Explicit Justifications Research Articles

‘If you pay, we'll operate immediately’

Objectives—To study the attitudes of health care staff in four postcommunist countries towards taking gifts from their clients—and their confessed experience of actually taking such gifts. Design—Survey questionnaire administered to...

White Women and the Dark Mother

One of the foremost champions of the ‘Dark Mother’ today is the overwhelmingly white feminist spirituality movement, based in the United States and Europe. Over the past twenty-five years, white spiritual feminists have approached the figure of the Dark Mother, which is borrowed from Hindu, African and Christian sources, with a uniquely fraught mix of longing, envy, hope, fear and guilt. This article first discusses the explicit justifications that white spiritual feminists offer for the incorporation of the Dark Mother into their religiosity, including their analysis of how the concepts of ‘lightness’ and ‘darkness’ are deployed and gendered in patriarchal religions. It then argues that, contrary to spiritual feminist claims, the Dark Mother as such does not exist cross-culturally but is rather the joint creation of the history of religions, Jungian psychology and spiritual feminist ingenuity, and that she is constructed and utilised primarily as a means of working through white racial guilt.

In defense of the social order: Racial thought among southern white Presbyterians in the nineteenth century

Because of the very centrality and perseverance of race in the nineteenth century, historians have often not been sensitive enough to changes within racial thought. This case study of Southern white Presbyterians ‐ based primarily on their numerous and rich published documents ‐ attempts to contribute to our increasingly complex understanding of white supremacy. Before the Civil War, the religious leaders of the Southern Presbyterian Church did not rely upon overt appeals to white supremacy to defend slavery. Instead, they cloaked their defense in scripture. Emancipation, however, challenged this defense of the social order. While the defenders of the antebellum South had turned to the Bible in support of slavery, the postbellum defenders of segregation could not rely upon significant scriptural argument to justify their new social relations. As Southern white Presbyterians began to construct a post‐emancipation defense of black subordination, explicit and overt racial justifications vied with biblical justifications as never before. This intellectual transformation helped pave the way for the rise of a new, unfettered and often violent form of racial prejudice in the late nineteenth century.

The Effect of Religious Orientation on International Relief and Development Organizations

Do variations in orientation make a difference for the programs and policies of international relief and development organizations? We analyze data on 63 American religiously based organizations and denominational agencies that provide emergency relief and long-term economic development services to people and communities in other countries. We find that differences in tradition make very little difference in the size of programs or in the actual program activities. The most significant difference between traditions is in how they publicly legitimate their activity to their constituents. For example, analysis of mission statements and program descriptions indicates that, in the explicit justifications for their activities, evangelical groups face different ideological tasks than mainline Protestant and ecumenical organizations. More subtle legitimations occur in how tasks are defined in organizational structure and budget accounting categories. Here, mainline Protestant and ecumenical groups are the most likely to draw sharp distinctions between religious church extension programs and secular relief and development activity, while evangelical organizations are more likely to blur such boundaries.

Application of fracture mechanics methods in safety analysis of piping components in subcreep and creep behavior

Application of fracture mechanics methods in safety analysis of piping components in subcreep and creep behavior

Construction of a Deductive Model by Simulation of a Traditional Archaeological Study

AbstractThis article is based on 2 observations. First, I note the quality of certain traditional archaeological studies, focusing on evaluation of results obtained and of information used. Second, I observe the incoherence of many of the constructions of "analytical" archaeologists, who sometimes naively imagine that it is possible to substitute sophisticated algorithms for analysis of the logic and archaeological meaning of problems in prehistory.The goal of this work is twofold: (1) to set up a model for analysis of traditional archaeological works that resolves the linguistic and logical difficulties encountered during extraction of the information they contain; and (2) to give an example of the way in which "description" and "calculation" may be integrated into a logical analytical scheme, so that the problem of "interpretation" (that is, of proceeding from formalisms to meaning) is resolved without reproducing the shortcomings of traditional discourse. These shortcomings include a preponderance of personal intuition, an absence of explicit justifications, and numerous incoherences.This paper is meant to be a contribution to efforts to reestablish the bases of archaeological reasoning in their historical continuity, beyond the mechanistic oppositions tending to mask the dialectic between "new" and "traditional" archaeology.The paper is translated from its original French by Claudine Farrand.