How to use this Page

Matt J. Rossano is head of the Psychology department at Southeastern Louisiana University.  His new book, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved, presents an evolutionary history of religion, drawing together evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show the valuable adaptive purpose served by systemic belief in the supernatural.  In the excerpt below, Rossano reminds us of the comfort of believing in things that may be irrational.

In April 2008, the phone rang at the home of Howard Enoch III. It was the U.S. Army. Howard’s father would finally be coming home. Sixty-three years earlier, in the waning days of World War II, Second Lieutenant Howard “Cliff” Enoch Jr. climbed into his P-51D Mustang fighter for a mission over Halle, Germany. He never returned. When the Iron Curtain enveloped the site where Enoch’s plane went down, the army declared his remains “unrecoverable.” But dedicated members of the U.S. Army’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command refused to give up on Cliff Enoch. In 2004, their review of crash sites in the former East Germany revealed suspicious plane fragments near the village of Doberschutz. Two years later, an onsite excavation team found what appeared to be human remains. The remains were flown to a laboratory in Hawaii for DNA analysis while the army continued to study the crash-site evidence. In the end it led to the phone call – and a burial with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

“Remarkable” is how Howard Enoch described the events of that spring. “I will now have a place…to know where he is…to be close to him,” he said. “Before this, I always thought of my father as a young man, sitting in a beautiful pasture in Germany, waiting for someone to bring him home – and that is what happened.” Commenting on the extraordinary effort the military expended in retrieving and identifying the remains, army spokesman Johnnie Webb explained that it was important for people to know that the “creed and tradition” in the military is to “leave no one behind.” The military, he said, would always do their utmost to “honor that promise.”

A bittersweet story. But most would agree that it ends as it should. It is right and good that the brave young soldier be returned to his home, his country, his family. The human desire to keep loved ones near, even in death, hardly needs an explanation or justification. Yet very little of this story can be defended as reasonable. Cold logic would correctly conclude that it is of no consequence where Cliff Enoch’s remains are buried, or even whether they are ever conclusively identified. After 60 years there’s no doubt that he is dead. His loved ones have gone on with their lives, and the skeletal remnants care nothing about the ground under which they lie. From a practical standpoint, a backyard cross is as good a remembrance place for the downed pilot as a cemetery plot. And wouldn’t the army’s limited resources be better spend on increased health and education benefits for veterans or better housing for military families, rather than on the retrieval of a few old bones?

Howard Enoch was welcoming back a man whom he had never known. Now 63 years old, he was born after his father Cliff was shot down. The fallen hero was but a picture on the wall, a story only rarely broached, more a myth and a spirit than a man. But is it fair to say that Howard and this spirit were strangers to each other? Was there no relationship here at all? The fact that it just feels wrong – cruel, even – to simply let Cliff Enoch’s bones lie anonymously in

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a member of the sociology faculty at Rice University, where she is also Director of the Program on Religion and Public Outreach, Institute for Urban Research. Her new book, Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, investigates the unexamined assumption of what scientists actually think and feel about religion.  Surprisingly she discovered that nearly 50 percent of the scientific community is religious.  In the excerpt below we learn how religious scientists incorporate their faith into teaching.

“My Faith is Simply Part of Who I Am”

About 39 percent of the nearly 1,700 scientists I surveyed considered their religious or spiritual beliefs influential on their interactions with students and colleagues.  Specifically, faith can create an ethos for teaching.  In other words, the faith of these scientists is a part of their everyday lives to the extent that they see it shaping the what, how, why of their teaching.

A Catholic chemist was especially forthcoming about his religious views after I turned off my tape recorder.  A recent immigrant, he thinks that academics (and Americans in general) should talk more openly about religion and integrate it into their lives.  He blames the present unwillingness to discuss religion on what he called the “political correctness” of the United States, which he contrasts with the religious discussions people have in his home country.  Although he clearly had outspoken views about public discussions of religion, this scientist explained that at work, his faith influences him primarily through the ethos it provides for teaching: “I would say religion itself doesn’t come up, rather the values I get through religion…As a teacher you have, for example, a little bit more regard toward weaker students and trying to help them out and also communicate to them the joy of studying science.”  Here, he explicitly contrasted himself with more secular colleagues who he thinks mainly spend time with the better students.

Similarly, a physicist said that his faith causes him to treat those who work in his lab compassionately, going out of his way to do things for them that do not necessarily benefit his own career.  In his words, “I’m at an age where I see mentoring as one of the most important things I can do,…trying to get [younger scientists] on paths that will get them to the jobs that they want.  And you know there’s no particular self-interest here.  I mean the majority of [other scientists] I don’t think do this.”  This physicist is also establishing a clear boundary between himself and his colleagues who, in his sense of things, care more about their own personal success than making sure that students are mentored well.  Obviously, nonreligious professors might also mentor students well.  The point is that religious scientists often mentioned this ethos of teaching as something that they believed separated them from their secular colleagues.

The Jewish economist…also said that his faith has a great impact on how he cares for students.  He remembers his mother lighting candles on Friday evenings, a ritual that left him with “very peaceful imprints.”  And this knowledge that he belongs to a broader faith community influences, for instance, how he thinks about promoting character development among his students, such as those who have failed a class.  These students might then meet him in his office to request a higher grade:

And I say, “Well close the door and let’s talk now.  Aren’t you ashamed to be here?  What do you want out of life when your parents are spending money to keep you here?  Are you really interes

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Rom Harré, Linacre College, Oxford and Georgetown University, Washington DC, is the author of Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrödinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory. In it he looks at the controversial role of living things – plant, animal, human – in scientific experimentation from a new perspective: setting aside moral reflection it examines the history of how and why living creatures have been used. In the original post below, Harré talks about ways in which living things has been experimented with – not necessarily on – throughout history.

Animals and plants have played a part in science since Aristotle began the study of embryology by opening one of a clutch of fertilised eggs each day until the last one was due to hatch. Recently reflections on the way living creatures and their remains have been used in research has centred on the important moral problems that this raises. Not much attention has been given to how organisms have played a part in science more broadly. I was struck by the fact that most discussions were centred on experiments on animals and little was said about experimenting with animals. The role of plants in science was largely ignored – after all few people believe that flowers feel. Nevertheless there is a surely a kind of moral depravity in laying waste a stand of plants.

Scientific research is as much a practical matter of managing equipment as it is sitting in one’s study building theories. What sort of equipment do scientists use? There are instruments that react to temperature, the presence of gases, the lapse of time, and so on. Equally important are pieces of apparatus that are used to study natural processes in isolation from the complexities of the real world. They are simplified versions of natural things and processes. In short they are models or analogies of the real thing. A calorimeter with a mixture of ice and salt is a kind of analogue of the ocean, and we can use to study what happens when the sea freezes,  but in comfort of home, so to speak.

People used animals and plants for certain very specific purposes. Roland Beschel estimated the age of glacier moraines by the diameter of lichens calibrated in the local churchyard, an organic clock. John Clarke constructed a model world for a group of voles out of an old swimming pool he had come across by accident as an apparatus for studying the effect of overcrowding on populations. Barry Marshall used his own stomach as an apparatus for testing the helicobacter theory of peptic ulcers.

Suspending our moral feelings we can follow Stephen Hales’ studies of blood pressure with experiments that could lead only to death of the animals he chose for this purpose.  In the imagination we can attend Pavlov’s lecture in which he demonstrated the nervic hypothesis of digestive control using a dog he had surgically modified for the purpose. Stephen Hales worked tirelessly to improve the lot of prison populations, and Ivan Pavlov built a monument to honour of the dogs that played an essential part in his researches. Marie Antoinette insisted that some animals be sent aloft in a balloon before human aeronauts were risked, just as dogs preceded people into space.

Sometimes the animals and plants are imaginary – such as Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat. Sometimes the living apparatus is the site of an infamous

John Ehrenberg and J. Patrice McSherry are Professors of Political Science at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus.  Jose Ramon Sanchez is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. Caroleen Marji Sayej is Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College. Together they wrote The Iraq Papers, which offers a compelling documentary narrative and interpretation of this momentous conflict. In the post below we learn about torture.  This post first appeared here.  Read other posts by these authors here.

So, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney admitted last week that he “is a big supporter of waterboarding” and torture. This was not the first time he admitted as much. Back in 2006, he told conservative talk show host Scott Hennen that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed amounted to no more than a “dunk in the water.” Torture, Cheney said, was a “no-brainer” if it permitted authorities to collect actionable intelligence. Torture, Cheney has insisted, “it saves American lives.” Moralists among us can oppose this with the proverbial “the ends should not justify the means.” Conservatives usually place themselves in this camp on many other issues. Why do they insist on torturing, then, given how it a real violation of their moral principles? Why do they also reject the fact that most military and intelligence experts argue that not much actionable intelligence can be gathered by torture? Even Napoleon understood that. In 1978, Napoleon wrote his Major-General Berthier in Egypt that the:

“barbarous custom of whipping men suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this method of interrogation, by putting men to the torture, is useless. The wretches say whatever comes into their heads and whatever they think one wants to believe.”

Most governments have rejected torture since the late Middle Ages precisely because it is not only immoral but also not effective. And yet U.S. government agents interrogated Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed over 266 times. The only actionable intelligence Zubaydah provided apparently came in the first hour when long time FBI agent Ali Soufan interrogated him using traditional, non-coercive techniques. Zubaydah stopped talking when CIA a

Allan Barsky, JD, MSW, PhD is a Professor of Social Work at Florida Atlantic University and a member of the NASW National Ethics Committee. He is also the author of Ethics and Values in Social Work: An Integrated Approach for a Comprehensive Curriculum, which offers a series of learning modules that will ensure graduates receive a comprehensive ethics and values education.  In the post below Barsky asks how we learn moral courage?

When social workers think of ethics, they often think of the NASW Code of Ethics. The Code of Ethics identifies a list of ethical principles and standards of behavior for professional social workers. It tells us to respect the dignity and worth of all people, to maintain client confidentiality, to promote client self-determination, to maintain high standards of professional competence, and to promote social justice. When ethical guidelines are clear and non-conflicting, they are generally easy to follow. But what happens when social workers know the right way to act – what is ethical – but acting in an ethical manner poses risks to the social worker? Consider a social worker who knows that the executive director is using agency funds for personal benefit, a worker who is aware that a clinical supervisor is acting in a discriminatory manner toward African Americans, or a worker who suspects that key donors to the agency have earned their money through illegal Ponzi schemes? Consider also a social worker who unintentionally breaches the Code of Ethics but is too ashamed to admit it. In such cases, the worker knows that the right thing to do is to confront the unethical behavior or wrongdoing. In practice, workers may do nothing for fear of reprisal. A worker’s fears may include:

• What if I raise the issue and my superiors get angry?
• What if I can’t prove the wrongdoing and people accuse me of being insubordinate, traitorous, or disloyal?
• Am I willing to risk scorn, humiliation, alienation, or even the loss of my job?

On the other hand, if the worker does not confront the wrongdoing, then the worker’s inaction perpetuates the problem.

Knowing what is right does not necessarily mean that workers will do what is right. Often, it takes significant moral courage to do the right thing. Moral courage refers the virtue of having the strength to do what is right in the face of opposition. Moral courage is required to put ethics into action under challenging circumstances (Strom-Gottfried).

So if moral courage is so important, where do we learn it? Certainly, some people learn moral courage from their families and from modeling key people in their formative years. Has anyone heard of a course in moral courage – in primary education, in college, or in any school of social work? I haven’t. If we expect social workers (and indeed all people) to act ethically, shouldn’t we equip them with the skills they need to put ethics into action? Shouldn’t social work education include the development of moral courage?

The question is not simply, “Should we provide education to foster moral courage?” but “What should moral courage education include?” What knowledge and information should we provide, and what types of learning experiences should be used to promote moral courage? How can we ensure that social workers not

Ebook: How to Write a Children’s Picture Book

It started out as 30 Days to a Stronger Picture Book. But now, (drum roll, please), it’s an Ebook. Expanded from it’s original format, it now includes new sections on writing rhymed verse for a picture book, and many examples of different types of texts.

How to Write a Children’s Picture Book includes 36 self-paced lessons on every aspect of writing, editing and selling your children’s picture book.

Basics of Writing a Children’s Picture Book

Start your journey toward publishing by studying the basics of children’s picture books: number of pages, word count, audience, setting, characters, words, messages, morals, themes, voice and more.

The Unique Writing Process for a Children’s Picture Book

Once you understand the basic structure of a children’s picture book, it’s time to choose a topic and write your first draft. Learn topics to avoid and perennial topics. Special techniques for editing your picture book manuscript are also covered.

Typical Picture Book Genres

If you want to write a specific type of children’s picture book, you’ll find tips here for humor, rhyming text, poetry collections, picture book mystery, picture book biography, creative non-fiction picture book, and the ABC picture book.

How to Submit Your Children’s Picture Book

Your story is done? Learn the biggest mistake people make when submitting to a children’s book publisher and how you can avoid it. How do you find the name of an editor? What about self-publishing?

Download your pdf immediately.
Order NOW!

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Picture Book Topics to Avoid
2. Research Competition
3. Picture Book 4

Above is a sample picture from my wife’s keepsake children’s book collection.  They are from a series called “Alice in Bibleland” which aims to educate young children about God and good behavior.  We’ll come back to them in a moment. 

Some children’s books, The Berenstien Bears being the biggest culprit in my mind, aim to teach a moral or lesson through their stories.   Little Timmy learns to tell the truth, Silly Sarah remembers to brush her teeth and so on. 

Too often, these stories are corny or, worse yet, “preachy” and kids can see right through them.  Given free choice, how many kids say, “Read me ‘Tommy Turtle Learns to Respect His Parents’!”   Not many.  What is it that so often makes these stories fall flat?  I believe that it is because these stories are not “true”. 

Even in fiction, we want our stories to have a ring of truth to them even as we acknowledge that they may have never happened at all.  We want stories that we believe could happen, or, given a universe where bears and rabbits talk and play poker, would likely happen in a similar fashion.  

This is called the suspension of disbelief, but it doesn’t mean believing anything and everything in a story.  It means allowing for the possibility and “playing along”.  Let’s pretend I’m reading a story (suspend your disbelief for a moment) whose setting is in a world exactly like ours except that bears and rabbits talk and play poker.  Now let’s say that the bears discover that the rabbits have been cheating and say, “Gee Whiz, Rabbits.  Your cheating has cost us our entire month’s salary of honey.  We would kindly like it back.”   “No way, Jose,” say the Rabbits, to which the Bears reply, “Oh well, forgive and forget.  Another hand?”

This story is unbelievable.  Not because the bears and rabbits are talking and wagering large sums of honey, but because we don’t believe that, GIVEN all those facts, the bears would react in that manner.  The same goes with a lame story about Little Johnny stealing from the cookie jar.  He does so because he wants a cookie, and feels good when he succeeds in getting it.  But when his mother tells him, “You shouldn’t steal from the cookie jar, it will spoil your dinner,” he wouldn’t believable say, “You are right, Mother.  What a naughty boy I’ve been.  I will listen to you from now on.”

We might believe if, however, Little Johnny continues to eat all the cookies, gets an upset stomach and misses out on his favorite meal, Pizza Night!  Nothing sets of alarm bells in our brains more than a character who is forced to act counter to her nature by an author with an agenda.

Now, back to Alice in Bibleland.  The book that particularly appealed to me was called “Psalms and Proverbs”.  As moral instructions, Proverbs are very good because they represent wisdom and truisms passed down for hundreds of generations.  The same goes for Aesops Fables (a good site full of these fables can be found here).  Everyone knows someone like the greedy fox, or the shortsighted grasshopper and the lessons they teach from their follies ring true because we’ve observed people or situations like them for ourselves.

Whether or not you are aiming to teach your child about God, the above pages are universal.  “A soft answer turneth away wrath,”  and “Pleasant words are as a honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones.”  They are moralistic and illustrated in AGONIZING sweetness, but they don’t read as “false”, like some other books that strongarm their stories to fit the moral or lesson.

I hope I’ve helped you put your finger on why some of those books you’ve come across (you know the ones) are so dang CORNY.

…

Baroness Mary Warnock is a philosopher renowned for her writing on moral issues. Previously a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, she is now an Independent Life Peer in the House of Lords, and a writer and broadcaster. Elisabeth Macdonald has spent her career working in cancer medicine in the UK as well as periods as a Consultant Oncologist in France and in research at Stanford University, California. Their book, Easeful Death: Is There a Case for Assisted Dying?, is publishing in paperback in March, and you can read their previous blog post here. The following is an excerpt about the medical perspective of assisted death.

Doctors in general are of a conservative turn of mind when contemplating decisions involving their patients. Medicine is a discipline in which taking risks with patient welfare is almost never justified and doctors, even those trained to model their care on the latest evidence-based research, are not easily persuaded to change a long established policy. It is not surprising that the contemplation of such profoundly serious changes of practice as assisted suicide and euthanasia has led to controversy, disagreement, and fierce professional debate. Doctors are currently forbidden, like every other citizen, to end human life. There is no legal indulgence conferred by a medical or nursing qualification.

So what attitudes do these professionals express when discussing the interests of patients in grave distress who seek medical aid to end their lives? In medical ethics much discussion centres on the difference between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. For many people it seems important to distinguish between killing and letting die and to prohibit the former while authorizing the latter in certain cases. In the past the distinction was sometimes, not very helpfully, referred to as that between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ euthanasia. In recent years, however, the distinction between killing and letting die has become blurred. For example, switching off a respiratory-support machine could be interpreted as actively terminating a patient’s life. Alternatively this act may be seen as withdrawing the artificial means maintaining a life which is already unsustainable by the individual alone. In other words this act discontinues an artificial circulation in a patient who is actually already dead (letting die).

We would contend that there is no morally relevant difference between killing someone and allowing him to die. A well-known example cited in medical ethics describes two young men, each of whom want their 6-year-old cousin to die in order that they can gain a large inheritance. Smith drowns his cousin while the boy is taking a bath. Jones plans to drown his cousin, but as he enters the bathroom he sees the boy slip and hit his head: Jones stands by doing nothing while the boy drowns.

Smith killed his cousin: Jones merely allowed his cousin to die. Both of these acts are clearly reprehensible but do demonstrate that the distinction between killing and letting die is morally irrelevant. Moreover, someone who starves another person to death is as guilty of murder as someone who poisons that person. The person who allows a fellow human being to die of hunger is as morally guilty as someone who acts to poison him. The difference lies in the more obvious and direct causal implications of the verb ‘to kill’. Killing, like pushing or pulling, kicking or smashing, is manifestly doing something to produce a certain effect. John Stuart Mill insisted that a cause is not necessarily an ‘active intervention’. The failure of the guards to patrol the walls may cause the fall of the city. Yet people may still instinctively feel that failing to do something is less causal than killing them. It is less ‘hands on’. It is after all doing nothing, and may therefore seem to be incapable of producing any effect. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Moreover, ‘to kill’ is a verb that contains a record of its own success. If I kill you, you are dead; whereas if I, say, fail to feed you, there is room for another event to come along either to save or to dispatch you. There is space for what the lawyers call novus actus interveniens.

A case that illustrates the medical abhorrence of active intervention to bring about death was that of a 40-year-old woman known only as Ms B. In 2001 she suffered a burst blood vessel in her neck and became totally paralysed. She was kept alive on a ventilator for a year, her brain unaffected. When the year was up, she asked that she might get someone to switch off the ventilator at a time of her choice, when she felt she had had enough. The hospital authorities refused, and one of the doctors involved was reported as saying: ‘She is asking us to kill her, and this we would not like to do’. Ms B appealed to the courts, and a court was convened round her bed. The judge, Lady Butler-Sloss found that she was suffering from no mental incapacity, and that it would be lawful for the hospital to grant her request. They still repeated that they could not kill her, even if it would be a lawful act. So Ms B was moved to another, less squeamish hospital, where in due course she asked for the ventilator to be switched off and she died.

Thus, doctors are profoundly suspicious of any action which may be classified as killing; and this is partly, we believe, because of the emotive violence contained within the very word ‘killing’. This word carries with it images of battlefields or grisly car accidents. These images are far removed from the scene of calm, caring, easeful, and timely death that is the ideal we would all wish eventually for ourselves.

Check out this site that gives you your Hobbit name. There's a link at the bottom that leads to another page for an Elven Name.