This article introduces a language‐based tool for addressing the role of religion in violent conflicts. Value predicate analysis (VPA) is an easily transportable, relatively uncomplicated early warning tool for measuring the probable near‐future behavior of modest‐sized religious groups in settings of potential conflict. We show that it is possible to identify a range of nine types of probable group behavior toward other groups. This approach significantly refines current binary assessments of violent/not‐violent group conduct. The authors (1) provide a warrant for diagnosing religion‐group behavior through performative analysis; (2) present a theoretical overview of VPA; (3) summarize their research, data analysis, and field collection methods; (4) present field test results; and (5) conclude with recommendations for further research.

This paper demonstrates the statistical processing of data from a multicentric study. Seventy-seven patients with a suspicious, solid breast mass were included in a two-center study, using clinical breast examination, mammography, and ultrasound. The assessment was formalized using a uniform evaluation sheet. The prospective results of the examinations were compared with the histologic report. The degree of interdependence between an examiner's diagnosis and diagnostic criteria used was assessed using the kappa statistics. We found that despite standardized assessment, the criteria used for differential diagnosis were at least partially different. The criteria valid for diagnosis at both centers were whether a mass fitted well into the surrounding tissue or led to destruction or architectural distortion, whether it was fixed to the surrounding tissues, as assessed by sonopalpation maneuvers, and whether it borders were sharp or unsharp.

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Prayer after Augustine explores the place of prayer in the works of Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict, three figures critically important to the development of Latin medieval philosophical and theological thought. Part I offers a chronologically ordered reconstruction of Augustine’s understanding of prayer, tracing both theological reflections and practices from his early philosophical dialogues to his late anti-Pelagian polemical works. Part II investigates how Boethius in his Opuscula sacra and De consolatione Philosophiae and Benedict in his Regula take up Augustine’s understanding of prayer. For all three authors, the virtue of patience emerges as the means through which they struggle to confront the chasm between time and eternity, mortality and immortality, and humanity and divinity. At the heart of this book’s approach is an argument for a more complex understanding of religious and moral traditions that appreciates the subtleties with which late antique authors draw on their predecessors’ works and lives. By proposing a distinction between two levels of tradition—Augustinianism 1 and Augustinianism 2—this book argues for a distinction between the act of citing, referencing, and alluding to another author, and the use of general orientations and constellations of thought borrowed from another author. As Boethius and Benedict exemplify, the development of a religious tradition may oftentimes be less an affair of dialectical reasoning and more an expansion and refinement of devotional sensibilities.