Modern historical criticism of the gospels and Christian origins began in the seventeenth century largely as an attempt to debunk the Christian religion as a pious fraud. The gospels were seen as bits of priestcraft and humbug of a piece with the apocryphal Donation of Constantine. In the few centuries since Reimarus and his critical kin, historical criticism has been embraced and assimilated by many Christian scholars who have seen in it the logical extension of the grammatico-historical method of the (...) Reformers. The new views of New Testament exegesis and of early Christian history are important and well known. Many New Testament scholars would now hold with Schweitzer and Bultmann that Jesus was a preacher of the imminent end of the world. He may have secretly considered himself to be the Messiah, or he may have simply sought to pave the way for another, the apocalyptic Son of Man. After his execution, his disciples' experiences of his resurrection forced on them a conclusion already implicit in his teachings and personal piety: that Jesus was indeed, or had become, the Messiah, and was in fact God's Son. They expected he would soon return as the Son of Man he had predicted. (shrink)

ROBERT M. PRICE replies to Sciabarra's criticism that Carol Selby Price and Robert Price's Mystic Rhythms erroneously classifies Rush lyricist Neil Peart as "conservative." "Conservative" may imply limitation of individual freedom by the government—or by organized religion. Peart leans more toward a non-religious libertarianism and Rand's Objectivism, which may be considered "conservative" in the same narrow sense. Ironically, Randian thinkers share with religion the use of the Hero Myth archetype. Price focuses on recent Rand-type (...) comic book superheroes, including Steve Ditko's Mister A and The Question, and Alan Moore's parody on these, Rorschach. (shrink)

As we await the Second Coming of President Donald Trump, it is important to understand that his conservative Evangelical supporters view him not as a new Christ but as a new Constantine, a guardian of Western Civilization in a crucial period when we face threatened conquest by foreign enemies and infiltrators, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, and Militant Islam Thus he should be seen also as a new Charles Martel. He need not be a Bible-reading pietist to fulfill these roles, so Christians need (...) not be ashamed of him if he isn’t. (shrink)

Price replies to Sciabarra's criticism that Carol Selby Price and Robert Price's Mystic Rhythms erroneously classifies Rush lyricist Neil Peart as "conservative." "Conservative" may imply limitation of individual freedom by the government—or by organized religion. Peart leans more toward a non-religious libertarianism and Rand's Objectivism, which may be considered "conservative" in the same narrow sense. Ironically, Randian thinkers share with religion the use of the Hero Myth archetype. Price focuses on recent Rand-type comic book superheroes, (...) including Steve Ditko's Mister A and The Question, and Alan Moore's parody on diese, Rorschach. (shrink)

Functional imaging studies of neurologically intact adults have demonstrated that the right posterior cerebellum is activated during verb generation, semantic processing, sentence processing, and verbal fluency. Studies of patients with cerebellar damage converge to show that the cerebellum supports sentence processing and verbal fluency. However, to date there are no patient studies that investigated the specific importance of the right posterior cerebellum in language processing, because: case studies presented patients with lesions affecting the anterior cerebellum, and group studies combined patients (...) with lesions to different cerebellar regions, without specifically reporting the effects of right posterior cerebellar damage. Here we investigated whether damage to the right posterior cerebellum is critical for sentence processing and verbal fluency in four patients with focal stroke damage to different parts of the right posterior cerebellum. We examined detailed lesion location by going beyond common anatomical definitions of cerebellar anatomy, and employed a recently proposed functional parcellation of the cerebellum. All four patients experienced language difficulties that persisted for at least a month after stroke but three performed in the normal range within a year. In contrast, one patient with more damage to lobule IX than the other patients had profound long-lasting impairments in the comprehension and repetition of sentences, and the production of spoken sentences during picture description. Spoken and written word comprehension and visual recognition memory were also impaired, however, verbal fluency was within the normal range, together with object naming, visual perception and verbal short-term memory. This is the first study to show that focal damage to the right posterior cerebellum leads to language difficulties after stroke; and that processing impairments persisted in the case with most damage to lobule IX. We discuss these results in relation to current theories of cerebellar contribution to language processing. Overall, our study highlights the need for longitudinal studies of language function in patients with focal damage to different cerebellar regions, with functional imaging to understand the mechanisms that support recovery. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

: In spite of recent political setbacks for the movement toward universal health insurance, considerable support remains for the idea. Among those supporting such plans, most assume that a universal insurance system, especially if it is a single-payer system, would offer a single list of basic covered services. This paper challenges that assumption and argues for the availability of multiple lists of services in a universal insurance system. The claim is made that multiple lists will be both more efficient and (...) more fair. Any single list will fund some services that are quite attractive to some people, but only marginally attractive to others. Thus any single-list plan will fund some services that produce only marginal benefit for the resources used. Moreover, since some people will hold values quite compatible with the single list and others will hold values leading to preferences for unfunded services, some people will get much more benefit from any single list than other people will. Fairness and efficiency require providing an entitlement to universal access to health insurance that could be purchased by typical consumers for a fixed price of perhaps $3500. By permitting everyone to pick their preferred list of services available at that price, each person will efficiently use his or her entitlement while getting more equal opportunity for benefits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionRobert M. Veatch (bio)The Kennedy Institute of Ethics regularly sponsors intensive bioethics courses for physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals. While the basic course, held in June of each year, provides a general introduction to bioethics, advanced courses, which are often held in March, focus on more specific topics such as death and dying, justice and the allocation of resources, or theories and methods in bioethics. This year (...) the advanced course addressed one of the most sensitive and complex bioethical issues of our day: managed care. This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal includes revised versions of many of the papers from that meeting.As defined by one of the papers in this issue, managed care involves a system of health care delivery that manages resources, quality, and access associated with the delivery of health care. The key element of managed care is that, for the first time, managers—often from outside the health care professions—are intentionally controlling resources, and therefore controlling health care professional decisions that use those resources. The objective is not merely to eliminate utterly useless interventions—no one could plausibly object to that. Rather the target is also the elimination of inefficient and wasteful resource consumption. Increasingly, we recognize that many diagnostic tests and treatments offer, at best, a very marginal chance of doing the patient good. Some of these come at considerable cost. From the point of view of the rational organization of resources, no rational person would insist on receiving every last procedure that offers only a tiny chance to do a small amount of good at great cost. Managed care is designed to bring to consciousness and rationalize the decisions about which of these marginal, expensive benefits are worth pursuing.The problem is that any effort to eliminate any of the these expensive marginal services flies directly in the face of the Hippocratic ethic. Physicians and other clinicians traditionally are trained to believe that it is their moral duty to do what is best for the patient. Only now are we realizing that, taken literally, no rational person would want literally the best possible care, assuming that such care would include thousands of long-shot, expensive efforts to get the most modest of benefits at great cost. In a world of finite resources, rational people would certainly want very good medical care; they would want reasonable care. But they would also want some criteria of efficiency and fairness applied. The Hippocratic tradition has never addressed the problem of the difference between the best care and care that is of very high quality, but is chosen with an awareness that the best in medicine will necessarily come at the price of potentially serious [End Page vii] deprivation in other spheres of life. The ethics of managed care is fundamentally an exploration of how health care professionals can reconcile their traditional, if short-sighted and naive, commitment to doing what is best for their patients with increasing realism about the absurdity of pursuing every last possible increment of benefit.To the clinical health care professional, the issue raised most poignantly by managed care is whether the various health professions can still be practiced with integrity in a setting in which outsiders are charged with the rationalization and systematization of limits placed on excessive use of marginally beneficial resources. Edmund D. Pellegrino, a clinician and former Director of the Kennedy Institute, sets the tone for the course and for this issue of the Journal by making an appeal for the retention of the highest ethical standards of integrity for clinicians practicing in a managed care setting. He is unwilling to let standards be lowered in the process of systematizing the rational use of health care resources. The remaining papers in this issue respond to those pressures to change the nature of the clinical lay-professional relationship. Some of these presentations originated as panels designed to bring out varying points of view. The published form of the presentations, like the original oral remarks, are of different lengths. All have been edited by the presenters, some taking on the form of more finished papers, others still reflecting the less formal conversation of... (shrink)

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the (...) Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

Lawrence M. Friedman and Robert V. Percival, The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870?1910 Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981, 335 pp. Charles Campbell, Serving Time Together: Men and Women in Prison Fort Worth, Texas Christian University Press, 1980, 237 pp.

Does anybody know what love is? This question, the title of a love song by the Motown singer Irma Thomas, echoes through the series Black Mirror. This chapter seeks to answer this question by studying how love, as defined by both Thomas Aquinas and Irma Thomas, appears and disappears in the universe of the show. We learn that most people don't know that love is the total giving of the self to another. But if they did know what love is, (...) as a few characters in the show do, they'd be happier. (shrink)