The competition for souls: Sava of Serbia and consumer choice in religion in the thirteenth century Balkans

SUMMARY The word αίρεσις , heresy means choice and in a world where religious belief was taken for granted the history of Catharism in Europe can be explained through believers exercising many of the criteria they were later to adapt to choosing secular consumer goods. Believers in the west in the C12 and early C13 had a choice of religions. Catharism became popular in France and Italy on the basis of the virtuous lifestyle of its protagonists, its relative cheapness compared with Catholicism and the simplicity of its theology of individual salvation. Its decline was as much to do with Catholicism being ‘re-packaged’ by groups such as the Franciscans, lay guilds and the Beguines as by any persecution. A similar analysis of heresy in eastern Europe would be valuable, despite the relative scarcity of sources. There is some evidence that opposition to the Bogomils focused on the capacity of the Orthodox Church to bring material well being to believers and to provide contact with a world of affluence the lay individual could mostly only dream of. Hugh Eteriano’s Contra Patarenos gives numerous examples of earthly prosperity springing from making the right spiritual choices and both he and later writers against the Bogomils such as Patriarch Germanus II emphasised the physical value and beauty of objects used in Orthodox worship, as opposed to the austerity of Bogomil sermons delivered in private houses. Outside Constantinople the Orthodox Church of the thirteenth century faced the threat of heresy from both Catholic and Bogomil missionaries without the resources available within the capital, and unable to deploy coercion as in the West. Archbishop Sava of Serbia therefore used a variety of methods to maintain the allegiance of the population to Orthodoxy. At the assembly at Žiča in 1221 he outlined gentle courses of repentance for both groups and used his links with his brother, king Stephen Prvovenčani to promise gifts to returning noble heretics. Sava also emphasised the Orthodox Church’s capacity to enrich the life of the laity, sending out ‘exarchs’ or trained priests to preach in Slavonic and encourage the sacrament of marriage, thus targeting families and future mothers. On an inevitably limited scale Sava was also able to stress the sensuous experience of Orthodox worship. His programme of church building included vivid programmes of wall painting to impress the laity. These occasionally conveyed a materialist message, such as the picture of Christ distributing bread from a basket labelled ‘Provider’. In short, Sava combined the responses to heresy of east and west. He deployed the appeal to sensuous experience and material well being of Orthodoxy he had seen in Constantinople and Nicaea, but also emphasised lifestyle, vernacular preaching and facilitating lay access to the sacraments which had been articulated in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council. Insofar as neither Bogomilism or Catholicism regained their potency as threats in the region the strategy seems to have been successful

The Medieval Inquisition: Scale-free Networks and the Suppression of Heresy

Qualitative evidence suggests that heresy within the medieval Catholic Church had many of the characteristics of a scale-free network. From the perspective of the Church, heresy can be seen as a virus. The virus persisted for long periods of time, breaking out again even when the Church believed it to have been eradicated. A principal mechanism of heresy was through a small number of individuals with very large numbers of social contacts. Initial attempts by the Inquisition to suppress the virus by general persecution, or even mass slaughtering, of populations thought to harbour the "disease" failed. Gradually, however, the Inquisition learned about the nature of the social networks by which heresy both spread and persisted. Eventually, a policy of targeting key individuals was implemented, which proved to be much more successful.Comment: 12 page

03-10 "Progressive and Regressive Taxation in the United States: Who’s Really Paying (and Not Paying) their Fair Share?"

The political debate over recent reforms of the federal income tax in the United States has focused attention on the fairness of taxes. While the Bush administration claims its reforms make taxes fairer, critics counter that the majority of the tax cuts accrue to the wealthy. While the fairness of the federal income tax is an important issue, little attention has been paid to a more important issue: the fairness of the entire U.S. tax system. The federal income tax is one of the most progressive elements of the U.S. tax system; other taxes are regressive including sales and social insurance taxes. Analysis of any particular tax reform proposal is incomplete without consideration of its impact on the overall distribution of taxes.

03-01 "Read My Lips: More New Tax Cuts - The Distributional Impacts of Repealing Dividend Taxation"

The Bush administration advocates its January 2003 proposal to repeal personal dividend taxation on the basis that the cut would stimulate the economy, primarily benefit American seniors, and eliminate an unfair case of "double taxation." This paper primarily analyzes the proposal using a different criterion - its distributional impacts. Contrary to the administration's claim that seniors receive over half of all dividend income, U.S. Census Bureau data indicate that seniors receive only about one-quarter of dividend income. Dividend income is more concentrated towards high- income tax filers than the distribution of U.S. income as a whole. About two-thirds of dividend income accrues to the top 10% of tax filers. Less than one-fifth of tax filers with adjusted gross incomes of less than $75,000 have any dividend income at all. Also, dividend income is highly skewed by race - only 8% of blacks and 6% of Hispanics receive dividend income.

Cholinergic innervation is necessary to shift reward timing activity in rodent visual cortex

While the biological analogue of prediction error has been well characterized in the midbrain dopaminergic system, the possibility of other neuromodulatory systems acting as global reinforcers is a topic of much debate. Reward timing, the phenomenon by which single unit responses in primary visual cortex (V1)
reflect an operantly learned stimulus‐reward interval, offers a tractable preparation to investigate reinforcement learning in vivo: theoretical work suggests that reward timing results from the interaction of stimulus‐evoked recurrent network activity and a global reinforcement signal that indicates the time of
received reward. We hypothesized that this signal is conveyed by cholinergic neurons arising from the basal forebrain (BF), a strong candidate system that projects globally to most cortical regions, has a known role in plasticity, and is involved in attention and the representation of salience. To test the necessity of such a signal in entraining reward timing in V1, rats were trained on an initial stimulus‐reward contingency, received a neurotoxin in V1 that eliminated BF cholinergic terminals, and subsequently trained on a second contingency. We found that extracellular single unit recordings from V1 of lesioned animals, but not saline‐infused controls, failed to show shifted neural reports of reward that matched the new contingency. Importantly, neurons of
lesioned animals continued to display intervals associated with the initial contingency, arguing that cholinergic input is required to learn, but not to express, reward timing activity