Religion and Subjective Well-Being Among China’s Elderly Population

Evidence from developed and developing countries alike demonstrates a strongly positive relationship between religiosity and happiness, particularly for women and particularly among the elderly. Using survey data from the oldest old in China, we find a strong negative relationship between religious participation and subjective well-being in a rich multivariate logistic framework that controls for demographics, health and disabilities, living arrangements and marital status, wealth and income, lifestyle and social networks, and location. In contrast to other studies, we also find that religion has a larger effect on subjective well-being on men than women.

Gay and Lesbian Life at Colby 1969-1974

The history of a gay and lesbian student community at Colby seems to point to the difficulty of visibility. For students who were able to find others like themselves, their group of lesbian and gay friends had to remain underground. For students who were grappling with their newly found, socially stigmatized sexuality, the experience was isolating if they did not know where to find others like themselves. This paper seeks to address the social forces that kept sexually variant students from expressing their sexual identities openly on campus. Part of this difficulty is attributable to the compulsory heterosexuality assumed by general American society at the time, manifested in the silence or outright hostility directed against homosexuals. Naturally, Colby students replicated this assumption. Some of the students we interviewed seemed to internalize compulsory heterosexuality, while it was forced upon others. Religion and psychology were two methods of enforcing heterosexuality that were relevant to the people we interviewed. Another significant obstacle to visibility was Colby's location and the nature of Colby's student body. Waterville, unlike more urban cities, did not have a history of gay life, and thus an established gay community or gay identity into which one could be socialized. Colby, as a small, homogeneous and isolated space, posed difficulties in establishing a gay community as the population to draw from was small and regulated.

Wolves in sheeps' clothing: Creationist manipulation of Kansas science standards

So the question that animates this paper is this: what happens when a state's education policy seeks to make popular social and religious values a central part of its education standards in direct confrontation with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? I will try to answer that question in three ways. First, I will examine the tactics used in the manipulation of curricula to reflect social and religious values, with special focus on the Kansas case. Second, I will try to ascertain the determinants of success in these efforts; under what conditions are movements to impose creation science on public school curricula likely to succeed, and when to fail? Third, I will try to place these struggles over educational curricula, and between religion and science, in broader context, focusing on what they tell us about the nature of public policy making in the contemporary United States.

Intent and Method: A Study of Female Characters in Aeschylean and Euripidean Drama

Aeschylus and Euripides used tragic female characters to help fulfill the purpose of religious celebration and to achieve the motivation of public reaction. The playwrights, revising myths about tragic woman and redefining the Greek definition of appropriate femininity, supported or questioned the very customs which they changed. Originally composed as part of a religious festival for Dionysus, the god of wine, revelry and fertility, the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides were evaluated by Aristotle. He favored Aeschylus over Euripides, but it appears as if his stipulations for tragic characterization do not apply to Aeschylean and Euripidean women. Modem critics question both Aristotle's analysis in the Poetics as well as the tragedies which he evaluated. As part of the assessment of Aeschylus, the character of the Persian Queen, Atossa, appears as a conradiction the images that Greeks maintain of non-Greeks. The Persians is discussed in relation to modem criticisms and as on its function as a warning against radical changes in Athenian domestic life. The Oresteia, a trilogy, also charts the importance of an atypical woman in Aeschylean tragedy, and how this role, Clytaemnestra, represents an extreme example of the natural and necessary evolution of families, households and kingdoms. In contrast to Aeschylus' plea to retain nomoi (traditional custom and law), EUripides' tragedy, the Medea, demonstrates the importance of a family and a country to provide security, especially for women. Medea's abandonment by Jason and subsequent desperation drives her to commit murder in the hope of revenge. Ultimately, Euripides advocates changes in social convention away from the alienation of non-Greek, non-citizens, and females. Euripides is, unfortunately, tagged a misogynist by some in this tragedy and another example-the Hippolytus. Euripides' Phaedra becomes entangled in a scheme of divine vengeance and ultimately commits suicide in an attempt to avoid societal shame. Far from treatises of hate, Euripidean women take advantage of the little power they possess within a constrictive social system. While both Aeschylus and Euripides revise customary images and expectations of women in the context of religiously-motivated drama, one playwright intends to maintain civic order and the other intends to challenge the secular norm.