Great Questions Research Articles

La biojurídica o el bioderecho como mediador de los nuevos dilemas biomédicos

The advance of bioethics as a science has exceeded the ethical scenario to fully immerse oneself in other environments of knowledge, essentially in the sphere of the legal, as it is, the bio-legal and towards a new protagonist of an emerging science such as the biolaw. There are dilemmas or bioethical premises from which generate the great juridical questions, around the legal sciences, which must be adjusted to the social reality generated by the great biotechnological advances, in order to regulate the behavior generated by human behavior. The objective of the research is to analyze the role of bioethics in the development of biolaw or biolaw as a mediator of new biomedical dilemmas. The methodology used is a bibliographic documentary research which focuses on the positions of some authors such as Aparisi (2007) and Schaefer (2017), among others. A documentary review was made from a critical stance of the literary sources selected and used for the development of the research, this with the purpose of identifying the different conceptions that biotechnological advances have had on human behavior and its need to be regulated by law. It is concluded that the relationship between bioethics and law has been very useful, at the time of responding to the theme of the debate on the great bioethical dilemmas, which results in the emergence of a novel legal branch such as bio-legal or biolaw.

The Struggle to Love: Pedagogical Eros and the Gift of Transformation

Why does anyone become a teacher, and why a student? Education in its contemporary form has evolved into a subsystem of society in which professional ‘teachers/ educators’ are confronted with an ever-changing group of people called ‘pupils/students’; and the individuals in both groups now have to deal with this institutionalised confrontation. Neither one nor the other decision—to become a teacher or to become a student—seems to have much to do with a specific other person, and it certainly does not have much to do with the actual person(s) that one is related to by becoming a teacher or by becoming a student in a specific institution. However, if pedagogical relations were as depersonalised as suggested, why is it that teachers as well as students hold very different relations to different students and teachers—relations that are more or less ‘deep’, ‘affectionate’, ‘successful’? And how are we to perceive education outside of formally institutionalised contexts (or those special relations that occur even within formalised contexts but transcend them)? Is there another type of pedagogical relationship? And what would be the reasons for entering into a pedagogical relationship other than becoming and being made a part of a subsystem of society? Why do two people gravitate towards each other, freely recognising each other as teacher and student? Attempting to answer those questions, the following paper revisits some historic positions, being conscious that those answers are also part of the answer to a much greater question: What is education?.

Thomas Henry Groom’s Vision of Christian Religious Education

The purpose of this study is to explore Thomas Henry Groome's vision of Christian religious education, which leads to ‘inform, form, and transform' Christians and Christian community in the direction of the Kingdom of God. Most scholars usually examine their discipline and reflect upon Christian education to ask and answer critical questions for the past, present, and the future. In this sense, we can call the Christian religious education (hereafter, CRE) of Thomas H. Groome (1945-present), a leading Roman Catholic educator, a good example of such a study. Groome's work, an accomplished formative and informative model of CRE, tries to show that we Christian educators need to recognize and attend to six foundational questions consciously and critically ㅡ what, why, where, how, when, and who ㅡ to shape and transform our practices. Groome's intention is not that all of us as Christian religious educators need to use his shared praxis approach to CRE; rather, he stresses that we should be aware of and consciously attend to the six great questions in CRE. These questions should be answered by each generation. Groome proposes a CRE toward education for the Kingdom of God by wresting with viewpoints of a wide variety of theologians and religious educators ㅡ from those of ancient Greek thinkers to the more recent Jean Piaget. In what follows, I will first attempt to explain the main features of Groome's CRE with reference to the six major questions, which represent the nature of, the purpose of, the context of, an approach to, the readiness for, and the copartners in CRE. Second, I will explore his approach to CRE and/or to educating for Christians and Christian community from a practical theological perspective. Third, I will offer the contributions of his model of CRE, which challenges us to rethink and strengthen Christian education or the educational ministry, along with critical review. Finally, I will conclude by stating what Groome's CRE means to us in our time.

Enhancement of Cardiac Store Operated Calcium Entry (SOCE) within Novel Intercalated Disk Microdomains in Arrhythmic Disease

Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE), a major Ca2+ signaling mechanism in non-myocyte cells, has recently emerged as a component of Ca2+ signaling in cardiac myocytes. Though it has been reported to play a role in cardiac arrhythmias and to be upregulated in cardiac disease, little is known about the fundamental properties of cardiac SOCE, its structural underpinnings or effector targets. An even greater question is how SOCE interacts with canonical excitation-contraction coupling (ECC). We undertook a multiscale structural and functional investigation of SOCE in cardiac myocytes from healthy mice (wild type; WT) and from a genetic murine model of arrhythmic disease (catecholaminergic ventricular tachycardia; CPVT). Here we provide the first demonstration of local, transient Ca2+entry (LoCE) events, which comprise cardiac SOCE. Although infrequent in WT myocytes, LoCEs occurred with greater frequency and amplitude in CPVT myocytes. CPVT myocytes also evidenced characteristic arrhythmogenic spontaneous Ca2+ waves under cholinergic stress, which were effectively prevented by SOCE inhibition. In a surprising finding, we report that both LoCEs and their underlying protein machinery are concentrated at the intercalated disk (ID). Therefore, localization of cardiac SOCE in the ID compartment has important implications for SOCE-mediated signaling, arrhythmogenesis and intercellular mechanical and electrical coupling in health and disease.

Le proche et le lointain dans l’univers imaginaire de Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen’s works reflect the great questions that he never ceased to ponder, be they personal and psychological or religious and metaphysical : love and separation, death and immortality, this world and the hereafter… To address these issues, he generally uses pairs of either spatial or temporal opposites, in an effort to give concrete form to the images that haunt his imagination. In focusing on the metaphors of far and near that Andersen uses, this study covers not only his famous Fairy Tales and Stories, but all his works – his novels, poems, travel writings, correspondance and Diaries. Through this specific example, it allows the reader to trace some of the characteristic meanderings of his thought and his imaginary world.

Evidencias arqueológicas del uso del barro como materia prima en la arquitectura argentina del periodo colonial temprano

La fundación de ciudades en el norte y oeste de la República Argentina durante el primer siglo de conquista ibérica fue un complejo proceso de prueba, error y articulación de recursos y técnicas diversos. Las materias primas y sistemas constructivos utilizados en la arquitectura de tales ciudades continúa siendo uno de los grandes interrogantes de la arqueología colonial, dado que la mala conservación del registro construido limitó su análisis y desplazó el interés de los arqueólogos hacia otras evidencias, más abundantes y disponibles. Un relevamiento sistemático de escritos de individuos que transitaron por la región durante el siglo XVI permitió detectar un acotado pero interesante conjunto de menciones referidas al uso de barro en la construcción de estructuras, dato que resultó consistente con lo observado en el terreno en intervenciones arqueológicas realizadas en las áreas fundacionales de algunas de estas ciudades. Dicho resultado abre la puerta a una caracterización más detallada de la arquitectura temprana de la región, hoy completamente desaparecida.

Environmental effects of GATT/WTO membership: an empirical evaluation

ABSTRACTOne of the great questions for scholars of international relations and economics concerns the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the natural environment. Does membership in the multilateral trade regime constrain environmental regulation and increase the environmental burden of national economies? Do countries pay a heavy environmental price for trade liberalization? Although this question has been debated extensively, there is little statistical evidence to contribute the debate. We provide a comprehensive statistical analysis of the environmental effects of joining the multilateral trade regime. We collected data on a variety of environmental policies, institutions, and outcomes that should be influenced by the General Agreementon Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO membership if the predictions of environmental pessimists or optimists are valid. A wide range of statistical models designed to identify the causal effect of the GATT/WTO on the environmental indicators shows that joining the GATT/WTO does not have negative effects on environmental quality.

Evidencias arqueológicas del uso del barro como materia prima en la arquitectura argentina del periodo colonial temprano

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">La fundación de ciudades en el norte y oeste de la República Argentina durante el primer siglo de conquista ibérica fue un complejo proceso de prueba, error y articulación de recursos y técnicas diversos. Las materias primas y sistemas constructivos utilizados en la arquitectura de tales ciudades continúa siendo uno de los grandes interrogantes de la arqueología colonial, dado que la mala conservación del registro construido limitó su análisis y desplazó el interés de los arqueólogos hacia otras evidencias, más abundantes y disponibles.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="p2">Un relevamiento sistemático de escritos de individuos que transitaron por la región durante el siglo XVI permitió detectar un acotado pero interesante conjunto de menciones referidas al uso de barro en la construcción de estructuras, dato que resultó consistente con lo observado en el terreno en intervenciones arqueológicas realizadas en las áreas fundacionales de algunas de estas ciudades. Dicho resultado abre la puerta a una caracterización más detallada de la arquitectura temprana de la región, hoy completamente desaparecida.</p>

Theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation induced functional connectivity changes between dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and default-mode-network.

Functional connectivity (FC) is fundamental to brain function and has been implicated in many neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric disorders. It is then of great scientific and clinical interest to find a non-invasive approach to modulate FC. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive neuromodulational tool that can affect the target region and remote brain areas. While the distributed effects of TMS are postulated to be through either structural or functional connectivity, an understudied but of great scientific interest question is whether TMS can change the FC between these regions. The purpose of this study was to address this question in normal healthy brain using TMS with continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) pulses, which are known to have long-lasting inhibition function. FC was calculated from resting state fMRI before and after real and control (SHAM) stimulation. Compared to SHAM, the repetitive TMS (rTMS) reduces FC between the cTBS target: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) and brain regions within the default mode network (DMN), proving the effects of rTMS on FC. The reduction of FC might be the results of the inhibitory effects of cTBS rTMS.

The great medical questions—and beyond: A medical-humanities curriculum

Abstract from the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Medical Humanities in the Middle East; 2018 Nov 17-18: Doha, Qatar.

On the Idea of a National Church: Reassessing Congregationalism in Revolutionary England

In 1641, the Congregational minister Thomas Goodwin delivered a series of sermons to his independent church in London, expounding the letter to the Ephesians in characteristically meticulous detail. Goodwin had recently returned to England after a brief but formative period of religious exile in the Netherlands, and as the Sundays passed, his auditors were surely moved by the oratory of a speaker so “blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment.” The minister's breadth was equally impressive. The sermons opened up a cornucopia of Christian themes, flowing from one topic to the next as Goodwin's capacious mind found stimulus in the scriptural text. Seemingly eager to follow every possible digression, application, and excursus, Goodwin's unhurried pace required thirty-six sermons simply to exhaust the epistle's first chapter. And yet, amid this abundance of subject matter, one issue in particular arrested Goodwin's attention. While delivering his thirty-fifth discourse on Ephesians, Goodwin paused to consider what he described as “the Great question of these times” and, alternatively, “the great Controversy of the times.” By the middle of 1641, Goodwin's world was experiencing an unprecedented upheaval—England had been invaded by Scottish covenanters, the archbishop of Canterbury had been arrested and imprisoned, and the king had been forced to call a parliament he would be unable to dissolve. Yet Goodwin's “great Controversy” turned not upon political or cultural convulsion but rather upon a seemingly obscure point of ecclesiastical polity, a question not often considered by modern historians and even less often fully appreciated: “the great Question of these times,” said Goodwin, was “whether yea or no . . . many congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” What did this strangely worded question mean to Goodwin and his hearers, and why did the future president of Magdalen College and religious adviser to the Lord Protector deem this rather specific query the very hinge upon which the nation's future turned? To answer these questions, we must consider how the early modern English mind understood the idea of a “national church”—for though he does not explicitly invoke the term, it was, as we will see, a concept embedded at the very center of Goodwin's “great Controversy.”

Motivation for environmental volunteering - A comparison between Austria and Great Britain

Environmental volunteering engages people on an environmental, social, and personal level, whilst providing a valuable contribution to nature conservation. It is of high importance for many organisations worldwide. However, it is unclear whether the engagement is based on the same motivational factors. This study investigates cultural differences in environmental volunteering between Austria and Great Britain and questions whether different social frameworks are reflected in the respective voluntary involvement. Beside socio-demographics and the study focuses mainly on eight main motivation factors identified in previous research. Empirical and quantitative data was collected via a standardised online questionnaire from a total of 473 environmental volunteers, 255 from Austria and 248 from Great Britain. The survey results revealed significant differences between the two countries including the education, the start of the activity and the duration of volunteering. The respondents in Great Britain are strongly motivated by career opportunities and the learning experience, while the Austrian respondents are mainly attracted by value and esteem. The discussion shows that according to the literature, these differences are likely to be determined by different cultural values in the respective countries. Management implicationsVolunteers contribute worldwide to achieve nature conservation goals. Beside the key motivation “to help the environment”, “environmental values and esteem”, in addition motives around the learning experience (positive effects for the career, new skills and environmental knowledge) and the social experience may significantly influence the attractiveness of voluntary work. Managers working with volunteers should address these motives when designing projects, developing organizational structures and when advertising positions. However, when analysing and promoting volunteering in different cultural settings the relevance of these motivational factors may differ and should be considered.

Determining the Speed of Sound as a Function of Temperature Using Arduino

When sound waves are taught at the secondary level, the speed of propagation of sound is one of the most important characteristics to be analyzed. However, it is very common in textbooks that the value of sound speed in air is considered constant regardless of the experimental conditions. The great question is that since sound is a mechanical wave, its speed is influenced by the medium of propagation and also by the temperature. In most cases, the techniques reported for that goal usually make use of expensive equipment and techniques that may not be affordable and/or easy to implement in schools, which is an experimental limitation for the teachers to show this influence on their students. In this work, we present a low-cost experimental apparatus, controlled by the open source electronic platform Arduino®, with which it is possible to determine the speed of propagation of sound as a function of the temperature for a short measuring region, thus enabling the students to verify experimentally this important feature of sound waves.

Marital crises and companion animals: an approach in legal practice

The object of the present work is to describe the elements that the lawyers must take into account when dealing with cases of marital crises and the role of companion animals in these. The progressive transformation of the family model has led to the appearance of new situations that are not legally regulated, one of which is how to proceed in cases of separation and divorce in which the spouses have shared pets. The lawyer's role in cases of marital crisis is one of the great questions of the practice of law today. Without developing a stricto sensu parenting plan, which is reserved exclusively for the treatment of the children of the marriage, these situations require a language similar to that used to regulate guardianship and custody relationships. However, it is undeniable that these situations require detailed attention, having to avoid problems and future contingencies that could affect the welfare of the spouses and animals.

A Conversation with Lisa Brooks about Our Beloved Kin

A Conversation with Lisa Brooks about Our Beloved Kin Matt Cohen MATT COHEN: Thank you very much for being willing to do this. I'm going to just appreciate for a moment, because this is a beautiful and disturbing book that obviously took a lot of heart, energy, persistence, patience, and time to write. But it's also a personal joy for me to talk with you because, like so many other people, I have learned so much from your work, and from your way of being in this profession, if I can put it that way. I'm grateful to you. Your first book, The Common Pot, was hugely provocative for lots of us in its gesture of simultaneously recovering the centrality of writing and literacy to Indigenous resistance in the Northeast and modeling a new approach to literary history. Our Beloved Kin, I feel, continues its strong thread of regarding, paying respect to, and telling stories about the landscape of the Northeast. It alters the metaphorical landscape of our imaginative and, I think a lot of people would say, sacred connection to the past. Now, this new book is, on the one hand, a new history of King Philip's War: it uncovers new information about the motives of the settlers; the motives of Natives and Native communities leading up to the war; new understandings of the action, the scope, the impact, the duration of the war. It also offers an unprecedented picture of Indigenous experience of the war. I mean unprecedented in the sense of scope, but also its willingness to follow people down difficult and what seem like contradictory paths. LISA BROOKS: That's such a great way of putting it. You're describing a lot of my experience while writing it. MC: There's also an underlying argument about how the historiography of the war from the 1670s until now has itself been colonialist, with a few important exceptions. This is even the case when the historian has every intention of doing justice to Native people, then and now, affected by the conflict. But it still happens, and it has something to do with the storytelling. The other thing I find amazing is that the book—because it takes its stance as an act of remembering and of decolonizing a major story about American history—is itself a diplomatic event. [End Page 157] LB: That is so true. MC: So maybe I should start by asking, what are, at the broadest level, the revisions of the war or of the telling of the war you wanted readers to come away with or to confront? And then, how did this other way of telling and this other kind of gesture of the book as linking people today come together? LB: That's a great question, and a big question, and it's amazing to hear you talk about it in this way, because I feel like at this point, even though I'm a short remove from the writing process, I had a similar experience of being taught by it. I was learning from the process of researching and writing it and teaching various aspects of that and not just seeing things through my own lenses, but also so many other people's lenses through that process; I learned so much from it. And it's like it has its own life, really. So I think the questions that you're asking speak to the process, as well as the final product that it became. I've said this at several talks already: I didn't set out to write a book on King Philip's War. That wasn't my goal. And it's not actually a goal I would recommend to anybody, right? [Laughs.] It's not something I would say: "Hey, you know what you really need to do is write a book about King Philip's War." It's been written about so much, but also it's a traumatic violence to live with for a number of years, even if going back through the history is nothing compared to what it was like for the people who lived through it. So...

What's in a Name?

What's in a Name? Margaret Ellen Newell (bio) William S. Kiser. Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 266 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. Andrés Reséndez. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. 448 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, index. $30.00. At a recent roundtable on Indian slavery at the Myaamia Center at Miami University, borderlands historian Andrew Offenburger posed two great questions: Is slavery the appropriate "container" for the variety of labor arrangements and captivities that indigenous people experienced? And why are scholars of Native American history suddenly using the term? Certainly, Indian slavery is having a moment. A slew of award-winning works have discussed Indian slavery's scale and effects across the western hemisphere. But is slavery too blunt an instrument for analyzing the Native American experience? An institution that has existed in many eras and places, slavery would seem a capacious container. Still, in the Americas slavery remains closely associated with European colonization, with victims of African descent, with plantations, and with the racialized, heritable, chattel form that emerged between 1650 and 1750. This definition would appear to leave little room for pre- and post-contact indigenous practices, the non-economic aspects of captivity, and the nuances of peonage. Another nomenclature controversy involves the use of terms like "human trafficking" in talking about the past. This issue has popped up at panels on slavery and has invited passionate "yeas" as well as naysayers who fear teleology. In Brazil, Sudan, Thailand, Syria, and the United States, to name a few, women and children are trafficked for sex, unpaid workers are held against their will, and regimes justify the enslavement of ethnic and religious minorities. Does establishing a link with the present help or hinder our understanding of the unique historical circumstances that produced eighteenth-and nineteenth-century slavery? Should our stories of slavery end with the Thirteenth Amendment? [End Page 24] These two books speak to the question of what to call unfree Indians and why names matter. In The Other Slavery, Andrés Reséndez offers an emphatic "yes" to the question of whether slavery is the appropriate analytical tool for understanding colonization and the indigenous experience in Latin America and the U.S. borderlands. William S. Kiser offers a more ambiguous answer in Borderlands of Slavery, in which he explores efforts to end Indian bondage in New Mexico in the Civil War era, a fight that turned on whether captivity and peonage really constituted slavery. A finalist for the National Book Award and a Bancroft Prize-winner, The Other Slavery is a tour de force. Reséndez combines synthesis and original research seamlessly, and since he draws material from Latin American and borderlands histories unfamiliar to many U.S. historians, it feels fresh. The scope is breathtaking, ranging over four centuries and covering the Spanish empire (including the Philippines and the Caribbean), independent Mexico, and the southwestern United States. At the same time, individual stories and often searing first-hand testimony give emotional heft to this persuasive account. Not afraid to name names when it comes to slavery, Reséndez surveys an array of coerced labor regimes: the Mit'a, encomienda, repartimiento, and similar forced labor requirements; debt peonage; ransomed captives forced to labor to repay their benefactors; convicts and rebels sentenced to servitude; indentured servants; orphans and paupers bound to service; and ostensibly free wage laborers whose employers never paid them are all gathered under the same umbrella. The Other Slavery puts Indian slavery into dialogue with Atlantic African slavery, not to argue that they were the same but rather to convey significance and horror. Upping numbers first proposed by Brett Rush-forth, Reséndez estimates that between 2.5 and 5 million Indians experienced enslavement. The numbers suggest that a higher proportion of Indians faced enslavement than did Africans, and The Other Slavery challenges common understandings of the Americas' demographic catastrophe. Slavery and slaving, not merely epidemic disease, bore significant blame. Traders kidnapped entire populations of some Caribbean Islands and stole able-bodied adults, especially women...

The North-West Mounted Police, 1873– 1885 by Jack F. Dunn

Reviewed by: The North-West Mounted Police, 1873– 1885 by Jack F. Dunn Bill Waiser The North-West Mounted Police, 1873– 1885. By Jack F. Dunn. Calgary: Jack F. Dunn Publishing, 2017. xi + 815 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, bibliography, index of names. $30.00 CAD, $35.00 USD, cloth. Jack Dunn’s North-West Mounted Police, 1873– 1885, is a big book, coming in at 815 pages. That might be surprising to western historians because of the spate of existing books on Canada’s world-famous police force. It might be even more surprising because of the period under examination. Dunn has limited his study to only twelve years— from the formation of the mounted police in 1873 to the 1885 North-West Rebellion. Dunn, though, was clearly dissatisfied with past studies and wanted to gather as much information as possible about the “formative years” of the NWMP. After all, in his words, it was “certainly the most momentous twelve-year period in Canadian prairie history.” It was the police who “open[ed] the land for white settlement” and oversaw the changes that accompanied the agricultural colonization of the region. It’s a heady claim. But Dunn never provides a full explanation for his interpretation. He seems to prefer to let the chapters make the case: an eclectic mix of everything that is to be known about the mounted police and their activities during this period. Dunn has mined a wealth of resources about the NWMP and found a good deal of fascinating material— from duties, kit, desertions, sick leave, and recreation to horses, posts, crime, and border patrols. Some of his findings would make great trivia questions. It’s quite evident from Dunn’s history that the police served as a kind of handyman for the federal government. There was no task that they were unwilling to shoulder in the interests [End Page 389] of maintaining a Canadian presence in the region and ensuring good relations with the Indigenous population. Indeed, Dunn claims that when the NWMP marched across the southern prairies in 1874 (known today as the Long March), the force “effectively established law and order” in the region. He also suggests that one of the main reasons that the Mounties were successful was that they were essentially working in a wilderness with little white settlement. But Dunn’s argument begs the question as to whether the police were able to operate in the Prairie West because they were accepted by the Indian population and did not meet any resistance to their presence. Did the Mounties really exercise mastery over the Indians? And was the police-Indian relationship before 1885 undermined by Indian Affairs policies that went against the spirit and intent of the treaties? There are bound to be quibbles in a book of this size. Dunn, for example, suggests that the Canadian government initiated the treaties when in fact it was the Cree who forced Ottawa to negotiate Treaty 6 with them in 1876. And his use of “squaw” in discussing police-Indian sexual relationships is unacceptable. Dunn also offers little nuance in examining the participation of Indians in the North-West Rebellion— they are largely rebels in his eyes. Still, the book is a good reference work. The time line, detailed index, and contemporary photographs are welcome additions to mounted police history. Dunn is to be thanked for pulling all the material together in one source. Bill Waiser Department of History University of Saskatchewan Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Writings

The Writings Bradley C. Gregory, Brent A. Strawn, Stephen D. Ryan, and Christopher T. Begg 773. [Wisdom Literature] O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of Wisdom: A Redemptive-Historical Exploration of the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2017). Pp. xxi + 407. Paper $19.99. ISBN 978-1-62995-291-8. R.'s book examines the OT wisdom literature redemptive-historically as both providing insight into the great questions of human life and as pointing toward Christ. The first chapter introduces readers to the terminology of wisdom, its background in the ANE, and its literary forms. Subsequent chapters discuss standard introductory topics as well as the contents of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Song of Songs. R. adopts traditional notions of authorship, arguing that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations and ascribing the other four books to the time of Solomon.—B.C.G. 774. Lance R. Hawley, Metaphor Competition in the Book of Job (JAJ Sup 26; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). Pp. 256. $113. ISBN 978-3-525-53135-8. H.'s monograph, originally a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin (advisor: Ron Troxel) furthers some ideas put forward by Carol Newsom in her The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (see OTA 27 [2004] #708) by investigating how the metaphors used by Job, his friends, and God compete in the book. In this way, H.'s study "seeks a way forward for understanding the nature of the Joban discourse by assessing the interlocutors' use of metaphor, examining their patterns of cognition as they depict their understanding of the world and Job's particular situation via metaphor" (p. 15). The first chapter, "The Book of Job as a Conceptual Network," introduces the study and the notion of the Book of Job as a network of signified concepts operating on both literary and cognitive discourse levels. This is followed by a second chapter dealing with method and theory: "Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Joban Discourse." Chap. 3, "Speech Metaphors in the Joban Dialogue," treats a metaphorical target domain, i.e., that of speech (including a treatment of silence), while chap. 4, "Animal Metaphors in the Joban Discourse," takes up the metaphorical source domain of animals. Chap. 5, "Yahweh's Animal Images as a Response to Job," argues that the divine speeches are not metaphorical per se but that Yhwh's constant employment of animal imagery "removes the ground from Job's understanding of the world. One might suppose that this act of reframing necessarily sets off a chain reaction of conceptual reorganization in Job's brain, but his brief and ambiguous response to the divine speeches is insufficient evidence of this" (p. 209). A final chapter concludes the study ("Conclusion: Dynamics of Metaphor Coherence in the Joban Discourse") and summarizes H.'s results with regard to metaphorical coherence (perceptible or otherwise) and the three primary ways metaphor competition functions in Job: elaboration, extension, and questioning. A list of Works Cited and four indexes (ancient sources, authors, subjects, and conceptual metaphors) round out the volume.—B.A.S. 775. [Psalms] Christina Kumpmann, Schöpfen, Schlagen, Schützen: Eine semantische, thematische und theologische Untersuchung des Handelns Gottes in den Psalmen (BBB 177; Göttingen: V&R unipress/Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2016). Pp. 466 + 4 col. graphs. €75. ISBN 978-38471-0530-5. K.'s semantic, thematic, and theological study of the actions of God in the Book of Psalms is a revised version of her 2015 University of Bonn dissertation directed by Ulrich [End Page 248] Berges. In ten chapters K. analyzes the 1,767 psalmic verses in which God is the subject of a finite verb or participle. The textual basis of her study is the literal Elberfelder German translation of the Psalter checked against the Masoretic Text. The study is precisely focused and excludes consideration of stative or passive verbs and of the larger context of the psalm. With the aim of better understanding the portrayal of God in the Psalms K. treats in turn ten principal categories of divine action: verbs for doing or acting (handeln), creating (schöpfen), ruling (König sein/herrschen), acting powerfully or violently...

Silk-Stocking Sympathy: American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine

Silk-Stocking Sympathy:American Whig Rhetoric and the Irish Famine James M. Farrell (bio) On 11 November 1844 J. W. Mighels of Portland, Maine, wrote a letter to Henry Clay, who had just been defeated in the presidential election. Mighels styled himself a "native born Whig" and blamed Clay's loss in Maine on "an army of Irish paupers, set on and marsheled [sic] by their infernal priest."1 It was a view widely shared among members of the Whig Party, who felt the sting of defeat to James Polk and the Democrats. Clay's own running mate Theodore Frelinghuysen attributed the Whig electoral downfall to an "alliance of the foreign vote and that most impracticable of all organizations, the abolitionists." The Irish immigrant vote in New York City, he said, "was tremendous," and "it is an alarming fact that this foreign vote has decided the great questions of American policy—and counteracted a nation's gratitude."2 Clay lost the 1844 presidential election by a little more than 39,000 votes. More importantly, he lost electoral-college votes in several states like New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Maine, and Michigan that had been won by the Whigs in 1840. In the earlier election William Henry Harrison carried nineteen states for the Whig ticket. Clay and the Whigs won only eleven states in the subsequent presidential election. Of course, there are many reasons why any particular election turns out the way it does: the candidates are different, the issues are different, the electorate is different. In 1844 American voters were concerned about the annexation of Texas, the dispute with [End Page 206] Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, and the growing influence of antislavery sentiment in an American politics that was becoming increasingly sectional.3 But the 1840s also saw a surge in immigration, particularly among the Germans and the Irish, most of whom were also Catholic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century about half-a-million Irish had settled in the United States. By 1845 another one million Irish immigrants had made America their home.4 Thus, even before the Great Famine, the Irish had become a potent political force in America, particularly in the urban areas of the eastern seaboard. Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially as their numbers grew, the Irish overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party, and thus Irish political influence posed an existential threat to the Whig Party.5 Irish alignment with the Democratic Party is not difficult to understand. From its formative days as the coalesced opposition to Andrew Jackson, the Whig Party sought to be the conservative force in American politics. They were the party of business and wealth, and the party of moral reform. The Whigs attracted most of their support from the established ranks of middle- and upper-class American Protestants. They were, as one historian suggested, "anglophile elites."6 Although not all Whigs were bigots, the Whig Party had a virulent anti-Catholic element that continually fed nativist sentiment within its ranks. Most northern Whigs were also antislavery, a position that [End Page 207] put them at odds with Irish voters who mostly opposed the abolition of slavery, and who consistently expressed hostility toward both British and American abolitionists.7 From the Irish perspective the Whigs were "the party of Yankee Protestants and British-American immigrants," whereas the Democrats were more welcoming to Irish newcomers and more tolerant of their religion.8 Democrats portrayed Whigs as an elitist association of "narrow-minded, silk-stocking patricians bent on telling other people how to behave."9 For obvious reasons, elitist attitudes compounded with nativist sentiments and religious bigotry cannot form the foundation of a successful national political strategy, as Henry Clay and the Whigs had learned. "There can be no doubt of the greatness of the evil of this constant manufacture of American citizens out of foreign emigrants," Clay wrote to John Crittenden after his election loss. The most recent Irish immigrants, he thought, were "incapable of justly appreciating the duties incident to the new character which they assume."10 Indeed, during the 1844 election postmortem, "the belief that Clay was denied the presidency by the votes of immigrant Catholics became...

Paradoxo da liberdade: a reflexão sobre ser livre no pacto social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Filósofo e romancista, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) pode ser considerado como um dos autores mais complexos da filosofia política. Buscando resolver a grande questão dessa área, a saber, como o Estado pode ser legitimado, Rousseau argumenta em prol de uma teoria do pacto, buscando justificar a existência do Estado enquanto uma instituição artificial, fundada pelos próprios homens. Apoiado na natureza humana, Rousseau tem por finalidade argumentar por que os homens devem se submeter ao Estado e de que forma isso lhes seria vantajoso. Tentando convencer os homens das benesses do estado civil, Rousseau faz um longo estudo sobre a questão da liberdade, desde sua forma mais primitiva, vivida pelo homem no estado de natureza contido no Segundo discurso, à sua forma mais evoluída, no estado civil, apresentada no Contrato social. Esse artigo se propõe a analisar a construção teórica do que seria ser livre nos dois momentos propostos por Rousseau, com o objetivo de explicitar como esse conceito é capaz de basear a argumentação do autor.