Intensive care nursing is prone to episodic anxiety linked to patients’ immediate needs for treatment. Balancing biomedical interventions with compassionate patient‐centred nursing can be particularly anxiety provoking. These patterns of anxiety may impact compassion and patient‐centred nursing. The aim of this paper is to discuss the application of Bowen Family Systems Theory to intensive care nursing, mapping a framework to support critical care nurses’ well‐being and, consequently, the quality of care they provide. This article is founded on research, theoretical papers (...) and texts focused on Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST), and findings from a constructivist study on patient‐centred nursing and compassion in the intensive care unit. The goal of Bowen Family Systems Theory is to empower individuals, decreasing blame and reactivity. Bowen Family Systems Theory can be applied to the sometimes intimate relationships that develop in this environment, aiding understanding of nurses’ experience of compassion satisfaction and fatigue. Where organizational factors and management styles fall short in supporting critical care nurses to meet expectations, BFST can offer a perspective on the processes that occur within the intensive care unit, impacting nurse well‐being and quality of care. This paper makes plain the importance of understanding the anxiety that occurs within the intensive care unit as a system, so that individuals, such as critical care nurses, can be supported appropriately to ensure nurse well‐being and quality care. (shrink)

This narrative symposium examines the relationship of bioethics practice to personal experiences of illness. A call for stories was developed by Tod Chambers, the symposium editor, and editorial staff and was sent to several commonly used bioethics listservs and posted on the Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics website. The call asked authors to relate a personal story of being ill or caring for a person who is ill, and to describe how this affected how they think about bioethical questions and the (...) practice of medicine. Eighteen individuals were invited to submit full stories based on review of their proposals. Twelve stories are published in this symposium, and six supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. Authors explore themes of vulnerability, suffering, communication, voluntariness, cultural barriers, and flaws in local healthcare systems through stories about their own illnesses or about caring for children, partners, parents and grandparents. Commentary articles by Arthur Frank, Bradley Lewis, and Carol Taylor follow the collection of personal narratives. (shrink)

This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

Examines the theme of haunting in recent U.S. and postcolonial literature as a response to the dynamics of transnational literary circulation.

It is advisable to treat some sorts of discourse about fiction with the aid of an intensional operator "in such-And-Such fiction...." the operator may appear either explicitly or tacitly. It may be analyzed in terms of similarity of worlds, As follows: "in the fiction f, A" means that a is true in those of the worlds where f is told as known fact rather than fiction that differ least from our world, Or from the belief worlds of the community in (...) which the fiction originated. (shrink)

In today's business world, ethics is not simply a peripheral concern of executive boards or a set of supposed constraints on free enterprise. Ethics stands at the very core of our working lives and of society as a whole, defining the public image of the business community and the ways in which individual companies and people behave. What people do at work--and how they think about work--determines their attitudes and aspirations, affecting and even structuring their personal lives and habits. Working (...) from this premise, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader provides a practical overview of business ethics that concentrates on the ethical problems and dilemmas students are most likely to face in their prospective work environments. Classic and recent articles and cases cover a broad spectrum of issues and concerns--from private ethical dilemmas to larger considerations of corporate values--and propose guidelines for thinking about the business world in a moral context. Each reading and case is followed by lively questions for discussion. Offering a welcome alternative to the impersonal tone of most business ethics texts, the editors address students in an appealing and conversational manner. They provide engaging chapter introductions that include personal narratives and also present the ideas of great philosophers in a unique way--as emails. Ideal for introductory undergraduate and MBA courses in business ethics, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader can be read as a coherent narrative but also offers instructors great flexibility, as its various chapters, readings, and cases can be pursued in almost any order. A Companion Website featuring chapter objectives and summaries, study questions, self-tests, and off-site links of interest will soon be available. An Instructor's Manual with Test Bank is available to adopters. (shrink)

Part 1. Energetic disturbances -- Energetic clutter gutter -- Energetic residue -- Energetic interference -- Personal atmosphere -- House anatomy -- Part 2. Plugging in -- creative clearing power -- Spiritual assistance -- Energy measurement (energy testing/dowsing) -- Part 3. Energy-clearing solutions (steps and protocols) -- House energy-clearing treatment (steps and protocol) -- Distance house energy-clearing treatment -- Business energy-clearing treatment -- Personal energy-clearing treatment (steps and protocol) -- Energy-clearing protocols for children, pets, and more!

An in-depth examination of the work of this important medieval woman mystic.

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, and the (...) meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy. (shrink)

The intellectual history of the last quarter of this century has been marked by the growing influence of Africana thought--an area of philosophy that focuses on issues raised by the struggle over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid forms in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Existentia Africana is an engaging and highly readable introduction to the field of Africana philosophy and will help to define this rapidly growing field. Lewis R. Gordon clearly explains Africana existential thought to (...) a general audience, covering a wide range of both classic and contemporary thinkers--from Douglass and DuBois to Fanon, Davis and Zack. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of science has long been a desired outcome of science education, despite ongoing disagreements about the content, structure, and focus of NOS expectations. Addressing the concern that teachers likely focus only on student learning expectations appearing in standards documents, this study examines the current state of NOS in science education standards documents from nine diverse countries to determine the overt NOS learning expectations that appeared, NOS statements provided near those learning expectations, but not identified as learning outcomes, (...) and NOS statements found in ancillary text. Findings indicate that NOS ideas rarely occur as expectations for student learning and are far more commonly found in ancillary material. Moreover, consensus was not apparent in the overt learning outcomes for students. Given the well-documented poor state of NOS instruction and the consistent lack of NOS appearing in published curriculum materials, the NOS standards appearing in nearly all documents analyzed are unlikely to provide sufficient conceptual or pedagogical support for NOS to be accurately interpreted or translated into meaningful experiences for students. (shrink)

Her Majesty's Children reveals not only a deeply personal account of the experience of racism but is also a revolutionary work that asks us to reconsider our ordinary practices and lives to recognize and resist the traces of a colonial age of racism that so many claim is only part of our past.

Inoperative Learning draws upon the movement towards a weak philosophy that is currently gaining ground in educational philosophy: this weak philosophy does not offer a set of solutions or guidelines for improving educational outcomes, but rather renders assumptions about the theory-practice coupling that is so popular in contemporary education inoperative. By arguing that such logic reduces education to merely instrumental ends, which can only be assessed in terms of predefined measurement tools, this book presents a challenge to contemporary notions of (...) education as learning. There are various forms of inoperative education that temporarily suspend the goal-directedness of learning. From the perspective of learning, the neutralization of progress, growth, and maturity would usually be seen as obstacles needing to be overcome on the path toward set goals. Yet Lewis argues that a serious investigation of inoperativity opens up possibilities that would be otherwise unavailable in a world fixated on the question of learning. In dialogue with philosophers (Agamben, Benjamin, and Esposito), as well as authors (Kafka and Walser), and qualitative researchers (Lather), Lewis turns our collective attention to what remains when concepts such as learning, child development, teacher effectivity, and personal growth are left idle. Inoperative Learning presents a radical rewriting of educational possibilities. It should therefore be of great interest to educational researchers and educational philosophers concerned with the question of alternative logics of education beyond learning. The book may also be of interest to educational policy specialists who are looking for new and innovative forms of critique and analysis. (shrink)

Christianity teaches that whenever evil is done, God had ample warning. He could have prevented it, but He didn't. He could have stopped it midway, but He didn't. He could have rescued the victims of the evil, but - at least in many cases - He didn't. In short, God is an accessory before, during, and after the fact to countless evil deeds, great and small. An explanation is not far to seek. The obvious hypothesis is that the Christian God (...) is really some sort of devil. Maybe He is a devil as popularly conceived, driven' by malice. Or maybe He is unintelligibly capricious. Or maybe He is a fanatical artist who cares only for the aesthetic quality of creation - perhaps the abstract beauty of getting rich variety to emerge from a few simple laws, or perhaps the concrete drama of human life with all its diversity - and cares nothing for the good of the creatures whose lives are woven into His masterpiece. Oust as a tragedian has no business providing a happy end out of compassion for his characters.) But no; for Christianity also teaches that God is morally perfect and perfectly benevolent, and that He loves all of His creatures; and that these things are true in a sense not a million miles from the sense in which we attribute morality, benevolence, or love to one another. (shrink)

There is little empirical evidence showing a direct link between a capacity for statistical learning (SL) and proficiency with natural language. Moreover, discussion of the role of SL in language acquisition has seldom focused on literacy development. Our study addressed these issues by investigating the relationship between SL and reading ability in typically developing children and healthy adults. We tested SL using visually presented stimuli within a triplet learning paradigm and examined reading ability by administering the Wide Range Achievement Test (...) (WRAT-4; Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006). A total of 38 typically developing children (mean age of 9;5 years, range 6;4–12;5) and 37 healthy adults (mean age of 21 years, range 18–34) were assessed. In children, SL was significantly related to reading ability. Importantly, this relationship was independent of grade and also age. The adult data, too, revealed that SL was significantly related to reading ability. A regression analysis of the combined child and adult data revealed that SL accounted for a unique amount of variance in reading ability, after age and attention had been taken into consideration. For the first time, this study provides empirical evidence that a capacity for more effective SL is related to higher reading ability in the general population. (shrink)

Background Studying global health problems requires international multidisciplinary teams. Such multidisciplinarity and multiculturalism create challenges in adhering to a set of ethical principles across different country contexts. Our group on health system responses to violence against women (VAW) included two universities in a European high-income country (HIC) and four universities in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study aimed to investigate professional and policy perspectives on the types, causes of, and solutions to ethical challenges specific to the ethics approval stage of (...) the global research projects on health system responses to VAW. Methods We used the Network of Ethical Relationships model, framework method, and READ approach to analyse qualitative semi-structured interviews (n = 18) and policy documents (n = 27). In March-July 2021, we recruited a purposive sample of researchers and members of Research Ethics Committees (RECs) from the five partner countries. Interviewees signposted policies and guidelines on research ethics, including VAW. Results We developed three themes with eight subthemes summarising ethical challenges across three contextual factors. The global nature of the group contributed towards power and resource imbalance between HIC and LMICs and differing RECs’ rules. Location of the primary studies within health services highlighted differing rules between university RECs and health authorities. There were diverse conceptualisations of VAW and vulnerability of research participants between countries and limited methodological and topic expertise in some LMIC RECs. These factors threatened the timely delivery of studies and had a negative impact on researchers and their relationships with RECs and HIC funders. Most researchers felt frustrated and demotivated by the bureaucratised, uncoordinated, and lengthy approval process. Participants suggested redistributing power and resources between HICs and LMICs, involving LMIC representatives in developing funding agendas, better coordination between RECs and health authorities and capacity strengthening on ethics in VAW research. Conclusions The process of ethics approval for global research on health system responses to VAW should be more coordinated across partners, with equal power distribution between HICs and LMICs, researchers and RECs. While some of these objectives can be achieved through education for RECs and researchers, the power imbalance and differing rules should be addressed at the institutional, national, and international levels. Three of the authors were also research participants, which had potential to introduce bias into the findings. However, rigorous reflexivity practices mitigated against this. This insider perspective was also a strength, as it allowed us to access and contribute to more nuanced understandings to enhance the credibility of the findings. It also helped to mitigate against unequal power dynamics. (shrink)

My office is in a medical building in suburban Washington, D.C. —in Bethesda, named for the Biblical healing pool. All of the offices of my building are occupied by medical specialists, representing the most sophisticated training in the application of the scientific method. Downstairs and of service to all of us is a pharmacy, looking for all the world like a research laboratory with its gleaming surface, meticulous cleanliness, micro-balances, records, reference books, and cash register. It is neatly stocked with (...) modern, physiologically-defined preparations of active, predictable drugs. Among the enzymes, hormones, antibiotics, and chemo therapeutics for neoplasm, are a few newly hatched, unfledged remedies, but most are dependable and thoroughly assayed. The intently busy, white-coated, unsentimental pharmacists serve a hard-headed group of practitioners and a neighborhood of upper-class, well-educated patients. It is disconcerting, then, to see the undersurface of this sophistication, the irrational shadows beneath the science. On the front counter of the pharmacy are displayed attractive colored advertisements and pleasantly seductive inducements to self-improvement through diet cults and foods, tranquilizers, energizers, protein supplements, happiness promisers, preparations to enhance sexuality, vitamins artfully combined, and many packeted stuffs of no rational or pretended use whatsoever. “Why,” I ask the gimlet-eyed pharmacist, “do you have this large display of ‘Il Wah Genuine Chinese Ginseng, the Miraculous Herb of Life’? Doesn't it violate your university training? Your integrity as a modernist?” “Oh,” says he, “ginseng makes you feel better! You have more energy. You can do more! Lots of athletes use it, and people who work too hard and feel exhausted. It's only $3.45 a package. The prescriptions you give me once in a while yield no profit, but I sell a lot of ginseng. I use it myself!” Bemused, I walk back to my office, wondering about the easy abandonment of rationality, and pull down a box of medicinals collected the year before at an open-air pharmacy in the riverside markets of Brazil. The box gives forth deliciously rich forest smells. The packets within contain barks, roots, seeds, all of purported medical value. Other packets have amulets, charms, and protectives. The colorful labels on some of the patent medicines invoke ancient saints and healers, and promise happiness, health, prosperity and power. The essential rationale for their use in indigenous medicine was illusive to me despite many conversations with indigenous healers, and many times I have gone through the hundreds of items trying to find the key to what Brazilian and North American people fundamentally want from a pharmacy. In both cultures, where does magic stop and science begin? Do shops in both countries vend talismans in the search for the enhanced life, and fetishes against death? How much of all drug use is ritual and inchoate expectation? How can we reduce the mystification and incrementally increase the rationality of our pharmacopeia? (shrink)

Moral reasoning in bioethics -- Bioethics and moral theories -- Paternalism and patient autonomy -- Truth-telling and confidentiality -- Informed consent -- Human research -- Abortion -- Reproductive technology -- Genetic choices -- Euthanasia and physician assisted suicide -- Dividing up health care resources.

If a guilty offender is justly sentenced to be punished and an innocent volunteer agrees to be punished instead, is that any reason to leave the offender unpunished? In the context of mundane criminal justice, we mostly think not. But in a religious context, some Christians do believe in penal substitution as a theory of the atonement. However, it is not just these Christians, but most of us, who are of two minds. If the punishment is an imprisonment or death, (...) we do not believe in penal substitution. But if it’s a fine, even a big fine, we mostly do. (shrink)

This study examines how authentic leadership influences team performance via the mediating mechanism of team reflexivity. Adopting a self-regulatory perspective, we propose that authentic leadership will predict the specific team regulatory process of reflexivity, which in turn will be associated with two outcomes of team performance, effectiveness and productivity. Using survey data from 53 teams in three organizations in the United Kingdom and Greece and controlling for collective trust, we found support for our stated hypotheses with the results indicating a (...) significant fully mediated relationship. As predicted the self-regulatory behaviors inherent in the process of authentic leadership served to collectively shape team behavior, manifesting in the process of team reflexivity, which, in turn, positively predicted team performance. We conclude with a discussion of how this study extends theoretical understanding of authentic leadership in relation to teamwork and delineate several practical implications for leaders and organizations. (shrink)

Many commentators have contrasted the way that sociability is theorized in the writings of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham, emphasizing the extent to which Masham is more interested in embodied, worldly existence. I argue, by contrast, that Astell's own interest in imagining a constitutively relational individual emerges once we pay attention to her use of religious texts and tropes. To explore the relevance of Astell's Christianity, I emphasize both how Astell's Christianity shapes her view of the individual's relation to society (...) and how Masham's contrasting views can be analyzed through the lens of her charge that Astell is an “enthusiast.” In late seventeenth-century England, “enthusiasm” was a term of abuse that, commentators have recently argued, could function polemically to dismiss those deemed either excessively social or antisocial. By accusing Astell of enthusiasm, I claim, Masham seeks to marginalize the relational self that Astell imagines and to promote a more instrumental view of social ties. I suggest some aspects of Astell's thought that may have struck contemporaries as “enthusiastic” and contrast her vision of the self with Masham's more hedonistic subject. I conclude that, although each woman differently configures the relation between self and society, they share a desire to imagine autonomy within a relational framework. (shrink)

The scope of the issues -- The moral relationship between leaders and followers -- The morality of leaders : motives and deeds -- Puzzles and perils of transformational leadership.