Immense Authority Research Articles

Leadership of the Heart: Lessons From a 21st Century Arab Monarch

The past half a century has witnessed a universal and publicly acknowledged bankruptcy of strong ethical and moral leadership within corporations and nations alike, aptly summed up by President Obama in 2009, as: “the attitude that’s prevailed from Washington to Wall Street to Detroit for too long; an attitude that valued wealth over work, selfishness over sacrifice, and greed over responsibility”. Given the deteriorating state of ethical and humane leadership within much of the current crop of leaders of industry and governments, there are a few valuable lessons to be learned from the life and work of Sheikh Zayed, the monarch of the UAE until recently. Most important perhaps, were his traits of selflessness, sharing, consensus building and striving untiringly to uplift those under his care, eventuating in the transformation of the UAE under his watch, from a state of impoverishment to one of prosperity. There is little difference between modern day CEO’s, monarchs and nations’ leaders. However, whilst they all enjoy immense authority and power, how and to what end they use the same is a matter of personal choice, that eventually determines their legacies. As monarch of a fairly new state, despite being relatively free of legal or institutional compulsions, Sheikh Zayed’s choices were always premised on the ‘others first’ principle, that transformed the UAE to its current state. Surprisingly, despite such rare qualities, little has been written about him in the mainstream western academic leadership and ethics literature, which is a shortcoming this article seeks to rectify.

Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 by Jeffrey Thomas Perry

Reviewed by: Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 by Jeffrey Thomas Perry Robert Elder Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845. By Jeffrey Thomas Perry. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 208. $64.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-4307-2.) Any historian intent on mining the rich records of congregational life left behind by nineteenth-century southern Baptists had better have a sense of determination bordering on obsession. This makes Jeffrey Thomas Perry’s accomplishment in this book all the more remarkable, since the grit required to decipher church record books is not always paired with the analytical ability to interpret their significance. Drawing especially on record books from seven Kentucky churches, Perry has constructed a database of over 2,600 disciplinary cases. In this deeply researched study, he uses the decline of church discipline in Baptist churches in Kentucky as a window into how individuals and churches experienced the evolving relationship between church and state in the first half of the nineteenth century. Law in American Meetinghouses: Church Discipline and Civil Authority in Kentucky, 1780–1845 joins other excellent state-level studies of Baptist life such as Randolph Ferguson Scully’s Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville, 2008) and Gregory A. Wills’s Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785–1900 (Athens, Ga., 1997). But Perry’s book makes a unique contribution that extends well beyond geography. From the end of the eighteenth century until around 1830, the men and women who joined Baptist churches in the rapidly growing state of Kentucky made a Lockean bargain that had both spiritual and civil dimensions, giving their local congregations “immense authority over their public and private lives” in return for “watchcare” over spiritual matters and the adjudication of civil disputes in their communities (pp. 17, 33). Perry shows how Baptists “envisioned churches as law-producing sites and the practice of discipline as a viable alternative to local and state courts” (p. 38). At times, his argument risks getting lost in the carefully documented twists and turns of these cases, but there is little question about the weight of his evidence. By the 1830s, the rise of a domestic ideal that viewed the household as a garden walled off from wider society meant that churches were less willing to pry into the now-private lives of their members, especially when it came to sex. Meanwhile, the spread of new ideas about market relationships meant that churches were less willing to impose Christian ideals on their members’ business dealings, preferring to leave such matters to civil courts. Perry shows that after 1830, cases tended to focus on matters of doctrine or the fulfillment of church duties such as attendance, at least for white church members. However, churches still showed a vigorous interest in the private lives of their enslaved congregants. For instance, Perry finds that after 1831 a full 91 percent of adultery charges in his dataset were made against Black church members. [End Page 138] According to Perry, the most decisive factor in the decline of church discipline and the transformation of the relationship between church and state in Kentucky around 1830 was religious controversy, especially the rise of the Stone-Campbell Movement. As Perry writes, “the ‘democratization’ of American Christianity had given birth to a religious insurgency that unwittingly weakened churches’ authority in matters of local governance” (p. 112). In chapter 5, perhaps the most original chapter in the book, Perry documents how democratization and disestablishment led, ironically, to the return of state involvement in religious matters. Kentucky congregations rent by religious controversy appealed to state courts to adjudicate property disputes according to an 1814 law that recognized congregations as legal entities but forbade trustees from excluding congregants from church property in the event of a schism. “By seeking out state assistance,” Perry writes, “Baptists, who had fought so passionately for the separation of church and state during the Revolutionary era, inadvertently opened the door for civil authority to shape ecclesiastical affairs” (p. 153). Perry’s persuasive and important account of...

SOME LINGUISTIC AND STYLISTIC PROPERTIES OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE

Investigations of biblical texts have always been the topic of heated discussion among theologians and linguists, as well as representatives of other scientific disciplines. Over the years, the biblical stories and testimonies have been persistently challenged by different scholars, with a particular emphasis on the language of the Bible. In this paper, we dwell upon the events preceding the emergence of the King James Version and the immense authority that the KJV gained both in the churches of England and among the common people of the British Isles. As this translation of the Bible was authorised by King James, it is often referred to as the Authorised Version, and has become the Official Bible of England. Many people still believe that the KJV is The Bible, since according to them, its creation was inspired by God himself. Hence it becomes essential to reveal the factors which contribute to the supremacy of its language and majesty of style.

IoT Based Shoe Eye Strewing New–fangled Vision for Visually Impaired Ones

Civilization is having hasty progression amid technical accentuation and is certainly altering the duds into the potentials. Copious trials and predicament at bay, were supposed to be static, but contemporary investigators have ensured simplification with utmost ease. The formulated work epitomizes the technological surety for barrier break of prior challenges. IoT is imminent and has immense authority to unravel numerous societal problems. The formulated work intends to exhibit the manner in which IoT could aid visually impaired people to alter their sustenance and overwhelm unwanted adversities. The work emphases on designing a device for visually impaired people that would assist them to traverse autonomously, with effortlessness. Being unaware of information about alignment and positioning with respect to impediment on the way, internally as well as externally, the IoT Based Shoe Eye would ensure vigilance for the visually impaired people and would be attentive in ensuring the same. The shoe has been designed with precision for visually impaired people. The shoe comes with an assortment of ultrasonic sensors, water sensors, lights, speaker and GPS module. The shoe performs as a guide for the blind people. It would preserve the person from impediments on way and would declare an alert voice output through the speaker. The GPS kit would aid the family members of the visually impaired person to keep track over him. Hence, in the comparable manner, IoT could be a technological modus operandi that could alter the lifespan of a visually impaired person with utmost ease and strew happiness all the way, ensuring societal impact in the long way.

Of Beginnings and Endings: Huck Finn and Tom Eliot

Abstract In 1950, the year he wrote his introduction to an edition of Huckleberry Finn, T. S. Eliot, visiting the United States, seemed “more human than in England,” more boyishly “American”: a glimpse of his own “happy and lost” childhood, refracted perhaps through the prism of Huck. Defending the novel's final chapters, Eliot found it artistically “right that the mood at the end … should bring us back to that of the beginning,” even back to “the mood of Tom Sawyer.” But the ouroboric rondure that seemed artistically right to Eliot, a modernist poet wedded to what he called “style and order,” may rationalize a flaw. It seems regrettable that Eliot, with his immense authority circa 1950, should have put his imprimatur on an error—validating Mark Twain's original sin against his own (or Huck's) book, in order (to quote one of Eliot's favorite poets) to have the novel “end where it begunne.”

Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority

Steven Shapin argues that science, for all its immense authority and power, is and always has been a human endeavor, subject to human capacities and limits. Put simply, science has never been pure. To be human is to err, and we understand science better when we recognize it as the laborious achievement of fallible, imperfect, and historically situated human beings. Shapin's essays collected here include reflections on the historical relationships between science and common sense, between science and modernity, and between science and the moral order. They explore the relevance of physical and social settings in the making of scientific knowledge, the methods appropriate to understanding science historically, dietetics as a compelling site for historical inquiry, the identity of those who have made scientific knowledge, and the means by which science has acquired credibility and authority. This wide-ranging and intensely interdisciplinary collection by one of the most distinguished historians and sociologists of science represents some of the leading edges of change in the scholarly understanding of science over the past several decades.

Being Male Alone

Being Male Alone Gina Frangello (bio) Miracle Boy and Other stories. Pinckney Benedict. Press 53. http://www.press53.com. 244 pages; paper, $19.95. Pinckney Benedict is an interesting literary figure. He is a Christian whose work has been published in Esquire; he is the son of a Republican politician, attended Princeton, and was mentored by Joyce Carol Oates at Iowa, yet his fictional milieu is generally rural-poor, hardscrabble, and violent; he made an auspicious literary debut at the age of twenty-three and at one time was under a two book contract with publishing luminary Nan Talese, yet his new collection came out from the fab-but-very-small Press 53 after Talese dropped his contract in the recent publishing Armageddon. As if all this weren't paradoxical and complex enough, that collection—Miracle Boy and Other Stories—has met with mixed responses from the wildly enthusiastic to the vitriolic. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout calls it "amazing" and "exquisite" on the cover; Bookslut praised it as a collection of "mistakes gone terribly right"; and Dan Wickett's Emerging Writers Network was recently ablaze with criticism of Benedict's overtly Christian themes, with words like "saccharine" flying around the comments board. Benedict, while not a household name, is a writer whose work resonates deeply with his fans—and those fans are a diverse lot, from aficionados of Southern fiction or surrealism to those who enjoy genre-bending, for while Benedict's work is always literary, he doesn't color exclusively inside those lines but dabbles generously with about every genre at which you could swing a cat, save perhaps "romance." Stories of rural boyhood are pressed up against stories of talking birds, dogs turning into men, astronauts falling from the sky, and aliens learning to drive (and to "roll over in the clover.") It would be fair to say that, turning the pages of Miracle Boy—which Benedict told The Rumpus is his book that most closely reflects how his mind truly works—one is never sure what to expect plot-wise. Such wild divergence can, in the hands of lesser writers, lead to an uneven collection, a "throw everything you've got against the wall and hope something sticks" vibe. The fact that Miracle Boy never has that feel is a testament to Benedict's power as a writer, his immense authority over language and atmosphere, and a coherence and consistency of vision that threads throughout this work despite vast differences in plots. In fact, reading Miracle Boy, I began to believe that Benedict's experimentation with form and genre, which have been lauded in literary circles, as well as his Christian symbolism, which has sometimes been derided by those same circles, both, in the end, are more a part of these stories' shells than their hearts. Both are devices he uses skillfully and convincingly, but the core of these works seems more about exploring a deep well of male loneliness—for both loneliness and masculinity permeate nearly every line in this book like a heartbeat. The ages, lifestyles, even species may vary, but each character is a solitary island, even when in relationship with others. Sadness is a fundamental ingredient of all interactions, because all Benedict characters seem to understand, if on an unarticulated, unexamined gut level, that connection and even love are...well, "illusory" might be the wrong word (though sometimes the object of love may itself be illusory, such as when one of Benedict's young protagonists encounters a girl on whom he has a crush in the middle of a mountain waterfall), but at the very least transitory and fragile. We live and die alone. For all the Christian imagery, any concept of "God" seems to offer characters little joy or solace. Life is lonely. Life is violence. Life offers the opportunity for awkward, deeply felt tenderness, yes—best exhibited here in the relationships between fathers and sons—but even such tenderness is fraught with misunderstanding and isolation. If redemption-minded Christians and genre enthusiasts are grooving on this book, more power to them, but the core of Miracle Boy is a deeply existential one, powerfully rooted in a literary tradition less concerned...

Authority and Authority Relations in Mathematics Education: A View from an 8th Grade Classroom

Compared to studies in general education, authority has received little attention in mathematics education, despite an increasing interest in sociological perspectives in mathematics classroom research. The subject of authority is particularly important in mathematics education, on the one hand, because of the immense authority mathematics itself seems to possess and pass on to its practitioners, but also, on the other hand, because of the anti-authoritarianism present, to some degree, in many trends in mathematics education such as cooperative learning approaches and constructivist pedagogies. Such an anti-authoritarian stance appears justified by data from an 8th grade mathematics classroom (supplemented with data from a second 8th grade classroom) which suggest that teachers possess immense authority in the eyes of the students and that this and other authority relations are strongly evident in the students’ non-reflective ways of interacting not only with their teachers but also among themselves. However, theoretical considerations on authority show that the problem may not be authority per se but the way one conceives the notion of authority, that there exist kinds of authority, such as Benne’s ‘anthropogogical’ authority, which can encourage reflective and also fruitful collaborative work.

King Carson: an essay on the invention of leadership

For Ulster Protestants, riven by division since the fall of Terence O’Neill as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969, the recent troubles have seen their future steadily being conceded by default. Where there was certainty, there is now confusion; where there was once leadership, there are now only leaders. Not surprisingly, there have been wistful glances back to the mythical heroes of the past, in particular to Sir Edward Carson, who had steered them through the home rule crisis of 1912–14 to the promised land of Northern Ireland. Carson not only mobilised all Ulster Protestants, but also organised a largely successful rebellion and in time squared the circle to become one of the few rebels in English history to go on to be a law lord. Moreover, he was also a British leader, being four times in office, twice in the cabinet, and for twenty years one of the dominating figures in Tory politics. It is this duality that made Carson’s position exceptional in Anglo-Irish relations and contributed to the immense authority he periodically enjoyed. Indeed, in Ulster before the Great War his sway assumed near-charismatic proportions. Viewed as a case study in leadership, therefore, his career was, in terms of British politics, unique.

"The Corn and the Wine": Emerson and the Example of Herbert

L T H 0 U G H Emerson's appreciation of the metaphysical poetry of George Herbert has scarcely gone unnoticed, no one has quite thought to cast Herbert in the authorizing/inhibitive role of precursor. The reasons would seem obvious enough. First of all, in general, Emerson's immense authority over subsequent (American) poetry and prophetic writing has often made it hard to think of his own literary projects as profoundly influenced. Secondly, in the particular case, the determined traditionalism of Herbert's piety and the elaborate sacramentalism of his symbolism appear simply alien to Emerson's secular habit of thought. And though there is only slightly more historical distance between Emerson and Herbert than between, say, Wordsworth and Milton, no high argument in Herbert seems in any way to forecast Emerson's revolutionizing doctrine of the original relation.'

The Churches and the Refugee Problem in Bavaria 1945-49

One of the most striking features of Germany under the occupation of the western allies was the immense authority enjoyed by the churches. In May 1945, there was no German government and none of the major post-war political parties had been founded. On the other hand, the churches had emerged largely unscathed from the National Socialist era and were therefore one of the few bodies capable of filling the 'powervacuum' which existed in the early stages of the occupation. Moreover, the Catholic church, in particular, had the confidence of the western allies, and in the summer and autumn of 1945, British, American and French officials frequently made important political appointments on the recommendation of religious leaders. At local level, too, allied representatives invariably relied heavily on the advice of the village minister or priest. In the absence of political institutions, the ecclesiastical authorities also assumed responsibility for resolving a number of the problems facing the German people in the period directly following the collapse of the Third Reich. But how did the churches use their influence? This article

Editorial comment on the news

Youth Training Scheme. The most important event in the manpower field over the past four weeks has been the publication of the MSC plans for its Youth Training Scheme which came out on 4 May. An element of confusion has been introduced into the topic owing to the fact that there are two top‐level bodies with their fingers in the pie: on the one hand there is the Government speaking through the Employment Minister and his Department; on the other there is the ‘independent’ Manpower Services Commission. Both speak with immense authority though it is the Government, in the person of Norman Tebbit, which has the ultimate upper hand.

Should the History of Science Be Rated X?

I suggest that the teacher who wants to indoctrinate his students in the traditional role of the scientist as a neutral fact finder should not use historical materials of the kind now being prepared by historians of science: they will not serve his purposes. He may wish to follow the advice of philosopher J. C. C. Smart, who recently suggested that it is legitimate to use fictionalized history of science to illustrate one's pronouncements on scientific method (56). On the other hand, those teachers who want to counteract the dogmatism of the textbooks and convey some understanding of science as an activity that cannot be divorced from metaphysical or esthetic considerations may find some stimulation in the new history of science. As historian D. S. L. Cardwell has argued (57, p. 120): . . . [I]f the history of science is to be used as an educational discipline, to inculcate an enlightened and critical mind, then the Whig view . . . cannot do this. For it must emphasize the continuities, the smooth and successive developments from one great achievement to the next and so on; and in doing so it must automatically endow the present state of science with all the immense authority of history. He suggests that the critical mind might be inhibited by seeing the present as the inevitable, triumphant product of the past. The history of science could aid the teaching of science by showing that "such puzzling concepts as force, energy, etc., are man-made and were evolved in an understandable sequence in response to acutely felt and very real problems. They were not handed down by some celestial textbook writer to whom they were immediately self-evident" (57, p. 120). The past may give some hints on how to survive the most recent recurrence of public hostility to science. Rather than blaming historians such as Kuhn for encouraging antiscientific attitudes, as one physicist did in a public address in 1972 (58), one might consider this criticism of the older style of science history, published in 1940 by W. James Lyons (59, p. 381): The historians of science are responsible, it would appear, for the unpopularity of science among those most acutely affected by the depression. In their clamor to enhance the scientific tradition, and hoard for science all credit for the remarkable and unprecedented material advances which studded the century and a quarter preceding 1930, these historians have been more enthusiastic than accurate . . . science emerged [in the popular mind] as the most prominent force responsible for making this modern world so startlingly different from all preceding ages. Thus when, for many people, the modern world, in spite of all its resources, began to slip from its role of "best of all imaginable worlds," science came in for a proportionate share of blame. Had a more accurate picture of the part science has played been presented, science would not now be the object of so much suspicion and resentment. In more recent times, hostility to science has been intensified by the image of the "objective," robot-like scientist lacking emotions and moral values. If the new approach to the history of science really does give a more realistic picture of the behavior of scientists, perhaps it has a "redeeming social significance." Then, rather than limiting the conception of science to the strict pattern allowed by traditional local standards, one might try to change those standards in such a way as to reflect the freedom that the boldest natural philosophers have always exercised.

The State and Religion: Iran, India and China

In the three societies considered in this essay, there are three quite different kinds of relation of religion to the state. In Iran, there came to be a church and, consequently, a church-state relationship. In India, there was the oddest of all embodiments of religion, one which was entirelysui generis. China had a dead minimum of religious organization distinct from the organization of state. It would not be true to say that there were never any ecclesiastical institutions in China, but they were non-existent during much of China's history and, during most of the time when they did exist, they were marginal to the society's main form. The outward observances of religion in China were always conducted chiefly by state personages as a part of their proper functions. China offers, in fact, an extreme case of possible relations between religion and government, a case at the opposite end of the spectrum from the end where Strayer finds those relations in Europe. Indian ecclesiastical institutions are, of course, to be found in the caste system. Through the caste system the Brahmans have exerted their immense authority. The origin of caste remains a matter of dispute and its relation with and effect upon the state remain obscure. The Iranian church came to be a solid and very formidable body, offering a most instructive comparison with the Christian church in Europe. But the Iranian church did not begin to emerge until the Parthian period, reaching its full development in the Sassanian era, from the third to the seventh centuries A.D.