Ce volume reprend quelques-uns des articles que Joseph Pérez a publiés au cours d'une carrière consacrée à l'étude de la civilisation de l'Espagne et de l'Amérique latine. L'Espagne s'affirme comme puissance mondiale dans le dernier tiers du XVe siècle ; elle est alors confrontée à deux événements qui auront des conséquences considérables dans son évolution. D'une part, la découverte et la conquête d'un nouveau monde posent des problèmes philosophiques, politiques et moraux : de quel droit un peuple qui se (...) croit supérieur peut-il imposer sa tutelle à un peuple qu'il juge inférieur? D'autre part, l'avènement de la dynastie des Habsbourg oblige l'Espagne à intervenir - souvent à contrecœur - dans les querelles politiques et idéologiques de l'époque. Littérature et société dans l'Espagne moderne, humanisme et Renaissance, l'Amérique espagnole de la découverte à l'émancipation : autour de ces trois rubriques ont été regroupés des travaux qui cherchent à établir des jalons significatifs sur la voie qui conduit l'Espagne du Moyen Âge à l'époque contemporaine, de l'humanisme aux Lumières. (shrink)

Main Response Topics ? Introduction ? Open display and public evaluation ? Publicity versus patient privacy ? Facial tissue donation ? Validity of Louisville Instrument for Risk Acceptance ? Patients' understanding of risk ? Face versus hand transplantation ? Rejection rates/risks ? Patient compliance ? Exit strategy ? Functional recovery ? Societietal implications ? Psychological implications ? Conclusion: Uncertainty likely to persist.

A supertask is a process in which an infinite number of individuated actions are performed in a finite time. A Newtonian supertask is one that obeys Newton's laws of motion. Such supertasks can violate energy and momentum conservation and can exhibit indeterministic behavior. Perez Laraudogoitia, who proposed several Newtonian supertasks, uses a local, i.e., particle-by-particle, analysis to obtain these and other paradoxical properties of Newtonian supertasks. Alper and Bridger use a global analysis, embedding the system of particles in a Banach (...) space, to determine the origin of the strange behavior. This paper provides a common framework for the discussion of both the local and global methods of analysis. Using this single framework, the areas of disagreement and agreement are made explicit. Further examples of supertasks are proposed to illuminate various aspects of the discussion. (shrink)

A supertask is a process in which an infinite number of individuated actions are performed in a finite time. A Newtonian supertask is one that obeys Newton''s laws of motion. Such supertasks can violate energy and momentum conservation and can exhibit indeterministic behavior. Perez Laraudogoitia, who proposed several Newtonian supertasks, uses a local, i.e., particle-by-particle, analysis to obtain these and other paradoxical properties of Newtonian supertasks. Alper and Bridger use a global analysis, embedding the system of particles in a Banach (...) space, to determine the origin of the strange behavior. This paper provides a common framework for the discussion of both the local and global methods of analysis. Using this single framework, the areas of disagreement and agreement are made explicit. Further examples of supertasks are proposed to illuminate various aspects of the discussion. (shrink)

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

The supertasks described by Perez Laraudogoitia, involving the dynamics of a system containing an infinite number of particles in a bounded region of space, are characterized by the nonconservation of energy and by the spontaneous motion of particles. We argue that these features arise from the inadequacy of the local, particle-by-particle description used to analyze the supertasks. A global analysis, involving embeddings in Hilbert spaces, clarifies these supertasks and avoids what we regard as their nonphysical features.

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

This article addresses the research question: “How do Dutch highly educated Muslim women of Moroccan descent use prayer in dealing with problems?” The theoretical framework was mainly based on the work of Pargament et al. regarding religious coping. The empirical part of the study consisted of a quantitative and a qualitative part. This article presents results of the quantitative part. For the quantitative part of our research, 177 questionnaires were collected using snowball sampling. We asked respondents about their praying practices (...) and their ways of religious coping, using the Brief RCOPE. The connection and communication in their prayer with a loving, caring, benevolent God is the main religious way in which these Muslim women of Moroccan descent cope with all kinds of problems. This use of prayer as a way of coping can be clarified through the psychological functions of religiosity and prayer that are suggested by Pargament, Koenig, and Perez. Prayer could help them in: finding meaning, being master over their circumstances and controlling their emotions, finding comfort and closeness to God, experiencing intimacy with others and closeness to God, and transforming their way of life. We did find few negative religious coping strategies, such as negative feelings towards God or alienation. This is in line with research results of Abu Raiya and Pargament. As Islam implies surrender to God, it may be difficult for Muslims to admit their religious distress, doubts, and struggles. (shrink)

In four new and nine previously published essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations of economic actors. The "market failures" approach to business ethics that he develops provides the basis for a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state.

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the ...

How can we understand the world as a whole instead of separate natural and human realms? Joseph T. Rouse proposes an approach to this classic problem based on radical new conceptions of both philosophical naturalism and scientific practice.

A new approach for defining causality and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degrees of blame, and causal explanation. Causality plays a central role in the way people structure the world; we constantly seek causal explanations for our observations. But what does it even mean that an event C "actually caused" event E? The problem of defining actual causation goes beyond mere philosophical speculation. For example, in many legal arguments, it is precisely what needs to be established in order (...) to determine responsibility. The philosophy literature has been struggling with the problem of defining causality since Hume. In this book, Joseph Halpern explores actual causality, and such related notions as degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. The goal is to arrive at a definition of causality that matches our natural language usage and is helpful, for example, to a jury deciding a legal case, a programmer looking for the line of code that cause some software to fail, or an economist trying to determine whether austerity caused a subsequent depression. Halpern applies and expands an approach to causality that he and Judea Pearl developed, based on structural equations. He carefully formulates a definition of causality, and building on this, defines degree of responsibility, degree of blame, and causal explanation. He concludes by discussing how these ideas can be applied to such practical problems as accountability and program verification. Technical details are generally confined to the final section of each chapter and can be skipped by non-mathematical readers. (shrink)

In this book, Joseph Millum explains how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, what they consist in, and how parents should go about making decisions on behalf of their children. In doing so, he provides a set of frameworks to help solve pressing ethical dilemmas relating to parents and children.

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was arguably the most important English theorist to focus on the issue of political liberty during the English Enlightenment. His concept of freedom is of crucial importance to two of the major issues of his day: the right of dissenters to religious toleration, and the right of the American colonists to self-government. Priestley's writings lack a modern edition and this new collection will be the first to render accessible his Essay on First Principles, The Present State (...) of Liberty and the Letter of Advice. An introduction and notes, and guides to further reading and key figures in the text provide the student with all the material necessary for approaching Priestley. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates whether AI systems are or will be rights-holders, explaining the conditions under which people should recognize AI systems as rights-holders. It develops a skeptical stance toward the idea that current forms of artificial intelligence are holders of moral rights, beginning with an articulation of one of the most prominent and most plausible theories of moral rights: the Interest Theory of rights. On the Interest Theory, AI systems will be rights-holders only if they have interests or a well-being. (...) Current AI systems are not bearers of well-being, and so fail to meet the necessary condition for being rights-holders. This argument is robust against a range of different objections. However, the chapter also shows why difficulties in assessing whether future AI systems might have interests or be bearers of well-being—and so be rights-holders—raise difficult ethical challenges for certain developments in AI. (shrink)

This book is a state-of-the-art review on the Physics of Emergence. Foreword v Gregory J. Chaitin Preface vii Ignazio Licata Emergence and Computation at the Edge of Classical and Quantum Systems 1 Ignazio Licata Gauge Generalized Principle for Complex Systems 27 Germano Resconi Undoing Quantum Measurement: Novel Twists to the Physical Account of Time 61 Avshalom C. Elitzur and Shahar Dolev Process Physics: Quantum Theories as Models of Complexity 77 Kirsty Kitto A Cross-disciplinary Framework for the Description of Contextually Mediated (...) Change 109 Liane Gabora and Diederik Aerts Quantum-like Probabilistic Models Outside Physics 135 Andrei Khrennikov Phase Transitions in Biological Matter 165 Eliano Pessa Microcosm to Macrocosm via the Notion of a Sheaf (Observers in Terms of t-topos) 229 Goro Kato The Dissipative Quantum Model of Brain and Laboratory Observations 233 Walter J. Freeman and Giuseppe Vitiello Supersymmetric Methods in the Traveling Variable: Inside Neurons and at the Brain Scale 253 H.C. Rosu, O. Cornejo-Perez, and J.E. Perez-Terrazas Turing Systems: A General Model for Complex Patterns in Nature 267 R.A. Barrio Primordial Evolution in the Finitary Process Soup 297 Olof Gornerup and James P. Crutchfield Emergence of Universe from a Quantum Network 313 Paola A. Zizzi Occam's Razor Revisited: Simplicity vs. Complexity in Biology 327 Joseph P. Zbilut Order in the Nothing: Autopoiesis and the Organizational Characterization of the Living 339 Leonardo Bich and Luisa Damiano Anticipation in Biological and Cognitive Systems: The Need for a Physical Theory of Biological Organization 371 Graziano Terenzi How Uncertain is Uncertainty? 389 Tibor Vamos Archetypes, Causal Description and Creativity in Natural World 405 Leonardo Chiatti . (shrink)

Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in the early 1990s, consciousness studies today are a continuation of research that started in the late 19th century and that continued throughout the 20th century. From the beginning, the effort built on studies of animals to reveal basic principles of brain organization and function, and of human patients to gain clues about consciousness itself. Particularly important and our (...) focus here is research in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s involving three groups of patients—amnesia, split brain, and blindsight. Across all three groups, a similar pattern of results was found—the patients could respond appropriately to stimuli that they denied seeing (or in the case of amnesiacs, having seen before). These studies paved the way for the current wave of research on consciousness. The field is, in fact, still grappling with the implications of the findings showing that the ability to consciously know and report the identity of a visual stimulus can be dissociated in the brain from the mechanisms that underlie the ability to behave in a meaningful way to the same stimulus. (shrink)

Le cours de Schelling sur le Monotheisme, discretement polemique ( a l'egard de Schleiermacher et surtout de Hegel), enseigne a Munich a partir de 1828, forme dans l'edition posthume le porche de la Philosophie de la mythologie. Cette situation due a l'editeur n'est pourtant pas pleinement satisfaisante. Car alors le Monotheisme fait double emploi avec l'Introduction historico-critique a la Mythologie, avec laquelle il a sans doute alterne selon les semestres. Or l'elaboration parallele de l'expose de l'empirisme philosophique (Darstellung) et, plus (...) tardive, de la Philosophie rationnelle a retenti dans l'intervalle sur la signification du Monotheisme. La distinction de plus en plus accusee d'un negatif rationnel et d'un positif historique englobe desormais celle de la Mythologie ou du paganisme et de la Revelation ou du christianisme. A la philosophie negative revient la dignite de philosophie premiere. La mythologie, des lors coloree negativement, projette ses effigies de neant, mais comme des prefigurations de l'avenir. La refonte successive des seules versions de l'Introduction a la Revelation confere au cours sur le Monotheisme une certaine autonomie. Dans la ligne ideale d'un developpement synchronise, le Monotheisme occupe, bien que relativement en porte-a-faux, l'emplacement charniere, le point delicat d'amorcage de la philosophie historique, documentee. La presentation du Monotheisme comme theogonie transcendantale et theorie des principes ou puissances est en outre le plus simple et le plus clair de tous les textes de Schelling traitant du probleme de la transition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The main cause of the crisis was the behavior of the banks—largely a result of misguided incentives unrestrained by good regulation. Conservative ideology, along with unrealistic economic models of perfect information, perfect competition, and perfect markets, fostered lax regulation, and campaign contributions helped the political process along. The banks misjudged risk, wildly overleveraged, and paid their executives handsomely for being short‐sighted; lax regulation let them get away with it—putting at risk the entire economy. The mortgage brokers neglected due diligence, (...) since they would not bear the risk of default once their mortgages had been securitized and sold to others. Others can be blamed: the ratings agencies that judged subprime securities as investment grade; the Fed, which contributed low interest rates; the Bush administration, whose Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich made low interest rates necessary. But low interest rates can be a boon; it was the financial institutions that turned them into a bust. (shrink)

I am a person. But am I fundamentally and essentially a person? The animalist says no. So must the phenomenal continuity theorist, or so I will argue. Even if, contra animalism, we cannot survive zombification, being a subject of experience is not sufficient for being a person, and phenomenal continuity is not sufficient for our survival as the same person over time. These observations point the way to a positive account of personhood, and provide further insight into the conditions under (...) which literal survival preserves what matters. (shrink)

Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. (...) By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. (shrink)

In diesem Band werden Beiträge gesammelt, die sich nicht nur auf rein formal logische Aspekte, sondern auch auf Probleme beziehen, die mit der Erkenntnistheorie, der Naturphilosophie und der Dialektik in Verbindung stehen. Iván de los Ríos Gutiérrez stellt die Aristotelische Kontingenzlehre dar. Miguel García-Valdecasas erörtert die wissenschaftstheoretischen Fundamente der Aristotelischen Nous-Lehre. Joseph Li Vecchi entwickelt ein formales Modell für Inferenzen, die auf der Grundlage von analogischen Verhältnissen basieren. Niels Öffenberger charakterisiert die abgeleiteten Wahrheitswerte, die sich durch die Dichotomie der (...) schlichten Wahrheit und der schlichten Falschheit ergeben. Paloma Pérez-Ilzarbe und María Cerezo verteidigen durch eine Interpretation der Struktur der Assertion die Gültigkeit des Bivalenz prinzips im Rahmen der Aristotelischen Wahrheitstheorie. Gabriela Rossi präsentiert eine systematische Darstellung der Rolle der lysis als Instrument der Aristotelischen Dialektik. Mirko Skarica untersucht die zeitgenössische Rezeption der Aristotelischen Auffassung des einfachen prädikativen Satzes bei Vertretern sowohl der analytischen als auch der phänomenologischen Tradition. Alejandro G. Vigo charakterisiert das Aristotelische Modell der Kausalerklärung in der Naturphilosophie in Verbindung mit dem Begriff eines sog. Hintergrundsholismus. (shrink)

Since the introduction of the concept of brain death by the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death in 1968, the validity of this concept has been challenged by medical scientists, as well as by legal, philosophical, and religious scholars. In light of increased criticism of the concept of brain death, Stephen Napier, a staff ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, set out to prove that the whole-brain death criterion serves as (...) good evidence for death in the Catholic bioethical framework, on the grounds that when whole-brain death has occurred the soul has already departed from the body. Opponents have argued that (1) brain death does not disrupt the somatic integrative unity and coordinated biological functioning of a living organism and (2) clinical tests outlined in the practice guidelines for determining brain death lack sufficient power to exclude persisting function and fail to detect elements of the brain that, although currently functionless, may retain potential for recovery under conditions of optimal medical care. It is therefore possible that heart-beating organ procurement from patients with impaired consciousness is de facto a concealed practice of active euthanasia and physician-assisted death, both of which, either concealed or overt, the Catholic Church opposes. (shrink)

The English polymath Joseph Priestley wrote on a wide range of scientific, theological and pedagogical subjects. After the appearance of his influential Rudiments of English Grammar and A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar, both of which are reissued in this series, Priestley produced in 1765 his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education, which is included and expanded on in this 1778 publication. Here he explains the reasons behind his decision to guide the (...) curriculum at Warrington Academy towards a greater focus on subjects with a more direct application to 'civil and active life'. He offers more general instruction on the cultivation of young men in various spheres, notably through foreign travel and developing 'knowledge of the world'. Priestley ends by outlining a suggested course of lectures on the history and laws of England. (shrink)

In this paper I will put forward a simple case of a dynamical system which can exhibit both the indeterminism linked to escape to infinity and that linked to self-excitation. The case depends neither on the gravitational interaction between particles nor on their mutual collisions, and thus reveals the existence of a new kind of constraint that Newton's laws lay on the predictive power of classical dynamics.

In this short note I argue that, using the type of configurations put forward in a recent paper by Laraudogoitia in this same journal, new paradoxes of infinity of a completely different nature can be formulated.

Joseph Heath1 The Pareto principle states that if a proposed change in the condition of society makes at least one person better off, and does not make anyone else worse off, then that change should be regarded as an improvement. This principle forms the conceptual core of modern welfare economics, and exercises enormous influence in contemporary discussions of justice and equality. It does, however, have an Achilles’ heel. When an individual experiences envy, it means that improvements in the condition (...) of others may worsen the condition of that individual. As a result, envy has the potential to block a vast range of changes that we might intuitively be inclined to regard as Pareto improvements. (Or more precisely, envy results in too many states getting classified as Pareto-optimal, not because, intuitively, they cannot be improved upon, but because no one’s condition can be improved upon without making someone else envious.) For example, a market exchange between two people might not wind up being classified as a Pareto improvement if the benefits produced for the two parties generated envy in some otherwise uninvolved third. (shrink)

This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Holding others responsible for their omissions requires us to bridge an epistemic gap that does not arise when (...) holding others responsible for their actions—one that we might often fail to cross. (shrink)

When is it rational to undergo cognitive enhancement? In the case of what I’ll call massive cognitive enhancement, my answer is never. The reason is that one must base one’s decision to undergo massive cognitive enhancement on what I’ll call either phenomenal or non-phenomenal outcomes. If the former, the choice is not rational because massive cognitive enhancements are transformative and, I’ll argue with Paul (2015), transformative experiences cannot be chosen rationally. If the latter, the choice is not rational because it (...) ought to be based at least partly on phenomenal outcomes. This argument, however, leaves open the idea that it may nonetheless be rational to choose massive cognitive enhancement for others—for example, one’s children. The article explores this possibility, arguing that choosing enhancement for others can be rational or moral, but not both. (shrink)

Most philosophical defences of the state’s right to exclude immigrants derive their strength from the normative importance of self-determination. If nation-states are taken to be the political institutions of a people, then the state’s right to exclude is the people’s right to exclude – and a denial of this right constitutes an abridgement of self-determination. In this paper, I argue that this view of self-determination does not cohere with a group-agency view of nation-states. On the group-agency view that I defend, (...) a nation-state is the kind of group-agent that does not supervene on the intentionality of member/citizens. If we think that a nation-state is an intentional group-agent in its own right, then we should think that self-determination resides with the institutions of the state rather than with the citizens. If nation-states do not supervene on the intentionality of citizens, then it is unclear why citizens might have the right to control membership in the state as a feature of self-determination. (shrink)

I endorse five central themes of Charlotte Witt's Social Goodness: the pervasiveness and irreducibility of social roles and norms; normative externalism; the artisanal model; a richer social ontology; and the possible critical transformation of social norms from within. I reframe these themes within the biological account of the evolution and development of human ways of life in Joseph Rouse's Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. Witt's social analysis attends to human bodies as loci of artisanal skills and social salience (...) as gendered, sexed, and raced, but not to bodies as vulnerable, dependent organisms in social environments. A broader, biological conception of normativity shifts from Witt's focus on social roles and norms to the dynamics of social practices as shaping people's developmental environments. This more complex account of social dynamics enriches Witt's conservative account of how practices are transmitted and sustained. It thereby surpasses limitations in her account of how hierarchical social norms can be both obligating and open to critical challenge from within. It does so in three ways: by emphasizing normative conflicts within practices, by shifting from individual know-how to discursive practices as loci of artisanal authority, and by an account of power relations as intertwined with biosocial normativity. (shrink)

Sobb, Joseph Today's Gospel extract from the Sermon on the Mount, has two different though related themes. The second especially is reflected in the first reading. The first theme may be heard as a succinct, indeed stark, summary of much of Jesus' teaching. The way of living to which Jesus invites his disciples calls for an integrity, an undivided heart which, of course, reflects his own relationship with his Father. So Paul can boldly proclaim in his second letter to (...) the Corinthians that his own word is like Christ's, not a 'yes' and 'no', but always a whole-hearted 'yes.' In minor matters and significant ones, we can find ourselves pulled in many directions, with demands and expectations and options that may threaten to overwhelm us. Jesus invites us to a clear sightedness that will recognise what or who is the centre of our lives. Later in Matthew's Gospel, this question is echoed when Jesus says we have only one Teacher, one Father, one Master. In todays's second reading, Paul alludes to his ministry as Christ's 'servant,' though in a different context. The second theme of the Gospel extract follows on as the consequence of the Christian commitment to serve God without reserve. Jesus' challenging words conclude with the call to action, 'Seek first.' In this context, Isaiah's oracle may be heard as a startling word of encouragement and hope. This oracle has been preceded by a series of joyful and reassuring oracles to the servant of the Lord and to the dispirited people of Israel. It concludes with God's heartening affirmation that Israel is 'carved on the palms of my hands.' With the best of intentions, though unfortunately unhelpfully sometimes, you will hear the platitude, 'Try not to worry.' It is important to acknowledge that worry is not necessarily a bad thing, for we can be worried, that is concerned, about a situation or a person, and with good reason. In the former English text of the Mass, the so-called embolism following upon the Lord's prayer said 'Protect us from all anxiety.' This, surely, is the meaning of Jesus' exhortation, repeated five times, 'do not worry.' Anxiety can involve an element of fearfulness or lack of trust. There are many images of God in the Scriptures. Isaiah's oracles offer images of God that are a response to fearfulness and a reason for trust. They portray Israel's God in terms of the divine presence and action in Israel's story, a God who saves, who has compassion, who liberates, and who never will forget Israel. Jesus reiterates this image of God, 'your heavenly Father,' and chooses to illustrate it in attractively concrete and personal ways: life and food and clothing. The disciples are called to trust in God who knows their needs. Thus his call is really 'do not anxious,' for God's love can be trusted. But Jesus does not stop there. The word, righteousness, appears in Matthew's gospel seven times, five times in the Sermon on the Mount; never in Mark and once in Luke. At his baptism, Jesus acts to 'fulfil all righteousness;' he warns against a righteousness which is self-regarding. So the christian disciple's focus is outward not inward. To 'serve God' is to be active in the 'cause of righteousness.' In the Old Testament Scriptures, righteousness is ascribed to God in the first place, and then to God's People who are to reflect this God in their lives and action. Jesus, God's servant, continues this tradition, and calls his followers to do likewise. 'May your Kingdom come' is more than a petition; it is a call to action. (shrink)