he paper quantitatively analyses a sample of 300 Czech prayer books and other popular religious handwritten material (not including songbooks) from the 18th and 19th centuries. The author maintains that most of the material consisted of (partial) transcriptions of popular printed books and their widespread popularity was influenced by the growth of literacy and the individualization of piety. Their use was by no means limited to the milieu of the secret non-Catholics which were proscribed until 1781; indeed the majority of Catholic writings were not fully orthodox. The character and decoration of the writings in question were not directly related to the confessional nature of their originators and/or users; in fact the general rules of early modern popular culture played a much more important role and in many cases it is difficult to determine whether the source is catholic, protestant or sectarian. Prayer books fully reflected official forms of religion relatively late i.e. from the tum of the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of church domination over popular piety. However, even at this time the process did not result in absolutes: religious writings substituted the non-existence of baroque literature the printing of which was prohibited by the enlightened censorship prevalent at the time. Only a change in religious forms and new opportunities for the printing of pre-enlightenment books in the mid-19th century led to a decline in handwritten prayer books.
Western moral and political theorists have recently devoted considerable attention to the perceived victimisation of women by non-western cultures. In this paper, the author argues that conceiving injustice to poor women in poor countries primarily as a matter of their oppression by illiberal cultures presents an understanding of their situation that is crucially incomplete. This incomplete understanding distorts Western theorists’ comprehension of our moral relationship to women elsewhere in the world and so of our theoretical task. It also impoverishes our assumptions about the intercultural dialogue necessary to promote global justice for women., Alison M. Jaggar, and Anglické resumé
The study is a computer-assisted text analysis of corpora obtained from the web pages of nine volunteer, non-governmental organisations and interest groups. The analysis encompasses three areas of justice claims: trade unions (the relationship between employers and employees), feminism (the relationship between men and women), and human rights (the relationship between citizens, foreign nationals, and the state). The aim of the study, based on Foucaultian concepts, is to determine whether media communications are structured by the formative impact of the discourse of claim-making or justice. The main findings relate both to the content and the structure of textual production. First, the organisations examined do not make frequent use of normatively loaded words in their statements. The matter of justice is implicit in their texts. Second, the structure of the statements, represented by the thirty most frequently used words, exhibits a common pattern in all three areas studied. At the one end of the 'statement spectrum', there are words referring to the social situation of the contesting actors ('background'), while at the opposite end, words used in reference to their 'battlefield' (claim-making, bargaining and decision making) appear. This polar structure supports the hypothesis that the media communications of selected activist groups are influenced by the discourse of claim-making or justice.