The Proper Study of Religion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Gill
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Extensive Range ◽  
Explosive Expansion ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Considerable Experience ◽  
Academic Study

The Proper Study of Religion charts an innovative course of development for the academic study of religion by engaging the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith (1938–2017), perhaps the field’s most influential and important scholar in the last several decades. Smith was the author’s teacher and mentor for fifty years. Their careers coincided with the explosive expansion of the study of religion in secular universities in the United States beginning in the mid-1960s. Building on Smith’s foundational legacy through creative encounters, the book explores an extensive range of engaging topics, including comparison as essential to academic technique and to human knowledge itself; the important role of experience, richly understood, to both academic studies of religion and to religions as lived; play, philosophically understood, as a core dynamic of Smith’s entire program; the relationship of academic document-based studies to the sensory-rich real world of religions; and self-moving as providing a biological and philosophical foundation on which to develop a proper academic study of religion with expansive potential. The foregrounding of human self-movement, new to the study of religion, is informed by the author’s considerable experience as a dancer and student of dancing in cultures around the world. The Proper Study of Religion honors the remarkable and challenging work of an unforgettable giant of a man while also offering critical assessments and innovative ideas in the effort to advance the remarkable legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-210
Author(s):  
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Electric Pulse ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Free Communication ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The telegraph wove its way across the ocean at a time when religion’s role in public life was commonplace. Since then, networks have become more vital to everyday life in easily perceptible ways while religion is considered a less overt part of so-called secular public culture in the United States. The epilogue proposes that the relationship of telegraphic networks to the networks that shape our world today is not causal or continuous but one of resonance in which some elements are amplified and some are damped. The protestant dreams for the telegraph in the nineteenth century—particularly the promise of global unity, the celebration of unprecedented speed and ubiquity, and the fantasy of friction-free communication—reverberate in dreams for the internet and social media today. In cries that the internet makes us all neighbors reverberates the electric pulse of the celebrations of the 1858 cable’s capacity to unite the world in Christian community. And yet, it is not a straight shot from then to now. Some elements have faded, particularly overt religious motifs in imaginaries of technology. The original power of public protestantism in the first network imaginaries continues to resonate today in the primacy of connection.

Ethics Committees and Consultation in Mental Health

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don C. Postema
Keyword(s):  
Ethics Education ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biomedical Ethics ◽  
Spiritual Beliefs ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Understanding the role of ethics committees in providing ethics consultations, ethics education, and ethics-related policies is the context for exploring the relationship of ethics, psychiatry, and religious and spiritual beliefs. After a brief history of biomedical ethics in the United States since the mid-20th century, this chapter presents several case studies that exemplify frequently encountered tensions in these relationships. The central contention is that respecting these beliefs is not equivalent to acquiescing to ethical claims based on them. Rigorous critical reflection and psychiatric insight, coupled with the values embedded in the social practices of healthcare, provide the grounds for evaluating the weight and bearing of religious and spiritual beliefs in ethically complex cases. This is one contribution that ethics committees can make at the intersection of psychiatry and religion.

The Laws of Thermodynamics Tell You What Is and What Is Not Possible

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avelino Corma ◽  
Adolfo Plasencia
Keyword(s):  
Molecular Design ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
The World ◽  
Laws Of Thermodynamics ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Research Chemist ◽  
Distinguished Research ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Avelino Corma, the distinguished research chemist explains why scientific discovery is difficult. He then explains how ‘molecular recognition’ is achieved in nanochemistry, how molecular design and creating nanoreactors with zeolites is carried out in the laboratory to trap nanoparticles and make them react selectively, and what is meant by the ‘sociology of nanoparticles’. The relationship of chemistry with brain function or genome evolution is also considered. He then reflects on the role of chemistry from ancient times, when the discovery and synthesis of ammonia enabled the development of agriculture and societies, to the world as we know it today. The reason why chemistry is a fundamental discipline for balancing our ‘energy basket’ is also discussed, particularly with regard to achieving sustainable development of our planet.

scholarly journals The Role of Child Support Insurance in Antipoverty Policy

1985 ◽  
Vol 479 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
IRWIN GARFINKEL
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Child Support ◽  
Current System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Single Parent ◽  
Single Parent Families ◽  
Welfare Dependence ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article describes existing child support practice in the United States, giving attention to the establishment and enforcement of parental child support obligations as well as to publicly provided child support benefits. Effects of the current system on alleviating poverty are assessed. The article addresses several questions. Should low-income absent parents be excused from the obligation to support their children? Can child support provide more generous benefits to single-parent families while minimizing incentives for the formation of single-parent families? Should children in single-parent families be aided by a welfare program? What are the problems with the current child support system? Finally, a proposal for a new child support insurance system is described, along with estimates of the costs of the system and its effects on poverty and welfare dependence. The relationship of estimated benefits to costs is promising enough to warrant trying out the new system in selected jurisdictions.

Mutuality, responsibility, and reciprocity in situations of marked inequality

Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (63) ◽  
pp. 51-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia R. Dominguez
Keyword(s):  
Agenda Setting ◽  
American Anthropological Association ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
Conference Attendance ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Paradoxes shape the relationship of the US anthropological community to its counterparts elsewhere and require new thinking about leadership that focuses on mutuality, responsibility, reciprocity, and pragmatism. Explored here are some key contradictions I see in ways of looking at the current, past, or plausible role of the US anthropological community and, in particular, the American Anthropological Association and its nearly forty Sections. Marked inequality exists among national and international anthropological organizations in size, finances, journal production, and conference attendance and often in perceived degree of importance, control, vibrancy, or agenda-setting. Yet this intervention argues for ways to mitigate that marked inequality, nonetheless, by refusing a binary us-them conceptualization and emphasizing creative pragmatism, mutuality, and responsibility. Unconventionally it even asks whether US anthropology should lead more in the world of anthropology than it currently does or lead less, and why both are worth exploring.

2 Treaties

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Curtis A
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The U.S

This chapter considers the status of treaties within the U.S. legal system. The focus is on international agreements concluded through the senatorial advice and consent process specified in Article II of the Constitution. The chapter describes that process, including the Senate’s ability to condition its consent through reservations and other qualifications. It also discusses the role of treaties as supreme law of the land, including the situations in which treaties will be considered “self-executing” and “non–self-executing,” as well as the later-in-time relationship of treaties to federal statutes. The chapter also discusses the relationship of treaties to constitutional limitations concerning the separation of powers and federalism, including the implications of the Supreme Court’s 1920 decision in Missouri v. Holland. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the United States terminates treaties.

scholarly journals Progressive Politics and Humanistic Psychology in the Trump/Coronavirus Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (6) ◽  
pp. 778-791
Author(s):  
Elliot Benjamin
Keyword(s):  
Self Care ◽  
The United States ◽  
Humanistic Psychology ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
The World ◽  
Care Practices ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In this article, the author discusses the relationship of progressive politics to humanistic psychology in the Trump/Coronavirus era. The harsh realities of personal fears and severe challenges to our mental health evoked by both the United States presidency of Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are described initially. Then, a number of self-care practices that are consistent with the basic values of humanistic psychology and that we can undertake to help us meet these harsh realities are illustrated. Next, the author describes his own personal engagement and self-care in the world of progressive politics and humanistic psychology in the context of the Resisting Trump movement. The article concludes with the author suggesting that perhaps it may be worthwhile for politically like-minded others to also consider finding ways of merging their progressive politics with humanistic psychology in order to enhance their self-care through these turbulent times in the Trump/Coronavirus era.

scholarly journals Integrated Review of the Association of Cytokines With Fibromyalgia and Fibromyalgia Core Symptoms

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Menzies ◽  
Debra E. Lyon
Keyword(s):  
Sleep Disturbances ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chronic Widespread Pain ◽  
Response Patterns ◽  
Cytokine Activation ◽  
Fatigue Syndrome ◽  
Core Symptoms ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Fibromyalgia (FMS) is a chronic widespread pain (CWP) and fatigue syndrome that affects three to six million adults in the United States. Core symptoms of FMS include pain, fatigue, and mood and sleep disturbances. To date, consensus has not been reached among researchers regarding the pathogenesis of FMS nor the specific role of cytokine activation on the neuroendocrine—immune response patterns in persons with FMS. The purpose of this article is to describe and synthesize the results of research studies focused on the relationship between cytokines and FMS and among cytokines and core symptoms of FMS. There is some support in the literature for relationships among FMS symptoms and cytokines; however, there are discrepant findings related to whether proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines are elevated or reduced in persons with FMS and whether their levels correlate with the core symptoms of this disorder. Although the use of cytokine biomarkers must be considered exploratory at this time due to the lack of consistent empirical findings, biobehavioral research focused on understanding the relationship of FMS with cytokines may lead to a better understanding of this complex syndrome. This knowledge may ultimately contribute to the development of interventions for symptom management that address not only the symptom manifestation but also a biological mediator of symptoms.

scholarly journals Language and Nature in Southern and Eastern Arabia

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Kaltham Al-Ghanim ◽  
Janet C E Watson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Local Languages

This paper examines the relationship between language and nature in southern and eastern Arabia. The work is the result of a two-year interdisciplinary network between the University of Leeds and Qatar University, with partners in the UK, Oman, Canada, the United States, and Russia. Our hypothesis is that local languages and ecosystems enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and that the demise of local ecosystems will adversely affect local languages. In this paper, we examine some of the language–nature effects in Qatar and Dhofar, southern Oman. Our regions differ in that Qatar has two seasons, summer and winter, and is predominantly arid, with occasional rain, while Dhofar together with al-Mahrah in eastern Yemen has four distinct seasons, receiving the monsoon rains between June and September, and, as a result, is home to hundreds of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Since the 1970s, in particular, both regions have experienced some of the most rapid socio-economic changes in the world. We ask what affect this socio-economic change has had on the language–nature relationship, and suggest that decoupling of the human–nature relationship as a result of socio-economic change is contributing in these regions to language attrition. We consider spatial terminology, traditional terminology for weather, the traditional measurement of time by narratives around key climatic events, and the role of stars in determining the weather and their role in folklore.

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