Book Review: \u3ci\u3ePentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India\u3c/i\u3e

Book review of Pentecostals, Proselytization, and Anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India. By Chad Bauman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, xiii + 208 pages

The God of Love and the Love of God: Thinking With Rāmānuja About Grace in Augustinian Christianity

‘moments’ of the Lord’s gracious help offered to the devotee and also the active response of the devotee; second, to indicate the contours of an Augustinian Christian resolution of this theological paradox; and third, to offer some reflections on what Christian theologians could learn through an engagement with Rāmānuja’s understanding of the divine presence. As we will see, the doctrine of production of the world and the doctrine of divine favour are mutually interrelated across Vaiṣṇava Hindu and Augustinian universes. For the later Augustine (411–430 CE), the key theological note is the utter incapability of human beings, who have a single lifetime on earth, to initiate even the first turn towards God, and he concludes that for those saints who are timelessly foreordained to receive salvation this initial conversio itself is prepared by God’s grace. In Rāmānuja, on the other hand, we do not encounter such theological anxieties relating to a specific temporally-locatable moment – certain human beings, through the fruition of their beginningless (anādi) stream of karmic merits, are beginning to move in this lifetime towards the Lord Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa who is constantly assisting them in their spiritual endeavours. The Either/Or dichotomy between ‘divine grace’ versus ‘human autonomy’ which appears with sharp contrasts in Augustine and, following him, in the Reformed doctrinal systems of theologians such as Calvin, is largely absent from Rāmānuja’s understanding of how structured human response and divine favour are mutually intertwined in the human spiritual pilgrimage

‘I am the Living Bread’: Ram Mohan Roy’s Critique of the Doctrine of the Atonement

A striking aspect of Vedantic Hindu and Christian devotional universes is the theme of the humanity of God. Jesus and Viṣṇu or Kṛṣṇa, the transcendental source of worldly reality, are also intensely human figures – they live with and amidst human beings, and they (seem to) suffer and, most intriguingly, even (seem to) undergo death. However, as one plumbs the doctrinal depths of these universes, various theological divergences begin to emerge, relating to the nature of the divine, the relation of the divine to the world, and the soteriological dynamics of the spiritual transformation of human beings. From a Christian perspective, somewhere near the heart of this constellation of metaphysical-theological themes lies the doctrine of the atonement, which tries to make sense of how some events, between 1 CE–34 CE, associated with a Jewish man called Jesus crucially configured the shape of salvation. A survey of various theological attempts to explicate the dynamics of salvation indicates a wide range of ‘models’, such as the ransom, the moral exemplar, and the substitutionary. Thus, unlike the Nicene Creed (about the divinity of Christ) or the Chalcedonian Creed (about the incarnation of Christ), there is no dogmatic ecumenical creed about the redemptive work of Christ

Book Review:\u3cem\u3eDivine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries\u3c/em\u3e

Book Review of Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. NY and London: Bloomsbury, 2013, x + 148pp

Intertemporal Substitution in Maternal Labor Supply: Evidence using State School Entrance Age Laws

In this paper, I propose a new framework to study the intertemporal labor supply hypothesis. I use an exogenous source of variation in maternal net earning opportunities, generated through school entrance age of children, to study intertemporal labor supply behavior. Employing data from the 1980 US Census and the NLSY, I estimate the effect of a one year delay in school attendance on long run maternal labor supply. To deal with the endogeneity of school attendance age, I exploit the variation in child month of birth and state kindergarten entrance age laws. IV estimates imply that having a 5 year old enrolled in school increases labor supply measures for married women, with no younger children, by between 7 to 34 percent. In contrast to the results for married mothers, I do not find any statistically significant effect on labor market outcomes for single mothers or mothers of 5 year olds with additional younger children. Further, using a sample of 7 to 10 year olds from the NLSY, I investigate persistence in employment outcomes for a married mother whose child delayed school entry. The estimates suggest that delayed school enrollment has long run implications for maternal labor supply. Results point towards significant intertemporal substitution in labor supply. Rough calculations yield an uncompensated wage elasticity of 0.76 and an intertemporal elasticity of substitution equal to 1.1.Maternal labor supply, Kindergarten entry age, intertemporal substitution

School entry, educational attainment, and quarter of birth: a cautionary tale of a local average treatment effect

Studies of the effects of school entry age on short-run and long-run outcomes generally fail to capture the parameter of policy interest and/or are inconsistent because the instrument they use violates monotonicity, required for identification of a local average treatment effect. Our instrument addresses both problems and shows no effect of entry age on the educational attainment of children born in the fourth quarter who delay enrollment only because they are constrained by the law. We provide suggestive evidence that a waiver policy allowing some children to enter before the legally permissible age increases average educational attainment.We are grateful to Josh Angrist, Garry Barrett, Sandy Black, Jim Heckman, Caroline Hoxby, Claudia Olivetti, Daniele Paserman, two anonymous referees, the editors of this Journal, and participants in seminars at the Australian National University, Boston University, University of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Irvine, New York University, Pomona College, Singapore Management University, Tilburg University, the Tinbergen Institute, the University of Wollongong, Society of Labor Economists, and Econometric Society for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual caveat applies. Barua acknowledges funding under National Science Foundation American Educational Research Association grant REC-0634035. Lang acknowledges funding from the National Science Foundation under grant SEC-0339149. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funding agencies. (REC-0634035 - National Science Foundation American Educational Research Association; SEC-0339149 - National Science Foundation

Climate change and its risk reduction by mangrove ecosystem of Bangladesh

Climate change is amongst the most dreaded problems of the new millennium. Bangladesh is a coastal country bounded by Bay of Bengal on its southern part and here natural disasters are an ongoing part of human life. This paper discusses about the possible impact of climate change through tropical cyclones, storm surges, coastal erosion and sea level rise in the coastal community of Bangladesh and how they cope with these extreme events by the help of mangrove ecosystem. Both qualitative and quantitative discussions are made by collected data from different research work those are conducted in Bangladesh. Mangrove ecosystem provides both goods and services for coastal community, helps to improve livelihood options and protect them from natural disaster by providing variety of environmental suppor