The Registration Continuum in Personality Disorder Studies: Theory, Rationale, and Template

Registration is a tool to increase rigor of personality disorder research and its ability to reduce human suffering through improving people’s lives. This article details the problems that exist without registrations, which revolve around a study’s outcomes’ dependence on the data rather than on the theory being tested. Registrations exist on a continuum underpinned by bipolar timing and unipolar disclosure dimensions, the latter of which poses myriad points of decisions for researchers to register. The registration process provides memory aids and guideposts for researchers through the course of a study, transparently maintains public trust in the scientific enterprise, and preserves the severity of the tests used in the study. This articles provide a template for personality disorder researchers to consider and examples of how researchers can use registered flexibility to plan for contingencies that might arise during a study. It also addresses challenges in evaluating registrations and implementing registration in a research workflow.

The University of Students: A place for joint self-education

In this article, we explain, explore, and problematize the formation, organization, leadership, and daily educational life of the first (to our knowledge) international democratic university of students (UniS) in the 21st century. UniS is run by the students, for the students, and with the students for their diverse purposes, desires, interests, and needs. A student is anyone who freely chooses to study something for whatever reason. Everyone can become a student at any time without any high school credits, fees, bureaucracy, tests, or any other form of human suffering. But what exactly is UniS? Why students? What if…? How can one visualize UniS, which is “so vague, so bizarre, so unnecessary to me!” What are its philosophical principles? Who are we? What does the University of Students look like? In the spirit of curiosity, wonder, leisure, fun, freedom, and love for learning, we invite the reader to attend and connect with two working edu-clubs of UniS: a movie club “Schooling Around the World and Time” and an “Educationalist Club.” In addition, we discuss some of the main issues, limitations, and challenges, including the civilization of the necessities, colonization of the human spirit by the economy, a lack of genuine leisure, and toxification of the human by foisted education. The open-ended, poetic conclusion lets the readers form their own interpretations, ideas, questions, and answers about UniS. What is the future of UniS? And only time will tell, 10, 100 years later or 100 light-years from now.

Shifting the Blame: Storm and Wildfire Dramatic Images in American News Media

Some media frames might be likely to seek to evoke a certain sentiment, and that natural disaster coverage by the media focuses on the current impact of disasters. In their coverage, American news media use polar sentiment words to create bleeding images of natural disasters, potentially counter-productive to the wisdom of dealing with the natural disaster. Identifying the sentiment words that lead to a misperception of natural disasters can help journalists adopt the wisdom that natural disasters are not a human enemy. The corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) reported in this article investigates the American media's issues for dramatic reporting and the polar sentiment words utilized in the framing. The corpus is built from 100 news articles reporting wildfires and storms by ten major online American news media published from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2020. It uses AntConc to generate word-list and word-link from which it identifies the dominant issues. Subsequently, it compares the AntConc word-list with A List of Sentiment Words to reveal the tones and dramatic imaging. The findings show that the dominant issues in storm reporting are description, impact, and prediction, while wildfire reporting are cause, impact, action, and prediction. The negative polar words produce dramatic images of storm as a violent beast and wildfire as a vengeful invader. Such description is provocative to blaming natural disasters as a cause of human suffering rather than improving our behaviors to reduce the suffering. Thus, it is counter-productive to acquiring wisdom for dealing with natural disasters.

Animal Suffering, God and Lessons from the Book of Job

Nature shows itself to us in ambivalent ways. Breathtaking beauty and cruelty lie close together. A Darwinian image of nature seems to imply that nature is a mere place of violence, cruelty and mercilessness. In this article, I first explore the question of whether such an interpretation of nature is not one-sided by being phrased in overly moral terms. Then, I outline how the problem of animal suffering relates to a specific understanding of God as moral agent. Finally, in the main part of the argumentation, I pursue the question to what extent the problem of animal (and human) suffering does not arise for a concept of God couched in less personalistic terms. If God’s perspective towards creation is rather de-anthropocentric, then moral concerns might be of less importance as we generally assume. Such an understanding of the divine is by no means alien to the biblical-theistic tradition. I argue that it finds strong echoes in the divine speeches in the Book of Job: They aim at teaching us to accept both the beauty and the tragic of existence in a creation that seen in its entirety is rather a-moral. Finally, I address the question what such a concept of God could mean for our existence.

Un católico en Nueva York: Lorca’s Tragic Vision of the United States

This article discusses the role of Spanish Catholic tradition in the poetry of Federico García Lorca, especially in Poeta en Nueva York. Beginning with key concepts from Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life to elucidate this tradition of irrationality, suffering, and spiritual vitality, we see that Lorca uses similar ideas as resistance to a “Protestant” modernity that, according to Lorca, favored materialist progress while eschewing human suffering. This article also demonstrates how the use of Spanish religious tradition complicates long-standing stereotypes of Spain’s supposed lack of modernization.

Confronting Job’s Demons

The theme of demons connects three difficult passages in the Book of Job: Job’s curse on the day of his birth in 3:3–10, Eliphaz’s mocking censure of Job for that curse in 5:6–7, and 38:12–21, God’s challenge to Job for his appeal to demons. A crucial insight is provided by a Talmudic discussion of demons and human suffering, which connects Job 5:6–7 to Psalm 91:5–8.

Introduction

The Introduction outlines the book’s purposes and approach by explaining the title’s three components. It asks what it means to live skillfully and how the Vimalakīrti Sūtra focuses on the cultivation of life skills through the development of Buddhist practices. It then inquires into the meaning of a Buddhist philosophy of life and how it might play a crucial role in our efforts to diminish human suffering and to advance human awareness and awakening. Finally, it describes the unique character of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra and how this book will approach the sutra as a means to cultivate a contemporary philosophy of life along Buddhist lines that might accentuate the possibility of living skillfully.