Religious Restraints Research Articles

On the reasonability of reasoning with the religiously unreasonable

ABSTRACT Political liberals argue that religious citizens should exercise religious restraint: they ought, at least as a rule, not to rely directly on religious reasons in public political debates, and should instead draw only from the contents of a ‘reasonable’, secular political conception of justice. Political liberals hold that direct religious reasoners’ who fail to follow this rule fail to be ‘reasonable’ (in a technical sense) and contend that liberal polities may thus dismiss their religiously-motivated objections to otherwise justified democratic laws. However, I argue that political liberals’ own principles of ‘reasonability’ forbid such a dismissal. Those principles themselves, I argue, require liberal polities to offer direct religious reasoners who are reasonable in the basic, colloquial sense of being fair-minded and reciprocitous, deep reasons—that speak to their comprehensive religious doctrines—for why they should accept and reason from a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice. I call the position which requires such deep justification of a ‘reasonable’, political conception of justice Deep Inclusivism, and draw on the work of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic political thinker, to help illustrate what a fair-minded, reciprocitous religious reasoner might look like.

God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana M. Horowitz

Reviewed by: God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana M. Horowitz Robert Benne God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success. By Ilana M. Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 240 pp. The author, Ilana Horowitz, has as interesting a history as the subject matter of her book. She was born in the Soviet Union of non-religious Jewish parents who had to hide whatever Jewish rituals they had left. After immigrating to the United States she went to non-religious Jewish schools and continued her agnosticism. She entered an elite university, Stanford, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology. It was a great surprise to her to live in a neighborhood where many Christian families were devoutly religious. She began wondering how their religious intensity affected the educational outcomes of their children. Finding little research on that subject, she plunged into extensive empirical research and produced this book. [End Page 112] Her research shows that an "upbringing of religious restraint" leads to better educational outcomes for young people. By "religious restraint" she means that such young people are taught to be disciplined, respectful of elders and teachers, and devoted "to live a life that is pleasing to God" (15–17). They have higher grades and rates of graduation than similar young people who are not seriously religious. This difference is particularly true of working- and middle-class youngsters. There is not such a large difference between religious and secular children of highly educated upper-middle and higher-class parents. While the religiously intense young tend to do better with regard to grades and graduation in the lower grades and high school, they do not aim at elite education beyond high school. They do not aspire to go to the top schools. On the surface, this seems odd, but there are interesting reasons why the religious do not aim for the highest ranked schools. First, they do not pursue elite levels because that has little to do with living a life pleasing to God. They think they can get as well prepared for their vocations in nearby schools that are not so highly ranked. Second, as elite colleges exhibit more "wokeness," the religious young—reinforced by their parents—shy away from them. The author thinks this is a shame because such students would add religious and viewpoint diversity to those elite schools (177). Another interesting finding is that "abiders"—another word she uses for the seriously religious—tend to make less money than their secular counterparts. One reason is that they want more time with their families than high octane work allows. Another is that they like to live in areas that are more religious rather than the highly secular environs of large cities where more money can be made (179). There are other goods associated with the religiously intense. "They are significantly less likely to experience emotional, cognitive, or physical despair. They feel less anxious, healthier, and more optimistic about life" (179). They are content with social order, including traditional gender norms (181). The author even suggests that the decline of religion among young people is less than fearful Christians believe (11). Perhaps most encouraging to religious adults is that these young people take their Christianity into their public, secular lives (173). [End Page 113] All and all, this book offers some hope to Christians in a world that seems to be becoming more hostile to religion, especially orthodox religion. I found it very encouraging. While the book is very comprehensive, there is one gap that I wish she would have covered. How many serious young Christians are now home-schooled or go to Christian schools? There seems to be an ever greater number taking those routes, partly because their families believe that public schools are increasingly under the sway of anti-Christian ideologies. The author seems oblivious to those developments. Nevertheless, this is a very substantial book that should bring some satisfaction to Christians who worry about the decline of Christian faith and life in the next generations. Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Persistent Gender and Racial Hierarchies: Marriage Migration and Mixedness in Morocco from the French Protectorate to the Present

This article presents a historical and anthropological approach to mixed marriages in Morocco, tracking the continuities and changes between the French colonial period and contemporary experiences to see how attitudes towards mixed couples changed in Morocco throughout the French protectorate, in the post-independence period and the increasingly globalised world of the 21st century. This interdisciplinary approach combines historic data (primarily from a 1949 study into mixed marriages conducted by the colonial government as well as magazines, novels and memoirs) with 52 anthropological semi-structured interviews (conducted in Morocco between 2018 and 2022) with children of mixed couples and some of their parents.We examine first how the demographic make-up of mixed couples and where they choose to settle has shifted, looking at their gender split, their countries of origin, their occupations and where they met. This has diversified considerably throughout the 20th century: the individuals come from a much larger number of countries (no longer primarily Moroccan soldiers who returned from France with French women) and Moroccan women are now more likely to travel abroad. But gender still impacts mobility as the country of settlement is still often linked to the husband’s job. We then compare how in some cases legal and religious restraints have affected which mixed couples can marry. Although European men could marry Moroccan women, the French colonial authorities sought to ban European wives or partners of Moroccan men from entering Morocco because they believed these relationships would threaten the hierarchies of colonial rules. However, in contemporary Morocco migration is considerably easier for individuals from the Global North. Today the Moroccan family law (Mudawana) states that a foreign man has to convert to Islam if he wishes to marry a Moroccan Muslim woman. What is forbidden has changed, but women’s freedom remains subject to external pressures to maintain social cohesion. Finally, we examine the emotional motivations behind choosing mixed marriages, often overlooked by studies of migration, arguing that mixed marriage in Morocco has always shown a “desire for elsewhereness” and offered a space of freedom, a way to embrace new possibilities and turn away from certain social norms. In the 20th century, in the colonial and post-independence period, many Moroccan men used mixed marriage as a way to escape traditional pressures to pay a bride price (sdaq) to a Moroccan woman’s family. Some Moroccan men also expressed colonialist ideas that European women were more “evolved” and would make better partners than Moroccan women as they were more educated because of gender inequalities in access to education. This has changed due to Moroccan women’s improved access to education. But emotions are still at the heart of these experiences of intimacy across racial, national and religious borders. Contemporary and historical couples see mixedness as imbued with new opportunities to express their desire for change, for a new way of living and for creativity. Mixed marriages provide a change to re-evaluate customs and lifestyles, but these are also deeply intimate relationships born out of emotional attachment. This article reminds readers that marriage migration is, at heart, a migration for love. This love, and the feeling of possibility it offers, can be considered a threat to existing power structures. We argue that in post-independence Morocco, mixed marriages are no longer considered a threat to political power but that they still reveal the existence of persistent racial and gender symbolic boundaries. Indeed, social perception of mixed couples has shifted from a fear of neo-imperialism to a feeling of opportunities in a globalized world, but gender and racial hierarchies still prevail as significant symbolic boundaries that shape mixed couples and attitudes towards them.

Political Appeal of Religion

Much of philosophical reflections about the relations between religion and politics fall within the liberal tradition of religious restraint, which generated both the backlash of a new traditionalism and the critical turn in the study of religion. Moving beyond the real or imagined isomorphism of religion and politics, I show how the political functions of religion are closely connected to the anthropological reflections about culture and politics. The aim is to provide political theory with a new “awareness of what is missing” by revealing the deeply political significance of religion, not merely as an instrument used in political contexts for political purposes but a total political fact, which remain hidden behind the moral discourses of religious advocates, political leaders, and academic scholars.

Experiencing the Riverscape: An Eco-Spiritual Decoding of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in select writings of Neelum Saran Gour

AbstractContemporary times have triggered for an interdisciplinary cusp between disciplines that were conventionally read in a hinged academic encore. The Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ near Allahabad city where three holy rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati converge, is believed to be the holiest riverscape as one drop of amrit (nectar) during ocean churning by Gods and demons fell into its water and therefore, bathing and dipping in this sangam or confluence is considered auspicious. It is not that people only experience such spiritual values, rather internalize the same, even sometimes beyond religious restraints formulating a holistic human and ecological bonding. Therefore, river or for that matter riverscape like sangam transcends the environmental physical boundary to the living one as it shapes people’s experiences and accordingly adds meaning in their lives. Indian English author Neelum Saran Gour’s fictional representation of the riverscape of Gangetic ‘Triveni-Sangam’ in her select writings like Allahabad Aria (2015), Invisible Ink (2015), and Requiem in Raga Janki (2018) are woven within the interdisciplinary framework of ‘eco-spirituality’. The present research will examine how riverscape as an eco-spiritual entity shapes individuals’ experiences and helps them to locate the ‘self’ both in vyashti (the individual) and samashti (the collective) scale.

Renal replacement therapy for children throughout the world: the need for a global registry

BackgroundTo describe the factors affecting the incidence of renal replacement therapy (RRT) among children, information from RRT registries is required. We aimed to give an overview of existing pediatric RRT registries worldwide, identify regions with a need to commence or increase data collection on pediatric RRT, and provide a rationale for developing a global RRT registry.MethodsA survey assessing pediatric RRT registry status was sent to International Pediatric Nephrology Associateion (IPNA) members in 127 countries in January 2016. The survey was complemented by a systematic literature search for active pediatric RRT registries.ResultsComplete survey responses were retrieved from 94 countries (representing 86.2% of the world childhood population), with 84 (81.2%) having the means to provide RRT to children, given that there are no other limitations such as financial, social, or religious restraints. Fifty-one (35.3%) countries had national registries for both dialysis and transplantation, nine (30.0%) either had a dialysis or a transplant registry, six participated in international registries only (2.7%), and in 18 (13.2%), children on RRT were not followed in any registry. The search identified 92 pediatric RRT registries, primarily national registries located in Europe, North America, and Asia.ConclusionsAlthough pediatric RRT can be provided in 84 countries representing 81.2% of the world’s childhood population, national pediatric RRT registries are unavailable in many countries. To improve knowledge about the incidence and outcomes of pediatric RRT around the globe, an international population-based pediatric RRT registry has recently been initiated.

Christopher Smart'sSystema Naturae: Anti-Newtonianism and the Categorical Impulse inJubilate Agno

This article explores Christopher Smart's poetic emphasis on reading the world correctly in the face of contemporary religious and empirical anxieties about the incapacity of human ideas to frame the natural world and the inadequacy of language to describe, name and categorise it. Tracing a development from religious restraint to a new kind of botany, the article concentrates on four themes: the inability to express the divine and the risk of vanity in science in the poet's early work, Smart's rejection of scientific language, and his categorical impulse in Jubilate Agno, which orders his natural subjects into a new physico-theology.

A Comparative Political Economic Analysis of Fables of the Bees and Chi-Mi

The Fable of the Bees of Bernard Mandeville and Chi-mi of The Book of Guan Zi have much similarity in their economic reasoning. Both argue that extravagance in consumption spending will stimulate economic activity. The social political objectives of the two works are however very different. While The Fable of the Bees strives against religious and moral restraints on consumption, Chi-mi advocates extravagance as a political strategy to strengthen the control of the sovereign over powerful lords and officers and rich merchants. The amoral reasoning of The Fable of the Bees inspired classical economics. On the other hand, the economic analysis of Chi-mi had no significant impact on Chinese thinking given the tradition of suppression of commerce in pre-modern China.

Hemoglobinopathy Carrier Prevalence in The United Arab Emirates: First Analysis of The Dubai Health Authority Premarital Screening Program Results

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of hemoglobinopathy carriers in United Arab Emirates (UAE) nationals subjected to mandatory premarital screening in Dubai over a 4-year period. Data from UAE nationals who underwent premarital screening by the Dubai Health Authority between January 2007 and December 2010 were collected and analyzed. Premarital screening in Dubai is based on complete blood counts (CBC) and hemoglobin (Hb) high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).Among the 6,420 UAE nationals screened, 8.5% (n = 545) were suspected to be carriers. The following carrier frequencies were observed: β-thalassemia (β-thal), 4.56% (n = 293); Hb S [β6(A3)Glu→Val, GAG>GTG; HBB: c.20A>T], 2.9% (n = 186); Hb D-Punjab [β121(GH4)Glu→Gln, GAA>CAA; HBB: c.364G>C], 0.78% (n = 50); Hb Lepore (δβ hybrid gene) with an undetermined molecular genotype, 0.17% (n = 11); Hb E [β26(B8)Glu→Lys, GAG>AAG; HBB: c.79G>A], 0.03% (n = 2); and hereditary persistence of fetal Hb (HPFH), 0.016% (n = 1). Hb E-Hb S and Hb E-β-thal also occurred at a rate of 0.016% (n = 1) each; and 0.87% (n = 56) subjects were suspected of carrying silent β-thal.The prevalence of β-thal trait was consistent with the prevalence published by others in the region. Silent β-thal is challenging for screening programs, and is expected to arise in populations with a high prevalence of β-thal carriers. The prevalence of Hb S trait observed in this study was lower than that in other reports for the region. New cases of β-thal major (β-TM) still arise because many fertile couples got married before the screening programs were implemented, and pregnancy termination is not widely practiced in the UAE due to religious restraints. Moreover, some couples choose not to have prenatal diagnosis (PND) or pre implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), even if they are aware of their risk status.The prevalence of β-thal trait in the UAE is high. This justifies efforts to control the disease by holding regular community awareness and screening programs, performing premarital screening and genetic counseling, and making PND and PGD available to couples who request it.

Public Reason, Religious Restraint and Respect

In recent years liberals have had much to say about the kinds of reasons that citizens should offer one another when they engage in public political debates about existing or proposed laws. One of the more notable claims that has been made by a number of prominent liberals is that citizens should not rely on religious reasons alone when persuading one another to support or oppose a given law or policy. Unsurprisingly, this claim is rejected by many religious citizens, including those who are also committed to liberalism. In this paper I revisit that debate and ask whether liberal citizens have a moral obligation not to explain their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons alone. I suggest that for most (ordinary) citizens no such obligation exists and that individuals are entitled to explain their support for a specific law and to persuade others of the merits of that law on the basis of religious reasons alone (though there may be sound prudential reasons for not doing so). My argument is grounded in the claim that in most instances advocating laws on the basis of religious reasons alone is consistent with treating citizens with equal respect. However, I acknowledge an exception to that claim is to be found when using religious reasons to justify a law also implies that the state endorses those reasons. For this reason I argue that there is a moral obligation for some (publicly influential) citizens, and especially those who hold public office, to refrain from explaining their support for existing or proposed laws on the basis of religious reasons. I conclude by suggesting that this understanding of the role of religion in public political discourse and the obligations of liberal citizens is a better reflection of our experience of liberal citizenship than that given in some well-known accounts of liberalism.

RELIGIOUS CONVICTION IN THE PROFESSION OF ARMS

Many political theorists have argued that religious reasons should play a rather limited role in public or political settings. So, for example, according to the Doctrine of Religious Restraint, citizens and legislators ought not allow religious reasons to play a decisive role in justifying public policies. Many military professionals seem to believe that some version of that doctrine applies in military settings, that is, that military professionals should not allow their religious convictions to determine how they exercise command authority. We explain why the Doctrine of Religious Restraint should not apply to military professionals and articulate an alternative understanding of the justificatory role legitimately played by religious considerations in military settings. This alternative understanding assumes that military professionals will exercise command authority with tact, wisdom, and due respect for both the spirit and letter of the law, even when they are guided by robust faith commitments.

<em>Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy</em>, by Jean Fernandez

Reviewed by: Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy Deanna K. Kreisel (bio) Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy, by Jean Fernandez; pp. 207. London and New York: Routledge, 2009, £75.00, $125.00. Jean Fernandez's new book, Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy, is an incisive and engaging study of the overlap of two emergent discourses in the Victorian period: the so-called "servant problem" (middle-class anxiety over uppity, unruly, and social-climbing domestics) and the public discussion about mass literacy (8). Fernandez argues persuasively that the figure of the literate servant was a lightning rod for more general concerns about class mobility and hierarchical breakdown in the period. The problem of educating servants was a tricky one for the bourgeois householder. On the one hand, a tractable and polite servant was a mark of prestige: "the 'good' servant came to be socially, culturally and psychologically crucial for the maintenance of an employer's class identity" (3); on the other hand, the educated servant was also a potentially threatening figure uncomfortably associated with both Chartist-style class agitation and low cultural contamination in the form of cheap sensation fiction and pornography. The problem hinged on the very practice of literacy itself: as Fernandez points out, "Pernicious literacy was, in fact, inherently pornographic and revolutionary, given its rejection of religious restraint and its embrace of the secular ego" (4). While literacy was necessary to the molding and shaping of the good servant, its exercise was associated with potentially subversive practices of all kinds. Furthermore, the story-telling—particularly the narrating—servant exacerbated the middle-class master's anxieties about his own class position: "The literate servant, 'moderately' schooled through appropriate reading, would be rendered more docile and amenable to domestic discipline, while the servant who sought to rival the novelist in her powers of tale-telling and narration carried the threat of destabilizing and traumatizing the bourgeois subject" (13). One of the strengths of Fernandez's analysis is her attention to the ways in which the binary of "harmless versus harmful" servant literacy is blurred and broken down (13), particularly by the figure of the servant narrator. The fact that servant narrative was associated with myth and folklore (think of Jane Eyre, who was conditioned to see the supernatural everywhere by the tales of Bessie Lee at Gateshead) meant that the advent of servant literacy and the vogue for servant narrators in the novel paradoxically redoubled the subversive effect: "Servant logic resists bourgeois norms, because of the innately devious nature of domestics, who prefer to rely upon oral culture's democratic vesting of authority in personal judgment, rather than literate culture's faith in expert opinion" (18). As Fernandez notes, the destabilizing potential of servant narration is contained by the authorial practice of embedding such passages within multi-narrator novels where the domestic's tale is under contract; nevertheless, the practice becomes the "occasion for the novel to explore the contentious relationship between orality and literacy . . . while dramatizing the impact of literacy's politics upon narrative form and function" (22). In studies ranging from Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798) through Wuthering Heights (1847), Elizabeth Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story" (1852), The Moonstone (1868), and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Fernandez traces the effects of servant narration both on, and due to, larger cultural debates over literacy and class. The closing chapters of the study consider the ventriloquized servant voice in nonfiction and historical servants' autobiographies; as Fernandez demonstrates, these nonfictional texts rehearse the same concerns as their [End Page 573] fictional counterparts with "generic appropriation, parody, masquerade, and improvisation as conditions upon which self-hood becomes contingent. . . . [I]n both genres, the politics of narration remain firmly linked to questions regarding the indeterminacy of value attached to literacy" (24). Fernandez's analysis is astute and original. While the topics of literacy and the figure of the servant have been well covered by literary critics working in several different periods in recent years, the contribution of Fernandez's study is to consider the ways in which servant literacy both mobilizes class anxieties in the culture at large and...

Opening a Dialogue about Religious Restraint in Graduate Professionalization

Evangelical-Christian graduate students negotiate identities that separate their religious and academic communities of practice. Drawing on bell hooks's notion that marginalized groups must speak for themselves, this essay argues that evangelical graduate students in composition studies must seek involvement in formal conversations on writing, through journal articles, presentations, and appropriate venues in ways that embody rather than restrain their evangelical identities. In order for these students to seek such involvement, it is imperative that graduate instructors begin a dialogue about the potential ways in which restraint impacts students in our efforts to acculturate them into composition.

Gerard Dillon: Nationalism, Homosexuality, and the Modern Irish Artist

Gerard Dillon: Nationalism, Homosexuality, and the Modern Irish Artist* Riann Coulter (bio) In Self-contained flat, ca. 1955 (cover image), the Northern Irish artist Gerard Dillon presents himself inhabiting a domestic space of his own creation. Depicting the basement flat of his sister's house in London, where he lived from 1945 to 1963, the painting is divided into three sections, each featuring a self-portrait. The images of Dillon entering the living room and in the garden represent the public narrative of daily life, while the third portrait is located in the private realm of the bedroom. Dressed in the knitted sweater and loose trousers adopted from the west of Ireland fishermen, the central figure provides a distinct contrast to the self-consciously modern image in the foreground, whose green face and bohemian dress mark him as other. 1 The central figure enters a room containing Dillon's decorator tools, canvases, and a statue of the Madonna, while the self-portrait in the foreground inhabits a space dominated by paintings and a sleeping nude (back cover). 2 This sleeping figure can be related to the female nude in Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau, [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paul Gauguin, Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Watching), 1892, oil on burlap mounted on canvas, 72.4 x 97.5 cm, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. [End Page 64] 1892 (fig. 1), yet the broad shoulders and narrow hips make its gender ambiguous. If the central figure represents Dillon's public persona as artist and tradesman—and perhaps also, through the Madonna and fisherman garb, suggests his Irish Catholic roots—the portrait in the foreground can be read as his self-identification as a modern artist and a gay man. To date, Dillon's sexuality has been either ignored or underplayed and seldom related to his paintings. In the only monograph on the artist, James White tentatively suggests that Dillon's sexuality influenced his work, but he also attempts to minimize that influence by claiming that "such was his religious feeling that although he was drawn to people of that type, if he once had an encounter I believe that it never occurred again." 3 In contrast to White's speculations, the Belfast author Gerard Keenan, who knew Dillon in London, insists that he was "a very well-adjusted homosexual" unburdened by the censure that his Catholic upbringing imposed on homosexuality. 4 However, the artist's nephew, Martin Dillon, recalls that after his uncle's death he found a diary entry describing a homosexual encounter with a sense of guilt and concludes, "I think he had it there for people in the future to see that that was the sort of man he was; he couldn't tell people except in his paintings." 5 In his study of art and homosexuality in the twentieth century, Emmanuel Cooper argues that social, legal, and religious restraints on homosexuality, illegal in England until 1967, prevented gay artists from addressing their sexuality through their art. 6 Although these constraints did not eliminate homosexual expression, the fear of being found out and the guilt that resulted from societal disapproval and religious censure helped to drive homosexuals underground. 7 Despite the even greater restraints of Irish society, where homosexuality was illegal until 1993, several of Dillon's paintings can be interpreted through the lens of his sexuality. Existing readings of his work focus on his nationalist sympathies and his romantic [End Page 65] depictions of the west of Ireland but fail to recognize the significant influence that Dillon's sexuality had on his paintings. Reconsidering the oeuvre in terms of the artist's homosexuality and the tensions that it created with his Catholic and Irish nationalist background not only suggests new dimensions in his work but also reveals his ability to create multilayered personal images that could, nevertheless, be incorporated into the conservative canon of Irish art. Dillon's homosexuality is only one of many influences that informed his painting. However, the conflict between that identification and his romantic nationalist vision of a pure and uncorrupted Ireland makes his sexuality a disrupting presence within his oeuvre...

The role of the wedding place. Community context and marital timing in nineteenth and early twentieth century Netherlands

This study investigates how community characteristics influenced the timing of marriage of men and women in nineteenth and early twentieth century Netherlands on the basis of a large scale database consisting of marriage certificates covering five provinces of the Netherlands between 1840 and 1922. The results show the significance of religious context for understanding marriage timing in the nineteenth century. Living in a predominantly Catholic community resulted in a later marriage for both men and women, while living in a community that was dominated by Orthodox Protestants resulted in an earlier marriage, particularly for men. In addition, residence in a municipality with a high mobility, a large population size and a high birth rate speeded up marriage timing among both men and women. The results indicate that religious restraint and the urbanization and openness of places are, next to parental social class, of vast importance for understanding marriage timing. As our study only addressed those who married, future research will have to show whether the same mechanisms were at work for those that experienced permanent celibacy.

Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault Provoked by the Victim's Religious Beliefs

The number of drug-facilitated sexual assault incidents has lately been increased all over the world leading law enforcement agencies and hospital doctors to constant alert. The drugs involved may be benzodiazepines, hypnotics, other sedatives, anesthetics, drugs of abuse or ethanol. The detection of these agents in biologic fluids is difficult, since most of them are shortly acting, and provoke victim's amnesia which in turn leads the victim to report the allegation late. An unusual case-study of a 35-year-old, married woman who was admitted to the hospital with dizziness and loss of memory for a period of 10 days is here reported. The toxicological analysis of the victim's blood and urine for unknown sedative drugs, achieved by GC-MS, revealed the presence of zolpidem (Stilnox), a nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic. Concentration of zolpidem in blood, 11 hours after the last supposedly intake, was 47 microg/L. After family counseling at the hospital, the victim's husband confessed that he was replacing the contents of Losec capsules of his wife, with Stilnox tablets. This unjust act was committed by the husband in order for him to have sex with his wife, since she was not willing to participate in a sexual intercourse due to her religious restraints for a fasting period of 40 days. The aim of this article is 2-fold. First, to emphasize the fact that a sexual assault can take place not only between 2 strangers, but also within a happily married couple. Second, to remind doctors that any case of sexual assault must be examined toxicologically, for a better and thorough investigation.

Basic human worth and religious restraint

The Doctrine of Religious Restraint is the claim that citizens and officials in a liberal democracy should not support coercive laws that they know to require a religious rationale. The most prominent argument for the Doctine of Religious Restraint appeals to the claim that we ought to treat each person as having basic worth: citizens and officials ought to obey the Doctrine of Religious Restraint because doing so is required in order for them to respect their compatriots as persons who have equal moral standing. But this argument is not persuasive: citizens and officials who support coercive laws that they know require some religious justification need not thereby disrespect their compatriots. The article focuses throughout on the figure of an `Agapic Pacifist' who has sectarian religious reasons to oppose government's use of lethal military force.

Is Confucius leaving Korea? Political changes and challenges after the general elections

impeachment motion on May 15, 2004 President Roh stressed that the newly elected lawmakers would have to take ‘‘the lead in the reform’’. The impeachment drama and the general elections revealed remaining shortcomings of the political institutions, for example, the strong position of the president, the frequent exchange of cabinet ministers, a dysfunctional parliament, the structure of parties lacking clear political, more ideologybased programs, social inclusiveness and continuity. Many important issues – except the motion of impeachment against President Rohwere not discussed explicitly during the election campaign. Although the voters are aware of the parties’ differing ‘ideological’ positions, the two main parties, Uri Party and Grand National Party (GNP), have similar responses to certain issues. Moreover, strong clientelism and regional antagonism are evidence of institutional weaknesses. Regarding these democratic shortcomings a reform of the parliament and the political parties is a pressing issue. The 17th general elections were in a sense groundbreaking since they yielded to important changes but they also revealed remaining, in particular, political-institutional and structural deficits. Koreans voted with 38.3% and 35.8% of the seats for the Uri Party and the Grand National Party (GNP) respectively, for a rather moderate parliament which has certainly the potential to achieve reforms but which also needs to be reformed itself. The government camp is rooted in the moderate liberal democratic movement whereas the conservatives rely on traditional values and models from the past. However, the conservative party adapted to changes in society and has taken a more moderate stance with regard to the policy towards North Korea, conscientious objectors and the discriminatory patriarchal family head system. What are the changes the recent general elections have brought with? For the first time, the National Assembly is dominated by the post–Korean war generation representing the demographic majority of the country. However, the gap between the generations has further widened. The generational cleavage not only influences every-day politics but also affects family life. Most of the young voters are free from religious restraints and have no classdetermined ideology. Sixty percent of them have positive associations with the term ‘‘progressive’’, like ‘‘change, innovation, development’’, while forty Is Confucius leaving Korea? Political changes and challenges after the general elections

Turkey's divided Islamists

The operation launched by the Turkish police early this year against suspected members of the Turkish Hizbullah has dealt a severe blow to the operational capabilities of the militant Islamist organisation. There are also widening splits within the Kurdish nationalist and moderate Islamist movements. These divisions are causing frustration among younger radicals. Unless the government acts swiftly to improve socio-economic conditions and ease cultural and religious restraints, there will continue to be a stream of ready recruits for Islamic militant groups. It is becoming more likely that the focus of armed resistance to the Turkish state will shift in the long term from Kurdish nationalism to religious fundamentalism.

Populism with religious restraint: William B. Bradbury's Esther, the beautiful queen

Populism with religious restraint: William B. Bradbury's Esther, the beautiful queen