Protestant Parishes in the Old World and the New: The Cases of Geneva and Boston

1979 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kingdon
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Single Unit ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Old World ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Institutional Church ◽  
Historical Theology

There can be little doubt that for centuries the most important single unit of the Christian church has been the parish. It is surely the most fundamental of the structures upon which the institutional church has been built. Only by studying closely the parish and what goes on within it can we gain a real appreciation of what religion has meant and continues to mean to the average Christian at the grass roots level. It is somewhat surprising, given the general spread of interest in social history among contemporary historians, that there has not been more study of the parish. One can understand the superior appeal of historical theology to the historian who concentrates on ideas, given the range and sophistication of the systems of thought created over the centuries by theologians, but we should not forget that these systems could not even be comprehended by the great majority of Christians. One can similarly understand the superior appeal of ecclesiastical politics to the historian who concentrates on events, given the high drama in which ecclesiastical leaders have often been engaged, but we should not assume that these events necessarily even came to the attention of average Christians. But for the historian of society who is interested in the religious experience of the average man, the parish must be a starting point.

scholarly journals THE TROUBLES WITH A LOWER CASE t: UNDERGRADUATES AND BELFAST'S DIFFICULT HISTORY

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 219-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean O'Connell
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Lower Case ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

scholarly journals Implementation of lean in health care environments: an update of systematic reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui M. Lima ◽  
José Dinis-Carvalho ◽  
Thiago A. Souza ◽  
Elisa Vieira ◽  
Bruno Gonçalves
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Strategic Objectives ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Lean Tools ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Production Organization

Purpose Even though the implementation of lean in health care environments is relatively recent, it has been receiving a lot of attention in recent years. Partly because of the fact that it is a recent field of practise and research and partly because the number of works developed in this field has grown rapidly, it is important to frequently update the perspectives on this field of investigation. Thus, this study aims to review the implementation of lean tools and techniques applied to hospital organizational areas in a five-year period, between 2014 and 2018, complementing some of the most relevant reviews already published. The most important criteria such as tools, methods and principles, hospital areas intervened, improvements and difficulties were assessed and quantified. Design/methodology/approach As starting point for this systematic literature review (SLR), a set of selected pre-existing review publications was used to support the current study and as the ground base for the expansion of the studies about lean health care. The current study contemplated 114 articles from a five-year period between 2014 and 2018. A subset of 58 of these articles was critically assessed to understand the application of lean tools and methods in different hospital areas. Findings The thorough analysis of selected articles show a lack of works in continuous improvement approaches when compared to the application of production organization methods, visual management and diagnosing and problem-solving tools. The reported improvement results demonstrate alignment with the principles and foundations of lean philosophy, but such results are presented in isolated initiatives and without robust evidence of long-term maintenance. Moreover, this study shows an evolution in the number of articles referring to lean implementation in hospital areas, but in its great majority, such articles report isolated implementations in different areas, not spreading those for the global organization. Thus, some of the main recommendations are the need to implement studies on complete flows of patients, drugs and materials, instead of isolated initiatives and strive to promote the cultural change of hospitals through structural changes, following new visions and strategic objectives, supported by real models of continuous structural and sustained improvement. Originality/value The current study develops a new perspective of the articles published under the thematic of lean health care, published in a recent period of five years, which are not completely covered by other works. Additionally, it explicitly applied, in an innovative way, an approach that used a set of previous reviews as the starting point for this SLR. In this way, it integrates approaches and categories from different SLRs, creating a framework of analysis that can be used by future researchers. Finally, it shows the most recent implementations of lean health care, exposing the current trends, improvements and also the main gaps.

What Made Pompeius Fight in 49 B.c.?

1959 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. G. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World Order ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
European History ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Old World ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

The Civil War of 49 B.c. is one of the most important wars of European history, if only for the fact that it ended an old world order and paved the way for a new one which was to endure in Europe for nearly two thousand years. It is also one of the most dramatic wars of history, perhaps the most truly ‘tragic’, in the Greek sense of the word, of them all—so ‘tragic’ that it has never found a poet to do it justice, or to bring its leading characters fairly upon the stage. It was certainly the most unnecessary of wars. It involved the whole of Western civilization, and yet no really deep-seated emotions or animosities, racial, national, social, or even individual, caused the conflagration. It was, in fact, nothing but a trial of strength, with no constructive objective in view, between two men, highly educated, humane, related by marriage, not unfriendly to one another, members of the same society and the same clubs, as it were, whose interests, even, need not have been incompatible. It is generally agreed that the great majority of the senatorial aristocracy very definitely did not want the war; and it seems quite clear that the small minority, of some twenty-two, who did were powerless to commence it or wage it without the will and leadership of Pompeius. It is also agreed that Caesar, while prepared to fight for his skin and his dignitas, and to that extent responsible, did not want war and made sincere efforts both to avoid it and to stop it.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

Rudolf Otto and the Concept of the Numinous

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Sarbacker
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
English Language ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Rudolf Otto ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Academic Study

The contemporary academic study of religion has its roots in conceptual and theoretical structures developed in the early to mid-20th century. A particularly important example of such a structure is the concept of the “numinous” developed by the theologian and comparativist Rudolf Otto (1869–1397) in his work, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (1923). Building on the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1772–1834), and Jakob Fries (1773–1843), Otto developed the concept of the numinous—a “category of value” and a “state of mind”—as a way to express what he viewed as the “non-rational” aspects of the holy or sacred that are foundational to religious experience in particular and the lived religious life in general. For Otto, the numinous can be understood to be the experience of a mysterious terror and awe (Mysterium tremendum et fascinans) and majesty (Majestas) in the presence of that which is “entirely other” (das ganz Andere) and thus incapable of being expressed directly through human language and other media. Otto conceives of the concept of the numinous as a derivative of the Latin numen, meaning “spirit,” etymologically derived from the concept of divine will and represented by a “nodding” of the head. Otto argues that understanding the numinous in a satisfactory way requires a scholar to draw upon their own experience of religious sentiments, given its non-discursive and direct nature; this becomes a point of contention among later secular scholars of religion. In later works, such as Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (1932), Otto gives numerous examples of the ways in which the concept of the numinous can be applied cross-culturally to traditions beyond Christianity, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Otto’s theories regarding the numinous have been extremely influential in the development of the academic study of religion in the 20th and 21st centuries, as evidenced by the impact they had upon scholars such as Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Ninian Smart, whose works were instrumental in the formation of religious studies as a discipline. Jung cites the concept of the numinous extensively with regard to his theories on the breakthrough of unconscious material into conscious awareness. Eliade’s work The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959) takes Otto’s concept of the numinous as a starting point in the development of its own theory; Eliade’s use of the category of the “sacred” might be considered derivative of Otto’s larger conception of the “holy” (das Heilige). Eliade’s work, like Otto’s, has been extensively criticized for postulating a sui generis nature of both the numinous and the sacred, which are viewed by Eliade as irreducible to other phenomena (historical, political, psychological, and so forth). Smart’s influential “dimensional analysis” theory and his scholarship on the topic of world religions is highly informed by his utilization of Otto’s theory of the numinous within the contexts of his cross-cultural reflections on religion and the development of his “two-pole” theory of religious experience. The concept of the numinous continues to be theorized about and applied in contemporary academic research in religious studies and utilized as part of a framework for understanding religion in university courses on world religions and other topics in the academic study of religion. In part through the work of Eliade, Smart, and other scholars—Otto included—who have found a popular readership, the term has been disseminated to such a degree as to find common usage in the English language and popular discourse.

The Church: Catholic and Ecumenical

1979 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-367
Author(s):  
Bernard J. Cooke
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Communal Experience ◽  
Shared Awareness ◽  
The Church

“It is probably safe to say that theology will utilize religious experience as a starting-point even more than it has done in the past two decades. This will mean that the development of ecclesiology will spring from careful reflection upon the communal experience of Christians, upon their shared awareness of what it means to be the church, upon the manifestations of the Spirit as prophetic and life-giving. This will not be an entirely new approach for ecclesiology; what will be new will be some of the experiences shared in tomorrow's church.”

Federal Aid to Archaeology in the Southeast, 1933-1942

1985 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
William G. Haag
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Federal Aid ◽  
Old World ◽  
Half Century ◽  
World Archaeology ◽  
Grass Roots

Interest in the prehistory of America is hardly more than two centuries old, but it is within the last half-century that our concern for preservation and salvage has bloomed. Prior to that time there were individual voices urging study and protection of archaeological sites, but no grass-roots sentiment for protection. This may be largely because most of our antecedents came from the Old World; New World archaeology concerned our past not at all.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

scholarly journals Religious experience and desire

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-373
Author(s):  
FIONA ELLIS
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Epistemic Value ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Starting Point

AbstractI offer a new approach to the old question of the epistemic value of religious experience. According to this approach, religious experience is a species of desire, desire in this context involving a kind of experience which is cognitive and unmediated. The account is inspired by Levinas and Heidegger, and it involves a conception of experience which is shared by a disjunctivist account of perception. Perceptual disjunctivism is my starting point, and it provides the ground for the ensuing discussion of desire. In the final section of the article I argue that the parallel between perceptual disjunctivism and a Levinasian conception of desire points to a further strength in the account of desire here presented, namely, by suggesting the possibility of a disjunctive style response to scepticism about religious experience.

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