Death Of Innocence Research Articles

God and the Problem of Evil: Why Soul-Making Won't Suffice

AbstractIf you believe in the existence of an infinitely good, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity (‘God’), how do you explain the reality of evil – including the inexpressible suffering and death of innocents? Wouldn't God be forced to vanquish such suffering due to God's very nature? Alvin Plantinga has argued, convincingly, that if the possibility of ultimate goodness somehow necessarily required that evil be allowed to exist, God, being omnibenevolent, would have to allow it. But as John Hick has noted, the mere logical possibility of such a situation might not be enough to console the doubting theist. We need a positive reason to believe that evil as we know it is compatible with God's existence. So, Hick offers a ‘soul-making’ theodicy – or vindication – of God, suggesting that the human soul cannot fully progress to spiritual maturity (a kind of ultimate good on his account) without grappling with evil. In this short piece I argue that, if we accept Hick's premises about souls and soul-making, we can indeed make sense of evil to some extent. But, I suggest, his account cannot justify the type or amount of evil we see in the world, so his theodicy does not succeed

Grief experiences of nurses who lose their first-degree relatives with the diagnosis of COVID-19: A qualitative study

The grief experiences of healthcare professionals have both short- and long-term effects. This qualitative study was conducted between December 2022 and January 2023 to examine the grief experiences of nurses who lost their first-degree relatives to COVID-19. In this study, 22 nurses working in hospitals in Turkey were selected through a snowball sampling process. Data were collected with the “Nurse Information Form” and “Semi-Structured Interview Form.” Nurses were interviewed individually approximately 30 minutes. Collaizzi’s phenomenological analysis and MAXQDA 2020 software were used to analyze the data. A COREQ Statement Checklist was followed in the preparation of this study. The following five themes were identified: (1) Complex and deep feelings, (2) An inevitable end, (3) An innocent death, (4) Secluded funerals and rituals that could not be performed, and (5) Endless mourning. It is recommended to plan methods to protect nurses’ psychosocial health and maintain their hopes during the grieving process.

Autonomous weapon systems and the claim-rights of innocents on the battlefield

A goal of any modern war ought to be the minimization of innocent death and injury, while at the same time, maximizing the potential to decisively defeat the enemy as quickly and efficiently as is possible. As the techniques for warfighting have evolved, a growing trend of reliance on sophisticated technology has followed. Likely, autonomous systems will increasingly play a role—lethal and non-lethal—in future wars. Much of the current debate surrounding such autonomous systems—autonomous weapons systems (AWS) to be exact—is “pre-implementational” and potentially lags the political and military realities in the. Nations and non-nation state groups are actively pursuing the possibility of deploying such systems on the battlefield. The “pre-implementation” nature of these discussions risks making any one of them irrelevant as these nations continue to move ahead with development. As such, philosophers, military tacticians, political leaders, and other researchers in the field of artificial intelligence ethics must “get ahead of the curve” and examine what the battlefield and the laws of armed conflict ought to look like when—not if—such systems are deployed. Supporting this move from “pre-implementation” to “post-implementation”, this paper makes a normative claim about the nature of the relationship between innocents on the battlefield and combatants, given certain pre-conditions are met. I argue that, if and only if autonomous weapon systems reach a point in their development where they are capable of being both more discriminating in their target selection and more proportionate in their response to threats, then innocents on the battlefield1 (as a social kind) have a claim-right to not be unjustly harmed against both sets of combatants, claiming that AWS be used in place of human soldiers.

Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women’s Activism

This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mobley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism. These memoirs document personal transformation that surrounds racial violence against these Black women’s Black sons, Emmett Till (1941–1955) and Jordan Davis (1995–2012). Their religious orientations and experiences serve to chart their pursuit of meaning and mission in the face of American brutality. Centering religious experiences spotlights a tradition of Black religious women who view their Christian salvation as authorizing an ongoing personal relationship with God. Such relationships entail God’s ongoing communication with these Christian believers through signs, dreams, visions, and “chance” encounters with other people that they must interpret while relying on their knowledge of scripture. A focus on religious experience in the narratives of activist Black women helps to make significant their human conditions—the contexts that produce their co-constitutive expressions of religious and racial awakenings as they encounter anti-Black violence. In the memoirs of Till and McBath, their sons’ murders produce questions about the place of God in the midst of (Black) suffering and their intuitive pursuit of God’s mission for them to lead the way in redressing racial injustice.

Jerold Francis Lucey, MD (1926-2017)

We note with sadness the death of Jerry Lucey, a friend, mentor, and colleague. His name is familiar to all pediatricians though his life work and contributions as an outstanding clinician, neonatologist, investigator, advocate, educator, and editor. Dr Lucey was an internationally renowned neonatologist at the University of Vermont College of Medicine since 1956. He made numerous contributions to the care of premature infants, specifically advances in phototherapy and oxygen monitoring, and the promotion of randomized trials among neonatal units. He was the recipient of numerous awards in recognition of his outstanding qualities of scholarship and advocacy on behalf of children. In his role as the Editor of Pediatrics, Dr Lucey established policies and standards that have served to guide us all. His vision of having Pediatrics embrace the global medical community led to the establishment in that journal of a strong international science and clinical practice presence. Of specific note was his commitment to the highest ethical standards in research and publication. This is perhaps best exemplified by his response to an article published in Pediatrics in 1972, which had linked sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and breathing abnormalities.1Steinschneider A. Prolonged apnea and sudden infant death syndrome: clinical and laboratory observations.Pediatrics. 1972; 50: 646-654PubMed Google Scholar Several children from one family with apparent SIDS served as the basis for this study; they were later shown to be victims of medical child abuse. The published hypothesis of a genetic predisposition to SIDS, as well as a causal association between SIDS and infantile apnea, led to the use of home cardiorespiratory monitors to prevent SIDS. This widely cited report triggered not only parental anxiety but countess hours of fruitless investigation into the relationship between apnea and SIDS.2Consensus Statement National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Conference on infantile apnea and home monitoring, September 29, 1986–October l, 1986.Pediatrics. 1987; 79: 292-300PubMed Google Scholar, 3Firstman R. Talen J. The death of innocents. Bantam Books, New York (NY)1997Google Scholar, 4Duffy P. Bryan M.H. Home apnea monitoring in “near miss” sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and siblings of SIDS victims.Pediatrics. 1982; 70: 69-74PubMed Google Scholar Despite the fact that this article was accepted before Dr Lucey's tenue as editor, he addressed the issue head on, apologized for the mistake, and stated that the article was flawed and should never have been published.5Lucey J.F. A very important erratum? — 20 years later.Pediatrics. 1994; 93: 944Google Scholar Dr Lucey's dedication to the highest ethical standards is an enduring legacy. In 1990, he joined the editors of several general pediatric journals to express concern about ethical transgressions—such as the duplication of data in papers submitted to several journals (self-plagiarism) and the practice of dividing a study into several short reports (the “least publishable unit”)—in a constructive effort to maintain the quality of the pediatric literature.6Bier D.M. Fulginiti V.A. Garfunkel J.M. Lucey J.M. Spranger J. Valman B. et al.Duplicate publication and related problems.J Pediatr. 1990; 117: 903Abstract Full Text PDF Scopus (4) Google Scholar In 2009, Dr Lucey and the editors of the major US general pediatric journals met at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies meeting to initiate a workshop entitled “Ethics in Publishing”; this on-going workshop remains important and highly relevant today. Dr Lucey will be missed by all who have benefited from his contributions—his patients, his students, as well as pediatricians worldwide.

Aquinas's Opposition to Killing the Innocent and its Distinctiveness within the Christian just War Tradition

AbstractThis essay argues that Aquinas's position regarding the killing of innocent people differs significantly from other representatives of the Christian just war tradition. While his predecessors, notably Augustine, as well as his successors, from Cajetan and Vitoria onward, affirm the legitimacy of causing the death of innocents in a just war in cases of necessity, Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, is never justified. Even an otherwise legitimate act of just war cannot legitimate causing the death of innocent people, as this can never advance the common good. This stance also contrasts sharply with much modern and contemporary double effect theorizing in relation to jus in bello. In this regard, Aquinas's position, shaped decisively by his biblical and theological commitments, may point the way towards an ethical orientation beyond the typical divisions of “pacifism” and “just war.”

Aquinas's Opposition to Killing the Innocent and its Distinctiveness within the Christian just War Tradition

This essay argues that Aquinas's position regarding the killing of innocent people differs significantly from other representatives of the Christian just war tradition. While his predecessors, notably Augustine, as well as his successors, from Cajetan and Vitoria onward, affirm the legitimacy of causing the death of innocents in a just war in cases of necessity, Aquinas holds that causing the death of innocents in a foreseeable manner, whether intentionally or indirectly, is never justified. Even an otherwise legitimate act of just war cannot legitimate causing the death of innocent people, as this can never advance the common good. This stance also contrasts sharply with much modern and contemporary double effect theorizing in relation to jus in bello. In this regard, Aquinas's position, shaped decisively by his biblical and theological commitments, may point the way towards an ethical orientation beyond the typical divisions of “pacifism” and “just war.”

Facing Moloch: Barack Obama’s National Eulogies and Gun Violence

Abstract During his first term as president, Barack Obama delivered four national eulogies at the sites of gun violence tragedies, two of which garnered considerable national attention: one delivered in Tucson, Arizona on January 12, 2011 (following the attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords and an assembled crowd), and another in Newtown, Connecticut on December 16, 2012 (following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School). The deaths of innocents, the result of a host of causes, required the president to face the issue of gun violence, help the nation work through the trauma, and create the conditions of civility necessary for policy action. At Tucson, Obama drew from the book of Job to explain that the evil in Tucson happened “for reasons that defy human understanding.” In his Newtown address, Obama replaced the more fatalistic theology of his Tucson memorial with a spirit of perseverance and renewal rooted in 2 Corinthians. In this essay, I suggest that Obama’s eulogy at Newtown serves as a counterpart to the call Obama advanced in the Tucson address. I argue that, though the messages embedded in the Tucson speech serve as a legitimate theological and epistemological check on the presumptions of reason, the Newtown address better met the aspirations of civility because it led to a consideration of policies designed to reduce gun violence.

Remembering the Ancestor’s Image: Emmett Till and Predicaments of Witnessing

Remembering the Ancestor’s ImageEmmett Till and Predicaments of Witnessing Steve Edwin (bio) I couldn’t but help think of the first time I laid eyeson my son. I remembered my reaction to hisdistorted little face and how I made him cry. Iwould have given anything to take back that look.That face seemed so adorable now. My first lookand my last look at Emmett would be forever fusedin my mind. —Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence A 1981 poem by the African American writer and activist Audre Lorde begins by evoking the persistent presence of a forceful and depriving vision: However the image entersits force remains withinmy eyes rockstrewn caveswhere dragonfish evolvewild for life relentless and acquisitivelearning to survivewhere there is no foodmy eyes are always hungryand rememberinghowever the image entersits force remains. (Undersong 186) Entitled “Afterimages,” Lorde’s poem charts the intrusive and insistent impact of this nameless, painful image. It is by putting this visually experienced force into words that Lorde comes to understand the source of her hunger and her pain. Two scenes emerge: “A white woman stands bereft and empty / a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson.” This latter image, Lorde writes, is “recalled in me forever / a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep / etched into my vision.” The boy whose image is engraved upon the writer’s psyche is Emmett Till, who was lynched by white men when he was fourteen years old. His is one of the “fused images beneath my pain” (186). Lorde goes on to recall that in 1955 she saw images of Till’s body on “each corner’s photography” and averted her eyes (188). [End Page 710] In the years following she did not see the images distinctly but rather felt their impact in the form of inexplicable psychic pain. Lorde talks about carrying the painful visual traces of Till’s body silently inside her for twenty-four years, until she saw another seemingly unrelated scene that spurred her to write. Watching a television news report on the flooding of the Pearl River in Mississippi in 1979, Lorde sees a white woman survivor of the flood surrounded by her frightened children, talking to a reporter about the losses she and her family had just experienced. The woman’s husband suddenly breaks into the frame, grabbing her away from the camera and snarling, “She ain’t got nothing more to say!” The televised scene of a “tearless” mother holding “a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms” takes Lorde back to her own memories of Emmett Till (187). In the rest of her poem, Lorde examines the historical continuities of white male dominance that link the two events. For Lorde, vision is both an active faculty and a site where violence is done to the viewer. Often the viewer cannot avoid seeing the public spectacle of racist violence. In Lorde’s case the spectacle does violence to her as well. Lorde writes of Emmett Till: His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st yearwhen I walked through a northern summereyes averted from each corner’s photographynewspapers protest posters magazinesPolice Story Confidential Truethe avid insistence of detail pretendinginsight or informationthe length of gash across the dead boy’s loinshis grieving mother’s lamentationall overthe veiled warning the secret relishof a Black child’s mutilated bodyfingered by street-corner eyesbruise upon livid bruise. (Undersong 188) Writing is one way of transforming the viewer’s relationship to the spectacle and the violence it enacts. In “Afterimages” Lorde intends not only to articulate her rage and pain but to critique a dominant visual economy that amplifies the terrorizing effects of racist and sexist violation. The media’s pretense of “insight or information” could hardly mask the “the secret relish” with which a mass public of viewers consumed photographs of Till’s body along with narratives about his murder. The journalistic cliché merely sanitized and disavowed the ways the narratives were sexualized and the images “fingered by street-corner eyes.” By contrast...

Terrorism, Secularism, and the Deaths of Innocents

Terrorism, Secularism, and the Deaths of Innocents

Estimating the Probability of False Conviction for Criminal Defendants Who are Sentenced to Death

This study is addressed to one of the great unknowns of criminal justice: the frequency of convictions of innocent defendants. A general estimate of the rate of false conviction may be beyond reach, but the extraordinarily high number of exonerations among defendants who have been sentenced to death makes it possible to estimate a lower bound for the rate of false conviction among death sentences. Previous studies have shown that 2.3% of all defendants sentenced to death in the United States between 1973 and 1989 (Gross & O’Brien 2008), and 3.3% of defendants sentenced to death for rape murder from 1982 through 1989 (Risinger 2007), were exonerated and released because of strong post-trial evidence of innocence. These are underestimates of the rate of false conviction because some innocent death row prisoners are never identified and exonerated. This study focuses on those death-sentenced defendants who remain under threat of execution, as opposed to the large proportion who are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. Our hypothesis is that only those capital defendants who might still be put to death receive the extraordinary level of attention and scrutiny that makes it plausible to use the rate of exoneration as a proxy for the rate of false conviction at trial. Using survival analysis, we: (1) demonstrate that removing the threat of execution does in fact decrease the probability of exoneration for a death sentenced inmate by a factor of about 8; and (2) estimate that the cumulative rate of exoneration for those defendants sentenced to death in the United States between 1973 and 2004 who remained under threat of execution for at least 21 years is 4%. This too, however, is very likely an underestimate. There are strong theoretical and anecdotal reasons to believe that death sentenced defendants who might be innocent are more likely than other death row inmates to be removed from death row without being exonerated – at which point the probability of exoneration drops precipitously. If so, the population of defendants who remain on death row for long periods of time, or who are executed, includes a smaller proportion of innocent defendants than the entire population of death sentenced defendants, and the true rate of false convictions among all death sentenced defendants in the United States must be considerably higher than 4%.

Emmett Till’s Ring

On July 13, 1945, Mamie Till received a telegram at her home in Argo, Illinois, notifying her that her estranged husband, Private Louis Till, had been killed in Italy.1 The Department of Defense subsequently sent her his personal effects, including a silver ring he had bought in Casablanca, engraved with his initials and a date, May 25, 1943. During the following ten years, their son, Emmett Till, would occasionally try on his father's ring. Since Emmett was only four when Louis Till was killed, the ring was always too large for him. But in mid-August 1955, as he packed for what was to have been a two-week visit with relatives in Money, Mississippi, he tried the ring on again. Still too big for his ring finger, it now fit the middle finger perfectly. Emmett and his mother agreed that he could wear the ring on his trip to show his cousins and his friends. In her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, written with Christopher Benson, Mamie Till-Mobley recalls that during the conversation about the ring, Emmett asked her about his father: We had talked about the fact that his father was a soldier in World War II and that he had been killed overseas. The only thing I could tell him at that point was the only thing I was told by the army. The cause of death, I explained to Emmett, was I didn't know what that meant, and when I tried to find out, I never got a satisfactory answer from the army. A lawyer and friend, Joseph Tobias, had tried to help in 1948. But he was told by the Department of the Army there would be no benefits for me due to the willful misconduct. (TillMobley and Benson 2003, 103) This incident occurs at the point in the narrative when Emmett's mother has begun to realize that her little boy is becoming an adult. In the preceding pages, she describes his heightened sense of responsibility, his first date, his impromptu driving lessons, his insistence on vacationing with his cousins instead of traveling with her, her hopes for his future. By giving Emmett his father's ring, she thus acknowledges his growing independence and maturity. Furthermore, she binds him symbolically to his paternity and his patrimony, despite the fact that irreconcilable differences had torn his parents' marriage apart. As he boarded the train called the City of New Orleans on Saturday, August 20, at Central Station, Chicago, Emmett kissed his mother goodbye and gave her his wristwatch to keep, telling her he wouldn't need it in Mississippi. Although he removed his watch, he decided to wear the ring. Eleven days later, on Wednesday, August 31, Robert Hodges, a seventeen-year-old white fisher, discovered Emmett's mutilated body floating in the Tallahatchie River, even though his murderers-J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant-had tied a cotton gin fan around his neck in hopes of weighing him down.2 For allegedly whistling at-or saying something inappropriate to-Bryant's wife, Carolyn, in their store, Emmett had been killed. According to his mother's description, his tongue had been choked out of his mouth and left hanging onto his chin. His right eyeball was resting on his cheek. Only two of his teeth remained in his mouth, and the bridge of his nose had been broken. His right ear had been cut almost in half and one of his murderers had taken a hatchet and cut through the top of his head from ear to ear. He had also been shot through the head (Till-Mobley and Benson 2003, 135-36). Given its condition, it is thus little wonder that Tallahatchie County sheriff H.C. Strider scrambled to get Emmett's body buried in Mississippi as quickly as possible. He and other local law enforcement officials wanted to try to minimize the impact of a heinous crime that had already captured national attention. Once Emmett's mother, then known as Mamie Bradley, learned that plans were being made to bury her son in Mississippi, however, she insisted that he be returned to Chicago. …

Gender, Patriotism and the Events of 9/11

In the weeks after 9/11/2001, the events of that day were described in many ways. One of the most significant spins came from the government: initially the events were described as “a terrorist attack,” but not long after they became an “act of war.” We Americans were told that what occurred was not a crime to be addressed by punishing the perpetrators, but an attack on a nation-state, which requires us to take up arms against the enemy.Why does this shift in conceptualizing the events matter? Acts of war and acts of crime call for different responses: in war procedural safeguards (for example, innocent until proven guilty) are suspended, civil liberties are curtailed, the death of innocents is justified. Crimes against humanity unite us as human beings in response to the horrific acts of individuals. In contrast, attacks on nation-states call for an identification of “the enemy” as other nation-states, and we are called upon as patriots to defend our country.Since the fall of 2001, the U.S. continues to frame the 9/11 attacks as an act of war: procedural safeguards for those captured and held in Guantanamo Bayhave been suspended; civil liberties have been curtailed by the Patriot Act; other nations, most notably Iraq, have been identified as “the enemy;” and the death of innocents in combat has been justified. Does any of this have anything to do with gender?

War & the Forgotten Continent

As US and UK military forces invade Iraq the death of innocents in the Middle East will be added to those dying from AIDS, famine and preventable illness in Africa. The waging of war at any time, when not sanctioned by international law and the victims pose no threat to neighbours or invaders, is monstrous. It is even more so as US and UK resources are diverted towards the aims of death and destruction when millions in Africa are starving to death. In Iraq itself, the British Overseas Aid Group (Oxfam, Cafod, Christian Aid, Action Aid and Save the Children) warns of the humanitarian consequences of war in a country where more than 16 million are entirely dependent upon food aid. There has been little concern for the lives of those to be affected by military conflict as preparation to relieve the humanitarian disaster has taken second place to the creation of that disaster. The US will spend $12.5 billion a month on the war although it has offered $65 million to provide help with immediate humanitarian assistance. And when it is time for the reconstruction of Iraq, the US will offer only $50 million of a possible $1.5 billion to NGOs and the UN for the process – the rest goes to US companies, including those close to White House officials (The Guardian, 18 March 2003).

Death Takes Many Forms

Disturbing things are happening to the world's demography. While a child born today in the West can reasonably hope to live to perhaps 100, in Africa 9,000 people a day are dying of Aids and life expectancy is falling alarmingly. Statistically, a 16-year-old in Botswana can expect two decades of adult life, just half that of her parents. There are villages in Malawi that are in effect orphanages. Alex de Waal looks at the social and political implications of all this and tells the story (p87) of the spread of Aids in Africa through armies, where HIV levels are two to five times greater than they are in the general population. Death takes many forms, and this issue of Index explores some of them, and their hidden stories. In the rich West, we can afford to have big and troubling debates — the right to death and the right to life — which must seem unthinkable in other parts of the world. AC Grayling argues for the right for an individual to choose when and how to die (p26), while Mary Kenny (p35), acknowledging that 'edge of life' questions are difficult, reflects on her opposition to abortion and support of the death penalty. And how do we price individual lives? Peter Pringle (p93) compares the ^80 million spent so far on the Saville inquiry into Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday with the miserable compensation paid to the families of the 13 dead; he worries, too, about how much of the evidence is still stamped SECRET. Our regional file looks at India and Pakistan — both countries which, from time to time, casually threaten to use nuclear weapons in a war over Kashmir that has already cost 80,000 lives (pi36). There are other forms of dying we discuss. Carl M Cannon (p40), looking at the death of innocence, asks why it took more than 15 years for the paedophile priests scandal in the US to come properly to the world's attention. Stacy Marking examines the disorderly phenomenon of book-burning (p63), while Helena Drysdale tells us about the death of a language — with its loss of collective memory, a culture buried; and warns us about the 40 or so endangered minority languages spoken in the EU (p69). Even nations die: Aminatta Forna, returning to Sierra Leone (p75), walks through buildings that symbolise the gradual crumbling of systems, organisations, services and the cohesive set of values that bind a nation together. Yet in Romania, as in much of Eastern Europe, Irena Maryniak discovers ghosts and myths of communism still unburied (p49), silence competing with truth for the public ear. •

The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil (review)

Reviewed by: The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil Christine Perkell Mark Petrini. The Child and the Hero: Coming of Age in Catullus and Vergil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 152 pp. Cloth, $37.50. This brief study of youthful figures in the Aeneid proposes that Vergil represents the “coming of age” or initiation into adulthood as the devastating collision of the innocent child with the treacherous, deceitful adult world. Failure of youth to thrive, analogous to (according to this reading) the portended failure of Augustus to achieve his goals of Roman renewal, has causes embedded in “human nature, in nature itself, and therefore in history” (2), so that the question implicitly posed by the poem, specifically in this motif of early death, becomes, for Petrini: can the future ever be different from the past? Iulus, poised on the edge of childhood, functions in the poem as a symbol of the possibility of reconciliation of Roman hopes of renewal (as in the prophecy of Apollo, 9.641–44), on the one hand, versus a set of “facts,” as constructed by Vergil, of politics, nature, and history that would suggest that such hopes are illusory (2). Whether there could be a glorious Roman future if Iulus could shake free of the past or whether he is doomed to repeat the worst of Troy remains unresolved through the end of the poem by virtue of Iulus’ suspension in youth. [End Page 464] This argument is set forth in Petrini’s introduction, summarized above. The main part of the book runs to six chapters, represented here by citing some of the author’s own summary remarks. Chapter 1: The Child and the Hero. Child characters, writes Petrini, “exemplify various ideals of innocence—cultural simplicity, enduring love, pietas, an idealized heroic past—and they flourish briefly and die as they come of age” (8). The deaths of the young signify the loss of renewal (9). Another related theme revolves around what the author terms Homeric heroism, read as an expression of cultural innocence. The failure of Homeric heroism in the world of the epic thus marks for Petrini a kind of cultural decline: “Vergil presents the ideals and tokens of conventional heroism—spolia, laudes, virtus—as illusions that betray and deceive in an inverted heroic world” (12). Chapter 2: Catullus. Petrini suggests that failure of innocence, pathology of adulthood (19), faithless love, friendships betrayed, death as separation (17)—motifs found in Catullus 64, 65, 66—were imitated by Vergil. It is from these texts especially that Vergil develops his own themes of the innocence of youth and the deception of the adult world. Chapter 3: Nisus and Euryalus. Petrini finds an elaboration of this initiation into death and corruption theme in the Nisus and Euryalus episode, wherein “Euryalus’ departure from his mother and participation in the night mission become the death of innocence in a corrupt world . . . , and his initiation from childhood to adulthood is a travesty of natural growth” (47). Euryalus “is out of context in battle and the throng of heroes, and in his death we feel the passing of simplicity and delicacy, the destruction of an ideal of amor” (48). Euryalus is initiated into adulthood by Nisus, whom Petrini reads as a cultural primitive, as denoted, for example, by his wearing of a lion skin, thus a representative of precivilized innocence (25). He attributes the failure of the mission of Nisus and Euryalus to the corrupt world they find in Italy and not, in the first instance, to their own reckless choices. In fact he reads the question of whether their actions are right or wrong as negligible; his interest rather is in what he sees as the inevitability of their behavior in the corrupt world of the epic (25–32). Chapter 4: Pallas. “Aeneas’ tutelage of Pallas and the introduction of the younger hero to the world of the older is presented as an assault on innocence, and Pallas’ death as the violation of a figurative childhood. The puer, innocent and inexperienced, is drawn to the attractions of heroism; the rewards and values of the heroic world emerge as illusions, which threaten and...

Book Review The Death of Innocents: A true story of murder, medicine, and high-stakes science By Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan. 632 pp. New York, Bantam Books, 1997. $24.95. 0-553-10013-0

Book Review The Death of Innocents: A true story of murder, medicine, and high-stakes science By Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan. 632 pp. New York, Bantam Books, 1997. $24.95. 0-553-10013-0

"The Death of Innocents": Observations on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

"The Death of Innocents": Observations on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Melodrama Redeemed; or, The Death of Innocence: Milly and Mortality in The Wings of the Dove

MELODRAMA REDEEMED; OR, THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE: MILLY AND MORTALITY IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE Emily Schiller University of California-Los Angeles At the end ofhis 1 879 study ofNathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James writes that the author "combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems."1 This, of course, could be a description of James himself. Critics have compared their works for some time, sifting through plots, tiiemes, characters, settings , and ethical concerns in order to establish clear lines ofinfluence.2 F. O. Matthiessen was the first to suggest some similarities between The Marble Faun (1860) and The Wings of the Dove (1902), but Marius Bewley wrote the first full essay on the topic.3 As others have afterhim, Bewley focuses on the connection between Hilda and Milly Theale, using Hawthorne's pale moralist to explain James's mysterious heiress.4 The connection between Hawthorne and James is a deeply important one. But it lies more in the realm of "spontaneity of the imagination" and "care for moral problems" than in a list of simple resemblances between characters. Milly's similarity to Hawthorne's copyist begins and ends with surface detail. Both heroines are young American girls; both travel to Italy; both see their resemblances to old Italian paintings; and both are characterized by their friends as "doves." The novels do indeed share a central preoccupation with the implications of innocence and its loss, butMilly's innocence is at once more specifically complex and more humanlyuniversal than that ofHawthorne's cold heroine. Hilda is an artificial—though sometimes appealing—construct of nineteenthcentury society. Her innocence is largely a kind of perverse ignorance, fueled and protected by an inflexible moral code based on narrow middleclass conventions and a debased interpretation of Christian orthodoxy. She has no love or even compassion for other human beings whose lives stray beyond the petrified limits ofher experience. No pinched New Englander, Milly is an heiress of "vast" and "startling " New York, a descendent of those wild and wicked, "free-living" ancestors. Her innocence, sexual as well as emotional and experiential, is exactly what she wants most to lose. And for her, it is not "loss" that is involved but all of life itself to gain. Unlike Hilda, whose tower is a retreat from the troubling ambiguities and vulgar aggressiveness oflife, 194Emily Schiller Milly's precipice is a starting point, a temporary place for contemplation , where possibilities are considered and one course of action is decided on. And in the end, her Palazzo does not exclude but gathers all the world for her last days. IfMilly is not attempting to avoid life, is human duplicity her only or even her most important antagonist? If so, as a dying woman, she would be the most pathetic of victims. But is the state of Milly's health only so much window-dressing, a ploy to wring the last ounce of sympathy and horror from the reader? In the Preface to The Wings of the Dove, James turns over the problem of having a sick and dying young woman as the central figure of a novel. He resolves that the "act of dying" cannot be the concern of the "poet": Let him deal with the sickest of the sick, it is still by the act of living that they appeal to him, and appeal the more as the conditions plot against them and prescribe the battle. The process of life gives way fighting, and often may so shine out on the lost ground as in no other connexion. . . . My young woman would herselfbe the opposition—to the catastrophe announced by the associated Fates.5 Milly's struggle is not so much with the darker side of life but with the illumination of death. It is not her moral innocence that is at stake, but her mortal. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne contrasts the painful but necessary loss ofprimeval innocence in Donatello with the smothering dissemination ofartificial innocence in Hilda, thus creating a romance ofthe Fall that also succeeds in ironizing the popular heroines of "domestic fiction ." James, too, draws from the best-selling sentimental novels ofhis day, but the...

Area Bombing, Terrorism and the Death of Innocents

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the view that, in so far as they involve the deliberate targeting of innocent people, neither terrorism nor area bombing is ever morally permissible. Four attempts to justify this view are considered, all of which are based on the intuition that deliberately killing innocent people is wrong. By means of a detailed examination of the introduction of area bombing by Britain in 1940–41, it is argued that in certain circumstances there are other equally powerful and accessible intuitions which support the opposite view. It is further argued that only moral theories which provide for the weighing of competing moral intuitions are capable of avoiding this kind of impasse and the biased selection of intuitions that this form of absolutism involves.