The letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

Charlotte Yonge is one of the most influential and important of Victorian women writers; but study of her work has been handicapped by a tendency to patronise both her and her writing, by the vast number of her publications and by a shortage of information about her professional career. Scholars have had to depend mainly on the work of her first biographer, a loyal disciple, a situation which has long been felt to be unsatisfactory. We hope that this edition of her correspondence will provide for the first time a substantial foundation of facts for the study of her fiction, her historical and educational writing and her journalism, and help to illuminate her biography and also her significance in the cultural and religious history of the Victorian age

Cog and the Creativity of God

The construction of a humanoid robot may be within reach. The science of artificial intelligence (AI) offers new understandings to contemporary Christian theology. First of all, the emerging field of embodied intelligence discloses the wholeness of the human being, correcting the tendency in Christian theology toward an anthropological dualism of body and soul. Secondly, artificial intelligence offers fresh understandings of the human mind, with implications for how human creativity reflects the creativity of God

Challenging international development’s response to disability in rural India: A case for more ethnographic research

In this article I argue that an ethnographic approach has a contribution to make to the analysis of disability and development. Anthropologists document the experiences of disabled people whilst also critiquing the current operational structures and relationships that marginalise the rights of disabled people. The secondary argument states, if disability is to become a central part of all development agendas then disabled people must be made visible. Once greater visibility has been achieved it will be harder for development practitioners to ignore the specific needs of disabled people. A further benefit of using ethnographic techniques emerges through the analysis of how non-governmental organisations understand disability issues. Ethnographic research can both raise the profile of disability rights whilst also pointing out the short comings of current development practice

Challenging International Development’s Response to Disability

[Excerpt] This article argues that developing countries are often portrayed as being backward in appreciating the importance of inclusion. In addition the stigma attached to disability is thought to be greater in the Developing World. This article acknowledges the implications scarce resources have on inclusivity but argues that this does not necessarily reflect deeper prejudice in regard to disability. The development discourse has constructed a category of underdeveloped Other which is used to depict all marginalised people. This label fails to acknowledge and appreciate the different experiences and needs of people living with impairments. This article then goes on to highlight the support networks that are indigenous to many societies and suggests that development interventions should build on these rather than transplant a western model of inclusion. The article will develop these arguments through a case study documenting the life experiences of a rural poor, low caste Indian family of four. The wife and two daughters are blind. The sighted husband is the primary carer and cannot work because of the level of support required by his wife and two daughters. In the absence of a state welfare system this family is supported by families within the community who belong to the same social caste. The UK NGO working in the area uses images of this family to highlight extreme suffering and discrimination; it does not seek to appreciate how they cope with everyday life. The argument stressed throughout this article states that outside agencies must be motivated by a desire to know and understand the experiences of those living with impairments if their interventions are to be effective

Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which a South Indian, a North Indian "Bollywood" and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy

Sidgwick’s coherentist moral epistemology

I discuss the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences, in order to reach also in the domain of morality the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the apriori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was really worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of the naïve positivist starting point Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations