Three recent books focused on law, gender, and Islam not only make important individual contributions to the field of law and religion, but together, in their attention to issues of gender, sex, violence, and law, signal an important development in both this field and the field of Islamic studies. This state of the field essay examines Kecia Ali's revised and expanded edition of Sexual Ethics and Islam, Ayesha Chaudhry's Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition, and Hina Azam's Sexual Violation in Islamic Law. Individually and collectively, these works shed light on the way that societies use gender as a fundamental tool of social organization and hierarchy. While Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam focus mainly on the classical Sunni Islamic tradition, their insight has wider methodological import for the study of law and religion. Further, they illuminate the intellectual diversity within the Islamic tradition, both in the past and in the present. In doing so, they draw attention to the process of how the intellectual tradition is retrieved and appropriated in contemporary contexts. Finally, their work is historical and descriptive as well as normative: this kind of scholarship challenges the distinction in the study of religion between these two categories. Ali, Chaudhry, and Azam each places her observations and arguments about classical Sunni Islamic texts and traditions in productive conversation with ethical and legal questions that Muslims face today.

Despite its National Socialist origins, the post-war use of Berlin's Tempelhof Airport has seen it recast as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Since the airport's 2008 closure, the site has been caught between calls for increased engagement with its use under the Third Reich and economic incentives to repackage it as an attractive events location. Through analysing the different strategies through which Tempelhof's past is negotiated, this article will highlight the contested nature of Berlin's relationship with the past and the complex interaction between memory politics and more pragmatic issues.

After finishing a B.A. degree in History and Political Sciences from ValparaisoUniversity, I began my post-undergraduate life going into the U. S. Peace Corpsand spending three years as an English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher inlycees in Morocco. After all, in 1973, agreeing to a freesummer vacation in Morocco for Peace Corps training, if nothing else, seemedlike a good deal. Little did I know that an EFL/ESL (English as a secondlanguage)/applied linguistics life would begin at that point. I did learn that Iliked teaching (which surprised me a bit) and the opportunities for creativityit provided (even if teaching with ‘Martin and Jillian’ (Broughton1968) and First things first (Alexander 1972) (for those who remember). As a young teacher, Ivividly remember, as a break from the routine, teaching my senior students thelyrics to ‘All Along the Watchtower,’ first the Bob Dylan version,then the Jimi Hendricks version. Sometimes we just have to take some chances.Morocco was also a great place to be in the middle of multilingualism in action:Moroccan Arabic, Berber, Modern Standard Arabic, French, Spanish, and English.For many of my students, English was their fifth language.

Many philosophers in the analytic tradition have recently sought to explore the question of the meaning of life. In the first part of this article I subject two important approaches from this tradition – those of John Cottingham and Susan Wolf – to criticism. I then suggest that Cottingham and Wolf articulate certain assumptions about the meaning of life that are widely shared amongst analytic philosophers. I go on to subject those assumptions to criticism and seek to develop an alternative approach to the question, one that is largely overlooked in the contemporary literature.

Foreign language (FL) aptitude generally refers to a specific talent for learning a foreign or second language (L2). After experiencing a long period of marginalized interest, FL aptitude research in recent years has witnessed renewed enthusiasm across the disciplines of educational psychology, second language acquisition (SLA) and cognitive neuroscience. This paper sets out to offer a historical and an updated account of this recent progress in FL aptitude theory development and research. As its subtitle indicates, the paper centres on three major issues: following the introduction and clarification of basic concepts, Section 1 traces the early conceptions of FL aptitude dominated by John Carroll's pioneering work. Section 2 summarizes and examines more recent theoretical perspectives and FL aptitude models proposed by researchers from multiple disciplines that have significantly broadened the conventional research traditions associated with Carroll's original conception. Based on the research synthesis of current FL aptitude models, Section 3 suggests the directions FL aptitude theory and research might take in coming years. We conclude that a working memory perspective on FL aptitude presents one promising avenue for advance, as does the development of new aptitude tests to predict speed of automatization, implicit learning and greater control over an emerging language system. In addition, it is argued that issues of domain-specificity versus domain-generality for aptitude tests may lead to aptitude theory and research becoming more central in applied linguistics.

If God loves us and so desires union with us, why is it that so many, who once felt close to God and who have subsequently done nothing to precipitate separation from him, now experience only his absence? A metaphor which has been used repeatedly to answer this question is that separation from God is a kind of spiritual weaning process in which God uses the experience of his absence in order to bring about maturation and greater union with him. After discussing the use of this metaphor in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and John of Cross's poem The Dark Night of the Soul, I discuss the question of how someone's absence could be good for their maturation. I argue that separation has an important role to play in deepening relationships of love – drawing on research in de-adaptation in the psychological and sociological literature, I argue that in order for there to be a union of love, there must be an experience of both dependence and independence. This position can explain why God allows people who engage in the spiritual life to suffer the pain of separation from him.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, a group of doctors under the banner of the social hygiene movement set out on what seemed an improbable mission: to convince American men that they did not need sex. This was in part a response to venereal disease. Persuading young men to adopt the standard of sexual discipline demanded of women was the key to preserving the health of the nation from the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhoea. But their campaign ran up against the doctrine of male sexual necessity, a doctrine well established in medical thought and an article of faith for many patients. Initially, social hygienists succeeded in rallying much of the medical community. But this success was followed by a series of setbacks. Significant dissent remained within the profession. Even more alarmingly, behavioural studies proved that many men simply were not listening. The attempt to repudiate the doctrine of male sexual necessity showed the ambition of Progressive-era doctors, but also their powerlessness in the face of entrenched beliefs about the linkage in men between sex, health and success.

This paper considers research and practice relating to listening in instructed classroom settings, limiting itself to what might be called unidirectional listening (Macaro, Graham & Vanderplank 2007) – in other words, where learners listen to a recording, a TV or radio clip or lecture, but where there is no communication back to the speaker(s). A review of the literature relating to such listening reveals a tendency for papers to highlight two features in their introductory lines: first, the acknowledged importance of listening as a skill underpinning second language (L2) acquisition more broadly, and second, the relative paucity of research into listening compared with the skills of speaking, reading or writing. In the last ten years or so, however, there has been a growth in the number of studies conducted in the field, as evidenced in Vandergrift's review in 2007 and Vanderplank's more recent overview (2013). Consequently, my view is that it is possible to identify from that research certain key principles in relation to listening within instructed settings, particularly regarding listening strategies.

In the wake of the Second World War there was a movement to counterbalance the apparently increasingly technical nature of medical education. These reforms sought a more holistic model of care and to put people – rather than diseases – back at the centre of medical practice and medical education. This article shows that students often drove the early stages of education reform. Their innovations focused on relationships between doctors and their communities, and often took the form of informal discussions about medical ethics and the social dimensions of primary care. Medical schools began to pursue ‘humanistic’ education more formally from the 1980s onwards, particularly within the context of general practice curricula and with a focus on individual doctor–patient relationships. Overall from the 1950s to the 1990s there was a broad shift in discussions of the human aspects of medical education: from interest in patient communities to individuals; from social concerns to personal characteristics; and from the relatively abstract to the measurable and instrumental. There was no clear shift from ‘less’ to ‘more’ humanistic education, but rather a shift in the perceived goals of integrating human aspects of medical education.The human aspects of medicine show the importance of student activism in driving forward community and ethical medicine, and provide an important backdrop to the rise of competencies within general undergraduate education.