Becoming to Belong: On the Relation between Infinite Consciousness and the Absolute

My essay focuses on the relation between consciousness and reality. I argue, following Georg Cantor, that consciousness is a potential infinite driven by care to invest itself in the world historically. As human beings develop an authentic sense of self they are driven by good faith to postulate an Absolute infinite, which, following Spinoza, we may call God. Thus God, as the Absolute infinite, constitutes our reality, which I characterize as implicate information explicating itself through time. To live authentically is to recognize the nature of God and commit to Him through faith. Faith means to understand one’s self as a potentially infinite consciousness attempting to authentically participate in, and understand, the Absolute of God.     

Innovations in the afterlife of the Cold War: German-language human geography

This commentary will coalesce around two main points. First, the articles by Markus Hesse on urban geography, by Annika Mattissek and Georg Glasze on recent developments in discourse-analytic approaches, and by Ulrich Best on the genealogy of radical–Marxist or critical German-language geography all support the contention that key features of Germanophone human geography still mark it out as a ‘Cold War’ human geography. As will become clear, this contention goes well beyond noting the marginality (until recently) of radical–Marxist positions (Belina, B., Best, U., & Naumann, M. (2009). Critical geography in Germany: From exclusion to inclusion via internationalization. Social Geography, 4, 47–58). Second, I will argue that although this configuration has had real costs, including both analytic and ‘civic’ deficits, it has also allowed the development of distinctive strengths and innovative emphases in human geographic research that can and should be engaged by other sub-communities in the international discourse.     

Ryan White CARE Act Title I Funding Priorities and Unmet Service Needs in Baltimore, Maryland

The analysis presented in this paper explores the similarities and differences between the services selected as priorities for funding by the Baltimore Ryan White CARE Act Title I Planning Council during the first 2 years of the program in this metropolitan area, and services perceived by HIV/AIDS service providers and people living with HIV/AIDS to be unmet needs. The data used for these analyses were collected as part of a study to assess the implementation and impact of the CARE Act legislation in the Baltimore eligible metropolitan area( EMS ). This project includes three interrelated components: (a) a case study of the legislatively mandated Planning Council, (b) a survey of providers representing HIV/AIDS service organizations, and (c) a qualitative field study of the perceptions of people living with HIV/AIDS about the service delivery system. Taken together, the data from these three sources describe the similarities and differences among these three groups involved in HIV/AIDS care in Baltimore, in terms of their perceptions of services needed by people living with HIV / AIDS. The conclusions drawn from this study can be used to strengthen needs assessments in Title I-EMAs throughout the United States.     

Arafat's legacy,Abbas's challenges

The death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004 left much more than a set of job vacancies: as ‘Mr Palestine’, Arafat had come to embody the Palestinian cause, but also, due to the nature of his rule, left his successor Mahmoud Abbas with a list of major political and economic challenges. Chief among these is the Palestine Authority's relations with Israel and the need to return quickly to the negotiating table. But linked to the peace process are the conflicting challenges from Abbas's various domestic contenders, including from a new ‘young guard’ in the territories, a predominantly ‘old guard’ in the diaspora, and from Islamist groups—not to mention the problems stemming from the dire state of the Palestinian economy. This article examines these issues as both a legacy of Yasser Arafat and as a set of interconnected problems that will complicate Abbas' political manoeuvring in the coming months and years.