Mastering the Devil: A Sociological Analysis of the Practice of a Catholic Exorcist

This study takes the documented growth in the ministry of exorcism within the Catholic Church as a significant challenge to some accounts of secularization. After clarifying how, according to Catholic doctrine, the devil can operate in people\u2019s lives, this study offers a sociological interpretation of exorcism. This interpretation is illustrated and tested by a sociological analysis of data collected, over a period of 10 years, by a well-established Catholic priest in Italy who himself was well trained and well grounded in philosophical analysis. This sociological case study offers fresh insights into the contemporary social significance of exorcism and provides challenges for future research. In the analysis of the data, it was discovered that only 5% of the initial consultations lead to a ritual of exorcism and that a rapprochement with rituals of deliverance is found for the large majority of the cases

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Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 6 juin 2012

A comparison of computational approaches for maximum likelihood estimation of the Dirichlet parameters on high-dimensional data

Likelihood estimates of the Dirichlet distribution parameters can be obtained only through numerical algorithms. Such algorithms can provide estimates outside the correct range for the parameters and/or can require a large amount of iterations to reach convergence. These problems can be aggravated if good starting values are not provided. In this paper we discuss several approaches that can partially avoid these problems providing a good trade-off between efficiency and stability. The performances of these approaches are compared on high-dimensional real and simulated data