Enemy and Ally: Religion in Loving v. Virginia and Beyond

Throughout the Loving case, religion appeared both overtly and subtly to endorse or lend credibility to the arguments against racial mixing. This use of religion is unsurprising given that supporters of slavery, white supremacy, and segregation have, for decades, turned to religion to justify their ideologies. Although these views are no longer mainstream, they have recently appeared again in arguments against same-sex marriage and gay and transgender rights generally. What is remarkable in the Loving case, however, is an alternate use of religion, not to justify white supremacy and segregation but instead to highlight the irrationality of its supporters’ claims. In a brief but memorable interaction during oral arguments, Chief Justice Warren analogized interracial relationships to interfaith ones and managed, in a few words, to underscore the absurdity of treating religion and race differently under the law. The inherent tension between religion as both enemy and potential ally of those with vulnerable social identities is the subject of this Essay. The fact that Loving incorporates both aspects of religion is telling. The story of America’s progression toward equal treatment regardless of race, gender, and sexual orientation is inherently intertwined with religion, and the fiftieth anniversary of Loving provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore both sides of this fraught relationship

The grammatical puzzles of Socrates' last words

Socrates says "we owe" in the last words as head of his οἶκος, a collectivity owing a debt for the recovery from disease of one of Socrates' young sons. Socrates addresses Crito in the plural as head of his οἶκος, whose servants will perform the sacrifice as their master directs. Socrates had instructed that the youngest son be brought to the prison. The baby's presence is not adventitious, for had Socrates primarily summoned Xanthippe, the baby would have been left at home in the care of the οἰκεῖαι γυναῖκες. The dying Socrates instructs that the debt be paid for the baby who recovered from a bout of illness and did not die. The rhetorical arrangement of the facts that inform the instruction (dying/speaking versus not yet talking/living) is Plato's invention

The effects of provider control of Blue Shield plans : regulatory options / BEBR No. 645

Title page includes summary.Includes bibliographical references (p. 30-32)

The September 12, 2012 Rose Garden Address: President Barack Obama’s “9/11” Moment

Albert Einstein once said memory is deceiving given it is colored by the events of today. The old adage “history repeats itself” fails to illustrate the powerful capacity for memory to sustain and revise historical events. Presidents often inject memories of the past into public address to define troubling situations in ways that broad, national audiences can make sense of them. Barack Obama’s Rose Garden Address rejuvenates and exploits the public memory of September 11 in three ways: by (1) situating the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi as an extension of its timeline; (2) reaffirming the identity of the nation at a moment of community loss; and (3) presenting an eloquent moral vision of the future to illuminate the nation’s perseverance. As a public memory event, September 11 has proven remarkably resilient and yet fluid and adaptable as social and political contexts shift. Treating Obama’s speech as an extension of the September 11 memory in American public discourse can provide an update on its symbolic utility in light of a more recent, but understudied rhetorical artifact

Separation of Church and Hospital: Strategies to Protect Pro-Choice Physicians in Religiously Affiliated Hospitals

On December 7, 2000, St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Granite City, Illinois asked Dr. Yogendra Shah to step down from his position as Chief of the Department of Obstetrics-Gynecology because of pressure that the Catholic hospital had begun to receive from the anti-abortion community. Dr. Shah performed abortions at a private clinic across the street from the hospital, and an increasingly vocal lobby viewed the employment of this doctor as a violation of Catholic principles. On March 19, 1998, Dr. David Mesches was forced out of his position as the chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at New York Medical College, a Roman Catholic-affiliated hospital and medical school in Kingston, New York. Dr. Mesches, in a twist of irony, was attempting to assist in completing a merger between a Catholic hospital and two non-sectarian hospitals in the area. The merger agreement required all three hospitals to bar the performance of abortion and sterilization procedures. As a result, Dr. Mesches had agreed to lease space in his offices in Kingston to a private clinic, which would provide abortions and other women\u27s health services that would be restricted in the hospitals as a condition of the merger. When questioned about this choice, Dr. Mesches commented to a local Kingston newspaper that the right to abortion is the law of the land and added, it\u27s the right thing to do. , Soon after these remarks were published, Dr. Mesches was dismissed from his position. In December of 1998, Dr. Schales Atkinson received a letter from the Deaconess Hospital in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma indicating that in order to grant him permanent medical staff privileges, the Methodist hospital required him to sign a statement agreeing not to intentionally perform any abortion other than to save the life of the pregnant woman, at the Deaconess Hospital or elsewhere....

Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques oE Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas

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DYNIQX: A novel meta-search engine for the web

The effect of metadata in collection fusion has not been sufficiently studied. In response to this, we present a novel meta-search engine called Dyniqx for metadata based search. Dyniqx integrates search results from search services of documents, images, and videos for generating a unified list of ranked search results. Dyniqx exploits the availability of metadata in search services such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Image Search, and Google Video Search etc for fusing search results from heterogeneous search engines. In addition, metadata from these search engines are used for generating dynamic query controls such as sliders and tick boxes etc which are used by users to filter search results. Our preliminary user evaluation shows that Dyniqx can help users complete information search tasks more efficiently and successfully than three well known search engines respectively. We also carried out one controlled user evaluation of the integration of six document/image/video based search engines (Google Scholar, PubMed, Intute, Google Image, Yahoo Image, and Google Video) in Dyniqx. We designed a questionnaire for evaluating different aspect of Dyniqx in assisting users complete search tasks. Each user used Dyniqx to perform a number of search tasks before completing the questionnaire. Our evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of the meta-search of Dyniqx in assisting user search tasks, and provide insights into better designs of the Dyniqx' interface