles with Sparta in the First and Second Messenian Wars, compared to 20 percent spent on actual sites and monuments. Even when he buckles down to this final section, discussions of unusual water creatures and water bodies also engage his attention.