Sorts Of Questions Research Articles

A plant's guide to surviving the Chicxulub impact.

A plant's guide to surviving the Chicxulub impact.

Perceptions of the common good in planning

There has been plenty of debate in the academic literature about the nature of the common good or public interest in planning. There is a recognition that the idea is one that is extremely difficult to isolate in practical terms; nevertheless, scholars insist that the idea ‘…remains the pivot around which debates about the nature of planning and its purposes turn’ (Campbell & Marshall, 2002, 163–64). At the point of first principles, these debates have broached political theories of the state and even philosophies of science that inform critiques of rationality, social justice and power. In the planning arena specifically, much of the scholarship has tended to focus on theorising the move from a rational comprehensive planning system in the 1960s and 1970s, to one that is now dominated by deliberative democracy in the form of collaborative planning. In theoretical terms, this debate has been framed by a movement from what are perceived as objective and elitist notions of planning practice and decision-making to ones that are considered (by some) to be ‘inter-subjective’ and non-elitist. Yet despite significant conceptual debate, only a small number of empirical studies have tackled the issue by investigating notions of the common good from the perspective of planning practitioners. What do practitioners understand by the idea of the common good in planning? Do they actively consider it when making planning decisions? Do governance/institutional barriers exist to pursuing the common good in planning? In this paper, these sorts of questions are addressed using the case of Ireland. The methodology consists of a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 urban planners working across four planning authorities within the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland. The findings show that the most frequently cited definition of the common good is balancing different competing interests and avoiding/minimising the negative effects of development. The results show that practitioner views of the common good are far removed from the lofty ideals of planning theory and reflect the ideological shift of planners within an institution that has been heavily neoliberalised since the 1970s.

Agamben and the Migrations of Glory

In the American political imagination, there is a longstanding and wide-ranging discussion about the separation of church and state. Though Americans argue about whether it should be a ‘‘high wall,’’ or whether certain ‘‘breaches’’ in it might be desirable, they all take ‘‘separation’’ to describe an institutional arrangement. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, however, ‘‘separation’’ is an image that conceals much more than it reveals about the religious character of the state and the global economy. Agamben traces ‘‘the migrations of glory’’ from church, to state, to global capitalism. For part of this task, Agamben accepts Michel Foucault's diagnostic approach to power. By one reading, certainly, governmentality has us in its grip. But now government itself is overshadowed by the power of global capitalism. While Foucault sought only to make us ‘‘a little less governed,’’ Agamben is interested in a deeper iconoclasm and a greater emancipation. According to Agamben, our less-than-free condition can be illuminated by reflection on: (1) the state of exception and the camp, which are only made possible by a form of idolatry in which the sovereign assumes to themself a power that they should not have; (2) On another of the ‘‘maps’’ drawn by Agamben, however, there is a further ‘‘migration of glory,’’ away from national sovereignty, toward postmodern global capitalism; (3) The Coming Community provides the barest sketch of Agamben's hope for a remedy, while his reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans in The Time that Remains brings a more visible kind of messianic expectation or vocation back into the discussion of political life. A concluding section discusses five sorts of questions that might be put to Agamben about the overall shape of his project.

MOODLE – COMPUTERIZED DISTANT LEARNING SUPPORT SYSTEM

Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) is the system developed by the English-speaking community around the world for more than 10 years, supports both, offline and online training. In most cases, Moodle is used to support and connect learning face-to-face with online training, as well as with other types of learning. Moodle allows you to ask all sorts of questions and assess responses in a variety of ways. The central concept of Moodle is a course in which one or more teachers offer students resources (such as files, folders, Web pages) and participate in interactive activities (such as forums, wikis, blogging, lessons, seminars, assignments, examinations). Students and teachers can change roles, mutually assess each other, share knowledge on the topics of study in the glossary and database system. In the English-speaking world, there are public sites with detailed documentation on Moodle, which is constantly verified and modified in accordance with emerging new versions of the system; Russian versions do not have public sites with detailed translation of the English-language documentation. On what and to whom you want to perform actions in the daily practice of the modern versions, only the barest of outlines on paid seminars and presentations to those who started the implementation of Moodle in your organization are given. And this despite the fact that the system has a great variety of Moodle (over 500) settings with different levels of functionality to be performed, to maintain and develop specially organized by the team of specialists. The question is not only about creating a training course in Moodle. It's about maintaining the of the system within the institution, such as a University. Under the health maintenance means: availability and preservation of up-to-date documentation on system and manuals on Moodle separately for administrators, managers, teachers and students at their level, training consultants for each level and help Moodle users to carry out their work in an ever-growing versions of this system. The second important feature of the group is to perform administrative work on authentication of users and transfer/expulsion from the course assignment and modification of the roles, responsibilities and opportunities of users of Moodle, backing up, and take the necessary measures to ensure the confidentiality and security, implement the necessary measures for transfer students with the course on the course, at the end of the semester or school year, maintaining the required accounting and reporting documents, and so on. This article tries to understand the enormous potential of Moodle in transposition on the duties of the officers of the ad hoc group support this system within the University as a whole. Only competent and timely response to the needs of the teachers involved in the conduct of training courses in Moodle environment can allow to achieve a high level of educational services.

Relations to the past: a research agenda for historical theorists

What are current tendencies in historical theory, judging by the inaugural conference (2013) of the International Network for Theory of History? In this article, I note two tendencies: an interest in history beyond the academy and a desire to overcome the theoretical polarization that has characterized the field in past decades. Subsequently, I argue that these tendencies can be seen as reflecting a single research agenda, which, in turn, can be described in terms of ‘relations to the past.’ I unpack this notion, borrowed from Mark Day, in some detail, explain what sort of questions it helps address, and offer two examples from in and outside the historical discipline. If I am right in arguing that this research agenda captures much of what is currently being offered under the flag of historical theory, then historical theory seems on its way to become a field of expertise on the ways in which both historians and others relate to the past.

Front Porch

Front Porch Jocelyn R. Neal, Editor Click for larger view View full resolution In this issue’s South Polls, we witness the transformation of southern legislatures over the last half-century. “Radical members of the first legislature after the war, South Carolina,” ca. 1876, copyright Mercer Brown, Library of Congress. [End Page 1] What makes the South a region distinct from its surroundings, and what makes it tick? These sorts of questions are at the heart of Southern Studies, an enterprise unbounded by academic discipline and only debatably bounded by geography. For this issue of Southern Cultures, we cast a wide net and pulled together articles, essays, poetry, and photographs that were not constrained by an editor’s choice of theme or topic, but rather that range across the scope of the current discourse on the South, what it is and how it works. Perhaps it is unsurprising that, either because of or in spite of this approach, the writing in this issue delves into the blues, train wrecks, disasters morphing into ghost stories, ghastly institutions for the mentally ill, coal mines in Appalachia, colorful politics, and, of course, food and booze: boiled cabbage rolls, pickles with roast beef sandwiches, and whiskey. New South or not, the substance of the conversation appears to be old, familiar territory. The Gothic South rears up in the tales of death, drunkenness, stoicism, perseverance in the face of potential despair, and politics within politics. But those subjects serve at best as a preamble to the real insight of this issue: the people at the heart of these stories, their relationships, and the lines of demarcation within and among them—old and young, parent and child, white and black, male and female, northerner and southerner. It is within these character sketches and relationships, revealed amidst the chatter of everyday life, lunch breaks and midnight conversations, that we might enrich our understanding of the South. The most poignant writing here engages with the relationships between parents and children. “Rewriting Elizabeth: A Life Lost (and Found) in the Annals of Bryce Mental Hospital,” by Lindsay Byron, is almost unbearable in its account of a non-southerner mother wrenched from her children and ultimately destroyed by an involuntary commitment to an asylum. In novels ranging from Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain to Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, it is the scenes of mothers torn from children on which my friends and I ruminate in water-cooler conversations; here is an account more heartbreaking yet. Donna Tolley Corriher’s account of her grandmother Maggie’s cabbage rolls gives us some insight into the pragmatism of a young wife with eight children to feed, while the synchronicity of her impoverished coal camp existence and her viewing of Elvis Presley on television reminds us of how the South compresses time, the glitz of modernity overlaid with an isolated and poverty-riddled existence of yesteryear. Natalie Minik’s photographs—mesmerizing and inviting in their everyday-settings—call to mind the perspective of the children in these essays; in her work, are they bored? Pensive? Contemplative? In many, the subject’s position is framed by the South’s weather: blankets in the stadium, sweat and a cold drink under the sun. These are the same children of the South who might, in four decades, reminisce fondly, like Todd Boss in his “Apple Slices,” about eating lunch while on break with his dad’s construction crew. [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution Bill Koon on strong drink: “As bizarre as the tiff might sound to New Yorkers, it’s not so strange to old southerners like me. My own Palmetto State has had its share of peculiar booze laws. We have been committed to selling and drinking alcohol since we got statehood, but single servings were forbidden for the first half of my life—the length of which I’ll keep to myself.” From An Illustrated Guide to Cocktails, by Elizabeth Graeber. © 2013 by Elizabeth Graeber and Orr Shtuhl. Reprinted with permission from Elizabeth Graeber (elizabethgraeber.com). The bonds and tensions that arise in culturally prescribed gender roles, especially between spouses, is...

Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie

This volume is one of a pair which arises out of the activities during 2008 of an ARHC-funded research network centred around questions of worship and devotion in the early modern period, organised by Jessica Martin, Alec Ryrie, Natalie Mears and Judith Maltby. While the companion volume (edited by Mears and Ryrie, also published by Ashgate, 2012) explores Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, this collection of essays considers the more secret world of private and domestic religion. The issue of how individuals and households actually practised their religion outside the ritual and ceremony of public worship has, the editors note, ‘been left remarkably unexplored, both by literary scholars and especially by historians’ (p. 3). This is perhaps overstating things a little, but it is certainly true that we know much less about private religion than we do about public worship, in part for obvious reasons of evidence, but also because Reformation historians have indeed been slow to ask these sorts of questions.

Food Security, Biodiversity and Human Health: Ethnobiology as a Predictive Science

Ever since Mark Nathan Cohen’s (1976) treatise, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, ethnobiological explorations of historic shifts in subsistence strategies, agroeconomic structures and uses of biodiversity have explicitly dealt with the issue of cultural responses to food insecurity and declining nutrition health. More recently, sensationalistic and rather simplistic treatments of these topics by the likes of Jared Diamond (2005) have attempted to predict or ultimately avert future collapses in society’s capacity to sustain food security, with dubious results. However, archaeologists and ethnobiologists have diligently worked together to arrive at more nuanced understandings of how climatic, ecological, social, economic and political factors have interacted during prehistoric and historic periods of food crises (McAnany and Yoffee 2009, 2010). Nevertheless, the general sorts of questions posed by Diamond remain before us: Can the lessons learned from the historical sciences of archaeology, paleonutrition and ethnobiology be used to forge a more comprehensive and useful predictive science regarding trends and options for human health and food security? Can such predictions help assure the functioning of ecosystem services required for stable food production, while averting famine and improving nutritional health in the face of accelerating climate change, declining fossil fuel and fossil groundwater reserves, and burgeoning human populations? A thoughtful summary of interdisciplinary literature on the links between biodiversity and food security by T. C. H. Sunderland (2011) suggests that such an integrative and predictive science is not only possible but increasingly necessary. Drawing on an extensive review of ethnobiological literature, Sunderland concludes that:

Recent Developments in British Art Education: ‘Nothing Changes from Generation to Generation except the Thing Seen’

Developments inside and outside the contemporary academy and the continuing proliferation of free art schools call for serious assessment of those alternative models of art education. While acknowledging the wider global trend in free schools and the context that provides, this paper suggests that an understanding of such tendencies in Britain might more usefully be framed within the recent history of British art education, particularly since the so-called Coldstream reforms of 1960. These alternative models often claim to shift pedagogies towards a broader definition of art education, practice and disciplinarity and to do so through experimental and radical means. Here, as Thierry de Duve suggests, ‘pedagogy itself becomes a kind of strategy’. Yet, despite the freshness and energy of such projects, the sorts of question they seek to address are rarely new. In art historical terms, these developments are often less innovative than they aim to be, less a radical break with the past than an echo of earlier pedagogical practices and models. Therefore, this article seeks to reframe these projects and to reflect on them against a broader art historical narrative, assessing their value as one of the most recent innovations in British art education post-Coldstream.

Business Literature and Understandings of Business

Business is not just sets of activities and relationships. It is also a cultural category, an aspect of people’s understanding of the world and what is in it. Such understandings are interesting in their own right. In addition, however, they are useful for helping us to make sense of people’s actions and orientations in various parts of their lives. My purpose here is to illustrate how we might approach those understandings, the sorts of questions we can ask about them, and the sorts of things we might learn from them.

Latin Justice

Latin Justice

Conceptual model on application of chi-square test in education and social sciences

Whenever you think you have an idea of how something works, you have a mental model. That is, in effect, a layman's way of talking about having an hypothesis. The hypothesis needs to be tested for how closely it fits reality - and reality is the data collected from an experiment. So the data is collected on the few and compared with a few controls. Is there really a difference between the two groups? It is that sort of question where Chi-square analysis comes in. In short, if the differences between your model and reality are small, that is good; if huge, develop a new model! These differences are denoted as chi-square, which equals the sum of all the squares of the deviations divided by what was expected. A Chi-square test is one of the most frequently used tests with a number of improper applications. Some of the general causes of the improper applications include researchers not understanding the areas and conditions of application of the Chi-square test. To give solutions to the above problems, this paper explored the existing literature on the main areas of application of Chi-square, that include the test of frequencies (goodness of fit, homogeneity, independence) and the test of population variance. The paper identifies the shortfalls in the existing literature, and fills them by the application of appropriate illustrations and examples. To shield the loopholes in data analysis using Chi-square test, a simplified conceptual model which can be adopted by researchers is finally developed. Key words: Hypothesis, observed frequency and expected frequency.

Testing the Effects of Striker Replacement and Employer Implementation of Final Offers on Employer and Union Bargaining Power

Many sorts of quantitative and qualitative empirical research are regularly used to answer questions related to work and workplace issues. However, some issues involving human behavior may be difficult to capture using standard empirical methods. Common barriers include access to people or information; problems with accurate or honest reporting; behavior that occurs over long periods of time; cost; and ethical barriers as to research using human subjects. Important information related to collective bargaining can be difficult to collect for all of these reasons. Participants in collective bargaining may not want outsiders present for all or critical parts of negotiations. They may not be candid about motives or actions, or they may be honest but not fully self-aware as to motives or actions. Bargaining sessions may be long and extend over months or years. In the case of gathering information about collective bargaining within the larger union-employer-employee contexts may require decades of access and involvement. As a result, costs in terms of time and funding and other issues may rule out examining certain sorts of questions using actual participants engaged in collective bargaining. Thus, one important area that would benefit from empirical research – testing the effects of law and proposals for law reform in general and collective bargaining law reform in particular – has so many of these problems that many important issues cannot be tested using standard methods. In addition, testing law reform proposals requires gathering data on actions that have not yet happened. Simulations provide one useful way to overcome many of these problems. In effect, simulations create a law reform laboratory. Of course, simulations are only useful if they are reflect reality. This article examines evidence as to participants’ actions in a simulation used to test various iterations of laws governing how collective bargaining impasses are to be resolved and whether those actions sufficiently mirror those of employer and union negotiators as to provide reliable data on the likely effects of law reform.

Exploring the mental representation underlying familiarity assessment.

A new method was used to explore the role of perceptual information in familiarity-based recognition. The method uses a pairwise recognition task to compare recognition judgments to a test word when that word is related and unrelated to an immediately preceding word. If the false-alarm rate to the test word is greater when the two words are related, this is interpreted as reflecting an increase in the likelihood of positive familiarity assessment to the test word (Ngo, C. T., Sargent, J., & Dopkins, S. [2007]. Level of discrimination for recognition judgments reduced following the recognition of semantically related words. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 415-436. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2007.05.007). The occurrence of such an increase for a given sort of preceding word-test word relatedness is taken as indicating that information of the sort in question is involved in familiarity-based recognition. Whereas previous work with this method has failed to find evidence that perceptual information is involved in familiarity-based recognition, the present study observed such evidence, under conditions in which previous work with other methods suggested that perceptual information would be likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition. Thus, the study helped to validate the method and produced converging evidence that perceptual information is sometimes involved in familiarity-based recognition. The results of the study suggest that perceptual information is more likely to be involved in familiarity-based recognition when the lists for the recognition task are short.

Afterword: Welfare State Reform, Recognition and Emotional Labor

In this themed section, the editors and authors take us far beyond the usual thinking about welfare reform. How, they ask, do politicians want us to feel about welfare reform? How do we think we should feel and how do we feel about it? How does the disabled woman who has lost her government-provided caregiver and ‘hasn't been out of the house since Christmas’, feel about it? Or the man who petitions to restore his lost government aid – but fails to do so? Or the wealthy Dutch tax payer? These are are the sorts of questions that arise in the study of a changing welfare states.

A 3D approach to first year English education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the suggestive possibilities of an approach to undergraduate English teacher education that the author has called the 3D Approach – Develop professional knowledge, Display professional knowledge, Disseminate professional knowledge – in relation to a number of groups of first year pre‐service teachers (PSTs) engaging the teaching and learning materials of their English education course.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines ways in which this approach has been assessed by the PSTs themselves, constructing this as an expression of their lived experience as PSTs. The author draws on Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, initiates a systematic and orchestrated program of explicit scaffolding of first year PST learning and draws on University‐generated student assessment of their courses, focus groups and individual interviews to investigate ways in which the 3D approach may be considered as enhancing first year PST learning.FindingsPSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge have made visible the teaching and learning that they have engaged and articulated. What the author outlines in this paper is not a “Eureka” moment for first year PSTs, but it is the result of careful scholarly considerations of what careful scholarly considerations by first years in Education courses may engage. For this cohort of PSTs, and for the author, it is a particular form of engagement with pedagogy. It is a pedagogy for teachers, part of active engagement on the part of the teacher and the learner, producing knowledge together.Research limitations/implicationsLack of generalisability from case study research may be considered as a limitation, but the author would argue that it is the details thrown up for careful examination in a case study which may serve to inform professional discussion and debate.Practical implicationsNegative press of inadequate teachers emerging from universities, with their specious claims will not progress reasoned discussion; research on how the PSTs are themselves taught and how they develop as professionals will. PSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge will go some way towards enabling this to happen. This sort of research opens up possibilities for starting with the right sort of questions, a shift from asking the wrong sort of questions, which the author would argue is that sort on which the media are basing their opinion pieces.Social implicationsContinuing public discussions, usually conducted in and by the media, about teacher quality, particularly as this tends to be tied to notions of teacher pay, indicates a wider social concern about the need for quality teachers. This sort of social concern is also a major concern for teacher educators, and is to be addressed as such. This paper addresses some of those concerns.Originality/valueThe paper engages issues about teacher education raised publicly in the media and ties these to the more private domain of university practice in a given teacher education course.

“SPLITTING THE ROCKS”: Derek Mahon’s Beckett

This study assesses impact of Beckett's work upon early work of Northern Irish Derek Mahon. Arguing that Mahon co-opts Beckett as an influence by misreading his work as that of manque, essay examines Mahon's handling of Beckett as source, model and 'adopted' precursor in four poems: Exit Molloy, An Image from Tithonus and Last of Fire Kings.The pros outweigh cons that glowfrom Beckett's bleak reductio -Mahon, Beyond Howth Head1. Exit MolloyIn 1984 essay on Samuel Beckett's poetry, Derek Mahon called him a minor and idiosyncratic poet (1996, 50). As editor of The Sphere Book of Modern Irish Poetry in 1972, Mahon had represented Beckett by two poems and from Waiting for Godot (1972b, 111-14) - famous exchange from act 2 of play about All dead voices (the title Mahon gives it), complete with its name prefixes and directions. The 1984 essay ends by quoting same passage which, Mahon asserts, achieves [...] condition of music (1996, 53). The anthologist's co-option of passage is perhaps not surprising. In early Beckett criticism (of 1950s and 60s) it was commonplace to insist on musical or nature of much of his writing. In 1963, for example, Louis MacNeice, Mahon's poetic forerunner, described Beckett's drama as essentially lyrical, asking the sort of question that used to be prerogative of poets (124). In 2006 essay Mahon effects merger from opposite direction when he describes Beckett's best poems, examples of the existential lyric (1996, 56), as dramatic pieces in their own right [...] continuous with work for stage (2006, 1). But Mahon's anthologization of passage from Godot also hints at significantly personal reading.To present Godo /-passage as an honorary is to emphasize its qualities as momentary illumination, still point of insight amidst tedium and anxiety of waiting. In its context these qualities are heavily qualified: illumination is both made possible and clouded by obligation to speak, to bale out silence. While epiphany is not sine qua non of lyric, luminous moment is nonetheless native to genre. In drama, however, even lyrical drama of Beckett, any moment of is always likely to be submerged or rendered ambiguous by current of action. But Mahon's tendency has always been to read Beckett as manque. Much of time it is even dull, he wrote of Beckett's prose in 1976. One is tempted to skip. [...] But good bits are very good indeed. Not inexpressive as their author might wish, but expressive of rare vision, like 'brief scattered lights' [1959, 207] in Malone Dies (1996, 60). In 1986 tribute, Mahon asserts that novels of Beckett are a matter of texture rather than incident, quoting from How It Is: a few images on and off in mud earth sky few creatures in light some still standing (Beckett 1964, 8). This insistence on luminous moment issues in remarkable observation about the last words of Lucky's 'think' in Waiting for Godot, where 'the skull in Connemara,' 'the tennis' and 'Cunard' combine to suggest Proustian glimpse of childhood, summer afternoon in west of Ireland during long-ago school holidays (1996, 58).Although there is no evidence for it (Mahon was writing in 1976, before first generally available biographical information about Beckett), this last speculation is shrewd enough: comfortably-off Protestant Dubliners might very well have holidayed in West in 1910s. And Proust connection is natural. After all, Beckett's first book was critical study which asserts that Proust's entire book is monument to involuntary memory and epic of its action (Beckett 1965a, 34). Furthermore Beckett always claimed that vital shift in his own writing life and creative output, trigger for post-war frenzy of writing, which produced three novellas, trilogy of novels and Waiting for Godot, was result of revelation (Knowlson 351-53) in his mother's room in Foxrock. …

Review of periodical articles

The most striking feature of this year's publications is the large number of articles about the economic, financial and business history of medieval towns. ‘What was the Hanse?’ (Was war die Hanse?) sounds like the sort of question that might be asked in an undergraduate examination, designed to elicit a wide range of responses, from the purely descriptive to the more analytical. The question has, in fact, generated a substantial, if rather problematic, historiography, as two studies of the Hanse make clear. The tendency to define the Hanse as a ‘state’ or to see it as endowed with ‘state-like’ qualities does not do justice to the complexity of a more loosely framed and highly adaptable commercial and urban network.

Procreation and Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children * Edited by DAVID ARCHARD and DAVID BENATAR

Procreation and Parenthood deals with moral questions in relation to decisions about bringing children into existence and how to rear them. In their comprehensive introduction, David Benatar and David Archard provide a helpful overview of contemporary discussions of these two sorts of questions and explain how each chapter fits into the larger picture. In the following, I shall focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the part of the book that deals with procreation. In Chapter 2, Tim Bayne discusses the theoretical basis for so-called wrongful life cases and in particular three possible accounts thereof, namely the no-faults model, parity models and dual benchmark models (32). According to the no-faults model, it is incoherent to claim that being caused to exist can be harmful to the child. The two other models deny this. According to parity models, the level of welfare required for a life to be worth starting does not differ from the level required for a life to be worth continuing, whereas dual benchmark models require a higher level in the former case. Bayne critically discusses no-faults and dual benchmarks models and ends up defending a parity model. While I agree with his conclusion and many of his arguments, I nevertheless find a couple of them too swift. For example, I cannot see that no-faults theorists need to be committed to an Epicurean view of death (while they deny that existence can be better/worse than never existing, e.g. because the latter outcome does not include a welfare level, the badness of death can be assessed by comparing outcomes with different life lengths and indeed with different welfare levels; see e.g. McMahan 2002: Ch. 2).

Stopping at the Stone: Rethinking Belief (and Non-Belief) in Modernism Via A Passage to India

The modern mind takes such small flights. --E. M. Forster in his Commonplace Book The desire to think in binary terms seems to be a part of human nature with respect to belief: we see things--or want to see things--in black and white, yes or no, either/or terms. We want people to believe or not, to be religious or secular, to appeal to revelation or reason. This, in turn, drives us toward monolithic models of subject and linear narratives of conversion or religious loss: we think of conversion, following Augustine, as a turning of whole self to a state of belief. Historically modernity equated with wholesale religious loss, and secularity with unbelief and facile theory of a search for surrogates. As a side-effect, itself becomes defined in terms of pre-modern institutionalized Christianity, and there a great reluctance to approach new modes of potential modern religious engagement. In approaches to literary modernism, symptoms of this problematic approach manifest most clearly in kinds of questions we ask about authors and works with respect to religion religion (if we ask them at all): when did so-and-so lose their faith? does such-and-such work evidence belief? if so, in what? These questions reduce things back into simple binaries, monolithic models, and linear narratives--the very structures that we work so hard to dismiss in our attention to broader issues in modernity in favor of models of fragmentation and higher complexity But new debates about how we conceive of secularization--coming largely out of sociology religious studies, and philosophy--suggest new modes of thinking about religious engagement in modernity that can perhaps lead us in a better direction. These models, in turn, suggest a new sort of question as a starting point for talking about belief not is there belief?, but what does it mean to say 'I believe' (or 'disbelieve') in modernity? By tracking critical reception of belief in a work that debatably modernist and in an author who debatably religious, my hope to show by example how this new thread of questioning might offer a way out of our usual mode of thinking about religion in modernity, and how it can produce fresh readings of an old subject. This thread may seem to lead into, not out of, a maze--away from clarity nicely supplied by usual narrative of religious loss in modernity--but critics will, I hope, agree that this new and more complex model better fit for its subject. E. M. Forster and faith E. M. Forster lost his faith, according to his own belated 1959 account, quickly and quietly over course of his early years at King's College, Cambridge (1897-1900). The process occurred through [his] friendship with Hugh Meredith, who already disbelieved, and partly because of general spirit of questioning that associated with name of G. E. Moore. He abandoned Church dogma--first Trinity, then Incarnation because it hinged on doctrine of Original Sin, which he had never accepted. He also rejected personality of Christ. Although Christ offered that appealed to him--his personal warmth, his suffering in Passion--Forster saw another, uglier side of Christ's message that he couldn't reconcile with his own developing humanist values: away from worldliness and towards preaching and threats, so emphasis on followers, on an elite, so little intellectual power (as opposed to insight), such an absence of humor that my blood's chilled. I would on whole rather not meet speaker, either at an Eliot cocktail party or for a quick Quaker talk, and fact that my rejection not vehement does not save it from being tenacious. And so, as he puts it, the debunking of Christianity was effected with comparatively little fuss. By end of his third year at King's he disbelieved as much as he would at age eighty (Prince's Tale 313-39). …