When people use the phrase “personal relationship with Jesus,” how does one explain its significance? Normally attributed to evangelical Protestant Christians, use of the phrase “personal ...relationship with Jesus” is a complicated phenomenon, and an explanation of it requires drawing upon resources from across multiple disciplines rather than a single discipline only. Attempts to explain exactly what the phrase “personal relationship with Jesus” means frequently can be mystifying, on the one hand, or dismissive and simplistic, on the other hand. This article moves potentially toward a better context for understanding use of the phrase “personal relationship with Jesus” by drawing upon insights from multiple disciplines, including (1) rhetorical and cultural‐historical studies, (2) evolutionary and cognitive psychology, and (3) biological/behavioral and social/anthropological studies in order to set forth some basic lines of explanation for use of the phrase “personal relationship with Jesus.” The article concludes with some possible testable statements for future empirical studies.
In Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter suggests that documentaries are an especially apt form of contemporary memento mori; that is, documentaries offer ...transformative experiences for a viewer to renew one's consciousness of mortality.
Abstract Background Immunotherapy has demonstrated exciting curative potential in the treatment of lymphoid malignancies, but cancer cells have developed a variety of immune evasion mechanisms ...requiring targeted strategies. CXCR4 is a G-protein coupled receptor with crucial roles in homing, maintenance, and proliferation of a wide range of haematological cancers. We hypothesised that overexpression of CXCR4 in CD8 T cells (T-CXCR4) would improve homing to CXCL12-rich niches such as bone marrow, enhancing tumour killing. Methods We transduced murine CD8 T cells with a retroviral vector encoding either the Cxcr4 gene coupled to a GFP marker or a separate inducible vector encoding Cxcr4 and GFP under control of the Tet-On system. For allogeneic bone-marrow transplants, irradiated BALB/c recipient mice received intravenous B6 donor bone marrow and subcutaneous A20 lymphoma cells on day 0, and B6 T-CXCR4 or control T cells on day 2. For in-vivo imaging of T-cell accumulation, anaesthetised mice received luciferase-positive transduced T cells and luciferin. Transgenic OT-1 CD8 T cells expressing T-cell receptors specific for the SIINFEKL peptide were used in vaccination experiments. Findings In an allogeneic B-cell lymphoma model, T-CXCR4 were significantly better than control T cells at tumour control (p<0·0001, n=5 per group). In-vivo imaging did not demonstrate greater T-CXCR4 accumulation at the tumour site, suggesting superior per-cell function. In a vaccination model, OT-1 T-CXCR4 demonstrated substantially enhanced long-term persistence in bone marrow and spleen compared with control T cells (bone-marrow ratio 34 to 1, spleen 11 to 1; p<0·0001). T-CXCR4 express a distinctive CD62LHI CD122HI BCL2HI early memory phenotype post recall vaccination with increased effector cytokine production. This enhanced T-stem memory marker expression was not observed after in-vitro CXCL12 exposure and was specifically lost upon transfer to mice lacking interleukin 15 receptor α. Interpretation Coupled with gene expression data, these results suggest that heightened antitumour efficacy is mediated by successful homing and competition for cell-extrinsic niche-related factors, in particular interleukin 15 presentation by CXCL12-abundant reticular cells. Preferential generation of enhanced early memory T cells with therapeutic superiority to effector-type cells currently used in investigational protocols has great relevance for the design of next-generation immunotherapies. Funding Bloodwise.
As is widely known, memes are commonly understood as catchy items on social media--often an image with text--that "goes viral" and gets shared/spread among many people online. However, this article ...discusses the older, original, and more expansive sense of "meme", introduced and elaborated upon by Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett, among others, that initially means something like a "unit of cultural information." One way rhetorically and philosophically these days to conceive of "it all" is as a massive ecology of memes. What I call "memetica" is another way of exploring a rhetoric and conception of a totalizing ecology of information. The term "information" generally is ambiguous and may cover a massive amount of multi- and cross-disciplinary conceptual territory involving, for example, "bits" in physics, "genes" in biology, and "signs" in human sciences, humanities, and arts. This article briefly introduces the origins, rhetoric, and concept of memes as an initial way into the topic of information--arguably one of the most powerful, dynamic concepts in contemporary existence. KEYWORDS: Memetica; Memetics; Memes; Ecology; Information; Signs
ABSTRACT This article suggests that analysis of ideographs is useful within specialized contexts. The authors analyze the emergence of the <new evangelization> as an ideograph in the Roman Catholic ...Church at international, national, and local levels – metropolitan Detroit in particular. With its remarkable plasticity and power, <new evangelization> rhetoric has come to galvanize the leadership of the Catholic Church even as varying or conflicting ideas are advanced under that rhetoric. The <new evangelization> operates as a specialized ideograph that remains primarily internal to the Catholic Church but has implications beyond it. The authors suggest a continued and extensive application for analyzing ideographs in culture.
This article discusses psychotherapists writing about their own dealings with mortality. It includes a review of select literature with a focus on psychotherapists writing about dealing with the idea ...of his or her own future death. Themes that emerged from interviews with two existentially oriented psychotherapists are elaborated. The article includes personal/professional reflections by the author, along with possible clinical applications for psychotherapists, health care providers or other caring people who deal with mortality issues.
This article addresses a new religious movement within one of the oldest ecclesiastical organizations in Christendom—the Catholic Church. The Catholic New Evangelization (NE) is an intra-ecclesial ...movement articulated and inspired by the late Pope John Paul II. Our analysis of this movement focuses on the emerging tensions between the contrasting individualist and communalist orientations of what we call "Vatican II Catholics" and "NE Catholics," respectively. We examine responses to NE rhetoric and its implementation in the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit's central services, the archdiocesan seminary, and two local Detroit parishes. At these sites, the NE rhetoric, especially in its emphasis on having a "personal relationship with Jesus," has intensified individual versus community tensions among Catholic professionals and lay leaders in the Detroit area.
Death and Documentaries Bennett-Carpenter, Benjamin
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature,
2021, 2020
Book Chapter
One of the starkest realities of the real world is death. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that death is a primary topic of documentaries, with scholarly attention regularly being devoted to ...connections between film and mortality, bringing to mind particular documentaries such as Nuit et brouillard, The Day After Trinity, Grizzly Man, The Act of Killing, and others. "Documentary" could likewise mean a variety of things, from documentary film and television to the instant footage on social media. Perhaps many think first of the medium and genre of documentary film/television, but "documentary" may also include all its forms. Rooted in documentary-as-writing, the documentary era at-large arguably fully emerged with the development of celluloid-based film in the form of still photography and later the "moving picture" or cinema, early examples being the work of the Lumière brothers.
Displays of faith, discussed in this paper as evangelization, are often associated with the verbal, not the non-verbal. In common perception, these displays tend to be related to Protestants more ...than Catholics. With a number of qualifications, we find, however, that the data indicate possible non-verbal forms of publicly displaying faith that appear more frequently among Catholics than Protestants. Our data lead us to suggest that distinctions persist between Catholics and Protestants in terms of emphases upon the material versus the cognitive and the visual versus the verbal. These findings could suggest less usual conceptions of public displays of faith than those found in the literature.
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