‘Interested non-belief’ in God is now a common attitude, and one religious outlook such non-believers should take seriously is the Christian contemplative tradition. Drawing on C. S. Lewis, I identify the familiar phenomenon of ‘worldly union desire’: elicited by worldly things, and aimed at union with some beauty or goodness therein. I examine specifically Thomas Merton's contemplative outlook, arguing that by his lights worldly union desires manifest a desire for God and aid spiritual openness. Merton's picture extends any purely secular value in worldly union desire-experiences, giving union with God – and the spirituality aimed at this goal – a deep existential appeal for non-believers.

The use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) in healthcare allocation has been criticized as discriminatory against people with disabilities. This article considers a response to this criticism from Nick Beckstead and Toby Ord. They say that even if QALYs are discriminatory, attempting to avoid discrimination – when coupled with other central principles that an allocation system should favour – sometimes leads to irrationality in the form of cyclic preferences. I suggest that while Beckstead and Ord have identified a problem, it is a misdiagnosis to lay it at the feet of an anti-discrimination principle. The problem in fact comes from a basic tension between respecting reasonable patient preferences and other ways of ranking treatment options. As such, adopting a QALY system does not solve the problem they identify.

The past decades have seen dramatic improvements to dictionary content and format. Yet dictionaries – both paper-based and digital – remain disappointingly underused. As a result, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to train people in dictionary-consultation skills. Another solution would be to build lexicographic resources that require little or no instruction. In this paper, I present the ColloCaid project, whose aim is to develop a lexicographic tool that combines user needs, lexicographic data and digital writing environments to bring dictionaries to writers instead of waiting for them to get the information they need from dictionaries. Our focus is on helping writers produce more idiomatic texts by integrating lexicographic data on collocations into text editors in a way that does not distract them from their writing. A distinguishing characteristic of ColloCaid is that it is not limited to providing feedback on miscollocations. It also aims to ‘feed forward’, raising awareness of collocations writers may not remember or know how to look up. While our initial prototype is being developed specifically for academic English, the implications of our research can be broadened to other languages and usages beyond academic.

This article traces the development of national opera on political-historical themes in Germany between 1815 and 1848 and attempts to explain why this genre ultimately did not succeed. The focus will lie on the warrior hero Arminius/Hermann, one of the most potent national symbols of the nineteenth century, who was indeed brought to the German opera stage, but could never conquer it. The period between 1815 and 1848 not only forms a crucial phase in the coming of age of German opera against the background of a burgeoning national conscience, but also presents a lacuna in the current literature on Arminius as an opera character. Two early nineteenth-century Arminius opera projects will be discussed: musical realizations of August von Kotzebue’s 1813 libretto Hermann und Thusnelde and French composer Hippolyte Chélard’s 1835 opera Die Hermannschlacht, based on a libretto by Carl Weichselbaumer. Questions of authorship, patronage, musical style and reception will be addressed. This article presents a history of an operatic ‘misfit’ that fills a hiatus in the study of German nineteenth-century opera and will add to our understanding of the peculiar relation between opera and German national thought during the first half of the century.

In the 1950s, the National Association of Women Lawyers (“NAWL”) undertook what it considered its “greatest project,” the drafting and promotion of a model no-fault divorce law. It launched its campaign at a time when post-war realities and the law in practice were putting increasing pressure on the law on the books which lagged behind contemporary sensibilities. NAWL acted two decades before the no-fault divorce “revolution” of the 1970s. It did so in the 1950s when women were said to be both “domestic” and “quiescent.” The Article has three aims. First, it considers NAWL's project as a missing piece in the history of divorce law, the no-fault revolution, and the rise of mass divorce in mid-twentieth century America. Second, it reflects on the implications of NAWL's undertaking for the standard narrative of “domesticity” in the 1950s, an account that has been questioned in recent years. Last, it tells a story of women's activism in the depth of the so-called “doldrums” of the organized women's moveme

The fine-tuning argument for the existence of God requires that the probability that the universe is life-permitting if God exists is not nearly as low as the probability that the universe is life-permitting if God does not exist. Recently, some proponents of the fine-tuning argument have reasoned as follows. ‘Stipulate that the probability that there exists a life-permitting universe if God exists is one in a billion. Only the most hardened sceptic would refuse odds like that, right? So one in a billion is more than just fair to those sceptical of the fine-tuning argument. It is generous. Even on that generous assumption, the fine-tuning argument is very strong.’ This article explains why the assumption is not, in fact, generous.

In this article, I consider the most prominent contemporary attempts to reconcile Social Trinitarianism (ST) with monotheism, arguing that within ST, only mereological (part/whole) accounts can ultimately preserve monotheism. A corollary of this is that every other condition (or set of conditions) adduced in defense of a monotheistic ST really entails tritheism, that is, until a part/whole condition is deployed. Such models, I contend, fail necessarily insofar as they attempt to solve a puzzle that is wholly quantitative in nature with purely qualitative considerations. I conclude by remarking that the Social Trinity model propounded by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland succeeds where the others fail, though this model is itself by no means impervious to weighty objections.

Methodological naturalism is usually regarded as compatible with a range of religious commitments on the part of scientific practitioners and it is typically assumed that methodological naturalism does not imply metaphysical naturalism. Against this, it has been argued that the cumulative success of the sciences, conducted in conformity with the principle of methodological naturalism, actually provides compelling evidence for the truth of metaphysical naturalism. In this article I assess the argument for naturalism from the history of science and suggest that it is deficient in a number of ways. There may be reasons for adopting naturalism, but the history of science is not the place to look for them.

Two competing metatheologies – approaches that propose a certain starting point for generating a proper account of the nature of God – are Perfect Being Theology (PBT), the approach to theology originating with Anselm in his efforts to find a way of demonstrating that such a perfect being exists, and Creator Theology (CT). This article argues that CT has significant advantages over PBT. The adversities that afflict PBT, to which CT is immune, are these: the first concerns parsimony in the ontology of divinity, and the second concerns the explanation of contingency itself. CT generates a simpler defence of monotheism and an account of contingency, whereas PBT struggles to defend monotheism and has no resources for generating an account of contingency, an account needed in order to defend the central claims of the ontological argument.

How do people answer polar questions? In this fourteen-language study of answers to questions in conversation, we compare the two main strategies; first, interjection-type answers such as uh-huh (or equivalents yes, mm, head nods, etc.), and second, repetition-type answers that repeat some or all of the question. We find that all languages offer both options, but that there is a strong asymmetry in their frequency of use, with a global preference for interjection-type answers. We propose that this preference is motivated by the fact that the two options are not equivalent in meaning. We argue that interjection-type answers are intrinsically suited to be the pragmatically unmarked, and thus more frequent, strategy for confirming polar questions, regardless of the language spoken. Our analysis is based on the semantic-pragmatic profile of the interjection-type and repetition-type answer strategies, in the context of certain asymmetries inherent to the dialogic speech act structure of question–answer sequences, including sequential agency and thematic agency. This allows us to see possible explanations for the outlier distributions found in ǂĀkhoe Haiǁom and Tzeltal.

Popular song lyrics constitute an exception to dominant, standard language ideologies of English: nonstandard grammatical forms are common, relatively unstigmatized, and even enregistered in the genre. This project uses song lyrics to test whether genre cues can shift linguistic expectations, influencing how speakers process morphosyntactic variants. In three self-paced reading experiments, participants read sentences from pop songs. Test sentences contained either ‘standard’ NPSG + doesn't or ‘nonstandard’ NPSG + don't. In Experiment 1, some participants were told that the sentences came from lyrics, while others received no context information. Experiment 2 eliminated other nonstandardisms in the stimuli, and Experiment 3 tested for the effect of stronger context information. Genre information caused participants to orient to the sentences differently, which partially—but not straightforwardly—mitigated surprisal at nonstandard don't. I discuss future directions for understanding the effects of context on sociolinguistic processing, which I argue can inform concepts like genre and enregisterment, and the processes underlying language attitudes. (Morphosyntactic variation, genre, invariant don't, language ideology, pop songs, experimental sociolinguistics, sentence processing)*

This article analyzes the social realities that Austrian and German heterosexual men, all in their reproductive age, confronted in the aftermath of World War II; the kind of sexual and gendered configurations produced under Nazism and during the postwar period; and the ways in which these social and emotional realities were publically and privately dealt with after the war. It draws on reports in, and letters-to-the-editor of, the journal Liebe und Ehe from 1949 to 1951, as well as on a sample of fourteen private letters written by an Austrian policeman in 1951 about his love relationship with a nurse. Such early postwar narratives not only point at issues and conflicts between the sexes, but also suggest the rehabilitation of traditional gender roles in West Germany and Austria. Men struggled to conform to new guidelines of heterosexual domesticity, a development that hints not only at traumatic war experiences, but also at the ideological residuals of Nazism.