bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Biblical Offense at Work: Defilement and Blindnes
Authors: mccracken David
Published: November 2023

The first half of Matthew 15 is a good place to begin looking at the workings of the biblical offense since it contains a plethora of offenses. Jesus’s fame as teacher, preacher, and healer has spread sufficiently by this point in Matthew’s narrative that Pharisees and scribes have come to Galilee from Jerusalem, many miles away, to encounter the man. The first action that is reported of the Pharisees and scribes, however, is that they are offended not at Jesus but at his disciples, who have transgressed the tradition of the elders by not washing their hands when they eat. They approach Jesus with their complaint in the form of a question. Instead of answering the question, Jesus questions them: “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” !Matt. 15:3). God’s commandment, he charges, contradicts what they say. He explains their offense against God, and he goes on to insult them directly and unmistakably, quoting Scripture against them personally. In no uncertain terms, Jesus confronts the Pharisees with the possibility of offense: “You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines”‘ !Matt. 15:7-9).
Impacts Of Silviculture: Overview And Management Recommendations
Authors: Thompson Frank R , Probst John R , Raphael Martin C
Published: November 2023

Recent declines in population sizes of Neotropical migratory birds (NTMBs) have been attributed to problems on the breeding grounds as well as nonbreeding areas (Hutto 1988, Robbins et al. 1989a, Askins et al. 1990, Wilcove and Robinson 1990). Habitat loss and fragmentation, and the resultant area and edge-related decreases in reproductive success, are at least partially responsible for some local declines or extirpations (see Faaborg et al., Chapter 13, this volume, Freemark et al., Chapter 14, this volume, for reviews). Silvicultural practices alter land scape structure, forest age and structure, and create edges, causing concern for the impacts of these practices on NTMBs. This concern is often greater when timber is harvested on public forest lands because they are some of the least fragmented forests remaining in parts of North America (Wilcove 1988). Much research and management effort have been directed at the impacts of silvicultural practices on forest songbirds, partly evident by a series of regional workshops on management of forest birds from 1975 to 1980 (Smith 1975, DeGraaf 1978, 1979, 1980).
Revelation The Trinity as the Basis of God’s Relationship with Humanity
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

The title, “The Knowledge of God the Creator, “ which Calvin gave to Book I, corre-sponds broadly with the first article of the early baptismal creed that had traditionally been called the “Apostles’ Creed.’’1 Yet, when his actual systematic argument is care-fully analyzed, the theme of Book I must be specified more precisely. As we have shown earlier,2 Calvin’s concern here is not so much to treat the divine work of “cre-ation “ per se3 as to argue that in order to know the true God who is our Creator, God’s trinitarian self-revelation is necessary.
Redemption The Trinity as the Pattern of God's Relationship with Humanity
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

We have seen that, for Calvin, only God’s trinitarian self-revelation leads to the knowledge of the true God that is the basis of the divine-human relationship. It was noted, but not fully spelled out earlier, that this genuine knowledge of the true God is only available to those who are the recipients of God’s gracious redemption in Christ. According to Calvin, this redemption, while focused on the mediation of the second person of the Trinity, is at its deepest level the perichoretically united work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the divine work of redemption, then, we can say that the Trinity constitutes the pattern1 of the divine-human relationship.
Church, Trinity, and Contextuality
Authors: Butin Philip Walker
Published: November 2023

Thus far, a major portion of the 1559 Institutes has remained unaccounted for in our constructive exposition of the trinitarian character of Calvin’s vision of the divine-human relationship. Calvin himself had a settled tendency to divide the bap-tismal creed into four, rather than three articles.1 In spite of various theories to the contrary, it is most likely that the four Books of the 1559 Institutes reflect this prefer-ence, at least in very broad outline.2 If we continue to pursue our hypothesis that the larger paradigm for Calvin’s Christian vision has a trinitarian basis, pattern, and dynamic, then how do we understand Book IV and its contents? The final book of the Institutes is entitled, “The External Means or Supports by Which God Invites Us into the Society of Christ and Holds Us Therein. “ It consists of extended discussions of several of the most urgent and controversial theological issues of the Reformation: those of the church, the sacraments, and civil government. To a significant extent, the more abstract and theoretical doctrinal issues (including the doctrine of the Trinity) that were debated in the Reformation arose out of more pressing discussions centered around these three concrete, practical headings of theology.
The African Imagination
Authors: Irele F Abiola
Published: November 2023

Ever since the advent of African literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s, critics have been occupied with providing an account of its distinctive features and arriving at a definition of its specific nature. Most notable among these critics was Janheinz Jahn, who proposed the term “neo-African literature” to cover the specific corpus of writings produced by Blacks in the modem age and in the European languages, on both sides of the Atlantic; these writings were distinguished by a fundamental unity not only of reference but also of vision Oahn, 1961, 1966). His approach consisted of positing a structure of mind common to members of the black race, an informing principle of a collective vision of the world. This vision was presumed to be discoverable in specific modes of traditional African thought as expounded by scholars such as Placide Tempels, Marcel Griaule, and Alexis Kagame. For Jahn, this structure of mind and this collective vision are manifested in one form or another in the imaginative expression of Black writers, both Africans and those of African descent. Jahn’s approach, which derives from the essentialist tenets of the Negritude movement, is summed up in his use of the concept nommo as the operative factor of neo-Africanism in literature: the word is conceived as a living principle, an active force to be deployed in the writer’s confrontation with experience.
Religious Conciliation Between the Sandinistas and the East Coast Indians of Nicaragua
Authors: Nichols Bruce
Published: November 2023

Successive colonial interventions in Nicaragua by Spain, Britain, and the United States left a legacy of chronic domestic instability. Throughout the 1980s, one of the surrogate conflicts of the Cold War pitted the Soviet-supported Sandinista government against the U.S.-backed contras. Sometimes developing in parallel to that confrontation, sometimes intersecting it was a different type of conflict. The Sandinistas, upon coming to power in 1979, had failed to comprehend the culture of the Indians of the East Coast and had infringed on their sovereignty. Many Indians fled to neighboring Honduras and Costa Rica from which they waged a war of resistance, a fight for regional autonomy from the Sandinista government.
World Religions and Conflict Resolution
Authors: Cox Harvey
Published: November 2023

The story is told of the late John Foster Dulles that, during one of the recurrent conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors, he invited an Israeli and a Syrian representative-the first a Jew, the second a Muslim-to have a private heart-to-heart conversation with him. When they met, the secretary of state warmly shook hands with each of them, then smiled and asked, “Why can’t we all sit down together and work this thing out like Christian gentlemen?”
Denominations: Who and What are We Studying?
Authors: Ammerman Nancy T
Published: November 2023

This, we are told, is an opportune moment for reassessing how we do denominational studies. For much of this century, denominational study fell on hard times because denominations had become something of an embarrassment to the sort of scholars who inhabited most universities. If religion was a concern at all, it was certainly in a more universalistic (or, at the other extreme, more exotic) form than denominations. As H. Richard Niebuhr pointed out, American denominations were more a matter of region and ethnicity, race and class, than matters of differences in deeply held beliefs and practices.1 In an eagerness to heal these human divisions, scholars paid more attention to ecumenism than to the stories of individual denominations.
The South and the Politics of Identify
Authors: Cobb James C
Published: November 2023

Saturday Reviews 1976 Description of the South as “the New America” had seemed to suggest not only that the region’s long run as the nation’s “other” had finally come to an end but that a once ostracized Dixie might now actually show a stricken and uncertain nation how to rise above its divisions and doubts. Within a decade, however, many liberal observers were blaming the South’s strong and still strengthening influence on national affairs for the emergence of what struck them as a very different “New America;’ this one rigidly conservative and at times even reactionary, its racism and intolerance, social indifference, and sometimes, its downright meanness, almost palpable. In reality, of course, the fast-evaporating vision of the South as national redeemer and reconciler had been little more than wishful thinking in the first place. Although southern white leaders had been stressing the South’s fundamental Americanness since the secession crisis, they had spoken not of a”new” inclusive, empathetic, ultra-tolerant America but an older one defined by uncritical adherence to political and moral absolutes and social laissez-faire.
The Evangelical Rhetoric of Ramon Llull
Authors: Johnston Mark D
Published: November 2023

Ramon Llull (1232-1316), born on Majorca, was one of the most remarkable lay intellectuals of the thirteenth century. He devoted much of his life to promoting missions among unbelievers, the reform of Western Christian society, and personal spiritual perfection. He wrote over 200 philosophical and theological works in Catalan, Latin, and Arabic. Many of these expound on his “Great Universal Art of Finding Truth,” an idiosyncratic dialectical system that he thought capable of proving Catholic beliefs to non-believers. This study offers the first full-length analysis of his theories about rhetoric and preaching, which were central to his evangelizing activities. It explains how Llull attempted to synthesize commonplace advice about courtly speech and techniques of popular sermons into a single program for secular and sacred eloquence that would necessarily promote love of God and neighbor. Llull’s work is a remarkable testimony to the diffusion of clerical culture among educated lay-people of his era, and to their enthusiasm for applying that knowledge in pursuit of learning and piety. This book should find a place on the shelf of every scholar of medieval history, religion, and rhetoric.
Spiral of Cynicism
Authors: Cappella Joseph N , Jamieson Kathleen Hall
Published: November 2023

Why do some citizens vote while others do not? Why does less than half of the American voting public routinely show up at the polls? Why is it that the vast majority of political issues affecting our day-to-day lives fail to generate either public interest or understanding? These questions have troubled political scientists for decades. Here, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella provide the first conclusive evidence to date that it is indeed the manner in which the print and broadcast media cover political events and issues that fuels voter non-participation. This book illustrates precisely how the media’s heavy focus on the game of politics, rather than on its substance, starts a “spiral of cynicism” that directly causes an erosion of citizen interest and, ultimately, citizen participation. Having observed voters who watched and read different sets of reports—some saturated in strategy talk, others focused on the real issues—the authors show decisive links between the way in which the media covers campaigns’ and voters’ levels of cynicism and participation. By closely monitoring media coverage among sample audiences for both the recent mayoral race in Philadelphia and the national health care reform debate, the authors confront issues concerning the effects of issue-based and competitive-based political coverage. Finally, they address the question repeatedly asked by news editors, “Will the public read or watch an alternative media coverage that has more substance? ” The answer their findings so clearly reveal is “yes.” Spiral of Cynicism is a pioneering work that will urge the media to take a close look at how it covers political events and issues, as well as its degree of culpability in current voter dissatisfaction, cynicism, and non-participation. For, in these pages, a possible cure to such ills is just what Jamieson and Cappella have to offer. Moreover, their work is likely to redefine the terms of the very debate on how politics should be covered in the future.
De gula
Authors:   Regan
Published: November 2023

Questio est de gula. Et primo queritur utrum gula semper sit peccatum. Et uidetur quod non. Nullus enim peccat in eo quod uitare non potest, ut Augustinus dicit in libro De libero arbitrio. Set gulam nullus uitare potest: dicit enim Gregorius in XXX Moralium quod “per esum uoluptas necessitate miscetur; quid necessitas petat et quid uoluptas suppetat ignoratur”. Ergo gula non est peccatum.
Reassembling Daisy Miller
Authors: Wardley Lynn
Published: November 2023

When, at the end of the nineteenth century, critics of the “New Woman” discovered in her the features of the androgynethe person who “flirted with hermaphroditism”-their description might have applied just as well to the person who grew up alongside her, the male or the female adolescent (Smith-Rosenberg 260). In this essay I argue that Henry James’s “Daisy Miller: A Study” (1878) figures forth in Daisy the androgynous body constructed in popular nineteenth-century accounts of adolescence. If, as Frederick Winterboume sees it, Daisy Miller oscillates between masculine and feminine identifications, she also oscillates between American and alien, savage and citizen, parvenu and natural aristocrat. Set in Switzerland and in Rome, “Daisy Miller” chronicles the behavior of Americans abroad. But it also depicts a displaced landscape of North American immigration and the nativist’s anxiety about the American girl’s intimacy with a handsome Italian. Although Daisy’s “archetypal” (Welter 3), near “mythic” (Fiedler 298-300) influence has long been recorded, as has her migration from nouvelle to etiquette manual, no study has sufficiently accounted for her staying power as an American type.1 Part One of this essay begins to reinterpret Daisy Miller’s impressive reach by suggesting that her story be read in light of certain transformations in education in the postbellum and post-Darwinian US. Part Two attempts a more detailed explication of “Daisy Miller” to show that as Winterboume steps in to reeducate the flirtatious
The Religious World of kīrti Śrī
Authors: Holt John Clifford
Published: November 2023

In this interdisciplinary inquiry, John Clifford Holt seeks to uncover how Buddhism was understood and expressed during the waning years of indigenous political power in Asia's oldest continuing Buddhist culture. Holt focuses on King Kirti Sri Rajasinha and how, despite powerful and persistent Dutch colonial threats and a deeply suspicious Kandyan Buddhist Sinhalese aristocracy, he successfully revived Sinhalese Theravada Buddhism. As Holt demonstrates, Kirti Sri succeeded in formulating his vision of an orthodox Buddhism in a number of ways: through the patronage of monastic sanha and re-establishing traditional lines of ordination, translating the Pali suttas into Sinhala, sponsoring public Buddhist religious rites, and refurbishing almost all Buddhist temples in the Kandyan culture region. The ultimate aim of Holt's study is to describe and interpret Kirti Sri's articulation of a normative Buddhist world, the essentials of which remain normative for many Buddhists in the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka today. Scholars and students will find The Religious World of Kirti Sri is an indispensable resource for the understanding of orthodox Buddhism at this important historical juncture, as well as the present day.
Bad Kids
Authors: Feld Barry C
Published: November 2023

Written by a leading scholar of juvenile justice, this book examines the social and legal changes that have transformed the juvenile court in the last three decades from a nominally rehabilitative welfare agency into a scaled-down criminal court for young offenders. It explores the complex relationship between race and youth crime to explain both the Supreme Court decisions to provide delinquents with procedural justice and the more recent political impetus to "get tough" on young offenders. This provocative book will be necessary reading for criminal and juvenile justice scholars, sociologists, legislators, and juvenile justice personnel.
The Social Construction of Childhood and Adolescence
Authors: Feld Barry C
Published: November 2023

The ideas of childhood and adolescence as distinct developmental I stages and the belief that young people between about seven and seventeen years of age constitute a separate category with special needs represent relatively recent historical phenomena. While infants’ and young children’s biological or physical dependence may demarcate them from adults, to a much greater degree, social and cultural assumptions and legal strictures determine the status of adolescents. The variability of childhood and adolescence across cultures, time, and human experience greatly outweighs the universal and constant features attributable to innate biological development.
Procedural Justice in Juvenile Courts Law on the Books and Law in Action
Authors: Feld Barry C
Published: November 2023

Procedure and substance intertwine inextricably in juvenile courts. Progressives envisioned an informal court that made decisions in the child’s “best interests.” The Supreme Court in Gault emphasized the disjunctions between rehabilitative rhetoric and punitive reality and required greater procedural safeguards in juvenile courts (In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 [1967]). Although Gault provided impetus for the procedural convergence between juvenile and criminal courts, a substantial gulf remains between theory and reality, between the “law on the books” and the “law in action.” Theoretically, the Constitution and state laws entitle delinquents to formal trials and assistance of counsel. In reality, juvenile courts try youths using procedures to which few adults would consent. More than three decades ago, the Supreme Court in Kent v. United States observed that “the child receives the worst of both worlds: he gets neither the protections accorded to adults nor the solicitous care and regenerative treatment postulated for children” (383 U.S. 541,556 [1966], emphasis added). In the “worst of both worlds” of contemporary juvenile justice youths continue to receive neither therapy nor justice, but instead experience punishment without the criminal procedural safeguards provided to adults.
Serene Compassion
Authors: Carmody Denise Lardner , Carmody John Tully
Published: November 2023

The Carmodys provide an accessible overview and evaluation of Buddhist thought and practice, from a Christian point of view, focusing on Buddhist ideas of holiness and how they compare to similar values in Christianity.
Traurnatic Memories
Authors: Kolk Bessel A Van Der
Published: November 2023

Trauma, by definition, is the result of exposure to an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms people’s coping mechanisms. This makes the study of traumatic memories a special challenge, since it simply is impossible to present laboratory subjects with the sort of life-threatening stimuli that may give rise to the sensory reexperiences (in the form of flashbacks and nightmares) that are characteristic of postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When Roger Pitman (personal communication, 1994) showed normal college students a movie depicting actual executions, even this failed to provoke the sorts of intrusive memories that we see in PTSD. This raises the critical question whether tests using normal subjects exposed to videotaped stresses in the laboratory bear any relevance to the study of how people process traumatic events.
Women, Ministry, and Church Order In Early Christianity
Authors: Cardman Francine
Published: November 2023

Recognized by Paul as “coworkers,” women were apostles, missionaries, and leaders of house-churches in the early decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus. But as Christianity made its way through the Greco-Roman world, women’s leadership and ministry were increasingly pushed to the margins of evolving church structures. The process of institutionalization of the churches was already under way by the end of the first century CE; by the end of the fourth, it was essentially complete. As Christian churches assumed their place among the social, political, and religious institutions of late antiquity, they began to take on the values of their culture, particularly in regard to gender roles and the ordering of family and society.
The Grief of God
Authors: Ross Ellen M
Published: November 2023

Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries images of a wounded and bloody Christ proliferated in England, appearing in sermons, drama, church decorations, and spiritual treatises. Some scholars see these graphic portrayals of suffering as signs of a new emphasis on Jesus's humanity, while others see renewed emphasis on a terrifying God of vengeance. Ross, however, argues that these explanations have misunderstood the nature of medieval attitudes toward the suffering Christ. Analysing a wide range of textual and pictorial evidence, she finds that in their encounters with the wounded Jesus - the Saviour whose blood nurtures, feeds, and heals human persons - medieval believers found the God of mercy and love.
Mae West
Authors: Watts Jill
Published: November 2023

Why don’t you come up and see me some time? Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of secual wantonness and ribald humour. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of a film legend? Sifting through previously untapped sources, author Jill Watts unravels the enigmatic life of Mae West, tracing her early years spent in the Brooklyn subculture of boxers and underworlkd figures, nad follows her journey through vaudeville, Broadway, and finally, Hollywood, where she quickly became one of the big screen’s most popular - and colourfulstars. Exploring West’s penchant for contradiction and her carefully perpetuated paradoxes, Watts convincingly argues that Mae West borrowed haeavily from African Americna culture, music, adance and humour. Viewing West as a trickster, Watts demonstrates that by appropriating for her character the black tradition of double-speak and “signifying”, West also may have hinted at her own African-American ancestry and the phenomenon of a black woman passing for white. This absolutely fascinating study is the first comprehensive interpretive account of Mae West’s life and work. It reveals a beloved icon as a radically subversive artist consiously creating her own complex image.
Community Policing Chicago Style
Authors: Skogan Wesley G , Hartnett Susan M
Published: November 2023

Police departments across the country are busily “reinventing” themselves, adopting a new style known as “community policing”. This approach to policing involves organizational decentralization, new channels of communication with the public, a commitment to responding to what the community thinks their priorities ought to be, and the adoption of a broad problem-solving approach to neighborhood issues. Police departments that succeed in adopting this new stance have an entirely different relationship to the public that they serve. Chicago made the transition, embarking on what is now the nation’s largest and most impressive community policing program. This book, the first to examine such a project, looks in depth at all aspects of the program--why it was adopted, how it was adopted, and how well it has worked.
The Impact of CAPS on Neighborhood Life
Authors: Skogan Wesley G , Hartnett Susan M
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the impact of CAPS in the prototype districts. It details changes, over time, in program recognition, popular assessments of the quality of police service, and trends in neighborhood problems. We find that the program did not appear to market itself effectively, for there was little increase in the recognition of CAPS as a special police-community program. On the other hand, residents of most prototype districts detected positive changes in policing during its first year of operation. The visibility of community-oriented projects and activities went up, and residents of most of the prototype districts found the police more responsive to community concerns. Perceptions of police misconduct declined in several areas, and especially among African-Americans. There was also evidence that the program led to a significant decline in crime-related problems in three prototypes; drug- and gang problem declines in two districts; and significant decreases in levels of physical decay in two areas.
Reinventing Policing, Chicago Style
Authors: Skogan Wesley G , Hartnett Susan M
Published: November 2023

This book documents Chicago’s effort to develop a community policing strategy that works. Over time, the city’s CAPS program developed into one of the most substantial and closely watched experiments in 1990s policing. As we noted earlier, we followed the program from its inception through its implementation in five test districts and took advantage of the fact that the department’s prototyping process let us compare what happened in these districts with trends in areas where change had not yet occurred.
To Reclaim a Legacy
Authors: Sherwin Byron L
Published: November 2023

An ancient Jewish legend tells that when the Holy Temple in Jerusalem had been set ablaze by the enemy and its destruction was imminent, a group of priests climbed up to the roof and held the keys to the Temple aloft. Thereupon, a hand reached down from heaven to reclaim the keys for safekeeping.1 Centuries later, another conflagration began that ultimately would decimate the countless temples of stone, wood, and flesh that constituted the Jewish community of Poland. This time, however, no angelic hand reached down to reclaim the keys. They remained in the hands of the citizens of the lost Atlantis of the Polish-Jewish community that was consumed by a flood of fire. What was once the greatest Jewish community in the world is now little more than a memory, a fatly fading photo in the family album of the Jewish people.
Transmigrations of a Name
Authors: Sherwin Byron L
Published: November 2023

My omnipresent dybbuk obsessed me. There was much more to see than I had seen in Poland. There was more to know about what I had seen. Somehow, I felt rooted there, strangely at home in that strange land. I decided to find out why. I decided to search for the Makower Ruf. Perhaps recovery of my family’s past there, my genealogy, was a way of appeasing this demanding dybbuk.
Signs of Diaspora Diaspora of Signs
Authors: Gundaker Grey
Published: November 2023

Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective of vernacular activities and creolization. It shows that African-Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings. Distinct from conventional script literacy on the one hand, and oral culture on the other, these “creolized” vernacular practices include writing in charms, use of personal or nondecodable scripts, the strategic renunciation of reading and writing as communicative tools, and writing that is linked to divinaton, trance, and possession. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the Southeastern United States and the West Indies, Gundaker offers a complex portrait of the intersection of “outsider” conventions with “insider” knowledge and practice.
Poetical Odds And Addends
Authors: Brichto Herbert Chanan
Published: November 2023

The poetic address to Scripture, departing in so many ways from the regnant schools of biblical literary criticism, necessarily entails the argumentative and dis-putatious nature of our discussion of texts, narrative and structural. I employ the first two adjectives in the older sense of reasoning, deducing, arriving at conclu-sions, without the newer overtones of quarrel or altercation. Nevertheless putting forth an alternative approach to one that has taken the stance of an orthodoxy is what occasions the ubiquitous exposition of the assumptions and presuppositions (and their justification) of a method which, by reason of its relative novelty, will appear as a challenge at best and contentious at worst.
The Crisis In The Churches
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: November 2023

At a time when already overworked clergy are being called upon by budget cutting politicians to do more for the poor, the sick, and the elderly, American churches are suffering persistent financial shortfalls. In fact, contrary to popular media images of millionaire televangelists, America’s churches are cutting back programs and staff, clergy salaries are stagnating, and many parishes are having trouble raising enough money to keep the church lit and heated on Sunday. Why are America’s churches in financial distress? Robert Wuthnow, a leading commentator on religious life in America, asserts that the steady drop in donations, volunteering, and personal involvement is a direct result of a spiritual crisis--a crisis caused in large part by the clergy’s failure to address the vital relationships between faith and money, work, stewardship, giving, and economic justice. In The Crisis in the Churches, Wuthnow offers a searching study of this financial crisis and of the spiritual vacuum that has silently grown worse during the past decade. To do this, he lets the churches speak for themselves, quoting extensively from interviews with clergy and laity in sixty Protestant and Catholic congregations throughout the U.S., and drawing from the texts of over 200 sermons, from church financial records, and a national survey. What emerges is that parishioners often feel the church does not care about what they do from Monday to Friday, offers no guidance in their most pressing day to day concerns, yet always seems to be asking for more money. Clergy, for their part, say they hesitate to talk about finances because they know “the money question” makes people uncomfortable. But failure to raise the subject often makes it necessary to cut the very programs and services that middle class parishioners desire and would support. Wuthnow argues that in order to survive, churches must find ways to minister to the economic concerns of their own middle class parishioners. Indeed, of every $1,000 received by churches, $900 comes from people who work in middle class occupations. Clearly, anything that motivates middle class members to become more involved will strengthen a church’s financial well being and capacity to serve its people. Although the situation is critical, Wuthnow finds much cause for hope. He points to ideas and programs that some churches have enacted to challenge their members to think differently about work and money and giving. Parishioners sometimes respond positively when clergy speak boldly and concretely about matters of faith and finance, and some churches have formed small groups whose members meet regularly to discuss issues of spirituality, work, personal finances, and stewardship. A serious and sympathetic examination of the crisis behind the stained glass, this thought-provoking volume will be highly valuable both practically and as moral support to clergy, parishioners, and anyone else concerned about restoring vitality and significance to American churches.
Ritual
Authors: Bell Catherine
Published: November 2023

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.
Crime Is Not the Problem
Authors: Zimring Franklin E , Hawkins Gordon
Published: November 2023

Year after year, in poll after poll, crime tops the list of American anxieties. Indeed, crime is seen by many people as the number one problem in the United States, a threat to the quality of life unparalleled in any other developed country. Now two legal scholars, Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, have conducted intensive research on the question and have reached a startling conclusion--crime is not the problem. America's great problem, they argue, is lethal violence. In Crime is Not the Problem, Zimring and Hawkins revolutionize the way we think about crime and violence--by forcing us to distinguish between crime and violence. The authors reveal that when we compare the United States to other industrialized nations, in most categories of nonviolent crime (burglary, theft, and other property offenses), American crime rates are comparable--even lower, in some cases. Moreover, this general trend holds true when we compare specific cities of roughly the same size (New York and London, Los Angeles and Sydney). As the authors show, crimes like burglary and theft are a part of modern urban life worldwide. Only when it comes to lethal violence does the United States outpace other Western nations, with homicide rates many, many times greater. Equally interesting, the authors find that most killings in America are unconnected to criminal activity (that is, more murders stem from arguments than from break-ins or muggings). But if high property-crime rates don't kill innocent victims in other countries, why are the risks so much greater that victims will be killed or maimed in the United States? And what can be done to bring the death rate from American violence down to tolerable levels? To address these questions, the authors take a hard look at what is believed about the causes of lethal violence. Here, too, the conventional wisdom about the causes of violence is subject to revision. The impact of television and movie violence on rates of homicide is wildly over-rated, as Zimring and Hawkins demonstrate with data from Europe and Japan. By contrast, it is hard to overestimate the importance of guns--used in 70% of all killings--in the distinctively high rates of deadly violence in America. Reducing lethal violence required different tactics than fighting a general war on crime, the authors conclude. They argue that traditional law and order, tough on crime campaigns blur the distinctions between lethal violence and other offenses, they argue. Lawmakers need to craft a sophisticated response that specifically addresses death dealing mayhem. In Crime is Not the Problem, Zimring and Hawkins reshape the debate about crime in the United States, throwing sharp new light on old questions and suggesting new directions for public policy. By making the crucial distinction between lethal violence and crime in general, they clear the ground for a targeted, far more effective response to the real crisis in American society.
On Mass Media Effects
Authors: Zimring Franklin E , Hawkins Gordon
Published: November 2023

Mass communications are full of violence because they reflect the interests, values, and concerns of their audience. But do these communications increase the level of real-world violence in the United States as well as reflect it? There is widespread belief that they do. Eight out of ten American adults believe that media renditions of violence are themselves a problem, and the topic is considered important enough to have attracted the attention of Senator Robert Dole of Kansas in the early stages of campaigning for the presidency of the United States (Broder 1995). The issue of mass media effects on violence was one of the small number of topics that generated a full-blown task force investigation by the National Commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s (U.S. National Commission 1969b:xi). And it has been the subject of recurrent research by behavioral scientists for decades.
Strategies of Prevention
Authors: Zimring Franklin E , Hawkins Gordon
Published: November 2023

The first section of this chapter introduces five contrasts that help to illuminate the special nature of loss prevention as a policy goal. The second part of the chapter discusses some necessary elements in a balanced agenda of loss reduction. The final part of this chapter discusses the relationship between social tolerance of the problem of lethal violence and the priority of violence as a social problem. We argue that the larger salience of lethal violence in recent years is, to some extent, evidence of salutary social developments.
Introduction and Summary of Results
Authors: Bergren Theodore A
Published: November 2023

Sixth Ezra is a short, oracular Christian writing that is cast as the words of God mediated through an unnamed prophet. The main part of the work sets forth predictions of impending doom for the world at large and for certain specific sections of it, conveying this message with eschatological language and imagery. In this regard 6 Ezra is reminiscent of, and stands in the tradition of, Jewish and Christian prophetic writings of the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere that enunciate God’s threats and “woes” against humankind for their sinfulness and envisage imminent destruction on the earth as a result. Sixth Ezra is furthermore concerned to exhort a group of God’s “chosen” people to remain faithful and resist sin in order to escape the imminent calamities. In the first part of the work (15:1-4), God instructs the prophet to speak and write down the words of the prophecy, and reassures the prophet of the validity of the message.
The Social Gospel and Its Critics
Authors: Jenkins Thomas E
Published: November 2023

Its leading theologian was Walter Rauschenbusch. The meaning of the social gospel was found in its name: salvation was social, not just for the individual but for society. This was what Jesus had meant by the kingdom of God. Not just a heavenly afterlife but a better life for everyone here and now. Jesus was a social reformer. What made him special was that he knew that reform came through the power of God. God was immanent in history and spread throughout humanity; thus he could drive history forward and bring people together. Indeed, this was the meaning of the incarnation. First manifest in Jesus, God could become manifest in all of humanity. Humanity integrated into a harmonious whole would be the final incarnation of God.
Speaking Law to Power: Occasions for Cause Lawyering
Authors: Abel Richard
Published: November 2023

Under what circumstances does law check power? That it can do so at all reflects the fundamental contradiction of liberalism. Law is simultaneously rule and politics, ideal and reality, neutral and partisan, above the fray and in the midst of it. Most of the time law reflects, reproduces, and reinforces existing power inequalities. Anatole France’s now cliched observation perfectly captures the paradoxical effect of blind justice in an unjust society. More recently, Marc Galanter’s pathbreaking article elaborated the ways in which lawyers and courts routinely amplify the advantages of the “haves.” I have expressed similar skepticism in criticizing informal justice and legal aid. Here, however, I want to attend to the possibilities as well as the limitations of liberal legalism, the moments when law offers leverage to the relatively powerless as well as those when it is wielded, or trumped, by power. These are the occasions for cause lawyering.
The Struggle to Politicize Legal Practice: A Case Study of Left-Activist Lawyering in Seattle
Authors: Scheingold Stuart
Published: November 2023

Cause lawyering cuts against the grain of a widely accepted belief that law and lawyers are supposed to be apolitical agents for resolving society’s conflicts while somehow remaining unsullied by them. This commitment to autonomy is institutionalized in a variety of practices and understandings relating to the rule system, to courts and judges, and to the legal profession. With respect to the profession, for example Simon notes that, according to a core component of the “ideology of advocacy,” lawyers are supposed to be both partisan and neutral.1 They are expected to defend their clients in a vigorous and partisan manner while remaining neutral to their clients’ objectives, activities, and identities.
Cause Lawyering in the Third World
Authors: Ellmann Stephen
Published: November 2023

This essay is a sketch of cause lawyering in the Third World. The picture I present is not meant to be definitive, and indeed it is hard to imagine how a definitive portrait could be drawn, for there may now be thousands of cause lawyers at work in the nations of the South. Instead, this essay grows out of interviews conducted in May, 1991 with representatives of twenty-two public interest law groups from eighteen countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The sample is not random, for all of these groups had been brought together at a conference on “Public Interest Law around the World,” organized under the auspices of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and with the funding assistance of the Ford Foundation. Thus these are groups with contacts in the West, and with at least enough confidence in the legitimacy of an enterprise funded by the Ford Foundation to be prepared to participate in it. As we will see, these may be important limitations on the representativeness of this sample.
Attorneys for the People, Attorneys for the Land: The Emergence of Cause Lawyering in the Israeli-Occupied Territories
Authors: Bisharat George
Published: November 2023

As the study of lawyering for social and political causes extends beyonds the familiar contexts of the United States and Western Europe, one of the principal concerns of researchers must be to define the institutional, political, cultural, market, and other conditions that facilitate or inhibit cause lawyering. To the extent that cause lawyering in the non-Western world differs from its counterpart phenome non in the West, one must also ask, in what degree do these same factors account for the specific complexion and trajectory that cause lawyering assumes in different Third World societies? This essay grapples with the above questions through an examination of the role of indigenous lawyers in defending and advancing the “Palestinian cause”— at the broadest level, the struggle to achieve Palestinian national self- determination— in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Religion Against the Self
Authors: Nabokov Isabelle
Published: November 2023

This study, based on the author's fieldwork among rural Tamil villagers in South India, focuses on the ways in which people in this society interact with the supernatural beings who play such a large role in their personal and corporate lives. Isabelle Navokov looks at a spectrum of ritualized contexts in which the boundaries between the natural and spiritual worls are penetrated and communication takes place. Throughout, Nabokov's meticulous analysis sheds new light on this hiterto almost unkown domain - and entire range of fascinating phenomena basic to South Indian religion as it is really lived.
Of Women and Demons
Authors: Nabokov Isabelle
Published: November 2023

In this chapter and the next we explore a form of exorcism that, in sharp contrast to the countersorcery ritual, does seek to reintegrate participants with their former identities and milieus. What is peculiar to this ritual process is how it inhibits the kind of idiosyncratic exegeses we have just heard about. Far from enabling endless, private interpretations, it is prescriptive, even “totalizing, ” as Bruce Kapferer also characterizes Sinhalese exorcisms (1983), that is, it enforces a reality in which only one kind of consciousness and subjectivity is possible (1983: 5). The objective of this ritual is to “drive away ” (o.ttutal) demons known as peys. Now these malignant beings have a different ontological personality from that of the sorcery demons we have just met. Those supernaturals had proper names, clear-cut identities, and myths of origin that correlated with the careers and narratives of members of the great Hindu pantheon. But the category of pey that concerns us here represents the spirits of unknown, ordinary human beings who suffered unnatural or untimely deaths. Their inauspicious fates prevented any normative transit into the hereafter and stranded them in this world where they possess, or “catch ” (pi,ti), the living, most conspicuously young married women (also see Caplan 1989),l Throughout India anthropologists have noted the propensity for new brides to be afflicted by the untimely dead.2 Usually this sort of “ghost-possession ” (Freed and Freed 1993) is explained as a safe means for young wives to vent frustrations over their powerless role in their new families (Opler 1958; Freed and Freed 1964; Harper 1963; Kakar 1986; but see Skultans 1987).3 As Christopher Fuller writes, “Women’s possession episodes are ... culturally tolerated opportunities to complain about female inferiority and subordination within Indian society ” (1992: 233). From her research on the Mukkuvars, a Catholic fishing people in the southernmost Tamil district of Kanyakumari, Kalpana Ram also contends that demonic possession enables women to reinterpret “dominant ” symbolic constructs of the female body and sexuality, and to “challenge the daily discipline of living within the confines of respectable femininity ” (1991: 93).
Complications
Authors: Almeida Manuel Antonio De
Published: November 2023

We believe, from what we have related, that it will come as no surprise to any reader that the time had come for Leonardo to pay the tribute that no one escapes in this world, although it may be light and easy for some people and heavy and burdensome for others: The boy was in love. We do not even need to mention with whom.