Descartes on the human soul : philosophy and the demands of Christian doctrine

By the 17th century Catholic orthodoxy had defined a range of propositions concerning the human soul as revealed by God and verifiable by natural reason. The writings of Rene Descartes display a consistent adherence to these orthodox propositions. The conclusion presents him as ultimately unsuccesful in convincing his contemporaries that his philosophy provided the rational demonstration of the key soul doctrines and that he was worthy of the title "Christian philosopher"

Entrapping Christian and Muslim Arabs in racial cartoons in Australia : the other anti-semitism

Racial Cartoons are a powerful force disguised as entertainment operating to shape public opinion. During the 1980s, 1990s and after 9/11 in 2001, cartoons in the Australian press were particularly directed against Muslim and Christian Arabs without remorse or fear of redress or accountability. The offensive of such cartoons has essentially been directed on three fronts—oil, politics and religion. The drawback resulting from socio-cultural, historical and other differences are no doubt visible; but equally obvious is that anti-Semitism, which was directed against the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, is today mostly directed against the public relations deprived, opinion silenced and undemocratically governed, ethnically diverse Arabs. It is argued in this paper that several forces were behind such distorted visual strategies adopted by the Australian press. Pre-judgement stemming from an inbuilt bias of the cartoonist, or highlighting characteristics which conform to the national interest are likely factors. The debate in Australia as to whether public images and attitudes of a minority “cause” or “determine” policy or whether policy itself changes attitudes is still resting with the jury.

In the name of the Father : God in Lacan, Judaic or Christian?

This essay challenges the widespread notion that Lacanian psychoanalysis represents a 'Christianing' of psychoanalysis. It argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis brings to psychoanalysis a broadly "Averroist" attitude towards religion which develops out of and transcends Freud's position in Totem and Taboo. For Lacan, religious texts are an invaluable source of pre-psychoanalytic insight or another regal road into the champ Freudien: the dynamic of human beings' desire, in its co-conformity with language and Law. The text focuses on trying to decipher the missing content of the Names of the Father seminar: the seminar that "does not exist" (Miller, 2006) beyond its opening, esoteric and dramatic session. The force of doing this will be to show how much, and how fundamental, the things are that Lacan thinks the bible, and the first Abrahamic monotheism in particular, can teach us about human subjectivity and the instance of the Law that shapes it - insights which go to explain Freud's unmistakable attachment, despite himself, to the civilizational importance of his fathers.

Researching Moslem-Christian marriages : extrapolating from mixed-faith couples towards the practices of Convivencia

Moslem–Christian marriage can be seen as a kind of ‘testing place’ for examining and appreciating the practices of difference. This article offers a summary from a recent local research project which investigated these relationships (Ata, 2003). The empirical data from the study was ‘milled’ for its potential to inform practice, a process that generated four themes that practitioners may find useful in their attempts to design practice approaches that are sensitive to alternative anthropologies. Beginning from the contention that the otherness of those for whom we work can be a mirror for our own cultural and practice assumptions, we extrapolate from these themes to practise with other examples of diversity. It is argued that our efforts to practise with diverse populations will be unengaging, even colonising, unless we are able to denaturalise our own positions.

Anger at schools' Christian 'bias'

Buddhist community leader Dr Sue Smith has complained of the ''Christian bias'' in religious education in Victoria, saying if her group had access to government funding, they too could expand to hundreds of schools.

Creating an Indigenous Christian leadership in Papua

In eastern Papua, Christian missionaries found a social structure unparalleled in most areas of religious expansion in the world: it apparently lacked chiefs and any identifiable leadership. Nearly all the Massim societies of eastern Papua were matrilineal, and land was passed through females. Here, women enjoyed a higher status than elsewhere in what is now Papua New Guinea. By drawing on the records of missionary agents, both European and Polynesian, this paper shows how the Methodist, Anglican and Kwato (London Missionary Society) missions in eastern Papua all encountered difficulty in fostering a cadre of male leaders, but — as became evident after World War II — they experienced greater success in fostering women's leadership.

Nazi Germany as a christian state : the 'Protestant experience' of 1933 in Württemberg

 This article examines the response of Christians in Germany to the first year of the Nazi state. It responds to Manfred Gailus' call of 'micro-histories' and onsiders how Protestants in Württemberg conceived of 1933 and how they responded to the Nazis' antisemitism. It argues that they drew on a pre-existing myth of national-religious revival in World War I (the 'spirit of 1914') and remained 'actively passive' when it came to antisemitism.

How long should we ignore imperfect detection of species in the marine environment when modelling their distribution?

The application of the 'ecosystem approach' to marine conservation management demands knowledge of the distribution patterns of the target species or communities. This information is commonly obtained from species distribution models (SDMs). This article explores an important but rarely acknowledged assumption in these models: almost all species may be present, but simply not detected by the particular survey method. However, nearly all of these SDM approaches neglect this important characteristic. This leads to the violation of a fundamental assumption of these models, which presuppose the detection of a species is equal to one (i.e. at each survey locality, a species is perfectly detected). In this article, the concept of imperfect detection is discussed, how it potentially influences the prediction of species' distributions is examined, and some statistical methods that could be used to incorporate the detection probability of species in estimates of their distribution are suggested. The approaches discussed here could improve the collection and interpretation of marine biological survey data and provide a coherent way to incorporate detection probability estimates in the modelling of species distributions. This will ultimately lead to an unbiased and more rigorous understanding of the distribution of species in the marine environment.

Mediating the good life: prostitution and the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1880s–1920s

This article examines how the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in the name of promoting liberty and rights of women in their relations with men, constructed hierarchies to ascribe value to themselves through moral condemnation. The JWCTU used extramarital sex as a political issue to strengthen the position of the legal wife in the household as opposed to the concubine and prostitute. Their efforts to prohibit Japanese women from going abroad as prostitutes, while understood as an attempt to end a system of slavery that violated the inherent rights of Japanese womanhood, was actually a desire to regulate the behaviour of the poor. The JWCTU based its moral reform agenda on the importance of premarital chastity, strict monogamy and the obligation to work for the good of the nation. Its construction of prostitution as evil represents an important strand in the history of the relationship between prostitution and family as a socio-political issue in modern Japan.