Perspectives on the West in the Orthodox Church press of Kyiv diocese, 1900–1914

As Russian Orthodoxy in the late imperial period faced new pressures for freedom and democratization in society, the state, and the Church, Orthodox churchmen sometimes looked to the West – its culture and its religious confessions – as either cautionary tale or inspiration. This article examines how clergy and ecclesiastical academy scholars in the borderland diocese of Kyiv analyzed the West in the diocesan press. Their views of the West and of Russia helped to shape the Church’s varied responses to modern culture, political change, and calls for Church reform. Some contributors praised Western political freedom and law, but many experienced a fraught relationship with modernity. The Slavophile ideal of communal wholeness, which contrasted with Western impersonal legalism and atomization, and a reluctance to cede authority constrained the Orthodox response to modernity’s pressures. Retaining the Church’s role in society while addressing Western material vitality, modernist influences, and demands for freedom of conscience proved challenging. Some cautiously welcomed the Duma as a brake against bureaucracy but only as a consultative body, lest it curtail the tsar’s autocratic power. Rejecting the divisive individualism of Protestantism, they sought to soften Church hierarchy through conciliarism but stopped short of radically laicizing authority in the parish.     

Quantile Peer Effects of Immigrant Children at Primary Schools

We analyze how the share of immigrant children in the classroom affects the educational performance of native Dutch children in primary schools. Using quantile regressions, our paper studies these peer effects at different parts of the test score distribution of native children. After accounting for selectivity in the allocation of immigrant students across schools, we find no evidence for the existence of negative peer effects of immigrant children, either at the median or at other parts of the distribution.     

Spatially explicit survival modeling for small area cancer data

In this paper we propose a novel Bayesian statistical methodology for spatial survival data. Our methodology broadens the definition of the survival, density and hazard functions by explicitly modeling the spatial dependency using direct derivations of these functions and their marginals and conditionals. We also derive spatially dependent likelihood functions. Finally we examine the applications of these derivations with geographically augmented survival distributions in the context of the Louisiana Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results registry prostate cancer data.     

The Role of Scientific Expertise in COVID-19 Policy-making: Evidence from Four European Countries

Public Organization Review - Immense uncertainty and the need for drastic interventions cause politicians to rely heavily on scientific advice for underpinning or legitimating their COVID-19...