scholarly journals Folk Theories of Religious Identity- Evidence from Palestine and the United States

Author(s):  
Mostafa Salari Rad ◽  
Jeremy Ginges

How do people understand what makes a person Muslim, Hindu, or Christian? Social categories are sometimes viewed as natural kinds, where category membership is believed to derive from an underlying biological essence. Current theorizing posits this tendency to be motivated by contextual features such as saliency of categories, or quality of intergroup relations. Accordingly, along with categories such as ethnicity or gender, religious categories may be susceptible to essentialism in contexts of violent conflict along religious lines. An alternative perspective, drawn from the literature that links the spread of aspects of religious cognition to the growth of large-scale cooperative societies, is that religious category membership could be perceived as especially transformable by context and practice. We investigated essentialist reasoning about religious categories heavily implicated in intergroup conflicts in two populations: Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, and citizens of the United States. In four experiments (N = 2578), we employed variations of the adoption task to compare how people reason about membership in religious and national categories. Results show that people are less likely to believe that one’s religion (compared to one’s nationality) is passed on through some type of biological mechanism and so is “fixed at birth”. Thus, religious categories seem particularly resistant to essentialist reasoning, even when the social context appears to motivate such reasoning. Implications for understanding essentialist reasoning and the role of religion in intergroup conflict are discussed.

1966 ◽  
Vol 05 (02) ◽  
pp. 67-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. I. Lourie ◽  
W. Haenszeland

Quality control of data collected in the United States by the Cancer End Results Program utilizing punchcards prepared by participating registries in accordance with a Uniform Punchcard Code is discussed. Existing arrangements decentralize responsibility for editing and related data processing to the local registries with centralization of tabulating and statistical services in the End Results Section, National Cancer Institute. The most recent deck of punchcards represented over 600,000 cancer patients; approximately 50,000 newly diagnosed cases are added annually.Mechanical editing and inspection of punchcards and field audits are the principal tools for quality control. Mechanical editing of the punchcards includes testing for blank entries and detection of in-admissable or inconsistent codes. Highly improbable codes are subjected to special scrutiny. Field audits include the drawing of a 1-10 percent random sample of punchcards submitted by a registry; the charts are .then reabstracted and recoded by a NCI staff member and differences between the punchcard and the results of independent review are noted.


Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.


Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber

This chapter presents the historical and conceptual background to the book’s argument. It starts with a history of Ghana, followed by an analysis of the trends that have led to high levels of out-migration, and then to a description of Ghanaian populations in Chicago. Next, it addresses the concept of social trust in general and personal trust in particular, developing a theory of personal trust as an imaginative and symbolic activity, and analyzing interracial relations through the lens of racialized distrust. It concludes by describing the role of religion in the integration of immigrant groups into the United States and the particular religious frameworks that characterize Charismatic Evangelical Christianity in Ghana.


Author(s):  
Katherine Dugan

This book is an ethnography of millennial-generation Catholic missionaries. The Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) began hiring young adults to evangelize students on college campuses in 1998. Since then, FOCUS missionaries have developed a style of Catholic evangelization that navigates between strict and savvy interpretations of Catholic teaching in contemporary US youth culture. The Catholicism that FOCUS missionaries embrace and promote grew up with them and amid their middle-class American norms—missionaries own iPhones, drink craft beer, and create March Madness brackets. Born in the 1990s, millennial missionaries in their skinny jeans and devotional tattoos, large-framed glasses and scapulars embody an attractive style of Catholicism. They love saints and have memorized the “Tantum Ergo,” are fluent in college-student slang, but reject hook-up culture in favor of gender essentialism dictated by papal teachings. Missionaries rely on their social capital to make Catholicism cool. Many of their peers have been characterized as defectors from religious institutions. Yet, underneath the rise of “nones” is a story of increased religious piety. This book studies religion in the United States from the perspective of proud Catholic millennials. As they navigate their Catholic and US identities, these missionaries propose Catholicism as uniquely able to overcome perceived threats of secularism, relativism, and modernity. How, why, and with what implications is this Catholicism enacted? These questions, which point to power struggles between US culture and religious identity, drive this book. Through their prayers and evangelization efforts, missionaries are reshaping Catholic identity and shifting the religious landscape of the United States.


Author(s):  
Anne Nassauer

This book provides an account of how and why routine interactions break down and how such situational breakdowns lead to protest violence and other types of surprising social outcomes. It takes a close-up look at the dynamic processes of how situations unfold and compares their role to that of motivations, strategies, and other contextual factors. The book discusses factors that can draw us into violent situations and describes how and why we make uncommon individual and collective decisions. Covering different types of surprise outcomes from protest marches and uprisings turning violent to robbers failing to rob a store at gunpoint, it shows how unfolding situations can override our motivations and strategies and how emotions and culture, as well as rational thinking, still play a part in these events. The first chapters study protest violence in Germany and the United States from 1960 until 2010, taking a detailed look at what happens between the start of a protest and the eruption of violence or its peaceful conclusion. They compare the impact of such dynamics to the role of police strategies and culture, protesters’ claims and violent motivations, the black bloc and agents provocateurs. The analysis shows how violence is triggered, what determines its intensity, and which measures can avoid its outbreak. The book explores whether we find similar situational patterns leading to surprising outcomes in other types of small- and large-scale events: uprisings turning violent, such as Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, and failed armed store robberies.


Author(s):  
Richard Gowan

During Ban Ki-moon’s tenure, the Security Council was shaken by P5 divisions over Kosovo, Georgia, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Yet it also continued to mandate and sustain large-scale peacekeeping operations in Africa, placing major burdens on the UN Secretariat. The chapter will argue that Ban initially took a cautious approach to controversies with the Council, and earned a reputation for excessive passivity in the face of crisis and deference to the United States. The second half of the chapter suggests that Ban shifted to a more activist pressure as his tenure went on, pressing the Council to act in cases including Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and Syria. The chapter will argue that Ban had only a marginal impact on Council decision-making, even though he made a creditable effort to speak truth to power over cases such as the Central African Republic (CAR), challenging Council members to live up to their responsibilities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S563-S563
Author(s):  
Kenneth A Valles ◽  
Lewis R Roberts

Abstract Background Infection by hepatitis B and C viruses causes inflammation of the liver and can lead to cirrhosis, liver failure, and hepatocellular carcinoma. The WHO’s ambition to eliminate viral hepatitis by 2030 requires strategies specific to the dynamic disease profiles each nation faces. Large-scale human movement from high-prevalence nations to the United States and Canada have altered the disease landscape, likely warranting adjustments to present elimination approaches. However, the nature and magnitude of the new disease burden remains unknown. This study aims to generate a modeled estimate of recent HBV and HCV prevalence changes to the United States and Canada due to migration. Methods Total migrant populations from 2010-2019 were obtained from United Nations Migrant Stock database. Country-of-origin HBV and HCV prevalences were obtained for the select 40 country-of-origin nations from the Polaris Observatory and systematic reviews. A standard pivot table was used to evaluate the disease contribution from and to each nation. Disease progression estimates were generated using the American Association for the Study of the Liver guidelines and outcome data. Results Between 2010 and 2019, 7,676,937 documented migrants arrived in US and Canada from the selected high-volume nations. Primary migrant source regions were East Asia and Latin America. Combined, an estimated 878,995 migrants were HBV positive, and 226,428 HCV positive. The majority of both migrants (6,477,506) and new viral hepatitis cases (HBV=840,315 and HCV=215,359) were found in the United States. The largest source of HBV cases stemmed from the Philippines, and HCV cases from El Salvador. Conclusion Massive human movement has significantly changed HBV and HCV disease burdens in both the US and Canada over the past decade and the long-term outcomes of cirrhosis and HCC are also expected to increase. These increases are likely to disproportionally impact individuals of the migrant and refugee communities and screening and treatment programs must be strategically adjusted in order to reduce morbidity, mortality, and healthcare expenses. Disclosures All Authors: No reported disclosures


2021 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 102613
Author(s):  
Darius Scott ◽  
Nastacia M. Pereira ◽  
Sayward E. Harrison ◽  
Meagan Zarwell ◽  
Kamla Sanasi-Bhola ◽  
...  

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