Liberalism, the common good, and virtues

34 páginasThe object of politics is the pursuit of the common good understood as the conditions necessary for individuals and communities to flourish and fully develop their potentialities. Liberal democracies have greatly advanced the welfare of their citizens and have become the preeminent model for political organization today. However, they fall short in fostering the conditions required for the pursuit of the common good, such as a conception of human life as purposeful and the promotion of deliberative political decision-making processes by communities pursuing common goods. The Social Doctrine of the Church (SDC) and the promotion of virtues can address the obstacles to the pursuit of the common good that arise when an excessive reliance on the liberal model of politics and on the state fail to bring individuals and communities closer to fulfilling their aspirations to a full realization of their potentialities and a transcendental sense of human happiness. This essay defines the common good, warns about internal dynamics of liberalism working against the common good, like its excessive individualism and statism, and proposes the application of political virtues and the SDC concepts of subsidiarity and solidarity to define a proper role for the state in facilitating institutional structures supporting the pursuit of the common good.Maestría en TeologíaMagíster en Teologí

The Metaphors They Carry: Exploring How Veterans Use Metaphor to Describe Experiences of PTSD and the Implications for Social Work Practice

Working with military veterans poses significant challenges for social work practitioners. Among the most notable are learning to appreciate military culture, understanding military jargon, and engaging veterans who have experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The purpose of this project was to explore veterans’ use of metaphor in describing experiences of PTSD and to consider the therapeutic value of metaphor for social work practitioners. Using a secondary data analysis design, 359 online video interview segments of 56 veterans were reviewed with respect to the way that metaphor was used to describe experiences of PTSD. The metaphors identified in the secondary data were analyzed inductively and deductively by deriving themes from the metaphors that veterans used and associating them to conceptual themes identified in the literature on military culture. The findings indicate that veterans make use of metaphor to describe how PTSD once dominated their life, how they came to manage their PTSD symptoms, and how they used their experience of PTSD to promote a survivor’s mission. The findings also suggest that the metaphors that veterans use can also be associated with the conceptual themes identified by the research. These findings underscore the value of using metaphor in therapy with veterans who have PTSD as metaphor has been shown to facilitate cultural accommodation, symptom mitigation, and narrative integration

Missionaries Extraordinaire: The Vincentians from Saint Mary\u27s of the Barrens Seminary

The history of Saint Mary of the Barrens Seminary is discussed. It was essential to the evangelization of the trans-Mississippi and Southwest. Its importance is exemplified in the life of Jean-Marie Odin. Along with John Timon, he was one of America’s “most renowned Catholic frontier missionaries.” Odin served many roles at the seminary, including as professor, as the college’s president, and as secretary and successor to Joseph Rosati when the latter was the rector. As Saint Mary’s sole priest, Odin went on many mission trips in the area. In 1840, when he became Vice Prefect Apostolic of Texas, there were only two priests in the territory. By 1861, when he departed to become archbishop of New Orleans, there were “forty-two priests, a number of brothers, two orders of nuns, and forty-five churches or missions.” His other achievements there and in New Orleans are noted

The Metaphors They Carry: Exploring How Veterans Use Metaphor to Describe Experiences of PTSD and the Implications for Social Work Practice

Working with military veterans poses significant challenges for social work practitioners. Among the most notable are learning to appreciate military culture, understanding military jargon, and engaging veterans who have experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The purpose of this project was to explore veterans’ use of metaphor in describing experiences of PTSD and to consider the therapeutic value of metaphor for social work practitioners. Using a secondary data analysis design, 359 online video interview segments of 56 veterans were reviewed with respect to the way that metaphor was used to describe experiences of PTSD. The metaphors identified in the secondary data were analyzed inductively and deductively by deriving themes from the metaphors that veterans used and associating them to conceptual themes identified in the literature on military culture. The findings indicate that veterans make use of metaphor to describe how PTSD once dominated their life, how they came to manage their PTSD symptoms, and how they used their experience of PTSD to promote a survivor’s mission. The findings also suggest that the metaphors that veterans use can also be associated with the conceptual themes identified by the research. These findings underscore the value of using metaphor in therapy with veterans who have PTSD as metaphor has been shown to facilitate cultural accommodation, symptom mitigation, and narrative integration

Addressing concerns in performance prediction : the impact of data dependencies and denormal arithmetic in scientific codes

To meet the increasing computational requirements of the scientific community, the use of parallel programming has become commonplace, and in recent years distributed applications running on clusters of computers have become the norm. Both parallel and distributed applications face the problem of predictive uncertainty and variations in runtime. Modern scientific applications have varying I/O, cache, and memory profiles that have significant and difficult to predict effects on their runtimes. Data-dependent sensitivities such as the costs of denormal floating point calculations introduce more variations in runtime, further hindering predictability. Applications with unpredictable performance or which have highly variable runtimes can cause several problems. If the runtime of an application is unknown or varies widely, workflow schedulers cannot e�ciently allocate them to compute nodes, leading to the under-utilisation of expensive resources. Similarly, a lack of accurate knowledge of the performance of an application on new hardware can lead to misguided procurement decisions. In heavily parallel applications, minor variations in runtime on individual nodes can have disproportionate effects on the overall application runtime. Even on a smaller scale, a lack of certainty about an application's runtime can preclude its use in real-time or time-critical applications such as clinical diagnosis. This thesis investigates two sources of data-dependent performance variability. The first source is algorithmic and is seen in a state-of-the-art C++ biomedical imaging application. It identifies the cause of the variability in the application and develops a means of characterising the variability. This 'probe task' based model is adapted for use with a workflow scheduler, and the scheduling improvements it brings are examined. The second source of variability is more subtle as it is micro-architectural in nature. Depending on the input data, two runs of an application executing exactly the same sequence of instructions and with exactly the same memory access patterns can have large differences in runtime due to deficiencies in common hardware implementations of denormal arithmetic1. An exception-based profiler is written to detect occurrences of denormal arithmetic and it is shown how this is insufficient to isolate the sources of denormal arithmetic in an application. A novel tool based on theValgrind binary instrumentation framework is developed which can trace the origins of denormal values and the frequency of their occurrence in an application's data structures. This second tool is used to isolate and remove the cause of denormal arithmetic both from a simple numerical code, and then from a face recognition application