Hillsdale College

The agreement on original sin at the Colloquy of Regensburg has not generated as much attention as the agreement on justification. Protestant theologians saw their teaching on the remnants of original sin in the baptized as fundamental to understanding justification by faith alone and the imputation of Christ's righteousness. Roman Catholics condemned the Protestant view of the remnants of original sin as undermining the work of Christ, the sacrament of baptism, and the good works of Christians. The background and aftermath of the agreement about original sin in 1541 make this remarkable achievement more intelligible. While Regensburg's agreement on original sin could meet some of the concerns of Protestant and Catholic theologians, significant disagreements about the character of sin in the baptized from the beginning of the Reformation were not resolved and expressed themselves immediately after the failure of the Colloquy of Regensburg.

Before the famous agreement about justification at the Colloquy of Regensburg in 1541, major Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians agreed to statements about humanity’s condition before the fall, free choice, the cause of sin, and original sin. The translation of these four articles sheds light on the shape of theological controversy—and the possibility of shared language and even genuine agreement—about the creation, fall, and redemption of mankind. Annotations to the translation provide an account of later controversies about specific passages in the Regensburg agreement. Johann Eck, one of the Catholic participants and a major opponent of Martin Luther since the early days of the Reformation, opposed some of the formulations in the first four articles of the Colloquy. The Protestant and other Catholic participants at Regensburg generally agreed that Eck’s criticisms were wide of the mark.

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering – which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil – is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. Why does suffering push some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The aim of this article is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. In the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments.

What You Will Learn from This Chapter This chapter describes specific techniques plus general curricular approaches to performing CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in Drosophila in a classroom environment. We present several different scenarios for performing CRISPR in Drosophila, that can be adapted depending upon the length of time available for the class, and the technology available to the instructor and students.

The article argues for a Straussian interpretation of Tacitus’ Agricola by showing that Tacitus’ explicit praise of the life of Agricola and criticism of the Stoic martyrs are undermined by his implicit comparisons to other lives within the text and by his allusions to other works of Socratic political philosophy, especially Xenophon’s. The popular teaching of the Agricola is that Agricola’s policy of political quietism is the best way of life for an ambitious young Roman living under a tyrannical emperor, while the Stoic’s political extremism is not beneficial for the common good. The philosophic teaching, by contrast, is that a ‘serious and wise man’ will pursue a kind of Xenophontic approach to politics because he recognizes that the philosophic life is the highest life, but that it is necessary for the philosopher to advise the tyrant if the conditions for a philosophic life are going to be possible.

This paper explores the devotional background of the controversy surrounding Erasmus’ Latin translation of the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John in the second edition of his Novum Testamentum (1519). Erasmus relied on early Latin fathers to substitute sermo for verbum in his translation of the word logos, and years of debate ensued. Scholars have generally agreed that Erasmus’ translation was possible if not preferable and that it relied on solid scholarship, and they have tended to cast Erasmus’ opponents as unimaginative conservatives. This paper offers a more nuanced understanding of this controversy and its effects by situating it the context of late medieval piety and considering a similar debate between Jerome and Augustine on the proper roles of tradition and scholarship that served Erasmus as a model for his own scholarly activity. In this light, it becomes clear that whatever the philological merit of Erasmus’ word choice, his critics had legitimate pastoral reasons for concern about his translation of this single word.

Background Empty nose syndrome (ENS) is a poorly understood condition that affects a minority of patients who undergo inferior turbinate (IT) surgery. The Empty Nose Syndrome 6‐item Questionnaire (ENS6Q) was validated to diagnose ENS following IT reduction, with an ENS6Q ≥ 11 being suggestive of ENS. Medial flap turbinoplasty (MFT) involves IT bone removal ± submucosal reduction (SMR) and is highly effective at surgically treating IT hypertrophy. This study's purpose was to determine the incidence of ENS following MFT by comparing ENS6Q scores preoperatively and postoperatively. Methods A retrospective cohort study was conducted on consecutive patients who underwent bilateral MFT with or without septoplasty to address nasal obstruction. Preoperative and postoperative nasal obstruction and septoplasty effectiveness (NOSE, 0–20) and ENS6Q (0–30) scores were compared at a minimum 12 months postoperatively. Results Of 100 patients, mean age was 48.9 years and 53% were male. Mean follow‐up was 25.0 months (range: 12–66 months). Patients underwent MFT with SMR in 70% of cases, whereas 30% had bone removal only, and 79% had septoplasty. NOSE scores decreased significantly postoperatively (mean 9‐point reduction, p < 0.0001). Mean preoperative and postoperative ENS6Qs were 8.5 and 3.0, respectively, with a mean 5.6‐point decrease postoperatively ( p < 0.0001). While some patients developed elevated ENS6Q scores mainly in the first 3 months postoperatively, no patients had ENS6Q scores ≥11 at final follow‐up. Conclusions MFT ± septoplasty led to significant long‐term reduction in nasal obstruction, with no patients ultimately developing ENS6Q ≥ 11 postoperatively. Therefore, MFT was unlikely to cause ENS. Level of Evidence Level 4 Laryngoscope , 2024

In Appearance & Explanation, Kevin McCain and Luca Moretti argue that phenomenal explanationism (PE) offers a superior account to phenomenal conservatism (PC) as to why seemings justify. One of their arguments for this position is that PE is in a better position to respond to skepticism than PC, since the latter faces the problem of reflective awareness while the former does not. I deny that PE has any such advantage. To the contrary, I argue that PC offers a superior response to skepticism, especially when it comes to the beliefs of non-reflective agents.

This article examines the 1589–92 “Martin Marprelate” controversy—a battle of pamphlets, sermons, and plays which translated academic debates regarding the best way to govern the Church of England into a remarkably lowbrow register. I argue that the polemical centerpiece of this debate was the stock figure of a wicked prelate, drawn from a long history of popular religious performance reaching back to medieval passion plays depicting the persecution of Christ by the Jewish authorities. The pseudonymous presbyterian pamphleteer “Martin” and his anti-Puritan opponents like John Lyly and Thomas Nashe wrestled for control of this figure, seeking to cast each other’s clerical heroes as the tyrannical high priest Caiaphas of the gospels.

Based on recent collecting and a synthesis of ~100 years of historical data, 219 caddisfly species are reported from the state of Indiana. Seventeen species are reported herein from the state for the first time, including two previously thought to be endemic to the southeastern USA. Species records are also presented herein organized by drainage basin, ecoregion, glacial history, and waterbody type for two distinct time periods: before 1983 and after 2005. More species were reported from the state before 1983 than after 2005, despite collecting almost 3× the number of occurrence records during the latter period. Species occurrence records were greater for most families and functional feeding groups (FFGs) for the post-2005 time period, although the Limnephilidae, Phryganeidae, Molannidae, and Lepidostomatidae, particularly those in the shredder FFG, instead had greater records before 1983. This loss of shredders probably reflected the ongoing habitat degradation within the state. While species rarefaction predicts only a few more species to be found in Indiana, many regions still remain under-sampled and 44 species have not been collected in >40 years.

The hapax legomenon סֹחֶרֶת ( sōḥereth ) has eluded identification. Comparison with Ancient Egyptian ṯḥnt “faience, blue chalcedony” is phonologically plausible. “Faience” does indeed match the material evidence of the Susan palace.

In this article, Abel Winn reflects on his experiences as a student and colleague of Nobel laureate Vernon L. Smith.

Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §2 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, and natural theology, on the other. §3 offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it's important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §4 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed?

We critically examine the applicability of the effective potential within dynamical situations and find, in short, that the answer is negative. An important caveat of the use of an effective potential in dynamical equations of motion is an explicit violation of energy conservation. An effective potential is introduced in a consistent quasistatic approximation, and its narrow regime of validity is discussed. Two ubiquitous instances in which even the adiabatic effective potential is not valid in dynamics are studied in detail: parametric amplification in the case of oscillating mean fields, and spinodal instabilities associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking. In both cases profuse particle production is directly linked to the failure of the effective potential to describe the dynamics. We introduce a consistent, renormalized, energy conserving dynamical framework that is amenable to numerical implementation. Energy conservation leads to the emergence of asymptotic highly excited, entangled stationary states from the dynamical evolution. As a corollary, decoherence via dephasing of the density matrix in the adiabatic basis is argued to lead to an emergent entropy, formally equivalent to the entanglement entropy. The results suggest novel characterization of asymptotic equilibrium states in terms of order parameter vs energy density. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about ‘confessional culture,’ it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution – understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposure. It argues that, with digital enclosures, the renunciative self-mortification that lies at the heart of classic Christian confession is reprogrammed into what Byung-Chul Han calls a ‘pornographic self-presentation.’ The self-death dealt by the confessional thus becomes an apparently voluntary self-exploitation for the social media subject. In both cases, however, absolution governs via rituals of cathartic transparency, submitting interiority to processes of legible exteriorization and articulating the subject via an exhibitive logic that blurs the boundaries between communicative freedom and compulsory self-exposure.