The Third Wave of Liberation Theology. From the Catholic Enfant Terrible to Vehicle of Ecumenism, Interreligious and Social Dialog?

The past decade has seen a radical shift in the Church's stance toward liberation theology. At the same time, the complexity of its description has greatly increased. The issue has grown beyond South America and intra-ecclesiastical affairs. The multicultural and multireligious nature of liberation theology presents, on the one hand, a methodological difficulty and, on the other hand, an opportunity to look at faith and religion in different cultures and denominations through a new unifying key. According to the author, we are dealing with the “third wave” of liberation theology nowadays. Efforts are needed to utilize it more productive than the better known South American “infant terrible” of the Church.

On the Methodological Difficulty of Identifying Implicit Racial Beliefs and Stereotypes

In “Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality,” Melamed, Munn, Barry, Montgomery, and Okuwobi present an innovative and intriguing study on social influence, status beliefs, and implicit racial bias. To capture status-based expectancies, the authors measure implicit racial status beliefs using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) with words related to high and low status. We identify an important flaw in the study’s analytic approach that severely limits the conclusions that can be drawn based on the study. We argue that the authors neglected to separate the valence of the words included in the racial status IAT with the stereotype content of these words. It is therefore possible that the study’s racial IAT only captures implicit racial evaluations, and not status-based implicit racial beliefs.

Lateral Export of Dissolved Inorganic and Organic Carbon from a Small Mangrove Estuary with Tidal Fluctuation

The significance of aquatic lateral carbon (C) export in mangrove ecosystems highlights the extensive contribution of aquatic pathways to the net ecosystem carbon budget. However, few studies have investigated lateral fluxes of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and inorganic carbon (DIC), partly due to methodological difficulty. Therefore, we evaluated area-based lateral C fluxes in a small mangrove estuary that only had one exit for water exchange to the coast. We sampled water from the mouth of the creek and integrated discharge and consecutive concentration of mangrove-derived C (ΔC). Then, we estimated the area-normalized C fluxes based on the inundated mangrove area. DIC and DOC concentrations at the river mouth increased during ebb tide during both summer and winter. We quantified the ΔC in the estuary using a two-component conservative mixing model of freshwater and seawater. DIC and DOC proportions of ΔC concentrations at the river mouth during ebb tide was between 34% and 56% in the winter and 26% and 42% in the summer, respectively. DIC and DOC fluxes from the estuary were estimated to be 1.36 g C m−2 d−1 and 0.20 g C m−2 d−1 in the winter and 3.35 g C m−2 d−1 and 0.86 g C m−2 d−1 in the summer, respectively. Based on our method, daily fluxes are mangrove area-based DIC and DOC lateral exports that can be directly incorporated into the mangrove carbon budget.

Justification of atemporal values in Alexius Meinong’s theory of objects

In the history of philosophy, Alexius Meinong?s interest in axiology has traditionally been seen as confined to his earlier works. However, if we analyze his writing after 1917, in which Meinong discusses timeless values, it becomes clear that he became increasingly disinterested in psychology. Moreover, since the theory of the object, in Meinong?s view, could not be a part of metaphysics, he had to deal with the additional methodological difficulty of proving that the good exists independently of human subjectivity. The article discusses A. Meinong?s understanding of the object of desire, the object of a value-feeling and the connection between ethical values as objects of consciousness and time. It is shown that, according to Meinong, language is where values actually reside and only through language can their reality be explained.

Memoria y apropiación del pasado: una interpretación de la lucha en Oaxaca, México

La dificultad teórico-metodológica del artículo se sintetiza en las siguientes interrogantes: ¿Cómo abordar luchas que tienen expresiones en la memoria colectiva e imaginarios populares? ¿Es posible la comprensión de estas luchas bajo los marcos analíticos de la acción colectiva y los movimientos sociales? ¿En qué términos puede justificarse esta relación? Y, si no es así, ¿qué otras propuestas teórico-metodológicas resultan útiles para comprender las luchas que buscan recuperar y apropiarse del pasado? Nuestro supuesto es que las luchas con expresiones en los imaginarios populares y la memoria colectiva están negadas en los rasgos visibles e inmediatos de la acción colectiva y los movimientos sociales que responden más bien a programas racionales y jerárquicos. El objetivo de este artículo es desarrollar una propuesta teórico-metodológica que dé lugar a la comprensión de aquellas luchas ancladas en la vida local y que también nos permita recuperar los rasgos y cualidades negados en los marcos analíticos predominantes. Para sustentar estos argumentos, se retoma la experiencia de activistas que irrumpieron en los acontecimientos en Oaxaca, entidad del sureste mexicano, a partir del año 2006. Abstract: The theoretical-methodological difficulty of the article is summarized in the following questions: How to address the struggles that have expressions in collective memory and popular imaginary? Is it possible to understand these struggles under the analytical frameworks of collective action and social movements? In what terms can this relationship be justified? And if not, what other theoretical-methodological proposals are useful to understand the struggles that seek to recover and appropriate the past? Our assumption is that struggles with expressions in the collective memory and the popular imaginary are denied in the visible and immediate characteristics of collective action and social movements that respond rather to rational and hierarchical programs. Therefore, the objective of this article is to develop a theoretical-methodological proposal that allows the understanding of these struggles anchored in local life and at the same time allows recovering the aspects that have been denied by the dominant analytical frameworks. To support these arguments, let’s recover the experience of the activists who broke into the events that took place in 2006 in Oaxaca, an entity located in southern Mexico. Keywords: sociology, social movements, memory, struggle, antagonism, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Max Weber and the Idea of the Occident

Max Weber believed that the Occident had produced a set of unique institutions whose distinctiveness could be characterized using ideal types that accentuated their type and degree of “rationalism.” The rise of modern capitalism, one element within this set, had been enabled by the presence of other elements, he famously argued, none of which had indigenously arisen anywhere else in the world. This chapter reconstructs Weber’s idea of the Occident and examines how he understood the place of his own “modern European cultural world” within the development of occidental rationalism. It also considers the ways in which Weber’s comparative project might have been contaminated by various forms of “Eurocentric” biases, such as cultural prejudices, misapprehensions of Western uniqueness, and inept applications of the ideal-typical method. The most serious methodological difficulty with Weber’s comparative project is not his assertion of occidental difference, this chapter suggests, but rather his assumption that many paradigmatic cultural institutions were shared by societies whose developmental trajectories ultimately diverged. By attempting to understand non-Western institutions in terms of ideal types that were derived from European experiences, Weber often failed to appreciate the distinctive norms that structured the dynamism of non-Western societies.

III. Functions of short lifetime structures at large 9: case of nucleic acids

The short lifetime structures of nucleic acids are not well studied because of the poor recognition of their importance and the methodological difficulty. In case of proteins, which are a type of single-stranded biopolymers, the essential roles of their transient structures are well established. Therefore, the role of transient structures of nucleic acids is, naturally, of great interest. There have been multiple reports on the function-related unstable (transient) structures of single-stranded nucleotides, though not as many as at present. Recent methodological advances are now enabling us to observe structures with ultra-short lifetime (less than a nanosecond). On the other hand, the biological importance of transient structures of ribonucleicacid (RNA) is increasingly recognized because of the findings of novel functional RNAs such as microRNA. Therefore, the time has come to tackle the structure and function dynamic of RNA/deoxyribonucleic acid in relation to their transient, unstable structures. The specific properties of rapidity and diversity are hypothesized to be involved in unexplored phenomena in neuroscience.

Continuous bite monitoring: a method to assess the foraging dynamics of herbivores in natural grazing conditions

Accurate estimates of bite mass and variations in the short-term intake rate of grazing herbivores has been historically considered as a fundamental methodological difficulty, a difficulty that increases with the complexity of the feeding environment. Improving these methodologies will help understand foraging behaviours in natural grazing conditions, where habitat structure and interactions among different forages influence feeding decisions and patterns. During the past 30 years, we have been developing the ‘continuous bite-monitoring’ method, an observational method that allows continuous assessment of foraging behaviours, including bite mass, instantaneous intake rate and food selection, in simple to complex feeding environments. The centrepiece of the method is a ‘bite-coding grid’ where bites are categorised by structural attributes of the forage to reflect differences in bite masses. Over the years, we have been using this method with goats, sheep, llamas and cattle across a range of different habitats. After reviewing the development of the method, we detail its planning and execution in the field. We illustrate the method with a study from southern Brazilian native Pampa grassland, showing how changes in the forages consumed by heifers strongly affect short-term intake rate during meals. Finally, we emphasise the importance of studying animals grazing in their natural environments to first identify the relevant processes that can later be tested in controlled experiments.

A Data Collection Framework for Care Coordination and Clinical Communications About Patients (CAPs)

Care coordination unfolds through communications about specific patients between clinicians in the context of a specific illness episode. This is a largely informal process that is also ephemeral, in that it leaves little or no permanent documentary record. Recent research has identified care coordination and communication about patients as a potential solution for improving care for chronic illnesses while reducing health care costs and increasing accountability, and as vehicle for reducing medical errors. However, relatively few empirical data exist on the communications about patients that comprise care coordination, possibly due to the methodological difficulty in gathering such data. A theory-based and empirically refined method for representing and collecting data on CAPs is presented.

Methodological difficulty of cross-cultural studies

This article reviews the main methodological complexities, that come out from carrying out comparative sociological researches of modern societies, the specificity and meaning of cross-cultural analysis.