Book Review: To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

In reflecting on James Davison Hunter’s thesis To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, I must admit experiencing rising tension as to whether this book is to be a harbinger of hope, or another postmodern harbinger of doubt regarding the possibility of Christianity in our current environment. In unpacking such deliberations, I begin by outlining the form, content, and intent of Hunter as to his purpose, his theology for faithful presence and shalom, and my final musings. As with any review, the hope is to have the reader read the book him/herself. Instead of writing a review on this book from its obvious theological perspective, as an educator, I will comment on its equipping aspects of inspiring a faithful presence

An Economic Sociological Look at Economic Geography

Note from the editor An Economic Sociological Look at Geography by Patrik Aspers, Sebastian Kohl, and Dominic Power Interview A Conversation with Gernot Grabher A Comment on Economics and Sociology by Laurence Moss Book Review

On the works of Euler and his followers on spherical geometry

We review and comment on some works of Euler and his followers on spherical geometry. We start by presenting some memoirs of Euler on spherical trigonometry. We comment on Euler's use of the methods of the calculus of variations in spherical trigonometry. We then survey a series of geometrical resuls, where the stress is on the analogy between the results in spherical geometry and the corresponding results in Euclidean geometry. We elaborate on two such results. The first one, known as Lexell's Theorem (Lexell was a student of Euler), concerns the locus of the vertices of a spherical triangle with a fixed area and a given base. This is the spherical counterpart of a result in Euclid's Elements, but it is much more difficult to prove than its Euclidean analogue. The second result, due to Euler, is the spherical analogue of a generalization of a theorem of Pappus (Proposition 117 of Book VII of the Collection) on the construction of a triangle inscribed in a circle whose sides are contained in three lines that pass through three given points. Both results have many ramifications, involving several mathematicians, and we mention some of these developments. We also comment on three papers of Euler on projections of the sphere on the Euclidean plane that are related with the art of drawing geographical maps.Comment: To appear in Ganita Bharati (Indian Mathematics), the Bulletin of the Indian Society for History of Mathematic

The Skyrme Model for Baryons

We review the Skyrme model approach which treats baryons as solitons of an effective meson theory. We start out with a historical introduction and a concise discussion of the original two flavor Skyrme model and its interpretation. Then we develop the theme, motivated by the large $N_C$ approximation of QCD, that the {\it effective} Lagrangian of QCD is in fact one which contains just mesons of all spins. When this Lagrangian is (at least approximately) determined from the meson sector it should then yield a zero parameter description of the baryons. We next discuss the concept of chiral symmetry and the technology involved in handling the three flavor extension of the model at the collective level. This material is used to discuss properties of the light baryons based on three flavor meson Lagrangians containing just pseudoscalars and also pseudoscalars plus vectors. The improvements obtained by including vectors are exemplified in the treatment of the {\it proton spin puzzle}.Comment: Invited review for INSA-Book-2000 38 pages, 4 figures included via epsfi