The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has declared that to achieve accredited status, “engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility.” Many engineering professors struggle to integrate this required ethics instruction in technical classes and projects because of the lack of a formalized ethics-in-design approach. However, one methodology developed in human-computer interaction research, the Value-Sensitive Design approach, can serve as an engineering education tool which bridges the gap between design and ethics (...) for many engineering disciplines. The three major components of Value-Sensitive Design, conceptual, technical, and empirical, exemplified through a case study which focuses on the development of a command and control supervisory interface for a military cruise missile. (shrink)

This article examines arguments concerning the right of an unwed biological father to consent to the adoption of his offspring, and to take custody of the child even against the mother's wishes. The understanding of gender-neutrality that supposedly supports many such arguments is false, and risks diminishing women's decision-making authority under the guise of sex equality. Laws governing unwed parent's rights must emphasize the centrality of parental responsibility in establishing parental rights.

Gautier, Mary L It is exciting to be witness to the twenty-first century in American Catholicism. Much has changed over the course of the twentieth century and I will discuss some key trends in American Catholicism that likely will be shaping American parishes in the twenty-first. In particular, changes in Catholic population during the twentieth century have influenced the number of American parishes, their location, and their size, as well as the composition of parishioners and of the leaders who (...) staff those parishes. Other changes in American Catholic attitudes and behaviours have influenced parish life in the twenty-first century, affecting parish participation, sacramental practice, and attachment to the faith. At the same time, the aspects of the faith that people find attractive and the markers that people say are essential to their Catholic identity remain virtually unchanged as we head into the twenty-first century. How do we keep Catholic identity strong, engage new generations in parish life, and grow vital parishes in the twenty-first century? Those are the challenges we will explore. In this article, I will discuss three of the primary challenges to parish life that we hear about on a near daily basis from media calls: Why are parishes closing? Why are there so many former Catholics? Will Millennial Catholics keep the faith? (shrink)

I very highly recommend Fundamentals of Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy by Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, particularly with an eye toward the interdisciplinary foci of graduate programs that deal with critical thinking in globalized contexts. My enthusiasm for this book’s accomplishments are based on the intelligibility and clarity of the authors’ arguments, from which I refreshed my familiarity with theories of language and was able to learn recent developments and apply fundamental questions of translation, interpretation, and comparison that they (...) explored vividly in exemplary case studies. The success with which the authors lay out the fundamental issues of comparative philosophy, including the histories... (shrink)

It is with sincere appreciation that I commend this edited collection to readers of the AJTP. The collection meets the task of promoting lively discussion that addresses the interface between theology and philosophy, especially as shaped by empiricist, naturalist, process, and pragmatist traditions. As the most recent volume in the series Toward Ecological Civilization, it delivers papers from the Tenth International Whitehead Conference and Ninth International Forum on Ecological Civilization, held in Claremont, California, June 2015, thereby delivering on a second (...) focus for the AJTP: the development of liberal religious thought in America.The authors gathered in this collection take seriously the earnest and... (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject (...) to ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures—the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is “duly punished”—by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the (...) maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained “unrepresentable” in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence, this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist. (shrink)

Aquinas's teachings on usury are difficult to apply directly to the modern economy given the tremendous transformations in economic institutions and sensibilities since his day. However, his treatment of the relationship between the abstraction of money and the problem of disordered concupiscent desire proves to be helpful in understanding modern financial instability. Money invites a disordered understanding of the infinite good that is the object of human desire, channeling that desire into the fruitless quest for indefinite accumulation, which is both (...) destabilizing to the economic system and ultimately frustrates the pursuit of real goods. Aquinas's thought offers clarity about the proper role of economic goods in a life well lived that is necessary for thinking about the role finance should play in a humane economy. (shrink)

The asshole remains the one shameful part of the bourgeois body.... The anus is the private part par excellence of the bourgeois body.... It has no place in socially admissible desire.... The use of the asshole is the touchstone of the conflict between the private and the public. Guy Hocquenghem.

The narrative of the Fourth Gospel shows the tranference of the meaning of Israel's temple as the dwelling place of God. The temple shifts in meaning from a building to the person of Jesus and then to the community of believers.

Although very young children have unprecedented access to touchscreen devices, there is limited research on how successfully they operate these devices for play and learning. For infants and toddlers, whose cognitive, fine motor, and executive functions are immature, several basic questions are significant: Can they operate a tablet purposefully to achieve a goal? Can they acquire operating skills and learn new information from commercially available apps? Do individual differences in executive functioning predict success in using and learning from the apps? (...) Accordingly, 31 2-year-olds were compared with 29 3-year-olds using two commercially available apps with different task and skill requirements: a shape matching app performed across 3 days, and a storybook app with performance compared to that on a matched paper storybook. Children also completed the Minnesota Executive Functioning Scale. An adult provided minimal scaffolding throughout. The results showed: toddlers could provide simple goal-directed touch gestures and the manual interactions needed to operate the tablet after controlling for prior experience with shape matching, toddlers’ increased success and efficiency, made fewer errors, decreased completion times, and required less scaffolding across trials, they recognized more story content from the e-book and were less distracted than from the paper book, executive functioning contributed unique variance to the outcome measures on both apps, and 3-year-olds outperformed 2-year-olds on all measures. The results are discussed in terms of the potential of interactive devices to support toddlers’ learning. (shrink)