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This article builds on conversations that began here in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2019 on Jonathan Z. Smith’s legacy to the study of religion. Specifically, in this article I take up and elaborate on Heather Blair’s tentative proposal for thinking about religious studies as a kind of play. Beginning with Blair and engaging with the work of Sam Gill, Tyler Roberts, Robert Orsi, and others, I put forward a strong argument for adopting a playful approach to the study of religion. A programmatic alternative to reading religion against the grain and between the lines, a ludic approach to religious studies enables the scholar to engage with religion in ways that fruitfully combine at least provisional commitment to its rules with ironic disavowal, inviting the scholar to play between the incommensurate epistemologies of enchanted religious worlds, on the one hand, and the disenchanted modern academy, on the other. It is here, I argue, in this frictive space between these mutually exclusive and logically incompatible positions that religious studies finds its niche (or should), trafficking—and delighting—in the creative insights generated by the oscillation between fit and no-fit.

This experiential exercise uses feedback from peers to develop students’ classroom contributions and build a classroom climate that encourages active engaging and learning. It is best suited for courses that require active classroom participation, but works well in any format, traditional and online, and with any level of students. The activity takes a strengths-based approach, anchored in positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, and positive organizational scholarship, to guide peer feedback about classroom contributions. It asks students to provide appreciative and evaluative feedback to their teammates and discuss ways they can be more effective contributors in the classroom. This activity has several important learning objectives for students: (1) describe specific behaviors associated with effective contributions in the classroom, (2) gain awareness of how others view their classroom contributions, and (3) use appreciative and evaluative feedback to improve their contributions in the future.

Copyright © 2016 The North American Menopause Society. Objective: The objective of the present study was to compare the efficacy of two forms of menopausal hormone therapy in alleviating vasomotor symptoms, insomnia, and irritability in early postmenopausal women during 4 years. Methods: A total of 727 women, aged 42 to 58, within 3 years of their final menstrual period, were randomized to receive oral conjugated estrogens (o-CEE) 0.45 mg (n = 230) or transdermal estradiol (t-E2) 50 μg (n = 225; both with micronized progesterone 200 mg for 12 d each mo), or placebos (PBOs; n= 275). Menopausal symptoms were recorded at screening and at 6, 12, 24, 36, and 48 months postrandomization. Differences in proportions of women with symptoms at baseline and at each follow-up time point were compared by treatment arm using exact x2tests in an intent-to-treat analysis. Differences in treatment effect by race/ethnicity and body mass index were tested using generalized linear mixed effects modeling. Results: Moderate to severe hot flashes (from 44% at baseline to 28.3% for PBO, 7.4% for t-E2, and 4.2% for o-CEE) and night sweats (from 35% at baseline to 19% for PBO, 5.3% for t-E2, and 4.7% for o-CEE) were reduced significantly by 6 months in women randomized to either active hormone compared with PBO (P < 0.001 for both symptoms), with no significant differences between the active treatment arms. Insomnia and irritability decreased from baseline to 6 months postrandomization in all groups. There was an intermittent reduction in insomnia in both active treatment arms versus PBO, with o-CEE being more effective than PBO at 36 and 48 months (P =0.002 and 0.05) and t-E2being more effective than PBO at 48 months (P = 0.004). Neither hormone treatment significantly affected irritability compared with PBO. Symptom relief for active treatment versus PBO was not significantly modified by body mass index or race/ethnicity. Conclusions: Recently postmenopausal women had similar and substantial reductions in hot flashes and night sweats with lower-than-conventional doses of oral or transdermal estrogen. These reductions were sustained during 4 years. Insomnia was intermittently reduced compared with PBO for both hormone regimens.

This article confirms what others have argued about the bifurcated representation of Amerindian women in the Jesuit Relations (aggressive, insubordinate, prideful, and licentious on the one hand and docile, obedient, humble, and chaste, on the other) but extends the analysis of gendered discourse at work in the text to argue that the Relations persist in characterizing both types of Amerindian women as virile in excess of the limits of prescribed femininity. Attention to the stubborn persistence of the virile in Jesuit representations of Amerindian women suggests that the encounter between French Jesuit gender norms and the gendered ideals native to the indigenous populations of colonial Canada is best understood as an encounter between a range of competing discourses about gender and gestures toward a polyvalence of gendered discourses at play in colonial texts more generally.

Despite rising numbers of adolescents traveling abroad each year, the majority of study abroad research focuses on emerging adults. This study represents an effort to expand our understanding of the study abroad experience from the adolescent perspective. Qualitative data were drawn from interviews and focus groups with, and observations of, participants in the program. Results indicate preparing for and then sharing the experience with like-minded peers, coupled with exposure to a new culture and direct interaction with locals, facilitated a process of reflection and growth with both perceived short-term and potential long-term impacts.

Claude Martin s Vie de la Venerable Mere Marie de l'Incarnation claims to reproduce so faithfully Marie de l'Incarnation's spiritual autobiography that Claude's voice in the text is "but an echo" of his mother's own. A close reading, however, suggests that Claude so dominates the account of his mother's life that the Vie emerges as an instance of hagiography and apology that renders Marie the model of the Counter-Reformation saint, the paradigm of post-Tridentine Catholic devotion, and the obedient daughter of a patriarchal ecclesiastical hierarchy in an effort to draw the boundaries of female religious identity in early-modern New France.Keywords: authorship; Marie de l'Incarnation; hagiography, New France; UrsulinesON SEPTEMBER 27, 1654, Marie de rincamation wrote to her son, Claude Martin, from Quebec,The love and affection I have for you and the consolation I feel for the fact that you belong to God has made me get over myself to send you the writings that you have desired from me. I wrote them with repugnance and sent them with difficulty. But ... I have to tell you my intentions with regard to the above, namely, that I desire that these writings not be shared with or made known to anyone but you ... I beg you to write on the cover, Papers of conscience, so that no one touches them and glances at them without scruple ... If you happened to fall ill and were in danger of death, have them thrown into the fire.This letter, which "is short so that it makes more of an impression on you," accompanied the Relation of1654-Marie's spiritual autobiography and a source of urgency for Claude for at least eleven years.1 Composed at the behest of her spiritual director, the Relation of1654 traces Marie's spiritual development from a young and pretematurally pious girl in seventeenth-century Tours to the celebrated mystic and founder of the Ursuline order in colonial New France. When Marie finally revealed to her spiritual director her intention to send the Relation to Claude, he not only conceded but "even commanded me to do it."2 This, then, Marie did, but only on the condition of utmost confidentiality. "I trust," she continued in the letter of September 27, "that you will keep the fidelity for which I am asking and that after I granted you what you asked of me, you will not refuse me what I desire of you."3Claude published his mother's Relation in its entirety in 1677. Although he had originally intended to compose a biography of a more conventional sort, he was persuaded by "learned and pious people" to let his mother tell her own story, for to edit the text would have been to detract from the edifying simplicity of her prose and, indeed, "to correct the Holy Spirit who, after having made her do so many holy and heroic actions, guided her hand to put them down on paper."4 Nevertheless, Claude could not resist tinkering with his mother's work, appending a number of "additions" to the text, dividing the Relation into books and chapters, and editing Marie's prose-but only, he insists, in the interests of explaining, clarifying, and polishing-such that the resulting Vie de la Venerable Mere Marie de l'Incarnation amounts to the work of two authors. This great ser- vant of God, writes Claude in the preface to the Vie, "worked on it herself and her son put the finishing touches on it, but such that he speaks there as but an echo."5 At once inscribing and effacing himself from the Vie, Claude purports to give center stage to his mother's voice, casting himself in an exclusively supporting role as the "supplement that extends [Marie's voice] beyond its own activity even when it is no longer."6From the beginning, readers of the Vie de la Venerable Mere Marie de l'Incarnation seem to have seconded Claude's assessment of the insignificance of his editorial influence. Pierre Loisel, for example, doctor at the Sorbonne and chancellor of the diocese and University of Paris whose letter of approbation is appended to Vie, renders Claude the natural editor of the work of his motherwho not only gave him the milk of her breasts . …

The following paper makes use of Kohutian self-psychology as a hermeneutic for interpreting Marie de l'Incarnation and her perplexing decision to abandon her young son Claude in favor of religious life. The author argues that filtered through the lens of Kohutian self-psychology, Marie de l'Incarnation emerges as a pathological narcissist and the decision to abandon Claude symptomatic of a narcissistic grandiosity.

Local radiotherapy plus intratumoral syngeneic dendritic cell injection can mediate apoptosis/cell death and immunological tumor eradication in murine models. A novel method of coordinated intraprostatic, autologous dendritic cell injection together with radiation therapy was prospectively evaluated in five HLA-A2+ subjects with high-risk, localized prostate cancer, using androgen suppression, 45 Gy external beam radiation therapy in 25 fractions over 5 weeks, dendritic cell injections after fractions 5, 15 and 25 and then interstitial radioactive seed placement. Serial prostate biopsies before and during treatment showed increased apoptotic cells and parenchymal distribution of CD8+ cells. CD8+ T-cell responses to test peptides were assessed using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent spot IFN-γ production assay, demonstrating some prostate cancer-specific protein-derived peptides associated with increased titer. In conclusion, the technique was feasible and well-tolerated and specific immune responses were observable. Future trials could further test the utility of this approach and improve on temporal coordination of intratumoral dendritic cell introduction with particular timelines of therapy-induced apoptosis.

Writing to her son Claude from Quebec in 1644, Marie de l'Incarnation described the Canadian mission at Tadoussac, attesting to the 'very exemplary life (vie tres exemplaire)'and 'great fervour (grande ferveur)' of Christian converts who 'had been nourished in brutality (avoient este nourris dans la brutalite)'. The French, she went on, 'cried with joy to see wolves become lambs and beasts children of God (pleuroient de joye de voir des loups devenus agneaux et des bestes enfans de Dieu)'.1 Renderings of the indigenous Americans of New France as alternately and simultaneously 'wolves (loups)' - perfidious, insolent, barbarous - and 'lambs (agneaux)' - noble, submissive, docile - mark Marie de l'Incarnation's transatlantic correspondence as a rather conventional and hardly surprising instance of early modern colonial discourse.2 Dramatized in the Valladolid debate of 1550, articulated in the Jesuit Relations, typical to the rhetoric of American Puritans, this bifurcated image of the American sauvage proves a conspicuous - and well-studied - feature of early modern colonial texts.3There is, therefore, little to be gained at this stage in the postcolonial game from looking, again, at what Marie de l'Incarnation writes about the savage Other of seventeenth-century New France. If, however, we reorient the frame of analysis to consider not the content but the consequence of Marie's representations of the Amerindian, the work performed by such familiar tropes in the articulation of a distinctive brand of colonial identity comes into focus. In what follows, I argue that Homi Bhabha's model of ambivalent colonial discourse illuminates the ways in which Marie de l'Incarnation's epistolary corpus discursively produces a colonial identity that escapes the neat binaries of self and other. Taking as my body of evidence the extant letters sent by Marie from Quebec to her son Claude in France, I argue in particular that Bhabha's notions of stereotype, mimicry, and hybridity draw attention to the articulation of a colonial identity that takes shape not just in the interstices between colonizer and colonized but through the dynamic interplay of a range of colonial interests, as 'neither the one thing nor the other', 'split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference'.4Born in Tours in 1599 (just one year after the resolution of the French wars of religion and not quite thirty years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent), Marie de l'Incarnation (nee Guyart) migrated to the nascent colony of New France in 1639 to found the first Ursuline convent in the New World.5 There she would establish a school for the purpose of educating Native American girls, translate catechisms into indigenous languages, and serve some eighteen years as superior, negotiating with bishops, contracting with businessmen, and managing the affairs of her community of women. From New France, Marie would also carry on an extensive correspondence with her son, Claude, whom she had abandoned at the tender age of eleven to enter religious life. The letters exchanged between mother and son over the course of some thirty years (1640 to 1671) reveal much about the early history of New France, the spiritual itinerary of one of the most celebrated mystics of the seventeenth century, and - not least of all - an early modern anthropology of the savage Other.Like other early modern Europeans, Marie de l'Incarnation struggled to fit the native populations within a biblical worldview imported from France in which the place of the indigenous American was subject to debate. For Europeans both at home and abroad, the existence of New World natives gave rise to a series of questions: Were these curious people irrational beasts or human beings included within the sphere of biblical revelation? Did they represent an earlier stage in human development? A degenerate race? Were they, like the Europeans themselves, sons of Noah? …

Keeping up with changing technology is a constant in the healthcare environment. This article focuses on a creative approach to teaching large numbers of staff, a new patient controlled analgesia/epidural pain pump, in a short time frame with a limited number of educators. Implementation of competency checklists was utilized to verify that the learners understood the concepts and were able to apply the new skills learned. The success of this program is attributed to the active involvement of participants in a festive environment.

We report a single center phase II trial of sequential vaccination followed with vaccine plus interleukin-2 (IL-2). Vaccination consisted of autologous cells cultured from primary tumor or resected metastasis, transduced to express B7.1 surface molecule and then irradiated. The vaccine would hypothetically costimulate tumor-reactive T cells before IL-2 exposure. Treatment plan was 3 subcutaneous vaccine injections at 4-week intervals and subcutaneous IL-2 treatment for 6 weeks starting at week 7. Sixty-six patients enrolled, of whom 39 received at least 1 vaccine; most observed toxicity was attributable to IL-2 not vaccine; best responses were 3% pathologic complete response, 5% partial response, 64% stable disease, and 28% disease progression. Median survival was 21.8 months (95% confidence interval 17.8 to 29.6). Significant postvaccination increases in IFN-gamma responses to autologous tumor were observed in 2/26 cases. Eighty-one percent of posttreatment subdermal delayed-type hypersensitivity tests (using nontransduced, irradiated autologous tumor cells) had biopsies demonstrating injection site lymphocytic infiltration. Post hoc comparison of the median survival of subjects whose biopsies had lymphocytic infiltration appears longer than in the 19% noninfiltrated (28.4 vs. 17.8 mo, P=0.045, two-sided log-rank test). The single arm design precludes conclusive comparison of objective response rates (not different here) or median survival (longer here) versus those of historical series using similar IL-2 schedules alone. Better outcomes could be logically associated to vaccine response (detectable lymphocytic infiltrates) or to random events that a single arm study design cannot address. This vaccine approach may merit further clinical development.

Abnormal dendritic cell differentiation and accumulation of immature myeloid suppressor cells (ImC) is one of the major mechanisms of tumor escape. We tested the possibility of pharmacologic regulation of myeloid cell differentiation using all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA). Eighteen patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma were treated with ATRA followed by s.c. interleukin 2 (IL-2). Eight healthy individuals comprised a control group. As expected, the cancer patients had substantially elevated levels of ImC. We observed that ATRA dramatically reduced the number of ImC. This effect was observed only in patients with high plasma concentration of ATRA (>150 ng/mL), but not in patients with lower ATRA concentrations (