Are American Youth Alienated From Organized Religion?

The purpose of the project is to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of U.S. adolescents; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral, and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent to which youth participate in and benefit from the programs and opportunities that religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in youth's lives, in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion.

Religion in the lives of American adolescents

The purpose of the project is to research the shape and influence of religion and spirituality in the lives of U.S. adolescents; to identify effective practices in the religious, moral, and social formation of the lives of youth; to describe the extent to which youth participate in and benefit from the programs and opportunities that religious communities are offering to their youth; and to foster an informed national discussion about the influence of religion in youth's lives, in order to encourage sustained reflection about and rethinking of our cultural and institutional practices with regard to youth and religion.

Ben Marais (1909-1999): The influences on and heritage of a South African Prophet during two periods of transformation

University of Pretoria / Dissertation / Department of Church History and Church Policy / Advised by Prof J W Hofmeyr

Merleau-Ponty and Nishida: Artistic expression as 'motor-perceptual faith'

This dissertation carries out a dialogue between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Nishida Kitarō concerning their theories of artistic expression and faith. Both philosophers go through remarkably similar trajectories in their philosophic projects: In their early works they focus on the motor-perceptual body of the artist, and as they move towards the mature articulation of their ontologies, the concept of faith becomes central. I propose the term “motor-perceptual faith” to bring these seemingly diverse sets of concerns into a conceptual continuity. My study explores this connection, and argues that the artist’s motor-perceptual expressive body, as colourfully and sometimes poetically articulated in their early works, enacts the form of faith developed more abstractly in their later writings. Exploring these relations fosters a mutual expansion of the early by the later works, thus thickening the concept of faith by seeing it as enacted by the artist, while enlarging the concept of artistic expression by understanding it as a practice of motor‐perceptual faith. Framing these philosophers as putting forth a traditionally religious concept as illustrated by way of artistic expression, offers a new articulation of both of their writings, an important conceptual bridge between the two, while challenging un-ambiguous distinctions between art, philosophy and religion, and ultimately philosophy East and West.

Nihilism and emptiness: Nishitani's encounter with Nietzsche

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the Kyoto School philosopher, Nishitani Keiji, and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, focusing on the two thinkers’ respective approaches to the problem of nihilism. The work begins by positioning Nishitani’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s account of nihilism with reference to diverse readings of Nietzsche in Western scholarship. I then consider the development of Nishitani’s reading of Nietzsche from his lecture series on nihilism, The Self- Overcoming of Nihilism, through to his magnum opus, Religion and Nothingness. I make two key contributions to recent scholarly debate on Nishitani’s relationship to Nietzsche. The first is to emphasise the importance of Nishitani’s response to the idea of eternal recurrence for understanding his critical approach to Nietzsche’s thinking. I argue against the view, offered by Bret Davis, that Nishitani’s criticisms of Nietzsche are primarily based on the former’s negative assessment of the idea of will to power. The second contribution is to situate Nishitani’s critical approach to eternal recurrence within his broader attempt to formulate a Zen-influenced conception of temporality and historicity. I then argue for the necessity of this conceptual background for coming to grips with his conception of the ‘transhistorical’ grounds of historicity in emptiness (śūnyatā), as outlined in the later chapters of Religion and Nothingness.

Preserving patent policy space and securing access to medicines in developing countries: the role of states and pharmaceutical corporations

This thesis examines the tension between patent rights and the right to health and it recognizes patent rights on pharmaceutical products as one of the factors responsible for the problem of lack of access to affordable medicines in developing countries. The thesis contends that, in order to preserve their patent policy space and secure access to affordable medicines for their citizens, developing countries should incorporate a model of human rights into the design, implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of their national patent laws. The thesis provides a systematic analysis of court decisions from four key developing countries (Brazil, India, Kenya, and South Africa) and it assesses how the national courts in these countries resolve the tension between patent rights and the right to health. Essentially, this thesis demonstrates how a model of human rights can be incorporated into the adjudication of disputes involving patent rights in national courts. Focusing specifically on Brazil, the thesis equally demonstrates how policy makers and law makers at the national level can incorporate a model of human rights into the design or amendment of their national patent law. This thesis also contributes to the ongoing debate in the field of business and human rights with regard to the mechanisms that can be used to hold corporate actors accountable for their human rights responsibilities. This thesis recognizes that, while states bear the primary responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfil the right to health, corporate actors such as pharmaceutical companies also have a baseline responsibility to respect the right to health. This thesis therefore contends that pharmaceutical companies that own patent rights on pharmaceutical products can be held accountable for their right to health responsibilities at the national level through the incorporation of a model of civic participation into a country’s patent law system.

Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990

This study, "Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990," offers a new perspective on the historical origins of the modern prison industrial complex, sexual violence in working-class culture, and the ways in which race shaped the prison experience. This study joins new scholarship that reperiodizes the Civil Rights era while also considering how violence and radicalism shaped the civil rights struggle. It places the criminal justice system at the heart of both an older racial order and within a prison-made civil rights movement that confronted the prison's power to deny citizenship and enforce racial hierarchies. By charting the trajectory of the civil rights movement in Texas prisons, my dissertation demonstrates how the internal struggle over rehabilitation and punishment shaped civil rights, racial formation, and the political contest between liberalism and conservatism. This dissertation offers a close case study of Texas, where the state prison system emerged as a national model for penal management. The dissertation begins with a hopeful story of reform marked by an apparently successful effort by the State of Texas to replace its notorious 1940s plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. I analyze both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. My dissertation shows that this inmate Civil Rights rebellion was a success in forcing an end to the existing system but a failure in its attempts to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. The new Texas prison regime, I conclude, utilized paramilitary practices, privatized prisons, and gang-related warfare to establish a new system that focused much more on law and order in the prisons than on the legal and human rights of prisoners. Placing the inmates and their struggle at the heart of the national debate over rights and "law and order" politics reveals an inter-racial social justice movement that asked the courts to reconsider how the state punished those who committed a crime while also reminding the public of the inmates' humanity and their constitutional rights.

Kappa calculus and evidential strength: A note on Åqvist's logical theory of legal evidence

Lennart Åqvist (1992) proposed a logical theory of legal evidence, based on the Bolding-Ekelöf of degrees of evidential strength. This paper reformulates Åqvist's model in terms of the probabilistic version of the kappa calculus. Proving its acceptability in the legal context is beyond the present scope, but the epistemological debate about Bayesian Law isclearly relevant. While the present model is a possible link to that lineof inquiry, we offer some considerations about the broader picture of thepotential of AI & Law in the evidentiary context. Whereas probabilisticreasoning is well-researched in AI, calculations about the threshold ofpersuasion in litigation, whatever their value, are just the tip of theiceberg. The bulk of the modeling desiderata is arguably elsewhere, if one isto ideally make the most of AI's distinctive contribution as envisaged forlegal evidence research.

Editorial: context, content and aims [Special Issue - Formal Approaches to Legal Evidence]

This special issue "Formal Approaches to Legal Evidence" of the Artificial Intelligence and Law, September 2001, Vol. 9, Issue 2-3, which was guest edited by Ephraim Nissan.

Film and literature in the legal classroom

The way in which law and lawyers are portrayed in popular film and literature is a fascinating subject not only for the social scientist but, more importantly, the lawyer and law student. Increasingly in law schools, films and classic literature with a legal theme are being used to identify various aspects of legal activity ranging from legal practice (i.e. intrinsic lawyer skills including legal argument, negotiation and advocacy) to various aspects of the legal process (e.g. the function of the judge and jury) as well as important elements of legal and ethical theory. This article focuses on the Law Through Film and Literature option which is offered to law students in the final year of their LLB (Hons) degree at Greenwich. The aim is to show how law-related film and literature can be a useful tool in the legal classroom, as well as providing some insights into how students have responded and developed as a result of their experiences on the course.

Legal myth-making: Medea and the legal representation of the feminine ‘other'

The Law operates by, and through, the creation of ideal benchmarks of conduct that are deemed to be representative of the behavioural norm. It is in this sense that it could be contended that the Law utilises, and relies on, myths in the same way as do other disciplines, notably psycho-analysis. It is possible to go even further and argue that the use of a created narrative mythology is essential to the establishment of a defined legal benchmark of behaviour by which the female defendant is assessed, judged and punished. While mythology expresses and symbolizes cultural and political behaviour, it is the Law that embodies and prescribes punitive sanctions. This element represents a powerful literary strand in classical mythology. This may be seen, for instance, in Antigone’s appeal to the Law as justification for her conduct, as much as in Medea’s challenge to the Law though her desire for vengeance. Despite its image of neutral, objective rationality, the Law, in creating and sustaining the ideals of legally-sanctioned conduct, engages in the same literary processes of imagination, reason and emotion that are central to the creation and re-creation of myth. The (re-)presentation of the Medea myth in literature (especially in theatre) and in art, finds its echo in the theatre of the courtroom where wronged women who have refused to passively accept their place, have instead responded with violence. Consequently, the Medea myth, in its depiction of the (un)feminine, serves as a template for the Law���s judgment of ‘conventional’ feminine conduct in the roles of wife and mother. Medea is an image of deviant femininity, as is Lady Macbeth and the countless other un-feminine literary and mythological women who challenge the power of the dominant culture and its ally, the Law. These women stand opposed to the other dominant theme of both literature and Law: the conformist woman, the passive dupe, who are victims of male oppression – women such as Ariadne of Naxos and Tess of the D’Ubervilles – and who are subsequently consumed by the Law, much as Semele is consumed by the fire of Jupiter’s gaze upon her. All of these women, the former as well as the latter, have their real-life counterparts in the pages of the Law Reports. As Fox puts it, “these women have come to bear the weight of the cultural stereotypes and preconceptions about women who kill.”

Translating Nietzsche, mediating literature: Alexander Tille and the limits of Anglo-German intercultural transfer

Dr. Alexander Tille (1866–1912) was one of the key-figures in Anglo-German intercultural transfer towards the end of the 19th century. As a lecturer in German at Glasgow University he was the first to translate and edit Nietzsche’s work into English. Writers such as W. B. Yeats were influenced by Nietzsche and used Tille’s translations. Tille’s social Darwinist reading of the philosopher’s oeuvre, however, had a narrowing impact on the reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-Saxon world for decades. Through numerous publications Tille disseminated knowledge about British authors (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wordsworth) in Germany and about German authors (e.g., Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) in Britain. His role as mediator also extended into areas such as history, religion, and industry. During the Boer war, however, Tille’s outspoken pro-German nationalism brought him in conflict with his British host society. After being physically attacked by his students he returned to Germany and published a highly anglophobic monograph. Tille personifies the paradox of Anglo-German relations in the pre-war years, which deteriorated despite an increase in intercultural transfer and knowledge about the respective Other. [From the Author]