Personal Love Research Articles

Interpretation of Black Culture by Maya Angelou Through Music Poetry

African American music covers wide ranges of music and musical genres largely developed by African Americans. Negro spirituals, ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, rock and roll, soul, funk, and disco constitute the principal modern genres of it. Maya Angelou successfully applies to different styles of music in her poetry. With work songs, spirituals, souls, funk, jazz and blues, her poetry reveals African Americans’ withstanding hardships and expressing frustration as well as personal love and concerns. Through the analysis of the themes and the effect of the application of music merged with of her poems, the paper attempts to reveal the interpretation of black culture in Angelou’s poetry.

A survey on relationship among consumer personal characteristics, brand personality and brand love

A survey on relationship among consumer personal characteristics, brand personality and brand love

The Deep-Autism Story

The journal kindly invited me to offer a contribution after another clinical journal had solicited a paper on autism. Author was allowed to use the occasion to give more background information. This time around, author does not quote the grandmasters of the past like René Spitz and Mary Ainsworth but rather only describe the conditions under which the experience of personal love arises. The latter underlies, in the ontogenesis of the individual, the bifurcation from being a non-person to being a person. The context to understand this metamorphosis is “the smile theory.”

One dogma of philosophy of action

An oft-rehearsed objection to the claim that an intention can give one reasons is that if an intention could give us reasons that would allow an agent to bootstrap herself into having a reason where she previously lacked one. Such bootstrapping is utterly implausible. So, intentions to φ cannot be reasons to φ. Call this the bootstrapping objection against intentions being reasons. This essay considers four separate interpretations of this argument and finds they all fail to establish that non-akratic, nonevil, and deliberatively sound intentions cannot be reasons. The first argument is the argument from evil intentions, the second is the argument from akratic intentions, the third is the argument from errors in deliberation, and the last is what I call the ‘wizardry’ argument. This ‘argument’, put forward most clearly by John Broome, claims that intentions are so insubstantial that were they on their own reasons for action, that would amount to creating something out of nothing and that is impossible. The essay argues that the claim that intentions are insubstantial is too strong a premise to put forward without argument. For there are other attitudes that are on their own sufficient to generate reasons, such as loving attitudes. The essay then argues that the bootstrapping objection’s status as dogma in the philosophy of action has led to insufficient attention being paid to the entirely reasonable question of whether intentions are sufficiently like other reason-giving attitudes, such as loving and valuing. It may turn out that, just as loving someone can give the loving person a reason to act in a certain, so too can intending to do something give someone a reason to act in a certain way, but we cannot effectively engage this question without first giving up our commitment to the bootstrapping objection as a central “insight” in philosophy of action. The essay concludes by proposing two research questions that are opened up by the abandonment of the bootstrapping objection as dogma, and proposes that we turn our philosophical attentions to those questions.

Staying in the Room.

The call from the nursing home relayed that an 85-year-old male was coming in by ambulance complaining of increased shortness of breath. The nursing home told us that he had an unknown code status. Once the patient arrived, it was clear that he was in the process of dying. While I was preparing for aggressive resuscitative efforts, my attending physician was shuffling through some paperwork that came with the patient and discovered a “do not resuscitate” order, signed by the patient. The paperwork also stated that he had advanced cancer. It was clear why the patient had previously decided he did not want any procedures to be done, which we were quickly prepping to perform. With this added information we put a stop to our efforts, followed the wishes of the patient, and made him as comfortable as possible in his final moments. My attending asked the paramedics if the patient’s family was coming, and they said they would be arriving in 5–10 minutes. At the time, I was the senior resident in charge, and I was feeling the increased pressure of wanting to see more patients and to get some charting done. A 5–10 minute wait may not seem like much, but in the shift of an emergency physician, it can feel like an eternity. However, my attending didn’t leave the patient’s side, and he held his hand the whole time. After several long minutes, our patient’s family arrived in the emergency department. We went over the care of the patient and the family quickly understood the entire situation. With tears in their eyes, they still had one request from us: they asked that my attending and I participate with their family in prayer. Of course, we could not refuse. So as we gathered around the bedside, all holding hands, we instantly felt for that brief moment as members of the family. The more we listened to the prayer, something incredible happened. The patient, whom we had no previous connection to and knew nothing about, quickly became very real to us. During the prayer the family described our patient as not only a wonderful, loving person, but also the rock and foundation of this entire family, and that this dying patriarch would be missed beyond measure. What an unforgettable moment that was, to instantly connect to our patient and his family during his last moments on earth. Then I had an epiphany—what would it have looked like if the family had arrived and no one was at the bedside? It would have looked like their loved one was being abandoned in his final hour. But his family arrived to see my attending holding the hand of their loved one, and he was instantly able to explain the entire situation the moment they arrived. In emergency medicine, we train to save lives. We live for chest tubes, charged paddles, and difficult airways. In reality, the most important and meaningful thing we can do sometimes is as simple as staying in the room a few more minutes.

Post-apocalyptic Fiction as a Space for Civic Love

This article analyzes the civic love that emerges from three recent post-apocalyptic novels. Post-apocalyptic fiction captures our collective fears and reworks imaginatively how we might live together. In imagining how we might live together these post-apocalyptic texts go beyond the collective fear that might seem to be central to the genre to instead illustrate and inculcate civic love. This civic love is both evidence of just communities and illustrates the emotion necessary for creating such communities. Marge Piercy's He, She and It (1992), Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents (1998) and Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 (2012) illustrate the persuasive power of novels that highlight living in just communities. The love these characters have for their own communities, illustrated in their personal love relationships, awakens in the reader a sense of possibility for how we might live together.

P27 Transport factor in the spread of Ebola and the building of disaster risk management capacity in West Africa

BackgroundTransportation has been seen as a vital ingredient to developmental process and facilitation of economic growth across the globe be it developed or developing world. The benefits of transportation to the socio-economic development of the world including health cannot be ignored. Transport and health are also been discovered to be interrelated in many areas. Furthermore, it is also observed that modern mode of transportation has allowed and played a significant role in the movement of more people and products to travel around the world at a faster pace while they also open the ways to the interregional and international movement, spread and diffusion of infectious diseases, transfer of health personnel and equipment, provides access and enhanced patronage and utilization of health facilities across the globe. This includes the spread of Ebola virus disease (Ebola or EVD) that started in Guinea, West Africa in March 2014. However, so many people contacted it in Guinea, West Africa and died. As of mid –August, the virus had spread to neighboring Sierra Leone, Liberia and even distant country like Nigeria. As of October 2014, the spread has even gone beyond West Africa to United States of America (USA), Spain, France in Europe to mention a few, with WHO declaring that that infected persons could rise to 20,000 and said that it has used USD 489 million (NZD625 Million) to contain Ebola within six to nine months. Despite this enormous spending by the WHO and the governments of the affected countries, the continuous rapid spread of this virus is of great concern to every peace loving person across the globe and it is seriously spreading in border areas of the countries. The interest for this study is also based on the belief and observation that Ebola is spreading through different ways and means especially in developing countries where population is densely populated, high level of travel characteristics and porous borders among the neighboring nations. It is against this background that this study will examine the place of transportation in the spread of Ebola and the building of disaster risk management in West Africa states. MethodsA preliminary study was conducted by the researcher (s) to find out what are the factors responsible for the fast spread of the disease in West Africa. At the initial stage literatures were reviewed to identify the factors that may likely be responsible for the wide spread of this disease and the factors as ranked by the respondents were analysed. ResultsIt was observed that transportation play a significant role in the spread of the disease as a result of movement of people from one geographical location to another through the various means of transportation. For instance, Ebola came to Nigeria through an infected Liberian that travelled to Nigeria by air who became sick and refused to open up about his health status and he infested the staff of the hospital where he was admitted lending to the spread of the disease in Nigeria. ConclusionsThis paper presented key knowledge factors that were responsible for the wide spread of Ebola in West Africa but the impact of transport cannot be ignored as it ranked very high.

Representation of Romantic Love in Children's Drawings: Age and Gender Differences

AbstractThis study was designed to fill our current knowledge gap in children's representation of romantic love. To this end, we used a drawing task: 127 children ages 6 to 10 were asked to draw a person and a person in love. Performing content analysis, we identified seven graphic indicators used by children to depict romantic love in their drawings. As expected, results exhibited age and gender differences. First, older children used a higher number of graphic indicators than younger children. The use of each type of indicator (except for one) varied with age. Second, girls used a higher number of graphic indicators than boys. These gender differences were specific to three graphic indicators. Results are discussed in terms of children's developing representation of romantic love and of the potential impact of their socio‐cultural environment on this representation.

Training Emotion Cultivates Morality: How Loving-Kindness Meditation Hones Compassion and Increases Prosocial Behavior

Traditional moral philosophy has long focused on rationality, principled thinking, and good old-fashioned willpower, but recent evidence strongly suggests that moral judgments and prosocial behavior are more heavily influenced by emotion and intuition. As the evidence mounts, rational traditions emphasizing deliberative analysis and conscious decision making are called into question. The first section highlights some compelling evidence supporting the primacy of affective states in motivating moral judgments and behavior. The real challenge is finding a way to align intuition with desired behavior. In cool reflective states, one may desire to be a kind and loving person. But when it is time to act, the moment is often accompanied by strong affect-laden intuitions. I argue that if affective states are the primary motivators of behavior, then moral sentiments must be trained through habituation in order to increase prosocial behavior. The second section provides empirical evidence linking emotional training with increased prosociality. To highlight this connection, focus is placed on the relationship between habitual meditation training, compassion, and prosocial behavior. Recent studies by Antoine Lutz, Richard Davidson, Susanne Leiberg, and others show that various meditation practices can dramatically affect the human person at various levels, i.e., increased physical health, neural restructuring, regulation and development of emotions, and increased helping behavior, to name a few. The current article focuses on the impact the habit of loving-kindness meditation (LKM) has on compassion and prosocial behavior. Recent studies strongly support the conclusion that LKM training hones compassion and ultimately leads to an increase in compassionate behavior.

Roger Scruton: How to think seriously about the planet: the case for environmental conservatism

The main thesis of Roger Scruton’s provocative and insightful book How to Think Seriously about the Plant is that local solutions are the best way of dealing with environmental problems, such as climate change, deforestation, and pollution. Local solutions include free markets that give people incentives to take care of their environment; taxes that require consumers to pay for the true costs of pollution, tort laws that allow people to sue polluters for damages; and community associations that promote environmental stewardship. Global and national solutions favored by the modern environmental movement, such as international treaties and government regulations, are philosophically confused and psychologically unrealistic, according to Scruton. Global and national solutions are philosophically confused because morality is based on personal responsibility and love of home and family, rather than on abstract notions of distributive justice or social utility. Global national solutions are psychologically unrealistic because most people are motivated to protect their environment for economic reasons or out of love for their home and habitat, rather than from a commitment to a social or political cause. Global and national solutions also can create unintended consequences that cause more harm than good because they do not take local needs and concerns into account. One of Scruton’s key insights is that environmental problems often arise because polluters are able to externalize the costs of pollution, which means that they do not bear the full costs of pollution. For example, automobiles produce hydrocarbons emissions that can negatively affect air quality, increase respiratory illnesses, and contribute to global warming. Consumers of gasoline are shielded from these costs, because gas prices do not reflect the impacts of gasoline consumption on the

The Quest for Meaning and Wholeness: Spiritual and Religious Connections in the Lives of College Faculty by Jennifer A. Lindholm (review)

Reviewed by: The Quest for Meaning and Wholeness: Spiritual and Religious Connections in the Lives of College Faculty by Jennifer A. Lindholm William Buhrman Jennifer A. Lindholm. The Quest for Meaning and Wholeness: Spiritual and Religious Connections in the Lives of College Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014. Hardcover: 40.00$. ISBN 978-1-118-27147-6. Jennifer Lindholm’s provocative title comes from her administration of the 2012 Faculty Belief and Values Survey (FBVS). The survey, completed by more than 9,000 faculty members at over 250 institutions, investigated faculty attitudes towards spirituality and religion and, importantly, how these reflect the values they hold about their work in higher education. The Faculty Belief and Values Survey follows a significant pedigree of previous studies stemming from Lindholm’s collaboration with Alexander Astin and Denise Astin on the Spirituality in Higher Education Project. Their previous surveys include a set of items on the Triennial National Survey of College Faculty in 2004 (sponsored by the Higher Education Research Institute) and the College Student’s Belief and Values Survey (CSBV) in 2004 and 2007. The Faculty Belief and Values Survey stems from this collaboration, which developed the definitions used for measuring spirituality and religion on the CSVB as well as the survey items that might reveal the behaviors that college students associate with them. The processes and findings of the CSBV appear in Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Student’s Inner Lives (Jossey-Bass, 2011). This volume is referenced frequently in Lindholm’s current work. Those looking for more information on Lindholm’s guiding vision and previous conclusions will want to have Cultivating the Spirit at hand. Lindholm’s current book is divided into seven chapters that describe the empirical results of the Faculty Belief and Values Survey. Included also are a brief foreword, preface, and epilogue, each adding a glimpse into Lindholm’s own views about the role of spirituality in education. The first chapter describes the relationship of this survey to the prior studies of the Spirituality in Higher Education Project and provides background about the central operational definitions used to develop the test’s measures and items. [End Page 174] The second chapter gives a general picture of the spiritual and religious attitudes of faculty across a variety of characteristics including age, race, gender, as well as institutional and political affiliations. The remaining four chapters describe the results of the survey items with three dedicated to the spirituality measures and one to the religious. Following the protocol of the Spirituality and Higher Education Project, Lindholm distinguishes spirituality from religion. The former concerns a “multifaceted” attempt to answer life’s “big questions,” while the latter refers to behavioral or intellectual reactions to organized religion. The two have been separated to acknowledge that respondents may not necessarily associate religious beliefs and values with spiritual ones. Whether or not one agrees, noting this distinction is critically important to an informed reading of the book. Given their popular usage, it is easy to slip into reading these two terms as synonyms and thereby misconstrue Lindholm’s explanation of the data. Nine measures make up the survey and, of those, five focus on spirituality. “Spiritual quest” considers the importance of seeking meaning in life, of valuing beauty, and of becoming a loving person who possesses inner harmony. The “ethic of caring” inquires about the respondent’s concern for others, the desire to provide assistance to those in need, and a commitment to social justice. “Ecumenical worldview” measures the degree to which one views the world as interconnected and as calling for acceptance of others. The fourth measure, “charitable involvement,” queries participation in service activities and or other “helping behaviors” to friends or charities, including making monetary donations. Fifth, “equanimity” concerns one’s experience of “a dynamic state of internal equilibrium, or mental and emotional balance” with an internal “sense of calmness and peace” and an outward “sense of poise” (p. 158). The remaining four measures focus on participation in a religious faith tradition. The internal measure on “religious commitment” asks faculty the degree to which they seek to follow religious beliefs and feel those beliefs to be central to their identity. The “religious...

Beginning, Developing and Succeeding as a Thai Saxophonist: A Study of Teachers, Performers and the General Public

This qualitative research analyses stimuli during three phases in the career of Thai saxophonists. From a purposive sample of six saxophone teachers, six performers and twelve members of the general public, the paper reveals inspirations behind pursuit of a career in the saxophone, requirements for development as a saxophonist and conditions for success. The results show that reasons for starting to play the saxophone are personal interest and love of the saxophone, musical upbringing, friends, lifestyle, admiration of skilled saxophonists and the media. There are six requirements for development: personal characteristics, disciplined practice, good teachers, listening skills, experience and a musical identity. Role awareness and responsibility were the important requirements for success as a saxophone teacher. Successful professional saxophonists perform wholeheartedly to their full potential. Both saxophone teachers and performers must adapt their methods and techniques to the audience.

Feeling is Believing: Pentecostal Prayer and Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Sensory experience is pivotal to postmodern culture. A globalized world seems newly interconnected, yet individuals may feel more isolated than ever before. Scientific technologies and modern medicine have achieved remarkable triumphs and exhibited devastating limitations that leave people unsatisfied and searching for “more.” Modernization has not resulted in secularization, but sources of religious knowing—revealed Scripture, inherited tradition, institutional authority—have become unsettled. Postmoderns want more than intellectual certainty; they long for direct experiences of what is really real. In the United States and globally, many postmodern Christians combine “scientific” medicine with diverse touch-oriented “religious” and “spiritual” healing practices to find healing, reassurance that God is present with them personally, and hope for their future lives on earth and in the world to come. This essay draws on ten years of ethnographic research, in the United States and across globally diffuse social networks, on Christian prayer for divine healing and participation in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). I argue that touch-oriented healing practices attract adherents by promising sensory experience of the sacred. Bodily experiences in turn shape religious perceptions and may open a revolving door between religious worldviews. Ethnographic rE s E arch on p ray E r and c ompl E m E ntary and a lt E rnativ E mE dicin E Since 2003, I have been studying the global spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity through what I call “proximal intercessory prayer” for divine healing. The practice involves getting up close to a sick person, laying hands on their head, shoulder , or diseased body part, empathizing with their sufferings, petitioning God to heal, and commanding healing in the name and authority of Jesus of Nazareth. Many of the Christians I surveyed, interviewed, and observed sought prayer for healing both because they had physical and emotional needs and because they wanted evidence of God’s personal love and active intervention on their behalf. The pentecostal network at the center of my research—Christians influenced by the Toronto Blessing revivals of the

Miłość osobowa

This paper presents the concept of personal love in the Bible according to Nicolai Hartmann and Max Scheler. On this background the notion of sexual love as personal love according to Karol Wojty³a is discussed.

Love and loss, marriage and mourning: World War One in German home front novels

Mass death in World War One had significant costs on the home front, including disruption of marriage and bereavement practices. Home front novels, women's fiction written with an aim of depicting this disruption as well as supporting the war effort, provide a lens through which to examine discursive attempts to reconcile personal love and loss with nationalist imperatives to suppress grief and make willing sacrifices for the good of the nation. Authors failed to achieve a consistent, clear prescription for their readers: their attention to personal pain and the war's effects on broad sections of society made adherence to collective ideologies, including nationalism and socialism, difficult to maintain.

Wiara w rozumieniu Josepha Ratzingera – Benedykta XVI

Joseph Ratzinger believes that accepting faith is an act of cooperation between human reason and God’s grace. Ratzinger’s concept of man-God cooperation is complemented with his Logos Christology, under which Logos is not only a sense or a thought that manifests itself in objects (Greek conception), but through Incarnation, Logos reaches its fullness and becomes Logos incarnatus (Christian conception). Hence, believing in Logos gives man new, eternal life in God. And hence, faith is not a blind theory, or an out-dated idea. Instead, it is “seeking a path towards wisdom, reason and reality.” In this way, faith is a path towards man’s communion with God. Faith is a personal, and not a material category. Faith is, thus, a relationship of personal love, since God is Love (1 Jn 4:8).

Case Presentation: Long-Term Treatment

The long-term (14 years) psychodynamic psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy of a depressed, suicidal, self-mutilating female patient is described. Her diagnoses included Chronic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Recurrent Major Depression. Treatment was punctuated with repeated hospitalizations for self-mutilation (cutting) and suicidal ideation. A major determinant for her psychopathology was sexual abuse by her father from ages 6 to 14. This resulted in feelings of guilt and rage that she repressed and acted out through self-mutilating and suicidal behavior. A prolonged negative transference gradually became ambivalent, then positive. This was associated with her internalization of the healing qualities of the therapeutic relationship. She also gained insight into the reasons for her need to punish herself. Her initial self-representation as unworthy and bad was transformed into perceiving herself as a worthwhile, loving person. This case illustrates the role of long-term treatment for a complex, life-threatening, psychiatric disorder.

Verlusterleben und prolongierte Trauer bei depressiven Patienten

Inpatients diagnosed with major depression that had lost a loved person were asked about loss-related variables and symptoms of complicated grief (CG). CG was assessed by the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG-R). 14.2% of n = 127 individuals with unipolar depression met the criteria for CG. Depressive patients with CG compared to those without CG had a lower educational level; reported a higher loss-related burden at the time of loss, during the survey and the year after the loss; had significant different closeness within the relationships to the deceased; and time of loss was more recently. An adequate differential diagnostic is essential for the treatment of major depression. Therefore loss-related factors and symptoms of complicated grief must be investigated regularly.

Del amor personal humano al divino: Un estudio desde la antropología trascendental de L. Polo

In this work we study the human personal love and the divine personal love according the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo. We sustain that the human personal love is naturally open to the world, to others, to the self, and over all to God; that it is growing and susceptible of be elevated by God. The divine personal love is pluripersonal and is open to the man in his creation, elevation and glorification.

Editor's Column: Connecting Stevens to Connecticut

Editor's Column:Connecting Stevens to Connecticut Bart Eeckhout I like natives: people in civilized countries whose only civilization is that of their own land. Not that I have ever met any: it is merely an idea. Yet it would be nice to meet an idea like that driving a donkey cart, stopping to talk about the rain. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Barbara Church, Sept. 7, 1948 My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times, for every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world. —Alfred North Whitehead, quoted in Wallace Stevens' "A Collect of Philosophy" When Wallace Stevens, only months before his death in the summer of 1955, was asked to paint a verbal picture of Connecticut for a Voice of America radio series called "This Is America," he appears to have relished the definitional exercise. He launched his contribution in conspicuously affirmative terms: The thrift and frugality of the Connecticut Yankee were necessary to life in the Colony and still are. They were imposed on him by the character of the natural world in which he had come to live, which has not changed. It required thrift and frugality to live in Connecticut and still does. And now after three centuries or more of this tradition, the people of the state are proud of it. They are proud of the kind of strength of character which they have derived from this necessity, proud of the intelligent ingenuity with which they faced their many hardships and with which they rose to the high general level of intelligence [End Page 1] and dignified style of living that is now so characteristic of them. (CPP 894) After this classic example of patriotic oratory, deftly chained through rhetorical repetition, Stevens characteristically slid into the more idiosyncratic and personal reflections of a poet, who, on a recent trip to Boston, noted how "the word derelict kept repeating itself as part of the activity of the train" (CPP 894). Just as typically, he seized the opportunity of the train ride to move into a depiction of the observed landscape: But this was a precious ride through the character of the state. The soil everywhere seemed thin and difficult and every cutting and open pit disclosed gravel and rocks, in which only the young pine trees seemed to do well. There were chicken farms, some of them abandoned, and there were cow-barns. The great barns of other states do not exist. There were orchards of apples and peaches. Yet in this sparse landscape with its old houses of gray and white there were other houses, smaller, fresher, more fastidious. (CPP 894-95) This brief picture-book of snapshots—banal sights nonetheless recorded with an artist's precise eye—then issued in a personal love declaration: "The man who loves New England and particularly the spare region of Connecticut loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin lights, the delicacy and slightness of the beauty of the place" (CPP 895). The terms of the description may remind us of "The Motive for Metaphor," where the speaker remembers being "happy in spring, / With the half colors of quarter-things" (CPP 257), and they may bring to mind how Stevens at the time of composing that poem had been getting enthusiastic about the French Barbizon school painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Richardson 212)—the more so since his evocation of Connecticut's spare colors and thin lights continues with another pictorially rendered image of spring: When the spring was at its height we should have a water-color not an oil and we should all feel that we had had a hand in the painting of it, if only in choosing to live there where it existed. Now, when all the primitive difficulties of getting started have been overcome, we live in the tradition which is the true mythology of the region and we breathe in with every breath the joy of having ourselves been created by what has...