Serbian Orthodoxy Between Two Worlds

Orthodoxy has, by the Providence of God, been placed between Western Christianity, and Sunni Islam. Church nationalism (phyletism) has always been present in political and linguistic nationalism in the former Yugoslavia. The relationship between Serbian Orthodoxy, with Islam and Western Christianity is not satisfactory. In order to become satisfactory, it would be important for the Orthodox Church to create a new theology which would, primarily, be a theological (Orthodox) response to the signs of the times. However, this has not become the reality as of yet

God So Loved the World...Ministerial Religious Life in 2009

The Leadership Council invited me to speak about “vowed Religious Life” following an earlier and complementary presentation on the subject of Associates. In a sense, this is a bit like talking about “wet water” because the terms “vowed” and “Religious Life” are mutually implicating though not co-extensive. As all water is wet but not all wet things are water, so all Religious Life is vowed life but not all vowed life is Religious Life. Furthermore, there are many forms of vowed Religious Life such as monastic, mendicant, or apostolic and much that applies to one does not apply to another. So, to focus our discussion, I am going to circumscribe the topic in the hope of better contributing to our community project of meaningful discussion about our identity and relationships. My precise focus, therefore, will be on Religious Life, in 2009, of women who have made (or are preparing to make) perpetual public profession of the vows of consecrated celibacy, poverty, and obedience in the IHM Congregation, and who live out its charism, as articulated in the 1982-1988 Constitutions, in community and ministry.1 So, our topic is vowed Religious Life in the IHM Congregation in 2009. In what follows I have two objectives which will be given different amounts of space and emphasis but which will also intertwine throughout. First, I do want to supply a certain amount of data that might be useful in our ongoing discussions and which will already be well known to some people but perhaps less familiar to others. A colleague of mine once pointed out, as he reached for a dictionary, how much discussion time would be saved if people agreed not to argue about facts, but to look them up. So, I’ve tried to do some of the “looking up” for us and to include the results in this presentation. However, my second and more important objective is to interpret the data in a way that will illuminate our current experience and supply resources and energy for what lies ahead. I will do that interpretation as responsibly as I can within the limits of my own areas of competence but this is where you have to be the judge of what seems to flow legitimately from the data and to match your own experience. Any interpretation is only as good as it is persuasive. Two further points will affect these remarks. I am focusing this talk on IHM experience but very little of this experience is absolutely unique to us. Our current process of development is fairly common to many if not most Congregations of women Religious in the so-called “developed world”2 and much of my reflection is influenced by that common experience. Finally, we are working under tight time constraints this afternoon and Religious Life is one of those phenomena in which everything implies everything else. There is not time to make all the interconnections, much less explore them, so this presentation is necessarily selective. Please keep track of what needs to be brought up in later discussion

Diverging Paths: Transition in the Presence of the Informal Sector

This work suggests a development of the seminal model of transition from plan to market economy by Aghion and Blanchard (1994). We introduce an informal sector to show that its presence can generate qualitatively di?erent steady states, to which the economy converges in the end of transition. Two types of transitional dynamics are considered, and it is argued that they can help explain di?erences in evolution of formal and informal output exhibited, on the one hand, by East European countries and, on the other hand, by the former Soviet Union republics such as Russia or Ukraine.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40075/3/wp689.pd

3. The Emergence of Socialist Parties, 1848-1914

The emergence of socialist parties frequently is treated by Marxians and non-Marxians alike, as an inevitable development. From this viewpoint, the Industrial Revolution completed the breakdown of an essentially land-based social structure, economy, and political system. New classes were creates; new interests required political expression. Working people, united by the often miserable conditions under which they lived and labored, ultimately turned to socialism. [excerpt

Penrose voting system and optimal quota

Systems of indirect voting based on the principle of qualified majority can be analysed using the methods of game theory. In particular, this applies to the voting system in the Council of the European Union, which was recently a subject of a vivid political discussion. The a priori voting power of a voter measures his potential influence over the decisions of the voting body under a given decision rule. We investigate a system based on the law of Penrose, in which each representative in the voting body receives the number of votes (the voting weight) proportional to the square root of the population he or she represents. Here we demonstrate that for a generic distribution of the population there exists an optimal quota for which the voting power of any state is proportional to its weight. The optimal quota is shown to decrease with the number of voting countries.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

A framework for a European network for a systematic environmental impact assessment of genetically modified organisms (GMO)

The assessment of the impacts of growing genetically modified (GM) crops remains a major political and scientific challenge in Europe. Concerns have been raised by the evidence of adverse and unexpected environmental effects and differing opinions on the outcomes of environmental risk assessments (ERA). The current regulatory system is hampered by insufficiently developed methods for GM crop safety testing and introduction studies. Improvement to the regulatory system needs to address the lack of well designed GM crop monitoring frameworks, professional and financial conflicts of interest within the ERA research and testing community, weaknesses in consideration of stakeholder interests and specific regional conditions, and the lack of comprehensive assessments that address the environmental and socio economic risk assessment interface. To address these challenges, we propose a European Network for systematic GMO impact assessment (ENSyGMO) with the aim directly to enhance ERA and post-market environmental monitoring (PMEM) of GM crops, to harmonize and ultimately secure the long-term socio-political impact of the ERA process and the PMEM in the EU. These goals would be achieved with a multi-dimensional and multi-sector approach to GM crop impact assessment, targeting the variability and complexity of the EU agro-environment and the relationship with relevant socio-economic factors. Specifically, we propose to develop and apply methodologies for both indicator and field site selection for GM crop ERA and PMEM, embedded in an EU-wide typology of agro-environments. These methodologies should be applied in a pan-European field testing network using GM crops. The design of the field experiments and the sampling methodology at these field sites should follow specific hypotheses on GM crop effects and use state-of-the art sampling, statistics and modelling approaches. To address public concerns and create confidence in the ENSyGMO results, actors with relevant specialist knowledge from various sectors should be involved