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The Relationship between Community Religious Beliefs and Community Level of Public Library Development in the United States: An Empirical Analysis
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/3/thumbnail.jpgThis paper examines the relationship between the characteristics of the religious community in an area served by a public library in the United States and the level of development of that public library. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that as the degree of religious orthodoxy increases in a community the level of public library development in that community decreases. To test this hypothesis, two indexes are constructed: (1) the index of “religious orthodoxy,” and (2) the public library development index. Data for the index of religious orthodoxy comes from a 2000 study by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. The public library development index is based on 1974 and 2008 data collected by the U.S. federal government on all public libraries. Both data sets cover the entire U.S. The findings from this 2011 study are compared to the findings from a 1978 study by Williams (1978) that used similar measures. Tentative results from both studies indicate that while there is a definite negative relationship between the index of public library development in the most orthodox communities that relationship is not uniform for all levels of community orthodoxy and that changes do take place over time.</p
The Conversing God: Exploring Trinitarian Information Transfer through the Perspective of Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/7/thumbnail.jpgThe traditional Christian belief in the Trinity states that God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit, and that people were created in “the image of God.” This is understood to mean that humans reflect the nature of God and His ability to communicate. This ancient Christian concept has implications not only for theology, but also for communication within Christian communities. The goal of this paper is to explore the ability of a modern information theory to shed light on this doctrine and improve communication within the Church. This paper seeks to bridge the gap between ancient theology and modern theory by asking the following question: “Can Gordon Pask’s conversation theory serve as a framework for information transfer within the Trinity and within Christian religious communities?” The author’s perspective is that conversation theory can be used as a framework for exploring knowledge creation and sharing within the Trinity and subsequently within the Christian community. These new insights are based on Pask’s conceptualization of psychological and mechanical individuals, entailment meshes, and consciousness. As these concepts create new perspectives, they have significance for communities who model their communicating on Trinitarian theology. This discussion will be based on theoretical, theological, and biblical evidence which demonstrates that conversation theory can be applied to Trinitarian theology. Conclusions include implications for the process of creating and sharing religious knowledge from the individual and the corporate perspective. Keywords: Trinity, Gordon Pask, conversation theory, conversing, theology, community</p
Beyond Fashion: Fiber and Fashion Art by Vincent Quevedo
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Louis Taber’s World: Land, Agriculture, and the Schism of the Ohio Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) of the Religious Society of Friends, 1848 – 1861
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/16/thumbnail.jpgThis paper examines the participation of members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in an emergent national agricultural reform movement prior to the American Civil War. This paper focuses on the agricultural writings of Louis Taber, a recorded minister and teacher at the Friends Boarding School in Mt. Peasant, Ohio during the 1840s and early 1850s. Between 1848 and 1853 Taber regularly participated in an emergent national public discourse concerning agricultural improvement through the medium of the Ohio Cultivator. Following the Gurneyite-Wilburite schism of the Ohio Yearly Meeting in 1854 Taber only wrote for the agricultural press on a handful of occasions over the next three decades. This paper explores the connections between religion and information by elucidating how Taber’s participation in antebellum agricultural reform reflected his own ideological struggles in siding with the Wilburite faction of the Short Creek Monthly Meeting in 1854.</p
The Denial of Relevance: Avoidance, Awakening, & Guidance
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/6/thumbnail.jpgThe 19th Century shines brightly upon the 21st Century’s call for research of information and religion to gain spiritual knowledge. American author Henry David Thoreau (1854/1992) observed that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (7), and he sought to “awaken” his neighbors. Across the Atlantic, English Cardinal John Henry Newman (1868) asserted, “Many… refuse to be awakened, and think their happiness consists in continuing as they are” (58). T.S. Eliot heralded the perennial questions we find persistent each day: “Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (5). Such observations reveal what is true of modern humanity: we face an information need for solution or awakening to fulfill potential, to encounter information essential to well-being, and to identify and achieve our dreams.</p
Safe for Decolonization: The Eisenhower Administration, Britain, and Singapore
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/new_foreign_relations/10/thumbnail.jpgHow America left its indelible footprint on the culture and politics of Singapore
In the first decade after World War II, Singapore underwent radical political and socioeconomic changes with the progressive retreat of Great Britain from its Southeast Asian colonial empire. The United States, under the Eisenhower administration, sought to fill the vacuum left by the British retreat and launched into a campaign to shape the emerging Singapore nation-state in accordance with its Cold War policies. Based on a wide array of Chinese- and English-language archival sources from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States, Safe for Decolonization examines in depth the initiatives—both covert and public—undertaken by the United States in late-colonial Singapore.
Apart from simply analyzing the effect of American activities on the politics of the island, author S. R. Joey Long also examines their impact on the relationship between Great Britain and the United States, and how the Anglo-American nuclear policy toward China and the establishment of a regional security institution (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) affected the security and decolonization of a strategic British base.
Long sketches a highly detailed and nuanced account of the relations between the United States, Great Britain, and Singapore. He not only describes the often clumsy attempts by covert American operatives to sway top political leaders, infiltrate governments, influence labor unions, and shape elections, but he also shows how Eisenhower’s public initiatives proved to have far-reaching positive results and demonstrates that the Eisenhower administration’s policies toward Singapore, while not always well advised, nonetheless helped to lay the foundation for friendly Singapore–U.S. relations after 1960.
As the first multi-archival work on the U.S. intervention in Singapore, Safe for Decolonization makes an important contribution to the literature on Southeast Asia–U.S. relations. It will be of interest to specialists in decolonization, diplomatic history, modern Southeast Asian history, and the history of the early Cold War.</p
Seeing Drugs: Modernization, Counterinsurgency, and U.S. Narcotics Control in the Third World, 1969–1976
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/new_foreign_relations/17/thumbnail.jpgA timely historical analysis of a persistent global problem
Since its declaration in the early 1970s, the American drug war has spanned the globe in a quest to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Explaining the conceptual framework within which policymakers understood illegal opium production and trafficking, Seeing Drugs examines the genesis of the war on drugs during the Nixon and Ford administrations when the United States developed the policies that set the parameters of subsequent American drug control abroad.
Faced with rising heroin use in the United States and the fear of drug-addicted Vietnam veterans carrying their affliction home and propelled by the belief that heroin addiction spreads like a contagious disease, U.S. officials identified three Third World nations—Thailand, Burma, and Mexico—as the primary sources of illegal narcotics servicing the American drug market. Author Daniel Weimer demonstrates that drug-control officials in these countries confronted a host of interlocking factors shaping the illicit narcotics trade and that, in response to these challenges, policymakers applied modernization and counterinsurgency theory to devise strategies to assist the Thai, Burmese, and Mexican governments in curbing drug trafficking. The Nixon and Ford administrations sincerely believed their policies could rein in the narcotics trade and diminish addiction within the United States. In the end, however, the drug war only guaranteed continued American intervention in the Third World, where the majority of illegal drug crops grew.
Through interdisciplinary and comparative analysis, Seeing Drugsexamines the contours of the burgeoning drug war, the cultural significance of drugs and addiction, and their links to the formation of national identity within the United States, Thailand, Burma, and Mexico. By highlighting the prevalence of modernization and counterinsurgency discourse within drug-control policy, Weimer reveals an unexplored and important facet of the history of U.S–Third World interaction.
“Essential reading for anyone interested in both the history of U.S. drug policy and the process of modernization during the Cold War.” – William O. Walker III, author of Drug Control in the Americas and Opium and Foreign Policy
“Seeing Drugs explores the dramatic effects of post-1945 U.S. modernization and counterinsurgency efforts, joined with Cold War imperatives, on the United States’ war on drugs. The war on drugs was carried by American dollars, social scientists, officials, and technology into the poppy fields of Mexico, Thailand and Burma. Dan Weimer deftly demonstrates the layered ways in which beliefs about drugs as threat and symbol of antimodernism prompted Americans to forcibly transform drug-growing areas, sometimes with support from indigenous elites. His story, based on impressive research and capacious understanding of theory, reveals both the contradictions in the United States’ war on drugs as well as many reasons for its devastating effects. This work joins much of the most exciting new work in U.S. foreign relations, in taking serious interest in the transformative consequences of U.S. foreign policy for other nations. Seeing Drugs joins Al McCoy’s classic Politics of Heroin as a ‘must read’ for understanding the United States’ war on drugs.” - Anne L. Foster, author ofProjections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941
“Weimer persuasively demonstrates that discourses of modernization and counterinsurgency helped to shape both U.S. counter-narcotics policy abroad and domestic drug policy at home along coercive lines. An important and timely book with much to teach us about the contradictions of the ‘war on drugs’ in Afghanistan, Colombia, and elsewhere.” – Brad Simpson, Princeton University</p
Exploring the Mental Health Information Needs of Clergy
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Historic Christianity and the Redevelopment of the 21st Century Academic Library
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On the Home Front: Civil War Fashions and Domestic Life
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