Volunteering involvementand agency, communion and ethics

The aim of this paper was to check whether there exists a relationship between volunteering involvement and the level of communion, agency and degree of support for ethical codes. The questions concerned whether persons involved in volunteering (compared to those not involved) are characterized, on the one hand, by a higher intensity of agency and communion, on the other, a higher level of declared support for ethical codes (ethics of autonomy, universal good, dignity and collectivism). In order to find the answer, a study was carried out in which participated 37 people involved in hospice volunteering (including 19 women) and 34 non-volunteers (including 18 women).The results of the study show the existence of an assumed relationship in the case of agency and communion. As for ethical codes, the results did not provide evidence of the relationship between the level of their support and volunteering. The results of the presented study lead to the conclusion that selfless action for the benefit of the other people is associated with a high level of agency and communion, and not only with a high ethical level. Hence the postulate for pedagogical practice to shape and develop a sense of agency and communion in children and youth.

The Old Man in Purgatory: The Indian Part in Yeats's Vision of Salvation

This essay examines Yeats's Purgatory via A Vision, in an attempt to understand his view of salvation in particular relation to Indian philosophy. Read from a Christian perspective, Purgatory may be a work far from purgation, as T. S. Eliot once complained. I wish to show in this essay that Purgatory indeed places emphasis on purgation by a negative example, if in a different way from the Catholic one. Yeats denies the linear eschatology of Christian theology as well as its doctrine of salvation in eternal heaven. In A Vision, Yeats explains his view of the afterlife of the soul, which involves purgation through ‘the Dreaming Back’. The special treatment of the Old Man renders Purgatory a meta-purgatorial play that mirrors the Dreaming Back of his mother's spirit in the Old Man's, intensifying the theme of purgation. Purgatory effectively dramatizes the inability to forgive and cast out remorse: the impossibility of nishikam karma, or selfless action, to borrow Sanskrit terms, which is essential for Yeatsian salvation. Finally, I would also emphasize Yeats's deviation from the Hindu wisdom, which makes Yeats's vision uniquely his own.