Primary Loyalty Research Articles

A Common Creation Story? Interreligious Dialogue and Ecology

PRECIS This essay explores the contemporary proposal that our scientific understanding of the earth--how It originated and how it functions--can serve as a common creation story for all religions and as the basis therefore, for interreligious dialogue. Recognizing the danger that such a proposal can become another meta-narrative Imposed by the West, the author suggests that these dangers might be avoided if the religious communities approach the earth first of all as an ethical story rather than a creation By first taking up, together, the ethical challenges of an endangered planet, the religions can determine the common ground on which they might, as a second step, each other's religious stories about the earth and develop, together, a common creation The shared praxis of ecological engagement can become the common ground for deeper ecological religious dialogue. For the first time in our history, we have empirical evidence for a common creation story. Thus declared a group of fifty representatives of various religious traditions back in the early 1990's in one of the first steps toward what eventually was to become the Earth Charter. (1) Over the past decade, that vision of a common creation story has grown in both substance and urgency, especially through the scientific research and prophetic voices of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. (2) The proposal--and the dream--is that science, an enterprise that is available to all cultures and religions, is now providing the religious communities of the world with something that, so far, they have not been able to find on their own: a truly common ground that will enable them to talk together and work together as never before. The creation story as science tells it is delivered in a way that all religions can, and must, it. Hence, science and its understanding of our earth and universe are providing the arena for a new kind of interreligious dialogue. Swimme put it this way: Though scientific knowledge has put lethal weapons in our hands, it has also provided the Earth with the first common story of our origins and development . . . Precisely because this story of the universe comes to us through our investigations beginning with our eyes and ears and body, we can speak of a transcultural creation Members of every continent are involved in discovering and articulating this Members of every religious tradition are involved in its telling. (3) What science is telling us today about the origins of the universe (especially the creative, mysterious, still-evolving Big Bang) and how the universe works (through a pervasive, on-going net of interrelationships that make humans cousins to the stars, to the rocks and oceans, to all living creatures) (4) is a story that all religions can use to hear again and deepen their own stories of how the universe originated or how it works. As Sallie McFague has made clear, the scientific creation story is not meant to replace but to adjust and invigorate traditional myths and beliefs and relate them interreligiously: This common story is available to be remythologized by any and every religious tradition and hence is a place of meeting for the religions, whose conflicts in the past and present have often been the cause of immense suffering and bloodshed as belief is pitted against belief. What this common story suggests is that our should be not to nation or religion but to the earth and its Creator (albeit that Creator may be understood in different ways). (5) This suggestion of a primary loyalty to the new creation story has been spelled out by Berry. He announced that, unless religious communities realign their traditional creeds in view of the earth as the revelation and context of religious experience, they will not be able to respond adequately to the sensitivities and needs of our third-millennium world. We are . …

Globalization, Justice, and International Organizations: A Commentary

It is true that international institutions do not command the primary loyalty among the peoples of the world that would allow them the opportunity to legislate in favor of social justice. They do, however, command strong political backing from the most important political actors in world politics – namely, states. In addition, virtually all international organizations integrate nongovernmental organizations into their deliberative processes. Present globalization trends are increasing economic disparities between and within countries, but most regimes do provide poorer states with special provisions that can be used to protect their economic interests. Also, some have clearly benefited from economic openness. In the long term, it will be surprising if states do not address the problem of growing economic gaps through international regimes, although the likely adequacy of their responses is open to question.

Customer Loyalty to the Salesperson and the Store: Examining Relationship Customers in an Upscale Retail Context

Only recently has research interest in relationship marketing and customer loyalty converged in the retail context. Although this research shows that relationship customers maintain their primary loyalty to the salesperson, which then “spills over” and affects loyalty to the store, other research suggests that salesperson loyalty has direct effects on store-level outcomes, such as spending and word of mouth. However, this has not been comprehensively investigated, and relationship researchers have specifically called for research examining the effects of salesperson and store loyalty on store-level outcomes. Our research addresses this call, and shows that in an upscale retail context a relationship customer's loyalty to the salesperson is significantly related to store loyalty as well as the important store-level outcomes of share of purchases, word of mouth and competitive resistance.

A Change in the Family: The Image of the Family in Contemporary Chinese Children's Literature, 1949-1993

A Change in the Family:The Image of the Family in Contemporary Chinese Children's Literature, 1949-1993 Jane Parish Yang (bio) For the past two months, a most unforgettable event has been coursing through my brain. At nights before I sleep or in mornings when I have just awakened, this event clearly unfolds before my eyes like a scroll painting. It seems as if I can still feel the crisp air in my nostrils, so cold and sharp, and the moonlight flooding over my head, still so radiant and luminous. My hand, which Father had grasped tightly, still surges with warmth; my face still benumbed by Mother's icy tears! I have often told them both: "I will never forget that night." Mother then hugs me closely: "My child, I hope you will remember this forever." And what was it? That night two months ago, on the night of January thirteenth, when Father and Mother took me to Tiananmen Square to mourn our beloved Premier Zhou in front of the Monument to the People's Heroes. —Bing Xin, "Ji Yijian Zui Nanwang de Shiqing [Recalling a Most Memorable Event]" (1977) The quotation in the epigraph, from one of China's most famous modern writers, depicts a warm family relationship between parents and child connected to a larger political cause: the then-dangerous expression of support for moderation during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). From the thirteenth century on, how family and state relate to each other had been a central concern of Neo-Confucian philosophical and political teachings. Writings from the time of Confucius and Mencius, The Four Books, were annotated and explicated by the Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi (1130-1200), and were made the state-sanctioned texts for education in all of China. It was not the Neo-Confucians who first spoke of the family-state relationship, however, [End Page 86] as noted historian Donald Munro states: "To consider the government an extension of family relationships was a policy of Chou [1122-256 B.C.] feudalism" (46). Munro asserts that Chu Hsi and the Neo-Confucians merely tried to reconcile the "potential incompatibility between family-centered role fulfillment and duty to the public" (113).1 Proper relations among family members and between the family and the state were a central concern in these ethical teachings of Confucius: an individual was first and foremost a member of a family group, with duties and obligations to that group. Familial roles, especially the duties of the male side-father, elder brother, son—were specifically a part of these teachings. Only after one's duty to the family was fulfilled was one capable of serving the larger entity beyond the family: the state. The two roles were interconnected in NeoConfucian thought, with reciprocal obligations for each, but serving the family was seen as a prerequisite to serving the state. In fact, service to the state could be a means of empowering and enriching a family, and so service to the state often was subverted to the particular interests of the family. Neo-Confucians taught that one who was filial, that is, who carried out the proper role of a son, would not offend a superior. Likewise, it was thought that one who was fraternal, that is, who carried out the proper role of a brother, would know his correct role in regard to superiors. It was assumed that having learned proper behavior at home, one would know how to relate to superiors and inferiors in the wider realm outside the family. Yet even so, one's primary loyalty and interest lay with the family. The collective good of society was a secondary consideration in this family-centered ethical system. A change in values came with the advent of communist ideology, which influenced Chinese writings from the first part of the twentieth century. In the communist view, the interests of the individual, as well as of the family unit, were subsumed by the interests of society as a whole. The literary expression of communist ideology, socialist realism, allowed for no negative or vacillating characters in fact or fiction-only positive, exemplary ones, who would carry the Revolution to its inevitable victory. Such a...

Tribal identity and alliance behaviour among factions of the Kurdish national movement in Iraq

While most of the current literature on secessionist and nationalist movements treats them as a collective whole, the author of this paper argues that these movements do not always act as a cohesive unit in their attempts to achieve their nationalist aspirations. The article demonstrates that primary loyalty to sectarian group identity within these movements impacts on their alliance behaviour with the central government and foreign powers. The article integrates international relations theory and nationalism and group behaviour theories and applies them to factions of the Kurdish national movement in Iraq.

Inquiry as a Non-Invasive Approach to Cross-Curricular Writing Consultancy

In the concluding chapter of Writing in the Academic Disciplines, David Russell argues that WAC must find ways to harness the efforts of the disciplines—“where the faculty’s primary loyalty and interest lie” (304)—in order to end the marginalization of writing and make it a part of the fabric of all majors. His recommendations conclude a study which demonstrates, from its introduction onward, the “drive [of academic discourse] toward increasing specialization” (22) and the writing pedagogy meant to cope with that drive. Writing instruction has largely failed to keep pace with this specialization, let alone serve the central place it could for learning within departments. His treatment of this situation is comprehensive, but he does not discuss its solutions, how this harnessing may take place. In this essay, I propose the use of inquiry as a non-invasive approach to WAC consultancy for linking writing to the disciplines. After that, by way of a lengthy conclusion, I discuss such related matters as the place of freshman English in the writing enterprise, writing to learn versus learning to write, and the appropriateness of specialization. But for the next few pages I would like to establish that there is a problem to be solved. As loosely affiliated language communities, disciplines have their own values, purposes, and forms for writing. WAC consultants should look for the values the disciplines hold and help instructors develop assignments out of them. Not doing so in their interactions with faculty, at its worst, may create the type of scenario Paulo Freire describes as extension agentry. The agent presses his or her values on other cultures: “His cultural historical situation which gives him his vision of the world is the environment from which he starts out. He seeks to penetrate another cultural historical situation and impose his system of values on Inquiry as a Non-Invasive Approach to Cross-Curricular Writing Consultancy

Sample Size: Profound Implications of Mundane Calculations

Controversies in the design of clinical trials excite a small but feisty group of academicians. On one side of the controversy is a group I call the "rigorists," who argue that clinical medicine must be based only on facts that are established by scientifically rigorous clinical trials.1,2 Arguments for scientific rigor have an attractive purity about them that is both mathematical and moral. The simple certainties of statistical science can lead one to believe that, if only we would live by them, we would achieve not only low P values but universal peace and harmony as well. Thus, it may be considered not just good science but an ethical requirement of good research that studies be of sufficient size to give statistically significant results. No moral argument can confront such assertions head on. Nobody argues, for example, that studies ought to be of insufficient size to give meaningful results. Instead, on the other side of this debate we find a group whom I call "apologists," who make arguments about why, even though scientific rigor is the highest good, other considerations sometimes dictate that medical practice be based on knowledge that falls short of the highest scientific standards. These arguments can be based on the physician's primary loyalty to his or her patient,3-5 to the difficulties in deciding whether or not a sufficient state of uncertainty about the relative merits of two treatments exists to ethically justify clinical trials,6,7 or on the special difficulties in obtaining informed consent or randomizing patients in particular populations.8-10

Stressors, Personal Resources, and Social Supports in Military Performance During Wartime

Self-report measures of combat stressors, stress reactions, personal resources, and social supports were obtained from 48 Israeli combat veterans, each from a different military unit. These retrospective reports referred to military service in Lebanon during two time periods: (a) the initial invasion, characterized by high levels of combat stressors and high levels of endorsement of the official goals of the war; and (b) the subsequent holding operation, characterized by low levels of both. As predicted, soldiers reported a decline from the first period to the second in intensity of combat stressors, endorsement of goals, and frequency of stress reactions. There were also declines in military unit morale and primary loyalty to the unit, but unit cohesiveness, motivation to serve, and military performance remained unchanged. Regression analyses showed that military performance was strongly associated with unit cohesiveness, primary loyalty to one's unit, and motivation to serve, and was unrelated to intens...

Fraternization and rationality in global perspective

Etymologically, the term "community" derives from the Christian idea of a communion, a sacrament in which bread and wine are partaken of as a commemoration of the death of Christ. Under the Pauline Church this idea was extended into a covenant of faith in a universal Christian community under one God.1 This church was to be a unified body of individuals, a brotherhood bound in loyalty to God through the sacrificial body of his son. Max Weber, among others, pointed to the radical nature of this idea of a religious sodal? ity, for it required believers to invest their primary loyalty to it. Other social and economic bonds, including those of family, kin, clan and civic associations, are reduced to secondary status in this overarch? ing universal community of brotherhood and sisterhood. Even the most secularized sociological conceptions of community bear the mark of this religiously derived conception of the communion. American English is replete with cognates derived from the origi? nal sacramental communion: i.e., commune, communal, communi? cable, communicate, communism, communitarian, and such usages of "community" as in community chest, community college, and community-wide. In addition, we speak of a community of share? holders, a corporate community, a rural or urban community, the European community, or even, in a phrase that stretches its original meaning beyond recognition, a "community of interests."

Reducing Dropout Rates through Improved Intake Procedures

Effective intake procedures help identify unsuitable candidates for family counseling services, including those who are likely to discontinue treatment because of involvement of reluctant others or primary loyalty to another agency. Screening and streaming of applicants during intake reduces dropout rates.

Congress—Raj Conflict and the Rise of the Muslim League in the Ministry Period, 1937–39

The Government of India Act of 1935 was a constitutional device meant to extend the Raj's political alliances in Indian society. The Congress Party, on the other hand, construed the Act as a new challenge to the demand for independence. The authorities discovered that the Congress ministers’ primary loyalties lay with the imperatives of the party and not with the constitutional arrangement. Concern on this account was heightened by the resurgence of ground-level Congress activism. The Congress strengthened and expanded its volunteer organization while it governed the provinces. If the formal party institutions were weakened by corruption and factionalism during the ministry period, its grass-roots cadres were revitalized and mobilized opinion against compromises with the Raj, strengthening the ministers’ hands in any major clashes with the authorities. The latter were disturbed by links between the Congress ministers and party activity hostile to the Raj, even though a certain convergence of Congress and British interests kept the experiment of provincial autonomy going. The official response to this situation consisted, at one level, of making expedient concessions.But the authorities explored an alternative possibility as well. The Muslim League, which emerged as a mass party after 1937, was not exactly an ally, but it offered the most powerful resistance to the possibility of total mobilization under the Congress.

The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite

Elite marriage in Rome in the late Republic and early Empire was con tracted between noble houses of equivalent status, often for immediate political gains. Contrary to views advanced by some scholars, spouses nonetheless enter tained strong expectations of conjugal loyalty and happiness but marriage was relatively fragile. Power was vested in the older generation rather than men as such. A separate matrimonial regime was usually maintained during marriage and dowry was essentially recoverable on divorce or widowhood. Upper class women were therefore relatively independent although they subordinated in dividual preference to corporate interests. Their primary loyalty was to their natal kin but they observed the obligation to redistribute their dowry and patrimony in the following generation to their children, who belonged to the father's lineage.

Colonial Rule, Missionaries and Ethnicity in the North Nyasa District, 1891-1938

The study of Malawi's colonial history has been dominated by the establishment of British rule, the spread of Christian mission influence, and the development of nationalism, among other themes. Perhaps due to the Whiggish approach to history which has influenced many historians of colonial Malawi, critical issues such as ethnic awareness-which was developing in a pronounced way at the same time as the expansion of mission schools and the evolution of national feelings-have been neglected until recently (Vail, 1983: White, 1983). It appears that ethnic awareness has been taken for granted and accepted without a proper understanding of it. This article discusses ethnicity in the old North Nyasa district in the period 1891-1938. It demonstrates how the economic and political changes which took place in the region in the first three decades of the establishment of colonial rule promoted ethnic tension, and it argues that the indirect rule system (which assumed that the African was a tribal man, inwardlooking, with a primary loyalty to so-called traditional authority) was not only divisive, but also a major catalyst for greater ethnicity. It also argues that through certain educational practices which tended to discriminate against some peoples of the region, a number of Karonga-based missionaries of the Livingstonia Synod encouraged the growth of this phenomenon. The article, like some recent studies (Iliffe, 1979: 318-41; Ranger, 1979) pays particular attention to the role played by the elites of North Nyasa in the heightening of ethnicity in the district.

The Honorable Bureaucrat among the Philistines

The argument that analytical philosophy should be the working philosophy of public administration is premature. Since the primary loyalty of public administrators must be to the "American regime values," rather than to elected officials, an ability to do moral philosophy is the necessary foundation upon which all public administration education must be based. Specifically, it is indispensable to the correct exercise of the discretionary powers of public administrators.

The mentor role in individualized education at Empire State College

This paper discusses the role of mentors in individualized learning at Empire State College, New York State. The discussion implicitly questions roles and procedures in distance education. This individualized learning programme is defined and illustrated. The components of the role of mentor are likewise defined and illustrated. Then the implications of being a mentor working with individual students are spelt out as they illuminate the relationships of mentors in academia. The conclusion is offered that the mentor's commitment to his/her students is an exhibition of his/her fundamental commitment to a philosophical stance in education which surmounts primary loyalty to one's academic faculty. The final whimsical question is whether or not individualized learning and distance education are compatible or conflicting.

Are the Interests of Men and Women Identical?

One of the most influential attempts to organize working-class women in the United States was that of the Socialist party in its period of great strength between 1901 and 1912. By 1908, when party membership had climbed to over twenty thousand, Socialist women began a successful campaign of autonomous organization within the party and within two years had created women's branches in 156 Socialist party locals.' Socialist women's agitation, like Socialist politics in general, reached well beyond actual party members. In the early twentieth century the Socialist party was the only political party to allow women's participation and to endorse women's suffrage and other equal rights issues. Among radical groups, the Socialist party was the only organization that directed its women's organizing program to the whole working class, not just to employed women-at that time a small minority among their sex. The three selections printed here, from Socialist publications, reflect the efforts of women activists in the party to encompass the needs of all working-class women and to seek out their fundamental unity of experience in workplace and family. Many socialist women, in and out of the party, were developing at this time an analysis of women's problems based on this sense of unified experience. They avoided a primary loyalty either to the existing corpus

Beyond Autonomy? The Politics of Corporations

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A FORMIDABLE GROWTH OF literature on the political and other implications of business corporations. Much of the writing on the corporations has been of an alarmist nature. We are usually referred to the growth of an impressive economic (and, by implication, political) power of the corporations, the lack of effective democratic control on their activities, and the consequent need to establish a more effective set of constraints. It is suggested that internally the corporations are tending to by-pass the legislatures and other representative institutions, while externally the multinationals are integrating sectors of economies across states, and employing a management which may owe primary loyalty to the corporation and not the state in which managers are based. The emergence of the multinationals therefore not only seriously challenges many of our cherished political institutions and procedures, it also confronts our patterns of thinking about the sovereign state which have been inherited from the 16th century. In that they escape from the constraints of national boundaries and representative institutions it is alleged that the corporations are rendering obsolescent our traditional concepts of both state and sovereignty. Much of this argument is neatly encapsulated in the evocative titles of such scholarly works as Beyond the Nation State and Sovereignty at Bay.

The “New Nationalism”

Nationalism is of course a state of mind. It is a way of thinking which seizes a rather large group of people, usually all living in the same area, and causes them to consider themselves a nation; that is, as an actual or potential governing organization to which they give their loyalty. We continue to live in an era of nation-states. To give one's primary political loyalty to a sub-national group is to be provincial, to give it to another nation is to skirt being subversive, and to give it to a group of nations is to espouse supranationalism. In this context, what docs it mean to speak of “the new nationalism“?There are many surprises in the use of the term “new nationalism.” It sometimes refers to nationalism typical of a new nation.

The Expulsion of Ōkuma from the Government in 1881

In 1881, the Japanese government was headed by a single President, Sanjō, assisted by two vice-presidents, Iwakura and Arisugawa. These men alone had direct access to the Emperor on state affairs. Beyond giving advice of their own, their principal task was to mediate in disputes between the councillors and to advise the Emperor on which was the stronger side when his decision was necessary to resolve a deadlock. Sanjō and Iwakura were court nobles with long ties with Satsuma and Chōshū, whose armies had fought and won the Restoration war of 1868–9, and whose leaders thereafter held the key posts in the council, the executive and the Armed Forces. While deeply conscious of their primary loyalty to the Emperor and anxious to prevent his domination by powerful factions, Sanjo and Iwakura in the last analysis, and with some regret, regarded Satsuma and Chōshū as the essential pillars of the new regime. Arisugawa was a Prince Imperial, who had been raised to the position of vice-president in 1880. He had been chairman of the legislative Genrōin that included several prominent members antipathetic to Satsuma and Chōshū dominance of the government. While Sanjō and Iwakura were basicallyagreed with the Sat-Chō leaders that Prussia provided the best model for a future constitution, Arisugawa as chairman of the Genrōin had presented the Emperor with a draft constitution in 1879 that drew heavily from the English model. It should be noted that there was therefore a possibility that Arisugawa would dissent from his presidential colleagues when the issue of the constitution was raised within the government in 1881.

The Senate and American Federalism

At Philadelphia in 1787 the authors of the Constitution invented a new kind of federalism. In previous federal governments, the participating states were no more intimate than permanent allies, and citizens retained a primary loyalty to local governments. The federalism of 1787 achieved a converse effect, however, for it subordinated the member governments and created a nation. Likewise, while the earlier federalisms were notoriously prone to muddles in policy and stalemates in action, the American form turned out to give reasonably effective government, even in the short run. For both its nationalism and its effectiveness, therefore, it found favor with constitution makers elsewhere: in the larger Latin American states, in most of the new nations of the British Commonwealth, in the Germany of Weimar and Bonn, even, on paper at least, in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Probably the clearest demonstration of the prestige and utility of the American invention was the revision (in 1848) of the Swiss Confederation into a federalism patterned after the United States. The cantons thereby abandoned the one remaining survivor of the alliance type of federalism, represented in the middle ages by the Swabian, Rhenish, and Lombard leagues, as well as by the Swiss. And so it happens that about half the earth is presently ruled by federal governments—all of them reminiscent in one way or another of the Philadelphia invention.