For the Life of the World: Some Reflections

As its title would suggest, For the Life of the World: Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church offers a comprehensive statement of the ideals and principles that should guide Orthodox Christians, and the church itself, in the effort to live a Christlike life in today's pluralistic society. The expression “social ethos” might suggest that this document limits itself to social questions as these are commonly understood, offering a kind of Orthodox equivalent of Roman Catholic social encyclicals. On examination, it is clear that this document goes beyond the standard topics pursued under the rubric of social ethics. It includes an extended discussion of marriage and family life, addressing questions of marital relations and family dynamics as well as the social dimension of marriage; a comparably extended discussion of medical ethics; extended comments on ecumenical and interfaith relations; and reflections on the liturgy as the ultimate context for the moral life. We even find brief but perceptive remarks on our treatment of animals. This document is not so much a presentation of social ethics as a treatise on moral theology comprehensively considered. The nearest Roman Catholic parallel would be Veritatis Splendor, rather than one of the social encyclicals.

An Introduction, Review, and Conceptual Analysis of Mattering as an Essential Construct and an Essential Way of Life

While the importance of having self-esteem is widely recognized and has been studied extensively, another core component of the self-concept has been relatively neglected—a sense of mattering to other people. In the current article, it is argued that mattering is an entirely unique and complex psychological construct with great public appeal and applied significance. The various ways of assessing mattering are reviewed and evidence is summarized, indicating that mattering is a vital construct in that deficits in mattering are linked with consequential outcomes at the individual level (i.e., depression and suicidal tendencies), the relationship level (i.e., relationship discord and dissolution), and the societal level (i.e., delinquency and violence). Contemporary research is described which shows that mattering typically predicts unique variance in key outcomes beyond other predictor variables. Mattering is discussed as double-edged in that mattering is highly protective but feelings of not mattering are deleterious, especially among people who have been marginalized and mistreated. The article concludes with an extended discussion of key directions for future research and an overview of the articles in this special issue. It is argued that a complete view of the self and personal identity will only emerge after we significantly expand the scope of inquiry on the psychology of mattering.

The Boundaries of Cognition and Decision Making

This chapter outlines the role that individual-level empirical evidence gathered from psychological experiments and surveys can play in informing agent-based models, and the model-based approach more broadly. To begin with, we provide an overview of the way that this empirical evidence can be used to inform agent-based models. Additionally, we provide three detailed exemplars that outline the development and implementation of experiments conducted to inform an agent-based model of asylum migration, as well as how such data can be used. There is also an extended discussion of important considerations and potential limitations when conducting laboratory or online experiments and surveys, followed by a brief introduction to exciting new developments in experimental methodology, such as gamification and virtual reality, that have the potential to address some of these limitations and open the door to promising and potentially very fruitful new avenues of research.

The Man Who Does Not Sell

This paper focuses on one of the skilled individuals who invented a number of musical instruments which are not intended to be used or experienced by others. The instrument maker lives in an outskirt of Kandy. He has crafted many new musical instruments in addition to the replicas of musical instruments used for pop music. He articulates that he crafted these instruments not for earning money or to become popular as a good craftsman or musician but for his own personal satisfaction. The extended discussion with him implied that It is not that “he just makes instruments for his own satisfaction” but there are other reasons tied together with his background, crafting skills and musical interests, opinions about the society and his world view. In this research, his views on music, musical instrument playing, crafting and commoditization of musical instruments are explored. previous literature on organology, musical instrument making, and some socio-musicological studies are investigated in this regard as well as personal interviews with the craftsman were conducted in order to gather information that will be finally discussed. This research may provide some insights towards the future of creative arts and an un-industrialization of instrumental music, which can be seen as a contribution to sustaining human societies.

Lethal Incompetence: Leaders, Organizations, and the U.S. Response to COVID-19

The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. Voter competence is unlikely to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference to our politics. By contrast, the competence of officials can and does vary substantially over short periods of time. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens. We elaborate on this argument, emphasizing the “incompetence multiplier”: the way that the properties of hierarchies can amplify the incompetence of those in powerful positions. We illustrate our argument with an extended discussion of the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Saints or Sinners? Sexuality, Reputation and Representation of Queens from Contemporary Sources to Modern Media

This article explores allegations of sexual scandal connected with premodern royal women in Europe and China. It begins by assessing expectations of queenly ideals, particularly the emphasis given to female chastity in European and Chinese culture. This forms a foundation for an extended discussion of tales of sexual impropriety of both real and legendary queens from China in the third century BCE to eighteenth century Europe. This survey highlights three key themes: the idea of dangerous and destructive beauty, the topos of the wanton and promiscuous queen and perceptions of transgressive affairs. Finally, the article assesses the connection between the portrayal of the sexual scandal of royal women in contemporary sources with the way in which these women’s lives are represented in modern media, particularly films and television series. Ultimately, it demonstrates that allegations of sexual scandal could both be a means to attack these women (and their royal husbands) in their lifetimes and could have long lasting negative impact on the memory of their lives, resulting in their political power, agency and activity being obscured by an emphasis on their love lives and supposed affairs.

A cookbook for the investigation of coordination polymers by transition metal K-edge XMCD

In order to disentangle the physical effects at the origin of transition metal K-edge X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) in coordination polymers and quantify small structural distortions from the intensity of these signals, a systematic investigation of Prussian blue analogs as model compounds is being conducted. Here the effects of the temperature and of the external magnetic field are tackled; none of these external parameters modify the shape of the XMCD signal but they both critically modify its intensity. The optimized experimental conditions, as well as a reliable and robust normalization procedure, could thus be determined for the study of the intrinsic parameters. Through an extended discussion on measurements on other XMCD-dedicated beamlines and for other coordination compounds, we finally provide new transition metal K-edge XMCD users with useful information to initiate and successfully carry out their projects.

Combatants, Non-Combatants, and the Question of Innocence

Chapter 4 tackles issues surrounding the concept of combatant/non-combatant and the related notions of guilt/innocence, and the connection of these to the soldier/civilian distinction. The investigation is partly conceptual, but it also inevitably raises moral questions and their significance, since the tactical definition’s reliance upon such concepts relates immediately to the moral assessments enshrined in the just war principle of discrimination, which prohibits the direction of lethal violence at non-combatants and reflects a wider moral principle that prohibits violence against the innocent. Whether one or both of these principles should be rejected, modified, or allow of exceptions are further questions addressed in Chapters 5 and 6. The present chapter requires extended discussion of contemporary debates within the complex just war tradition, particularly between those loosely styled “traditionalist” and “revisionist.” It offers a judgment on the debate and discusses its relation to the author’s account of the nature of terrorist acts.

Status foundations: Further consideration of the role of ‘dominance’ and the relative importance of cost infliction and benefit generation

This extended reply addresses comments on our paper examining the role of cost infliction and benefit generation in status allocations across 14 nations (Durkee et al., 2020). Specifically, Cheng et al. (2021) identified multicollinearity among our predictors as cause for concern and reviewed existing evidence that purportedly challenges our conclusion that benefit generation is the primary foundation of human status allocation. To counter these concerns, we conducted re-analyses that addressed the collinearity among our predictions in different ways and found further support for our original conclusion that benefit generation is a more important predictor of status allocations than cost infliction. Additionally, we discuss the ambiguity of the empirical support for the role of cost infliction in human hierarchies and propose a distinction between pure cost infliction (PCI) and benefit generation via cost infliction (BGCI) to explain why “dominance,” as it has been operationalized in extant empirical studies, might be associated with status in human groups. We hope that our original data on the inferential foundations of status allocations and this extended discussion of the empirical and conceptual issues with the “dominance” construct can help improve future investigations of human hierarchies and their psychological underpinnings.