Unitary Perspective Research Articles

Matrimonio, familia y unitarismo: condicionantes sociopolíticos de la doctrina católica en la construcción de la identidad política y jurídica de la familia en Colombia

El artículo explora las tensiones presentes entre la perspectiva unitaria de familia y matrimonio tradicional en Colombia, y las tendencias jurídicas que están diversificando esta versión, hasta el punto de establecer un escenario de crisis conceptual social, cultural y jurídico respecto al paradigma mismo de familia. Se desarrolla: i) descripción del concepto doctrinal católico de familia; ii) influencia de la doctrina católica en el esfuerzo unitarista; iii) regeneración; iv) hegemonía sociojurídica del paradigma de la religión católica como característica sociojurídica hegemónica; v) relación entre la doctrina católica y lo que expresa el ordenamiento jurídico colombiano en cuanto a la familia; vi) el debate jurídico y jurisprudencial que se ha generado en cuanto al paradigma unitarista de la familia; y por último vii) modificación del paradigma familiar en el contexto jurídico.

Crisis Narratives and Masculinist Protection

Stockholm syndrome, or captor-bonding, is a psychological crisis response to which women are considered especially susceptible. The term was coined in connection with a 1973 hostage situation in Stockholm, Sweden. I argue that the syndrome originally indicated a crisis of state authority. The conception of Stockholm syndrome projected a crisis of the legitimate state onto the women hostages and reinforced connections between state protection, masculinity and physical force. Crisis narratives specifically targeted the women's agency, and the state's protector status was restored by gendering dependency and victimhood. The particular circumstances of the original Stockholm incident were a prerequisite for the syndrome's appearance and continue to inform common understandings and scholarly writing on the syndrome. When crisis discourse appropriates the Stockholm syndrome, a unitary perspective and gendered foundations of state power are reinforced. Possibilities of divergent perspectives and counter-discourses, which are critical to feminist interventions into crisis narratives, are thereby diminished.

A Program Development toward Transforming One's Own Lifestyle Pattern: Dialogue with Cancer Survivors and Their Families within a Unitary Perspective

Chronic diseases like cancer are related to one’s lifestyle, so more appeal is needed for people to pay more attention to their own lifestyle.Purposes were (1) to develop a support program to help cancer survivors and their families recognize their own lifestyle pattern and make a transformation on their life pattern, (2) to work with them within the program, and to delineate the essence of this kind of support program from the result. Theoretical framework of the program was Margaret Newman’s health as expanding consciousness within a unitary paradigm. Newman emphasizes that “dialogue” in a person-environment partnership is helpful for pattern recognition, which means to speak and listen from the center of one’s own truth.

Descriptive analysis of the theoretical perspectives in employment relations

The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the theoretical perspectives in employment relations and subsistence of unionisation. The general concept of unionisation and the analysis of theoretical perspectives in employment relations is discussed to contextualise this essay. The three theoretical perspectives discussed in this paper are the unitary perspective, radical perspective and the pluralist perspective which underpins this report. Elements of employment relations linked to the effects of unionisation are discussed since they form significant part of this essay. In conclusion, the author heralds that theories and techniques applied in employment relations are effectively based on the pluralist perspective as construed from the analysis

Allostasis as a conceptual framework linking bipolar disorder and addiction.

Bipolar disorders (BDs) and addictions constitute reciprocal risk factors and are best considered under a unitary perspective. The concepts of allostasis and allostatic load (AL) may contribute to the understanding of the complex relationships between BD and addictive behaviors. Allostasis entails the safeguarding of reward function stability by recruitment of changes in the reward and stress system neurocircuitry and it may help to elucidate neurobiological underpinnings of vulnerability to addiction in BD patients. Conceptualizing BD as an illness involving the cumulative build-up of allostatic states, we hypothesize a progressive dysregulation of reward circuits clinically expressed as negative affective states (i.e., anhedonia). Such negative affective states may render BD patients more vulnerable to drug addiction, fostering a very rapid transition from occasional drug use to addiction, through mechanisms of negative reinforcement. The resulting addictive behavior-related ALs, in turn, may contribute to illness progression. This framework could have a heuristic value to enhance research on pathophysiology and treatment of BD and addiction comorbidity.

Towards a unitary perspective between Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use Disorder. Heroin use disorder as case study

BackgroundGenetic, neurobiological, environmental and psychosocial mechanisms have received considerable attention in exploring the mechanisms that underlie comorbid PTSD and SUD. PTSD and SUD are not necessarily linked by a causal relationship, as the self-medication hypothesis had supposed. They might, in fact, both be caused by a third factor that predisposes these subjects to develop the two disorders (so allowing a unitary perspective). MethodsUsing a conceptualization of the PTSD spectrum, we studied the PTSD–SUD unitary perspective by testing the correlation between severity of heroin addiction, dose of opioid medication and severity of PTSD spectrum in 82 methadone-treated, heroin-dependent patients. ResultsCanonical correlation analysis (Wilks Lambda=0.125F=1.41 p=0.014), univariate and multivariate comparisons between subgroups, identified on the basis of addiction severity, showed a highly positive correlation between the PTSD spectrum and the severity of heroin addiction. In addition, negative correlations were found between PTSD spectrum severity and methadone dose (r=0.225; p=0.042). ConclusionsThis strength and breadth of the correlations encourage us to move towards a unified vision of the two disorders.

A Unitary Perspective for Cancer Nursing

Purpose/Objectives: With development of innovative cancer diagnosis/treatment and increased cancer survivorship, the education of Oncology Advanced Practice Nurses (OAPN) is becoming increasingly complex, from the standpoint of both medical and nursing models. The purpose of this educational article is to address this issue and to present the authors’ reflection on the educational practice with OAPN students in a unitary approach based on Margaret Newman’s theory of health as expanding consciousness. Data sources and data synthesis: The authors’ journals and the students’ descriptions of their practice were used, and the data was synthesized through dialogue among the authors and the OAPN students. Conclusion and implications for nursing: It is concluded that the unitary approach focuses on identifying the client’s pattern as a pathway to finding meaning in the situation. By incorporating the medical model within a unitary approach, OAPN students gain a renewed professional nursing identity. Knowledge translation: The knowledge gained in the process of pattern recognition will make a significant difference in survivorship care and will contribute to the core of OAPN education.

Rewriting the Language of Creativity: The Five A's Framework

For the past 5 decades the psychology of creativity has been influenced by what is known as the 4 P's of creative expression: person, process, product, and press. This conceptual schema, initially proposed by Rhodes (1961) , helped researchers structure their thinking about the phenomenon. However, it also supported an individualistic, static, and oftentimes disjointed vision of creativity. The present article aims to rewrite this fundamental language of the discipline by using terms that explicitly endorse a systemic, contextual, and dynamic approach. The 5 A's framework—actor, action, artifact, audience, affordances—is grounded in current literature from sociocultural and ecological psychology as well as theories of the distributed mind and tries to achieve a more comprehensive and unitary perspective on creativity. Several theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are considered.

Tomer Broude and Yuval Shany (eds). Multi-Sourced Equivalent Norms in International Law. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011. Pp. 344. $120. ISBN: 9781849461450.

Many scholars have struggled to try to figure out ways to preserve a unitary perspective on international law in light of, and more frequently going beyond, the conservative guidelines formulated by Martti Koskenniemi and his ILC Working Group, collected in the 2006 Report on Fragmentation.1 The proliferation of normative regimes arguably poses a threat to international law's very structure, in the absence of stabilizing elements such as a central legislature, judicial bodies with compulsory and general jurisdiction, and governance legitimized by democratic procedures rather than episodic state consent. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that academics have so far focused on the clash between international law sub-systems, in which norms belonging to different regimes point at different directions and leave states with the unenviable choice of complying with one of them while at the same time incurring state responsibility for breach of the others. The editors of the book under review adopt a new approach: Tomer Broude and Yuval Shany focus on equivalent norms, i.e., norms featuring a certain degree of similarity in their content. The working definition of this novel doctrinal category of Multi-Sourced Equivalent Norms (MSENs), set out in the opening chapter, is as follows: Two or more norms which are (1) binding upon the same international legal subjects; (2) similar or identical in their normative content; and (3) have been established through different international instruments or legislative procedures or are applicable in different substantive areas of the law [at 5]. Could these norms be the ideal lens for the study of international regimes' interplay?. MSENs provide states and individuals with the possibility or at least the temptation to indulge in regime-shifting:2 given the substantial equivalence of two norms, actors will choose to rely on the one belonging to the friendlier regime (in terms of judicial ...

Slaves immersed in a liberal ideology

Paradigm debates have been featured in the nursing literature for over four decades. There are at least two opposing paradigms specific to nursing that have remained central in these debates. Advocates of the unitary perspective (or simultaneity paradigm) consider their theories to be more philosophically advanced and contemporary alternatives when compared to the older more traditional ideas characteristic of models they describe as originating from the totality paradigm. In the context of these debates, I focus on some theoretical positions embedded in the unitary perspective, noting their limitations with respect to integrating the individual and social mandates of nursing; nurses are responsible not only for individual health-related needs, but also for the health of the collective. I explore two hypotheses that may explain the powers of endurance of the unitary perspective. Paley, who outlines the origins of nurses' 'slave morality', inspires the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis speaks to the location of nursing knowledge development in the context of liberal ideology. In this work, I outline key conceptualizations of the unitary perspective in order to clearly illustrate the limitations of the unitary perspective for nurses' social mandate. Then, I explore how slave morality and liberal ideological assumptions might both work to sustain the unitary perspective. A paradigm for nursing must have utility in addressing both the health-related needs of individuals, and for addressing the health of the collective. To this end, I advance suggestions in three areas: first, to transform nurses' slave morality to more honest and noble aspirations; second, to examine liberal ideological premises; and third, to end paradigm debate by resituating elements of the unitary perspective to the level of mid-range theory, where it could be most effective for research and practice with specific populations.

Comparison of Students' Knowledge Structure Coherence and Understanding of Force in the Philippines, Turkey, China, Mexico, and the United States

This study investigates the ongoing debate in the conceptual change literature between unitary and elemental perspectives on students' knowledge structure coherence. More specifically, the current study explores two potential explanations for the conflicting results reported by Ioannides and Vosniadou (2002)and diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004) in terms of differences in coding schemes and differences in student populations. The current study addresses these questions by applying the coding schemes from both studies to interviews with 201 students drawn from the United States, the Philippines, Turkey, China, and Mexico. The analyses focus first on the coding schemes, suggesting that differences in coding schemes seem unlikely to account for the differences in the original studies. The analyses then focus on potential differences between student populations, suggesting that some differences exist in terms of consistency and meanings that might result from language, culture, or educational systems, but that these differences are too small to account for the radical differences in the findings of the original studies. Two additional explanations are then proposed and explored involving the instruments and the epistemological stances invoked for the students. Overall, the results align more closely with the findings of diSessa, Gillespie, and Esterly (2004). [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Journal of the Learning Sciences for the following free supplement: Coding Schemes and Rules.]

Spatial correlation between brain aerobic glycolysis and amyloid-β (Aβ) deposition

Amyloid-β (Aβ) plaque deposition can precede the clinical manifestations of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) by many years and can be associated with changes in brain metabolism. Both the Aβ plaque deposition and the changes in metabolism appear to be concentrated in the brain's default-mode network. In contrast to prior studies of brain metabolism which viewed brain metabolism from a unitary perspective that equated glucose utilization with oxygen consumption, we here report on regional glucose use apart from that entering oxidative phosphorylation (so-called "aerobic glycolysis"). Using PET, we found that the spatial distribution of aerobic glycolysis in normal young adults correlates spatially with Aβ deposition in individuals with DAT and cognitively normal participants with elevated Aβ, suggesting a possible link between regional aerobic glycolysis in young adulthood and later development of Alzheimer pathology.

Ontologies of nursing in an age of spiritual pluralism: closed or open worldview?

North American society has undergone a period of sacralization where ideas of spirituality have increasingly been infused into the public domain. This sacralization is particularly evident in the nursing discourse where it is common to find claims about the nature of persons as inherently spiritual, about what a spiritually healthy person looks like and about the environment as spiritually energetic and interconnected. Nursing theoretical thinking has also used claims about the nature of persons, health, and the environment to attempt to establish a unified ontology for the discipline. However, despite this common ground, there has been little discussion about the intersections between nursing philosophic thinking and the spirituality in nursing discourse, or about the challenges of adopting a common view of these claims within a spiritually pluralist society. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the call for ontological unity within nursing philosophic thinking in the context of the sacralization of a diverse society. I will begin with a discussion of secularization and sacralization, illustrating the diversity of beliefs and experiences that characterize the current trend towards sacralization. I will then discuss the challenges of a unified ontological perspective, or closed world view, for this diversity, using examples from both a naturalistic and a unitary perspective. I will conclude by arguing for a unified approach within nursing ethics rather than nursing ontology.

The service‐dominant perspective: a backward step?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the “service dominant” perspective advocated by Vargo and Lusch and applauded by so many marketing academics in the USA is neither logically sound nor a perspective to displace others in marketing.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is a conceptual analysis of the Vargo and Lusch paper that takes account of the implications of the service perspective being adopted as the perspective to replace all others.FindingsThe paper finds that the definition of services, seeking as it does to embrace all types of marketing, is too broad to have much operational meaning, while the focusing on activities rather than functions misdirects marketing altogether. Vargo and Lusch revive the claim that marketing should be viewed as a technology, the aim being to discover the techniques and rules (principles) applying to marketing. However, indifference to theoretical considerations encourages crudeness and the cultivation of ad hoc solutions. The Vargo and Lusch paper suggests that there is a one best way: a single unitary perspective for marketing. Instead there is a need for multiple perspectives in marketing, together with the methodological pluralism that it implies.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper does not claim to have teased out all the implications of the service‐dominant approach to marketing and other marketing academics might take into account other considerations such as the feasibility of the approach.Practical implicationsThe paper suggests the abandonment of any approach that disdains theory and believes that the development of marketing technology is the way to go.Originality/valueThe paper offers original criticisms of the service‐dominant perspective and its value lies in holding marketing back from taking a backward step.

Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto's Orlando furioso (review)

Reviewed by: Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto's Orlando furioso Gael Montgomery Ita Mac Carthy . Women and the Making of Poetry in Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2007. 181 pages. Ita Mac Carthy's book, in her own words, "offers the most comprehensive study to date of Ariosto's women and endeavors to make sense of their place within the poem as a whole" (xi). This is a worthy goal that cannot possibly be accomplished in the roughly 170 pages that Mac Carthy has dedicated to the subject. She does, however, accomplish some other very useful things. The introduction gives an excellent overview of the essential feminist studies of the past few decades, identifying both their positive contributions and their deficiencies. Mac Carthy is wary of Pamela Benson's attempt in The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (1992) to establish definitively Ariosto's perspective toward women. She notes that Valeria Finucci successfully avoids this reductive tendency in her study The Lady Vanishes (1992), but criticizes Finucci's method of imposing a psychoanalytic, ahistorical perspective on the Furioso's sixteenth-century discourses about sexuality and gender. Mac Carthy observes that Deanna Shemek (Ladies Errant, 1998) and Constance Jordan ("Writing Beyond the Querelle: Gender and History in Orlando furioso," 1999) accomplish the task of combining theoretical approaches with consideration of the poem's larger context, but also remarks the incompleteness of their studies; Jordan, for example, examines only three of the poem's episodes in the course of her inquiry. Many of the problems Mac Carthy identifies in feminist criticism are common to Ariosto scholarship in general, and to her credit, she attempts to avoid them. Her book is relatively wide-ranging: five of the chapters are dedicated to important female characters (Alcina, Angelica, Marfisa, Olimpia and Bradamante). Another focuses not on particular individuals but on geste episodes, which involve knights coming to the aid of relatively minor female characters. This is an important inclusion, as Ariostan scholarship, feminist and otherwise, has traditionally given much attention to characters with "starring" roles in the poem at the expense of those that contribute in a less obvious but equally integral way to its various discourses. The geste episodes, Mac Carthy points out, are given to considerations of virginity, faithfulness and chastity; their female characters embody contemporary preoccupations with female sexuality and its control. Mac Carthy also refuses to waste time trying to define Ariosto's "true" viewpoint. [End Page 316] In her first chapter, which examines the poem's exordia, she establishes the "duplicity" of the poem (xvi)—a perfect term, as it pinpoints the intentionally deceptive and disingenuous qualities of the Furioso and its narrator in a way that words like "ambiguity," "ambivalence" or "contradiction" do not. The reader is led to hope that Mac Carthy will remain alert to this duplicity for the duration of her study, but this is unfortunately not the case. Too often she falls into the trap of accepting the narrator's representation of events at face value, as when she interprets his defense of Ruggiero's attempt to rape Angelica as a profession of the "faultlessness of lust" (35). For Mac Carthy, Ruggiero here typifies "the struggle between sensuality and reason for control of human behaviour without moral judgement" (35). She sees no irony in the incompatibility between Ruggiero's role as dynastic hero and his reprehensible behavior, nor in the contrast between the depictions of Ruggiero's "faultless" lust and that of Alcina, who is shown as malevolent and false. While Mac Carthy, to her credit, doesn't attempt to impose a unitary perspective on her material, she fails to recognize pertinent connections between the characters and episodes she examines; a thread that runs throughout the poem will be analyzed in one chapter and neglected in another. Mac Carthy is surprisingly inconsistent in her treatment of gender-specific aspects of Orlando furioso, alternating between recognition and disregard of the fact that the Furioso treats male and female characters differently, especially with regard to sexuality. Virtually every female character in the Furioso incorporates, in some way, anxiety about female sexuality, yet while Mac Carthy identifies this concern in the context...

Creative Movement and Transformation to Choreography: A Mode of Research Presentation

Creative movement is an expressive technique that can be used to generate knowledge from a unitary perspective. This column will present its use on research based on Newman's theory of health as expanding consciousness and the development of choreography based on participants'creative movements to present research findings.

The Politics of Method and Its Agentic, Performative, and Ontological Others

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences is an extraordinary book. It is extraordinary for the sheer amount of intellectual ground covered in the individual chapters and for its significance. By historicizing and provincializing each human science in turn, The Politics of Method opens the door to a true reflexivity, which is the necessary condition for what Michael Burawoy (2005: 511) calls ‘‘critical’’ consciousness in his conclusion to the volume. But The Politics of Method is also extraordinary for the theoretical ambition of its editor, who seeks to subsume the entire epistemological trajectory of the postwar American human sciences under a single interpretation. This was no small task: the book is over 600 pages long, and, like many edited volumes, it is also very eclectic—full of tensions, divergent perspectives, and (sometimes) somewhat contradictory substantive claims.1 Like the pieces of a kaleidoscope, each chapter has a unique character yet combines with the other chapters in multiple and intersecting ways to form different images and configurations, all of which offer a particular perspective on what is sociologically important about the epistemology of the human sciences. Ultimately, what we may call the ‘‘Steinmetz thesis’’—the argument that positivism has found a fertile ground in the postwar American social sciences (with the notable exception of anthropology) for reasons that have to do with the particular mode of regulation of the American economy—is just one plausible way, among many, to articulate a very disparate set of case studies. The strength of George Steinmetz’s thesis is to offer a unitary perspective for this volume. Its weakness, however, is to gloss over the real differ-

Death as a Transformation of Wholeness: An “Aha” Experience of Health as Expanding Consciousness

A nurse-patient clinical experience is presented from a unitary transformative perspective. The experience is interpreted through Newman's theory of health as expanding consciousness. A brief description of Newman's theory is given in order to provide the reader with Newman's key terms and fundamental philosophical principles. The nurse-patient healing partnership is explained using Newman's terminology and theory of health as expanding consciousness. The purpose of this article is to advance the critical importance of uncompromised and nonfragmented nursing care in partnership with the irreducible whole person.

A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (review)

A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics Leslie A. Howe (bio) A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics. By. Nancy R. Howell. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000. Is it possible for feminist theory to construct a cosmology that recognizes the multitude of possible perspectives generated by differences in race, class, and gender; encourages relational solidarity on the model of female friendship; and treats the natural world as at one with the human rather than as something to be risen above? This is the problem raised by Nancy R. Howell's book, A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (2000). In her attempt to provide a framework for such a cosmology, Howell explores a range of issues that a feminist cosmology would likely need to reconcile along the road to such a goal, as well as presenting some interesting alternate interpretations of divine power. At the same time, the effort also raises some additional questions about whether such a project is ultimately feasible—questions that one could wish were explored more fully and at a more fundamentally theoretical level. Howell's work is an attempt to weave together several different strands of thought, not all of which are obviously compatible. The first and foremost of these is Alfred Whitehead's metaphysics and process theology. Not a straightforward candidate for feminist theorizing, given its hierarchical and patriarchal elements, Howell nevertheless mines Whiteheadian cosmology for its emphasis on process and context, its relational perspective, which she places beside feminist discussions of friendship, and the development of selfhood and solidarity. Because of this relational orientation, the issue of feminist separatism gains a significant place in the discussion. Put simply, the problem that feminist theory has faced has been whether or not women can develop a woman-defined conception of self and practice within the context of masculinized definitions that place separation from others at the center of self-acquisition. The irony has been that feminist separatism has frequently been seen as the necessary means for women to develop their own reconstruction of self, one that reemphasizes in a positive rather than a destructive way the connection of self with others, that is, through receptivity rather than struggle. The risk has been that such a practice might itself reproduce the oppositional dualisms that threaten relationally oriented reconfigurations of selfhood. [End Page 212] This need to reconcile traditional dualisms further accounts for the ecofeminist strand in Howell's book, as it has been ecofeminists in particular who have been concerned to root out the dualist attitudes lurking within our language and thinking about human and nonhuman nature.1 The aim here is to ultimately reintegrate the natural into the human and vice-versa, without simply reiterating anthropo- or androcentrism by subsuming the natural under the human, as through a transpersonal Self that is defined, once again, in the language of domination. The greater part of Howell's book is an exploration of these themes as they are reflected in Whitehead, in selected feminist and womanist theory and literature, and in a few ecofeminist sources. The goal is to find a way of bringing these threads together in order to lay down a pattern upon which can be filled out a cosmology of human and natural relationship in connection with God on the model of a "pantheistic erotism," drawing each self forward to fulfillment in relationship. However, there may be at least one quite serious question about the feasibility of Howell's project, and that is this: Howell is quite concerned to avoid any kind of theorizing that fails to regard the distinctness of variant perspectives, particularly those attributable to the differences of race, class, and gender. The concern here is familiar: we do not want to impose a rigidly unitary (that is, totalizing) perspective onto alternate perspectives. Howell refers to the "multiversity," for example, rather than to the universe (2000, 14). Yet, surely the construction of a cosmology inevitably engages one in the project of presenting or constructing a unitary, organized, picture of the world (worlds?). I don't happen to think that this is necessarily a bad thing—I, for one, assume that there is some way that the world is, and I want to get...

A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (review)

Reviewed by: A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics Leslie A. Howe (bio) A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics. By Nancy R. Howell. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000. Is it possible for feminist theory to construct a cosmology that recognizes the multitude of possible perspectives generated by differences in race, class, and gender; encourages relational solidarity on the model of female friendship; and treats the natural world as at one with the human rather than as something to be risen above? This is the problem raised by Nancy R. Howell's book, A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (2000). In her attempt to provide a framework for such a cosmology, Howell explores a range of issues that a feminist cosmology would likely need to reconcile along the road to such a goal, as well as presenting some interesting alternate interpretations of divine power. At the same time, the effort also raises some additional questions about whether such a project is ultimately feasible—questions that one could wish were explored more fully and at a more fundamentally theoretical level. Howell's work is an attempt to weave together several different strands of thought, not all of which are obviously compatible. The first and foremost of these is Alfred Whitehead's metaphysics and process theology. Not a straightforward candidate for feminist theorizing, given its hierarchical and patriarchal elements, Howell nevertheless mines Whiteheadian cosmology for its emphasis [End Page 197] on process and context, its relational perspective, which she places beside feminist discussions of friendship, and the development of selfhood and solidarity. Because of this relational orientation, the issue of feminist separatism gains a significant place in the discussion. Put simply, the problem that feminist theory has faced has been whether or not women can develop a woman-defined conception of self and practice within the context of masculinized definitions that place separation from others at the center of self-acquisition. The irony has been that feminist separatism has frequently been seen as the necessary means for women to develop their own reconstruction of self, one that reemphasizes in a positive rather than a destructive way the connection of self with others, that is, through receptivity rather than struggle. The risk has been that such a practice might itself reproduce the oppositional dualisms that threaten relationally oriented reconfigurations of selfhood. This need to reconcile traditional dualisms further accounts for the ecofeminist strand in Howell's book, as it has been ecofeminists in particular who have been concerned to root out the dualist attitudes lurking within our language and thinking about human and nonhuman nature.1 The aim here is to ultimately reintegrate the natural into the human and vice-versa, without simply reiterating anthropo- or androcentrism by subsuming the natural under the human, as through a transpersonal Self that is defined, once again, in the language of domination. The greater part of Howell's book is an exploration of these themes as they are reflected in Whitehead, in selected feminist and womanist theory and literature, and in a few ecofeminist sources. The goal is to find a way of bringing these threads together in order to lay down a pattern upon which can be filled out a cosmology of human and natural relationship in connection with God on the model of a "pantheistic erotism," drawing each self forward to fulfillment in relationship. However, there may be at least one quite serious question about the feasibility of Howell's project, and that is this: Howell is quite concerned to avoid any kind of theorizing that fails to regard the distinctness of variant perspectives, particularly those attributable to the differences of race, class, and gender. The concern here is familiar: we do not want to impose a rigidly unitary (that is, totalizing) perspective onto alternate perspectives. Howell refers to the "multiversity," for example, rather than to the universe (2000, 14). Yet, surely the construction of a cosmology inevitably engages one in the project of presenting or constructing a unitary, organized, picture of the world (worlds?). I don't happen to think that this is necessarily a bad thing—I, for one, assume that there is some way that the world is, and I want...