Search results

For centuries, death has proved itself a well-spring of inspiration for artists and musicians. In particular, an artist's own experiences with death and bereavement often overflow into their creative process, giving birth to artworks which channel grief and embodied experience. Morning Heroes by the British composer Sir Arthur Bliss (1891–1975) is a paradigm of such praxis.

Morning Heroes (1930) was written in memory of Bliss's brother, Kennard, who was killed in action during the First World War. Using an anthology of texts, the work aims to enshrine a universal experience of war for both soldier and civilian and maintains its connection with the British War Requiem through its use of musico-funerary rhetoric. Bliss, who converted to Catholicism during the war, wrote several times in his later life about the spiritual nature of music, specifically its ability to heal and bring peace. It is significant, therefore, that Morning Heroes was to act as a catharsis for Bliss, sublimating his recurring nightmares of the war.

Adopting Douglas Davies' (2017) ‘words against death’ idea, this chapter considers Sir Arthur Bliss's Morning Heroes as ‘music against death’ through an examination of Bliss's use of text and music to craft a requiem in sound. It explores Bliss's use of death rhetoric and embodied experience to create a vehicle for grief and situates this process within the context of his own spiritual philosophies.

Scholars have begun calling for broader conceptualisations of moral disengagement processes that reflect the interaction of dispositional and situational antecedents to a predilection to morally disengage. The authors argue that collective leadership may be one such contingent antecedent. While researching leaders from the Gilded Age of American business history, the authors encountered a compelling historical case that facilitates theory elaboration within these intersecting domains. Interpreting evidence from the embittered leader dyad of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the authors show how leader egoism can permeate moral identity to promote symbolic moral self-regard and moral licensing, which augment a propensity to morally disengage. The authors use insights developed from our analysis to illustrate a process conceptualisation that reflects a dispositional and situational interaction as a precursor to moral disengagement and explains how collective leadership can function as a moral disengagement trigger/tool to reduce cognitive dissonance and support the cognitive, behavioural, and rhetorical processes utilised to justify unethical behaviour.

The history of Catholic Teacher Education is linked to the growth and development of Catholic schools that began in the early nineteenth century. The Catholic Church struggled to recruit enough certificated teachers and relied heavily on pupil teachers. This began to be resolved with the opening of Notre Dame College, Glasgow, in 1895 and St Margaret's College, Craiglockhart, in 1920. The two Colleges would merge into the national St Andrew's College in 1981. This national college would undertake a further merger with the University of Glasgow in 1999 to become part of the newly formed Faculty of Education, later School of Education. The School of Education continues to discharge the mission to prepare teachers for Catholic schools.

There is an emerging consensus within the literature on failed and failing states that state failure is contagious across borders. For its part, the literature on regionalisation claims that states within the same region tend to form clusters of security – or insecurity – so that geographical proximity is closely associated with inert security relationships. This article – along with the individual contributions in the volume it introduces – seeks to bridge these two literatures, which otherwise rarely talk to each other. The approach taken throughout the volume is largely qualitative and case-oriented, yet methodologically diverse, while the articles have a shared comparative ambition. This introductory article examines the debate on failing states and contextualises the volume's contributions within that debate. It then does the same in relation to the debate on regional security, before moving on to examine the role and impact of emerging regional responses to insecurity. When we examine recent state-building initiatives, the effectiveness of external actors seems limited, while existing power holders – and the conflicts between them – are at the centre in processes for building states. This calls for studying the practice of state-building, and for rooting policies in viable practices, even when the driving actors are not inherently benign. To a considerable degree, a state's strength and functionality are relational: the state can only be understood in relation to significant other states. Within regions, hegemonic states – and the strategies pursued by other states in their efforts to cooperate with, balance, or counter the hegemon – have major implications for security. Regional cooperation emerges through concrete collaboration to address commonly perceived challenges, at times as an unintended effect of a targeted initiative. Key actors – and the networks of which they form part – are often transnational, spanning the borders of several states. The behaviour of transnational actors, how they interface with the system of states and regions and the potential for their conversion into constructive political forces remain poorly understood. As a whole, these are findings that inspire an agenda for future research at the interface between the state and the region.