Guided Grief Imagery: A Resource for Grief Ministry and Death Education

Reviewed Book: Droege, Thomas A. Guided Grief Imagery: A Resource for Grief Ministry and Death Education. New York: Paulist Press, 1987

Shall Businesses Profit If Their Owners Lose Their Souls? Examining Whether Closely Held Corporations May Seek Exemptions from the Contraceptive Mandate

May for–profit, secular corporations claim the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)? This question is central to numerous lawsuits against the federal government in which business owners argue that certain regulations under the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act substantially burden the exercise of their religion. This Note examines the threshold hurdle that for–profit business owners must clear to successfully state a claim under RFRA: the question of whether the businesses are “persons” the statute protects. This is an issue of first impression for the U.S. Supreme Court, and it has split the circuit courts of appeal. First, this Note provides an overview of free exercise jurisprudence, with a focus on the ebbs and flows of the Supreme Court’s exemption doctrine. This overview includes a discussion of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the laws, regulations, and religious objections that form the basis of the current disputes. Second, this Note introduces the conflict among circuit courts and their varying interpretations of whether for–profit corporations are “persons” under RFRA. Third, this Note assesses this conflict by examining RFRA’s text and the context in which Congress enacted the statute. Nothing within this context precludes corporations from stating RFRA claims. In addition, this Note examines legislative history that supports application of the Dictionary Act, which explains that the word “person” in federal statutes includes corporations. This Note ultimately concludes that RFRA does indeed grant corporations the ability to seek exemptions, but that the statute will require courts to undertake the task of ascertaining the proper contours of the law as applied to different corporate forms

The Way to Contemplation: Encountering God Today

Reviewed Book: Jäger, Willigis. The Way to Contemplation: Encountering God Today. New York: Paulist Press, 1987

Inertial Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Quantum Scale Invariance

Weyl invariant theories of scalars and gravity can generate all mass scales spontaneously, initiated by a dynamical process of "inertial spontaneous symmetry breaking" that does not involve a potential. This is dictated by the structure of the Weyl current, $K_\mu$, and a cosmological phase during which the universe expands and the Einstein-Hilbert effective action is formed. Maintaining exact Weyl invariance in the renormalised quantum theory is straightforward when renormalisation conditions are referred back to the VEV's of fields in the action of the theory, which implies a conserved Weyl current. We do not require scale invariant regulators. We illustrate the computation of a Weyl invariant Coleman-Weinberg potential

The relationship of intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest religious orientations to Jungian psychological type among churchgoers in England and Wales

Employing the New Indices of Religious Orientation (NIRO), this study examines the theory that different religious orientations are related to individual differences in psychological type as developed by Carl Jung and operationalized by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Data provided by 481 weekly churchgoing Christians who completed the MBTI and the NIRO demonstrated that quest religious orientation scores were higher among intuitives than among sensers, but were unrelated to introversion and extraversion, thinking and feeling, or judging and perceiving; that intrinsic religious orientation scores were higher among extraverts than introverts, higher among sensers than intuitives and higher among feelers than thinkers, but unrelated to judging and perceiving; and that extrinsic religious orientation scores were unrelated to any of the four components of psychological type. The findings relating to Jungian psychological type differences are applied in order to elucidate the psychological significance of extrinsic, intrinsic, and quest orientations to religion

A novel DRD2 single-nucleotide polymorphism associated with schizophrenia predicts age of onset: HapMap tag-sincle-nucleotide polymorphism analysis

Background: Dopamine D2 receptor (DRD2) is thought to be critical in regulating the dopaminergic pathway in the brain which is known to be important in the aetiology of schizophrenia. It is therefore not surprising that most antipsychotic medication acts on the Dopamine D2 receptor. DRD2 is widely expressed in brain, levels are reduced in brains of schizophrenia patients and DRD2 polymorphisms have been associated with reduced brain expression. We have previously identified a genetic variant in DRD2, rs6277 to be strongly implicated in schizophrenia susceptibility. Methods: To identity new associations in the DRD2 gene with disease status and clinical severity, we genotyped seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in DRD2 using a multiplex mass spectrometry method. SNPs were chosen using a haplotype block-based gene-tagging approach so the entire DRD2 gene was represented. Results: One polymorphism rs2734839 was found to be significantly associated with schizophrenia as well as late onset age. Individuals carrying the genetic variation were more than twice as likely to have schizophrenia compared to controls. Conclusions: Our results suggest that DRD2 genetic variation is a good indicator for schizophrenia risk and may also be used as a predictor age of onset

Infrakritik og proximering:Om at finde den rette afstand

In this paper, we compare critical practices on the Danish fishery inspection ship The West Coast to such practices at the Nordic Folk Center for Renewable Energy. These cases are the ingredients for examining the role of critique in organizational experimentation and research. Taking our point of departure in a notion of critique as finding the right proximity introduced by Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we discuss alternatives to critique as based on a position detached from the object of critique. Our analysis shows that critique is immanent to the practices we study and already to some extent conceptualized by the practitioners. To further problematize the already ongoing critical engagements in the organizations we study, we relate our ethnographic descriptions to work done on infra critique (Verran, Willerslev). In conclusion, the relation between the notion of critique as infra-critic and scholarly critical practices is commented on. We find proximation to be a useful concept as an infra critical description of ongoing experimentation with professional identities and organizational boundaries