Sincere Love Research Articles

Dimensioni culturali e tematiche dei movimenti pro-eutanasia: la situazione fuori dai Paesi Bassi

Sorge all’interno del dibattito teologico, da parte di chi maggiormente ha sentito l’influsso del cosiddetto (ma solo cosiddetto…) “cattolicesimo liberale” e soprattutto nell’ambito medico, in cui la linea di pensiero liberista e utilitarista ha un ampio spazio, la riflessione sulla “libertà del morire”. A nostro parere siamo di fronte ad un’inopportuna e falsificata accezione del termine libertà, che viene ad essere invocata per costruire e fondare un altrettanto falso “diritto a morire”. Si tratta di una concezione di libertà non autenticamente tale: il “diritto a morire” secondo noi non può esistere, perché si tratterebbe di una contraddizione in terminis, che va a minacciare il diritto ben più accertato e riconosciuto che è quello “a vivere”: esiste se mai un diritto a vivere qualitativamente bene, e non solo dal punto di vista biologico, ma soprattutto antropologico, anche l’atto supremo della vita umana naturale che è appunto il morire, inteso a tutti gli effetti come atto della vita. Anche la volontà del paziente (living-will) non è il termine ultimo della sua libertà, la quale ha da confrontarsi con altre volontà, come del resto accade in tutte le azioni umane.
 Saranno poi necessarie delle specificazioni, caso per caso, o per gruppo di casi, atte ad evitare le possibili forme di accanimento terapeutico, laddove si sostituisca un “vitalismo biologico”, il più delle volte artificiale e attuato con mezzi sproporzionati, alla vita propriamente intesa.

Role modelsʼ perceptions of themselves and their influence on studentsʼ specialty choices

To examine the perceptions of faculty role models to learn whether their perceptions of role models' behaviors are congruent with those of their students. In 1996 a survey was mailed to 210 student-identified faculty role models at the University of Washington School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. The nominees were asked to rate to what extent each of 32 student-identified role model characteristics was representative of their behavior. They were then asked to rank order the characteristics they felt were most important to model for students. The role models were also asked to rate how much influence they perceived themselves to have on their students' specialty choices. A final, open-ended question inquired about the single characteristics they modeled to students that most influenced the students' specialty choices. The role models' specialties were grouped as either primary care (PC) or non-primary care (NPC). Data were analyzed with several statistical methods. Of the 210 mailed surveys, a total of 177 were returned, for a response rate of 84%. The role models perceived their behaviors much like their students did; the role models' self-ratings were generally high for all of the student-defined characteristics. Although clinical reasoning was considered the most important characteristic to model for students, the role models also believed that enthusiasm and love for their work were the characteristics that most influenced their students' specialty choices. Few differences were found between the PC and the NPC role models. The role models in this study agreed with their students about what is important to model. They did not intentionally try to recruit students to join their specialties but felt that demonstrating enthusiasm and a sincere love for what they did has a strong influence toward this end.

The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865

An astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States from every other industrial nation. In 1993, when the number of murders in Canada reached a high of 630, the United States (with nearly ten times the population) experienced 24,526 murders, out of a total of nearly two million violent crimes. The weapon of choice in 69.6 percent of those murders was a gun, and thousands more are killed by firearms every year in accidents and suicides.1 More people are killed with guns in the United States in a typical week than in all of western Europe in a year. It is now thought normal and appropriate for American urban elementary schools to use metal detectors to check students for firearms. We are familiar with the manifestations of American gun culture; the sincere love and affection with which our society views its weapons pours forth daily from the television and movie screens. Every form of the media reinforces the notion that the solution to your problems can be held in your hand and provide immediate gratification. Since the United States does not register guns, we have no idea how many there are or who actually buys them. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) estimates that there are 250 million firearms in private hands; an additional 5 million are purchased every year. The National Sporting Goods Association estimates that 92 percent of all rifles are bought by men (94 percent of the shotguns). Most of those men fall into the 25to 34-year-old age group, make between $35,000 and $50,000 annually, and do not need to kill animals for their survival.2 The consequence of this culture is also very familiar. To select just a few more statistics as indicators: The chief of police and mayor of New York City were nearly euphoric that the number of murders in the city dropped below two thousand (to 1,995) in 1993; it reached a contemporary low of 1,581 in 1994. Yet the total

The Hammonds of Redcliffe (review)

BOOK REVIEWS273 Two minor weaknesses are the printing errors (at least six, some of them glaring) and the unfortunately brief index of less than four pages for such a diverse discussion of speakers, issues, strategies, and ideas. Overall, the editor accomplishes quite well what he set out to do— provide an analysis of how the South, following the Civil War, attempted to speak to itself, not the North, in an effort to regain its selfconfidence , its pride, and its feeling of integrity. D. Ray Heisey Kent State University The Hammonds of Redcliffe. Edited by Carol Bleser. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Pp. xxii, 421. $19.95.) As readers of this journal are aware, no story in America's history has been so often told, or has so well stood the re-telling, as the Old South and its demise. A major part of Carol Bleser's Hammonds relates the Civil War era as it has seldom been told before, through the eyes of a prominent South Carolina family, its dreams and worries, its successes and failures. Using the voluminous correspondence of the Hammond family of South Carolina, Carol Bleser has skillfully reconstructed the social milieu of elite southern family life from theantebellum period well into the twentieth century. Bleser did exhaustive research, finding letters from different archives that fit together to create a pleasing and powerful narrative of a southern family over four generations. She liberally sprinkled footnotes providing background on historical figures, both obscure and famous, and clarifying confusing and unclear references. The able selection of letters, the footnotes, and introductory sections enhance the volume and make Hammonds distinctly Bleser's. The first quarter of the book, which focuses on the family patriarch, James Henry Hammond (died 1864), is particularly fascinating. It provides a valuable perspective on the political and military events of the Civil War era, and it establishes in dramatic fashion the characters of Hammond, his sons, Harry, Spann, and Paul, and Harry's fiancée (and later wife), Emily. James Henry's success as farmer and statesman, his charm, and his ability to convey ideas clearly are all readily apparent. However, so are his incessant and almost pathetic carpings about his sons' alleged failures. Counterposed against the father's impressions of his sons are a couple of simple and straightforward letters from Spann, and a much larger number of often touching, often self-effacing letters from Harry. Harry was destined to shoulder the almost impossible burden of carrying on his father's agricultural successes and the Hammond tradition. Harry reveals the immense pressures of being James Henry's son in a letter to his fatherin October 1858. Declaring that he has 274CIVIL WAR HISTORY failed in everything, he goes on to say: "I was the living, walking realization of utter complacency, patent to every age. It is fearful for a man to know and feel this, and he can't do so long and remain in his right mind. There is no help for it, but to blow your brains out—or forget it." Not long after writing this letter, Harry was appointed professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Georgia, much to the surprise and chagrin of his father. He might have done very well there if not for the intervention of the Civil War and the responsibilities of managing the plantation after his father's death. He thus undertook a job for which he was ill suited, and for the rest of his life fought against depressed cotton prices, bad weather, and the omnipresent ghost of his father. In the second section of the correspondence, which Bleserlabels "The Preserver," Harry Hammond becomes the focus. This section depicts the decline of the family's fortunes and Harry's increasing dissatisfaction with work that goes unrewarded and achievements that go unrecognized . But in both the first and second sections of the correspondence, the loving and sensitive side of Harry Hammond's character is also displayed . His letters to Emily, before and after their marriage, exude his intense and sincere love for her. The sentiment portrayed in the letters suggest that their relationship gave him new life: "I have been a stone, a block, and...

Lope's King Pedro: The Divine Right of Kings vs. the Right of Resistance

PEDRO I DE CASTILLA, known by the double epithet of el cruel and el justiciero, emerges as a rather antipathetic character in both the chronicles and the popular ballads which date from his reign. The most important source for the history of the reign of Pedro I is the contemporary chronicle of the chancellor of Castilla Pero L6pez de Ayala (13321407) contained in the Crdnica de los Reyes de Castilla, wherein Ayala recounts dispassionately a long series of murders carried out by royal order. Popular tradition, on the other hand, has tended to view Pedro more sympathetically as a conscientious rey justiciero who was concerned with the defense of the common man against the tyranny of the powerful nobility and who had a sincere love for his people. Lope's dramatic treatment of King Pedro exposes both the positive and the negative aspects of his ambivalent personality. He presents an idealistic and completely apologetic picture of an unjustly maligned sovereign in the Audiencias del rey don Pedro and in Ya anda la de Mazagatos. The king's unwavering fidelity to a strict ideal of justice results in a more severe and arbitrary characterization in El midico de su honra, La carbonera and El rey don Pedro en Madrid. In Los Ramirez de Arellano we see a defeated man who has lost his right to rule because of past cruelty and a disregard for Natural Law.' The seventeenth-century Spanish concept of kingship which is mirrored in the national drama of the Golden Age is in sharp contrast to the historical reality of the power and prestige of medieval rulers. In his historical plays, Lope de Vega invests even medieval rulers with the position and privileges enjoyed by Hapsburg monarchs. The result is the presentation of medieval events and personalities taken out of their own political framework and interpreted in the light of Golden Age ideals and seventeenth-century political theory.

An African Christian Looks at Christian Missions in Africa

The author, speaking out of sincere love and deep concern, examines very frankly some of the problems arising from the paternalism, racism, and insecurity of many missionaries in Africa.

Populists and Slavophiles

I T is an historical commonplace to say that the division between the liberal or radical-minded Westerners on the one hand, and the religious anti-Western Slavophiles on the other, was actually symbolic of the split-up Russian consciousness after the reforms of Peter the Great. It is less often realized, however, that an analogous dichotomy was taking place in the Western camp itself when, during the 1860's and particularly in the 1870's, the populist movement or narodnichestvo affected a very large portion of the leftish intelligentsia. Although devoid of any Orthodox-religious flavor, this populist current yet showed its Russian character to a remarkable degree. Its basic trend was hardly less Russian than that of the Slavophiles. In some respects narodnichestvo might even strike one as secularized Slavophilism-with due reservations, of course. To begin with, both the Slavophiles and the populists or narodniki cherished a sincere love for the Russian peasant masses, as well as for such of their time-honored institutions as the obshchina or mir (the village commune) on the one hand and the Russian artel (the artisan co-operative) on the other. In the obshchina in particular, with its collective ownership of land, they both saw an institution of a unique social and moral significance. But while the Slavophiles were looking for their ideal in the pre-Petrine past, the populists kept turning their eyes towards a future which, in their opinion, had much to do with the obshchina but very little with the sentimentalized paternal monarchism of the Slavophiles. Nor were they interested in the Slavophile preoccupations with Orthodoxy and

The Novels of Elena Quiroga

Among the many young novelists writing in Spain today, Elena Quiroga is unquestionably one of the most able and interesting.' This talented author, who in private life is Elena Quiroga de la Vailgoma, the wife of a historian and specialist in heraldry, was born in Santander. A great part of her life, however, has been spent in the region of Galicia, her father's home and the scene of several of her novels. In a letter to the writer she recalls in a delightful manner certain experiences from her childhood spent in a village located on the banks of the River Sil. She now resides in Madrid but continues to pass her summers on the Galician coast at a place not far from Vigo. Her first novel, La soledad sonora, appeared in 1949, sponsored by the Diputaci6n Provincial of La Corufia. Like all her work, it is a penetrating character study. Set for the most part in a rural area of the Montafia country, the story is concerned with an introspective young woman, whose efforts to understand herself are heightened by an acute sense of loneliness in the midst of life. Finding herself a widow at twentytwo after but a few months of marriage to a man she did not love, Elisa Pertierra remarries and discovers happiness she had never known before and a spiritual fulfillment she had not believed possible. It is happiness short lived, however, when news comes that her first husband, who had been reported killed while fighting with the Spanish Blue Division in Russia, is still alive. The novelist's resolution of this crisis -Elisa's renouncement of both men to return to her childhood home and a solitary existence-will strike most readers as hardly acceptable. However, up to this point the work has considerable merit as a first novel and foreshadows many of the attributes of more mature writing to follow. Viento del norte (1951), for which Elena Quiroga was awarded the Nadal prize, may well be her finest work so far although the author herself is inclined to think more highly of subsequent writing. It is the first of her novels about rural Galicia in which one finds that attention to landscape and the elemental nature of life there so characteristic of the literature of the region. The theme is the love of an upper-class landlord for a rude peasant girl, whom he receives into his household as a foundling and whom years later he marries, attracted by beauty and charms of a natural, uncultivated sort. As one would expect, the vast differences in age, background, and social status separate Don Alvaro, the scholarly master of the pazo, and the rustic servant girl, Marcela. But an even greater obstacle than these is the fact that affection is onesided. Alvaro's love, which is tragically real and sufficiently great to overlook his wife's social and intellectual deficiencies, is not reciprocated. After marriage, Marcela continues to be inhibited and inarticulate in the presence of a man for whom she can feel little more than the respect of a former servant toward one who has been her benefactor. In time, this regard degenerates into bitter resentment for having been led into an impossible situation for one of her station. Alvaro endures this painful relationship with dignity and restraint although inwardly suffering immeasurable anguish. Shortly before her husband's death following an accident that leaves him paralyzed, Marcela comes to realize somewhat the extent of his devotion and experiences for the first time a measure of sincere love for him. But acknowledgment comes too late.

Nature and the Country in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century French Poetry

The statement is often made that the Pléiade sang nature with exuberance and freshness. The feeling for nature, which virtually passed out of French literature when the poésie courtoise finally died with Charles d'Orléans, began to reappear early in the sixteenth century with Jean Le Maire de Belges. This re-ëmergence was at first very slow, and the new feeling did not attain its fullest development until the second half of the century. It is perhaps well to say at the outset that the words “a feeling for nature” applied to the poetry of the sixteenth century are not the equivalent of “a nature poetry,” and must not be taken to mean that the century of the Renaissance in France created a genuine poetry of nature. If we define this as consisting essentially in a sincere love and a spontaneous, as opposed to a conventional, treatment of nature; a concern with nature for its own sake instead of using it merely as an ornament in poetry with a primarily human interest; and a sympathetic interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things, we shall not find these conditions fulfilled in the French poetry of this period. In the first part of this paper I shall endeavor to trace the origins of the feeling for nature exhibited in sixteenth-century French poetry, to define its limits, and to explain why the Pléiade did not create a true nature poetry; in the second part I propose to show that the interest in nature was diverted in the last quarter of the century into another channel, to assume the form which may be called the solitude and desert motif, its predominant mode of expression in the next century, and to set forth the causes of this deviation.