scholarly journals Introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Hans Schelkshorn ◽  
Herman Westerink
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Islamic Countries ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Scientific Positivism

Abstract The emergence of a scholarly and popular interest in religious experience, spirituality and mysticism around 1900 plays a crucial role in the further transformations in religion in the twentieth century and in contemporary Western and non-Western societies. This volume contains philosophical reflections on the emergence of these new constellations, discourses and practices. The ‘rediscovery’ of the various spiritual and mystical sources and traditions, and the turn towards the individual’s religious experiences, can be situated against the background of a growing critique of global scientific positivism and the rise of secular (atheistic, Marxist) philosophies. The turn to spirituality and mysticism is associated with political projects of anti-imperialist emancipation in for example, India, the Islamic countries, Russia and Latin-America. Through philosophical inquiries into key authors such as Bergson, Blondel, James, Heidegger, Bremond, Weil, Solov’ëv, Rodó, Iqbal and Vivekenanda, this volume presents a comprehensive perspective on the fundamental issues and discussions that inspired the turn to spirituality in a modern era of secular reason.

Religious Disagreement, Religious Experience, and the Evil God Hypothesis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirk Lougheed
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Believer ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Peer Disagreement ◽  
Epistemic Peer ◽  
Religious Disagreement

Conciliationism is the view that says when an agent who believes P becomes aware of an epistemic peer who believes not-P, that she encounters a (partial) defeater for her belief that P. Strong versions of conciliationism pose a sceptical threat to many, if not most, religious beliefs since religion is rife with peer disagreement. Elsewhere (Removed) I argue that one way for a religious believer to avoid sceptical challenges posed by strong conciliationism is by appealing to the evidential import of religious experience. Not only can religious experience be used to establish a relevant evidential asymmetry between disagreeing parties, but reliable reports of such experiences also start to put pressure on the religious sceptic to conciliate toward her religious opponent. Recently, however, Asha Lancaster-Thomas poses a highly innovative challenge to the evidential import of religious experience. Namely, she argues that an evil God is just as likely to explain negative religious experiences as a good God is able to explain positive religious experiences. In light of this, religious believers need to explain why a good God exists instead of an evil God. I respond to Lancaster-Thomas by suggesting that, at least within the context of religious experience, (i) that the evil God hypothesis is only a challenge to certain versions of theism; and (ii) that the existence of an evil God and good God are compossible.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

Testing the Causal Mechanisms in Additional Cases

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
Liberal Democratic Party ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Relative Autonomy ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Liberal Democratic

Case studies of Indonesia and Japan illustrate that party-system stability in patronage democracies is deeply affected by the relative autonomy of political brokers. Over the course of a decade, a series of decentralizing reforms in Indonesia weakened patronage-based parties hold on power, with the 2014 election ultimately being a contest between two rival populists: Joko Widodo and Subianto Prabowo. Although Japan was a patronage democracy throughout the twentieth century, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remained robust to outsider appeals even in the context of economic and corruption crises. However, reforms in the 1990s weakened the hold of central factional leaders over individual members of the LDP and their patronage machines. This was instrumental to populist Junichiro Koizumi’s winning of the presidency of the LDP and ultimately the prime ministership of Japan. This chapter also reexamines canonical cases of populism in Latin America.

The passive voice in scientific writing through the ages: A diachronic study

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-489
Author(s):  
Alvin Ping Leong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Science Journal ◽  
Passive Voice ◽  
Composing Process ◽  
Diachronic Study ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Current Shift ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractDiachronic studies on scientific writing have indicated an increase in the use of passives from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. With the current shift in focus towards making scientific writing more accessible, there is less certainty on the extent of passive use in the modern era. Although the use of the active voice is presently encouraged, the findings from available studies are mixed. There are also few diachronic studies involving recent articles. This present study investigated the trend in passive use from the nineteenth century to the present day using 80 articles from a multidisciplinary science journal covering four time periods (1880, 1930, 1980, and 2017). The study found that the extent of passive use was stable from 1880 to 1980 (occurring in about 29–36% of all clauses) but declined in 2017 (averaging below 25%). The study also found a decline in the use of finite passives to describe methodological actions and a corresponding increase in the use of first-person pronouns in the 2017 articles. Further work involving a larger corpus and an understanding of writer decisions in the composing process is needed.

Elites, Elite Settlements, and Revolutionary Movements in Latin America, 1950–1980: Introduction

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-574
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Latin American Politics ◽  
Revolutionary Movements

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).

Unrevolutionary Mexico

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Gillingham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
Cultural Control ◽  
Partido Revolucionario Institucional ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
Entry Points ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
New Generation

Unrevolutionary Mexico addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) turned into a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience. While soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in modern Mexico the civilians of a single party moved punctiliously in and out of office for seventy-one years. The book uses the histories of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as entry points to explore the origins and consolidation of this unique authoritarian state on both provincial and national levels. An empirically rich reconstruction of over sixty years of modernization and revolution (1880-1945) revises prevailing ideas of a pacified Mexico and establishes the 1940s as a decade of faltering governments and enduring violence. The book then assesses the pivotal changes of the mid-twentieth century, when a new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats and businessmen joined with surviving revolutionaries to form the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which held uninterrupted power until 2000. Thematic chapters analyse elections, development, corruption and high and low culture in the period. The central role of military and private violence is explored in two further chapters that measure the weight of hidden coercion in keeping the party in power. In conclusion, the combination of provincial and national histories reveals Mexico as a place where soldiers prevented coups, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was concealed but decisive, and ambitious cultural control co-existed with a critical press and a disbelieving public. In conclusion, the book demonstrates how this strange dictatorship thrived not despite but because of its contradictions.

scholarly journals Latin American Universities: Stuck in the Twentieth Century

2017 ◽  
pp. 26-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Knobel ◽  
Andrés Bernasconi
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Education Sector ◽  
American Universities ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Flagship Universities ◽  
Latin American Universities

The higher education sector in Latin America has fallen short of its promise of spearheading cultural, social, and economic progress for the region. As higher education changes to meet the challenges on the new century, the few flagship universities of Latin America are called upon to lead. However, these universities face both internal and external obstacles that hinder their full modernization, threatening their leadership.

The State and the Electric-Power Industry in Mexico, 1895–1965

1965 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel S. Wionczek
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Electric Power ◽  
Electric Power Industry ◽  
Power Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Basic Trend ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
State Participation

Increased state participation in the economy has been a basic trend in twentieth-century Latin America. In the process, however, once-protected private interests may fall—as in this case-study from Mexico.

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