This study compares 20 subjects, in each of three different settings, with serious psychotic disorder who hear voices, and compares their voice-hearing experience. We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience. In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in (...) our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful. What we think we may be observing is that people who fall ill with serious psychotic disorder pay selective attention to a constant stream of many different auditory and quasi-auditory events because of different “cultural invitations”—variations in ways of thinking about minds, persons, spirits and so forth. Such a process is consistent with processes described in the cognitive psychology and psychiatric anthropology literature, but not yet described or understood with respect to cultural variations in auditory hallucinations. We call this process “social kindling.”. (shrink)

This article argues that attempting to overcome moral silence in organizations will require management to move beyond a compliance-oriented organizational culture toward a culture based on integrity. Such cultural change is part of good corporate governance that aims to steer an organization to enhance creativity and moral excellence, and thus organizational value. Governance mechanisms can be either formal or informal. Formal codes and other internal formal regulations that emphasize compliance are necessary, although informal mechanisms that are based on (...) relationship-building are more likely to achieve moral excellence. Such a shift can be viewed as a transformative strategy for overcoming the destructive side effects and business risks of the tendency within corporate cultures to remain mute when faced with issues that violate personal or corporate values. Genuine dialogues and appropriate ethical decisionmaking training can deepen the understanding and create a mindful awareness (of ethical values) and induce trust that embrace both complying with rules and regulations, as well as inciting creative "ethical innovation" with respect to human interaction in multinational companies. (shrink)

This comprehensive educational history of public schools in Hawai'i shows and analyzes how dominant cultural and educational policy have affected the education experiences of Native Hawaiians. Drawing on institutional theory as a scholarly lens, the authors focus on four historical cases representing over 150 years of contact with the West. They carefully link historical events, significant people, educational policy, and law to cultural and social consequences for Native Hawaiian children and youth. The authors argue that since the early 1800s, educational (...) policy in Hawai'i emphasizing efficiency has resulted in institutional structures that have degenerated Hawaiian culture, self-image, and sovereignty. Native Hawaiians have often been denied equal access to quality schools and resulting increased economic and social status. These policies were often overtly, or covertly, racist and reflected wider cultural views prevalent across the United States regarding the assimilation of groups into the American mainstream culture. The case of education in Hawai'i is used to initiate a broader discussion of similar historical trends in assimilating children of different backgrounds into the American system of education. The scholarly analysis presented in this book draws out historical, political, cultural, and organizational implications that can be employed to understand other Native and non-Native contexts. Given the increasing cultural diversity of the United States and the perceived failure of the American educational system in light of these changes, this book provides an exceptionally appropriate starting point to begin a discussion about past, present, and future schooling for our nation's children. Because it is written and comes from a Native perspective, the value of the "insider" view is illuminated. This underlying reminder of the Native eye is woven throughout the book in _Ha'awina No'ono'o_--the sharing of thoughts from the Native Hawaiian author. With its primary focus on the education of native groups, this book is an extraordinary and useful work for scholars, thoughtful practitioners, policymakers, and those interested in Hawai'i, Hawaiian education, and educational policy and theory. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to (...) radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental. (shrink)

I develop an exploratory analysis of “post-mortem photography”, a social practice existing in different cultures. The study, part of a larger project in Denmark, “The culture of grief”, combines Dialogical Self Theory, mainly concerning verbal and textual objects, with the iconic framework of affective semiosis to discuss the function of taking and keeping pictures of dead persons as if they were still alive or just sleeping. How can this practice and artifact culturally mediate the experience of death and the (...) elaboration of grief? What kind of inner dialogue is developed through the internalization of this specific kind of presence/absence? These are some of the preliminary questions I will try to answer by discussing some examples of post-mortem photography from the 19th and 20th centuries in different countries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents eds. by Michael J. Schuck and John Crowley-BuckSteven P. MilliesDemocracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents Edited by Michael J. Schuck and John Crowley-Buck NEW YORK: FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. 350 pp. $105.00 / $35.00Democracy, Culture, Catholicism is the product of a three-year, international project that started from a less specific inspiration. Originally begun at Loyola University Chicago's (...) Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage in 2010 as a broad inquiry into the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and politics, the project leaders eventually took a different bearing from events as diverse as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, and Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Caritas in Veritate to focus their project more squarely on democracy. Examining democracy from within the diverse experiences found in Lithuania, Peru, Indonesia, and the United States, the editors [End Page 208] present us with a valuable snapshot of where the Catholic engagement with democracy as a cultural expression finds itself today in a global perspective.Given the amount of material at play, the volume is a monumental achievement, if only for the clarity with which it presents its findings. Some essays are stronger than others. Still, the volume benefits tremendously from an apparent and unusual amount of editorial attention that sequences the essays and interrelates them with useful references to one another in such a way that Democracy, Culture, Catholicism escapes entirely the fate of so many volumes of collected essays. Here, the reader has the sensation of reading one coherent narrative, not twenty-three disparately connected, individual essays. This alone is impressive.The volume possesses other strengths. Reflections emerge throughout that engage the deeper questions of democracy. Who are these people making decisions together? How can we understand the composition of a political community? Too much democratic theory overlooks the complex interweaving of history, memory, and identity that operates like a substrate of our consciousness beneath our reason while we are presuming ourselves to be rational decision makers using democratic procedures. The book's engagement not just with democracy and Catholicism but also with culture is important. These essays treat culture not only in different local expressions but also (and in a way that is deep, serious, and sustained) as a phenomenon of consciousness.The American perspective always lurks in the narrative, threatening to dominate. This is inevitable not only because the project was managed in the United States but also because the polarizing obsessions of the church in the United States about how to acknowledge the norms of modern political arrangements have tended to dominate conversation in the church worldwide. The editors have shrewdly chosen to save the United States for the last part of this volume, allowing other voices to come forward first to claim their own space. This editorial decision, like so many others, improves the volume and keeps the narrative in good balance. Still, some questions linger in this reviewer's mind as the volume concludes.What do we mean by democracy? Throughout, the authors treat this as a question that is largely settled. Democracy is identified with democratic values that the church accepts, and in Schuck's words, what is under way is "a critical conversation with the culture of democracy" (330). Yet procedural democracy cannot be severed from these values. Are democratic norms and values vindicated when majorities choose undemocratic values? A more careful drawing of distinctions between democracy, liberalism, and republicanism would expose the inner conflicts in which Catholicism meets modern political norms.Perhaps most urgently for the subject matter of this book, are the claims of Catholic social teaching and Christian ethics a foundation for the democratic, participatory values of this secular age, as writers like Charles Taylor and David [End Page 209] Walsh have suggested? This also would raise questions about how culturally conditioned we should understand democracy to be, surely an important consideration for this very fine study.Steven P. MilliesCatholic Theological UnionCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Emotive speech is a social act in which a speaker displays emotional signals with a specific intention; in the case of third-party complaints, this intention is to elicit empathy in the listener. The present study assessed how the emotivity of complaints was perceived in various conditions. Participants listened to short statements describing painful or neutral situations, spoken with a complaining or neutral prosody, and evaluated how complaining the speaker sounded. In addition to manipulating features of the message, social-affiliative factors which (...) could influence complaint perception were varied by adopting a cross-cultural design: participants were either Québécois or French and listened to utterances expressed by both cultural groups. The presence of a complaining tone of voice had the largest effect on participant evaluations, while the nature of statements had a significant, but smaller influence. Marginal effects of culture on explicit evaluation of complaints were found. A multiple mediation analysis suggested that mean fundamental frequency was the main prosodic signal that participants relied on to detect complaints, though most of the prosody effect could not be linearly explained by acoustic parameters. These results highlight a tacit agreement between speaker and listener: what characterizes a complaint is how it is said, more than what it is about or who produces it. More generally, the study emphasizes the central importance of prosody in expressive speech acts such as complaints, which are designed to strengthen social bonds and supportive responses in interactive behavior. This intentional and interpersonal aspect in the communication of emotions needs to be further considered in research on affect and communication. (shrink)

Through listening to the voices of students, educators and community members can begin to reconstruct the culture of urban schools that are often full of stories about student deficits, genetic explanations about achievement, and cultural mismatch theories that may be traced to historical and sociological ideologies. The purpose of this heuristic qualitative investigation was to explore the ways in which student voice can contribute to reculturing high schools in urban settings. Data sources for this study included videotaped interviews and (...) observations in two Midwestern urban high schools to explore the stories of 28 culturally and linguistically diverse students in grades 10 through 12. Findings suggested that the teens in these urban high schools want caring teachers who listen attentively, provide engaging learning opportunities, and who demonstrate high expectations for achievement. They did not want teachers who, in essence, perpetuate hegemonic discourses via pedagogical practices, and school environments that resemble prisons. At the same time, students wanted more structure to ?avoid chaos? and asked teachers to give attention to the paradigm of the personal within the school curriculum. We extend the meaning of the study to include student voice as a critical stance for reconstructing the cultural context of urban schools, which entails listening to students to identify complex and sensitive topics for dialogue and inquiry. (shrink)

I argue for the universality of morality as against and in spite of the plurality and inevitable relativity of human cultures. Univer.

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for (...) visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’. (shrink)

Whether an individual doctoral study or a large-scale multidisciplinary project, researchers working across cultures face particular challenges around power, identity, and voice, as they encounter ethical dilemmas which extend beyond the micro-level of the researcher-researched relationship. In using a cross-cultural perspective on how to conceptualise research problems, collect data, and disseminate findings in an ethical manner, they also engage with the geopolitics of academic writing, language inequalities, and knowledge construction within a globalised economy. It is increasingly recognised that existing ethical (...) codes and paradigms either do not sufficiently address such issues or tend to be rather restrictive and insensitive to multiple and complex cultural and contextual differences. This book extends our understanding of the ethical issues and dilemmas faced by researchers in comparative and international education. It asks what the relevance of postcolonial theory is for understanding research ethics in comparative and international education; whether Western ethical practices in qualitative social research are incompatible with cultures outside the West; how a ‘situated’ approach can be developed for exploring research ethics across cultures and institutions; and how ‘informed consent’ can be negotiated when the process appears to contradict community values and practices. In sharing experiences from a wide range of cultural and institutional contexts, the authors offer both theoretical resources and practical guidance for conducting research ethically across cultures. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education. _. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue for the universality of morality as against and in spite of the plurality and inevitable relativity of human cultures. Universalisability is the litmus test of moral authenticity whereas culture tends to impose an egocentric predicament. I argue equally for the equality of cultures qua cultures and of the importance of different cultural perspectives, given the limitations of each and every particular culture, in a balanced and wholesome appreciation of moral issues, particularly issues (...) of cross‐cultural relevance. I then try to anchor my reflections on a few topical ethical issues of cross‐cultural relevance which have been the subject of controversy in recent times. (shrink)

Narrated in the first person, Peter Carey’s novel about the life of Australian bushranger Ned Kelly incorporates other aspects of speech derived both from Carey’s personal experience and from the editorial process. Kelly's voice is toned down to some extent by virtue of the latter, introducing expressions Kelly himself would not have used. Identifying these elements, along with the specific attributes of Kelly’s own speech, enjoins a diversity of cultural and social groupings that intersect and, in some instances, compete with (...) or contradict one another. Shifts in speakers might be signalled by textual markers or by adopting different expressive qualities and speech patterns, which may or may not include a change in grammatical person. In this novel, at one instance, a shift in person is apparent, but I want to argue, not necessarily a shift in the identity of the speaker because, although the grammatical voice shifts, its qualitative features are largely unaltered. The shift nonetheless introduces a significant change. Paradoxically, as far as literary theory is concerned, the subjective qualities produced through voice mean that stylisations of speech may be indicative of character point of view, rather than what is understood to be narrative voice, because they might function in narrative as inflections of speech that do not correspond to the established voice of the grammatically instanced speaker—offering a focalised perspective instead. The shift in True History presents problems in these terms, however: the point of view instanced here is clearly that belonging to the speaker, though the voice is Kelly’s, for the narrator’s point of view determines the generality of the descriptive terms where once these were specific and personal. Had the novel been narrated wholly in third person, an unproblematic reading of Kelly’s point of view, suggested by the use of his voice, would be possible. But the shift undermines this—Kelly’s point of view gives way to another, instanced in the shift that takes place in narrative voice. Carey, in other words, inverts the convention. This is not an instance of free indirect style or discourse, where grammatical mood is at odds with the speaker’s position and tenses align with the implicated subject position of another. The same features of voice that might identify character point of view must, in absence of any disparity of mood or tone, function in respect to narrative voice to convey something of its speaker’s subjectivity, and this seems apparent here: the speaker shares Kelly’s subjective emotional and intellectual perspective, but no longer occupies the subject position. Carey’s voicing of the bushranger therefore complicates distinctions between voice and point of view by revealing qualitative features of voice to be important to the question of who is speaking the narrative. (shrink)

Vladimir Solovyov was a philosopher of culture who sought to understand the essence of the most central and deep cultural crisis, as he spoke of Russia in the twentieth century. He has often been interpreted as a close follower of Schelling, someone who just took the basic methodology and concepts from Schelling without any deep contemplation of his own. The goal of this article is to reconsider one of the most widespread misconceptions, according to which Solovyov is a Russian (...) Schellingian. Despite a certain resemblance in style and occasionally similarly sounding arguments, Solovyov was not just a rewriter of Schelling or his ardent follower. The second aim of the paper is to reconstruct the concepts of culture in Solovyov and Schelling. The two aims are strongly connected. In this respect, this paper is less an attempt to summarize Solovyov and Schelling and compare their ideas, than a speculative attempt to speak about the philosophy of culture and to represent the philosophy of Solovyov and Schelling. On my reading, despite many terminological and argumentative parallels, Solovyov and Schelling were pursuing fundamentally different tasks. Their systems cannot be viewed as identical, as it is often the case; rather, Solovyov’s philosophy begins where Schelling’s ends. The fundamental difference between the two systems will be demonstrated based on the analysis of two writings: Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Solovyov’s Lectures on Divine Humanity. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the experiences of female leaders considering the interplay of gender, religion, and culture. Drawing on an inductive-qualitative study, the paper examines perceptions regarding the role of religion and cultural norms in women’s ascension into leadership positions in Jordan. The results indicated that Jordanian women leaders adopted an Islamic feminist worldview and did not embrace a liberal nor a socialist/Marxist feminist worldview. Women leaders seemed wanting to claim their religion back from those forces that are (...) reportedly holding their aspirations hostage to monolithic interpretations of religious texts. By constantly referring to their religion, female leaders wanted to be granted spaces of trust and responsibility in leadership positions that they did not see contradictory to the way they understood their faith. The paper provides insights into how women leaders understand prejudicial stereotypes and discrimination in their society, explaining how those are linked to patriarchal socio-cultural traditions emphasizing male control. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it (a) points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and (b) critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which (...) takes insights from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

This paper is an outcome of the business ethics course conducted during the third semester of the MBA course and aims to examine how a subordinate employee’s response, either by raising a concern or being quiet to repeated misbehavior of the leader, impacts an organization. Primary data was collected from the employees of mid-sized IT companies in India using a five-point Likert scale questionnaire. Structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the data. Mediation analysis has been conducted to verify (...) the mediating role of organizational culture. It is found that if an employee feels safe in an environment, they open up to suggestions or else suppress their thoughts to escape repercussion. The analysis shows that silence and voice in an organization have an impact on the organization’s culture. The implications of this study show that leaders violate the integrity of the organization by vandalizing the organization's objectives, outcomes, assets, and well-being of the co-employees. Previous studies have not focused on the mediating role of organizational culture on employee voice or silence. (shrink)

This article deals with voice and bodily deixis as manifestations of performativity in written texts. A speech act of origin presents as both vocal and performative events. Ritual matrixes of culture contain performative complexes, as suggested by Austin. Such performative nuclei are neither true nor false, that is, their negation cannot be logically inferred from true premises. The term deixis describes the performative moment of the utterance, its active and transformative force. The first embodied deictic utterance in Western history (...) would be the biblical phrase “And the word made flesh.” It is the first mythopoetical performative denoting the bodily incarnation of logos. In the article, the term bodily deixis is considered against the background of experimental poetry of E.E. Cummings. (shrink)

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news reported in (...) the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or “Existential Analytic.” In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of “world-traveling.” In the end, the essay defends the view of a “multiplicitous” self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that “travels ‘worlds’” and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

Using Bakhtin's notion of polyphony, this study explored the discussion of the end-of-life issues in the Course on Life and Death Education in one Chinese university. Ethnographic methods were adopted to investigate the collision between the classroom voices and the voices of the mainstream culture on end-of-life in the process of developing students' attitudes toward death. The findings revealed that “to understand death” involved challenging the voice of “strangeness and fear of death”; “honestly facing up to and accepting the (...) feelings of the fear, pain, and helplessness” was the response to “be brave”; and the goal “to die peacefully” resisted the notion of “extending life at any cost.” Through the collision between these voices, students developed their attitudes toward death in facing, understanding, accepting, and choosing how to die. The analysis further revealed that providing only one “answer” to death by the teacher is not sufficient or effective to foster students' attitudes toward death because the students are a diverse group holding different views on the end-of-life issues, which demonstrated the importance of creating dialogues in the life and death education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Voices in Public PlacesTimothy A Beach-VerheyReligious Voices in Public Places Edited by Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 330 pp. $53.91Religious Voices in Public Places grew out of a conference at the University of Leeds in 2003. It makes an important contribution to continuing debates about religion and contemporary liberalism. Acknowledging that John Rawls provides the paradigmatic model for articulating modern liberal (...) ideals, the authors take [End Page 203] his work as a starting point; yet through critical engagement with his work, they move the discussion about liberal ideals forward in new directions. Although they recognize that the United States has long stood as the classical instance of a liberal polity, they widen their attention to other liberal nations that have different ways of relating to the religious sphere.The book is helpfully divided into four parts dealing with philosophical views, theological views, public policy issues, and national contexts. Each section investigates the proper role of religious voices in an increasingly global and pluralistic political environment. While the authors bring different perspectives to this principle concern, they all tend to agree that religious voices contribute to public discourse and that liberal democracy does not require their exclusion. “Indeed,” as Linda Hogan writes in the introduction, “running throughout the volume is an affinity for approaches that believe that the route to a durable political culture lies in serious and systematic engagement with different, and even opposing, comprehensive doctrines” (7).The essays in the section on philosophical views engage critically with John Rawls. Nicholas Wolterstorff and Raymond Plant each argue that Rawls’s version of public reason requires a degree of moral consensus that is both unrealistic and illiberal. Rawls’s view of public reason, they argue, stacks the deck in favor of particular (liberal) assumptions, making its ideals of freedom and equality a sham. In turn, Maureen Junker-Kenny looks for a more adequate conception of public reasoning in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas. In the section on theological views, Luke Bretherton, P. Travis Kroeker, and Robert Gascoigne mine the Christian tradition for resources that engage pluralistic societies in ways that neither retreat into particularistic enclaves nor jettison Christianity’s distinctive faith for the sake of intelligibility. In their various ways, they call into question the prevailing view that religious convictions are a threat to a pluralistic society that values freedom, equality, and solidarity. In the section on public policy, Nigel Biggar, Paul Weithman, and Linda Hogan examine these questions through the lens of physician-assisted suicide, religion in public education, and international human rights; they make cogent arguments for including religious perspectives, in all their complexity and multiplicity, in the political life and public discourse of liberal democratic societies. The last section, on particular national contexts, makes it clear that there is more than one way for liberal societies to deal with religious voices. Peter Sedgwick examines the role of the Anglican Church in English public life; Brian Stiltner and Steven Michels study the role of religion in US political campaigns; and Jocelyne Cesari compares the way different liberal democratic polities in the West have responded to the expanding role of Islam in their societies.This fine volume of essays demonstrates that the discussion about religion and public life is moving beyond the stale binary categories of secular liberalism [End Page 204] and religious traditionalism. These essays exemplify and contribute to the more interesting discussion that is beginning to take place as we leave behind simplistic models in favor of more nuanced, rich, and realistic assessments of public discourse and political decision making in an increasingly diverse yet interdependent social environment. Nigel Biggar and Linda Hogan are to be thanked and commended for bringing this volume to fruition.Timothy A Beach-VerheyFaison Presbyterian ChurchCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, (...) and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity. (shrink)

The discourse among medical and scientific communities on hymen restoration is largely missing the voice of women affected. This article calls for a more nuanced reflection on women’s real life experiences and the complexities inherent in the negotiation process about the surgery going beyond “ideologies” and the extremes of rape and threats to life. By taking the clinical experience of a woman who requests restoration surgery before her arranged marriage, this article illuminates the grey zone beyond these extremes and explores (...) an individual woman’s options for making her own choices. (shrink)

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More (...) reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. (shrink)