Walters State Community College

Summary Christians often presume that immediate and universally extensive divine governance of human behavior is incompatible with human agency and responsibility. Against this presumption, Kathryn Tanner argues for a distinctive metalinguistic paradigm whereby Christians can coherently speak of God’s transcendence in such a way that divine action could never in principle ‘compete’ with human action. Thus, it is said, God can comprehensively will each human action without thereby compromising significant human freedom and corresponding moral responsibility. In this article, it is argued that Tanner’s non-competitivist paradigm fails to circumvent a theological version of the ‘direct argument’ for the incompatibility between human moral responsibility and causal determinism.

Before her recent retirement, Elizabeth Dobbins was a professor of nursing at Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tenn. The author has disclosed no financial relationships related to this article.

This chapter presents a discussion of the START model, which has been internationally recognized as a useful syllabi-tracking system that can be applied to online and on-ground teaching. START, an acronym for “(S)yllabus Analysis (T)racking System Covering Objectives (A)ssessment Methods (R)esearch Component Inclusion, (T)esting Through Research,” is presented in this chapter as a unique method for educators to heighten current academic standards by placing a priority on multidisciplinary approaches. Through this chapter, the authors sought to provide readers with an understanding of the application of the START model in the twenty-first century. Additionally, to further strengthen the presented information, the authors included reflections on past experiences in the application of the model at a university level.

In a recent paper, Seth Shabo sets out to show that logical renderings of the Direct Argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and causal determinism, an influential incompatibilist argument for this conclusion, fail. In particular, Shabo argues that the Direct Argument—cashed out in logical terms—fails because it rests on an invalid rule of inference, Rule B. Shabo argues that Rule B, rendered logically, is subject to a counterexample that he constructs. If he’s right about this, it follows that logical versions of the Direct Argument fail. In the paper, I argue that Shabo’s alleged counterexample to Rule B is unsuccessful. Since Shabo’s counterexample fails, I conclude that he has failed successfully to undermine logical versions of the Direct Argument.

The concept of wellness provides a positive view of life development that can support psychological support and counseling. There is little in the literature about wellness and seniors, especially women. This study describes one senior woman’s wellness across the life span by addressing two research questions: (a) What are the experiences of one woman’s wellness across the life span as analyzed through the lens of the Indivisible Self (Myers & Sweeney, 2004, 2005) model of wellness; and (b) What experiences does one woman describe related to the model’s second order factors: the Creative Self; the Coping Self; the Social Self; the Essential Self; and the Physical Self? We used an oral history method to gather the narrative and analyzed her narrative using the Indivisible Self model of wellness. Findings include a descriptive picture of wellness for this woman as it relates to the Second Order factors of the Indivisible Self model.

The patient records of 160 older adults who died in a community hospital were reviewed to determine the use of advance directives and evaluate their effect on the care decisions made by health care providers. Findings confirmed that the use of advance directives has not changed during the past 15 years. The documents did not seem to influence health care providers' decisions about the hospital unit in which patients were treated, the use of life-sustaining treatments, or the initiation of comfort care plans. The presence of a living will seemed to influence health care providers' decisions to write do-not-resuscitate orders more often and to use cardiopulmonary resuscitation less often for patients possessing the document. Recommendations for future research include implementation and evaluation of educational initiatives for both health care consumers and health care providers.

The purpose of this study was to determine if selected students whose homes were called, using a computer-assisted telecommunications device, on days when they were not in school would show an expected difference in school attendance, compared with selected students whose homes were not called. We also compared students in the control group with students in experimental groups by race, sex, and socioeconomic level. The results of the year-long study revealed that students whose homes were called on days when they were absent, using the computer-assisted telecommunications device, showed higher subsequent attendance rates than did students whose homes were not called.