A Short Biography of the Venerable

Naturally, contributions from places other than this one will be encouraged, indeed, sought. There could be no other way to promote a more wide understanding of Religion in Australia, than this. Religious Traditions journal in other words, though meant in part to be the product of a need felt among Australian "religionists", must, by dint of that very fact, take its place besides other international Journals in the field

Effects of spiritual care training for palliative care professionals

Little is known about the effects of spiritual care training for professionals in palliative medicine. We therefore investigated prospectively the effects of such training over a six-month period. All 63 participants of the three and a half-day training were asked to fill out three questionnaires: before and after the training, as well as six months later. The questionnaires included demographic data, numeric rating scales about general attitudes towards the work in palliative care, the Self-Transcendence Scale (STS), the spiritual subscale of the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT-Sp) and the Idler Index of Religiosity (IIR). Forty-eight participants (76) completed all three questionnaires (91 women, median age 49 years; 51 nurses, 16 hospice volunteers, 14 physicians).Significant and sustained improvements were found in self-perceived compassion for the dying (after the training: P =0.002; 6 months later: P=0.025), compassion for oneself (P < 0.001; P =0.013), attitude towards one's family (P =0.001; P =0.031), satisfaction with work (P < 0.001; P =0.039), reduction in work-related stress (P < 0.001; P =0.033), and attitude towards colleagues (P =0.039; P =0.040), as well as in the FACIT-Sp (P < 0.001; P =0.040). Our results suggest that the spiritual care training had a positive influence on the spiritual well-being and the attitudes of the participating palliative care professionals which was preserved over a six-month period

Algorithmic paranoia and the convivial alternative

In a time of big data, thinking about how we are seen and how that affects our lives means changing our idea about who does the seeing. Data produced by machines is most often 'seen' by other machines; the eye is in question is algorithmic. Algorithmic seeing does not produce a computational panopticon but a mechanism of prediction. The authority of its predictions rests on a slippage of the scientific method in to the world of data. Data science inherits some of the problems of science, especially the disembodied 'view from above', and adds new ones of its own. As its core methods like machine learning are based on seeing correlations not understanding causation, it reproduces the prejudices of its input. Rising in to the apparatuses of governance, it reinforces the problematic sides of 'seeing like a state' and links to the recursive production of paranoia. It forces us to ask the question 'what counts as rational seeing?'. Answering this from a position of feminist empiricism reveals different possibilities latent in seeing with machines. Grounded in the idea of conviviality, machine learning may reveal forgotten non-market patterns and enable free and critical learning. It is proposed that a programme to challenge the production of irrational preemption is also a search for the possibility of algorithmic conviviality

The contours and consequences of compassion at work

This paper describes two studies that explore core questions about compassion at work. Findings from a pilot survey indicate that compassion occurs with relative frequency among a wide variety of individuals, suggesting a relationship between experienced compassion, positive emotion, and affective commitment. A complementary narrative study reveals a wide range of compassion triggers and illuminates ways that work colleagues respond to suffering. The narrative analysis demonstrates that experienced compassion provides important sensemaking occasions where employees who receive, witness, or participate in the delivery of compassion reshape understandings of their co-workers, themselves, and their organizations. Together these studies map the contours of compassion at work, provide evidence of its powerful consequences, and open a horizon of new research questions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57917/1/508_ftp.pd