Understanding Folk Religiosity in the Philippines

This paper argues for the appreciation of Filipino folk religiosity as part of cultivating authentic faith expressions among Filipinos. It presents historical, anthropological, sociocultural, and theological views on significant folk religious groups, traditions, and practices in the Philippines, including but not limited to the millenarian movements and popular Catholic feasts. Despite the varied influences and variegated Philippine culture, folk religiosity among Filipinos can be generalized as a syncretic blending of pre-colonial beliefs with the Catholic faith. As an academic and practicing Catholic, the researcher explores the folk religious elements present in the development of the millenarian movements, the unique faith expressions and influences behind folk Catholic feasts and celebrations, and probes deeper into the meaning of ordinary faith expressions. Coming from his own experiences and insights, he refers to previous scholarly works in discussing how spirituality or reverence to the sacred is inherently embedded in the folk religious ways, how the cultural Filipino traits manifest in the religious practices and vice versa, and how folk spirituality enables the expression of deep cultural and personal Christian faith experience. In conclusion, he maintains that millenarian movements are valid faith expressions that also celebrate independence and Filipino identity; traditional festivals and religious rites are the locals’ unique way of authentically expressing their faith, and; preserving folk religions and folk religiosity among Catholics is beneficial for engendering the growth of the faithful and the development of religion. A clear sense of folk religiosity is elemental in reappropriating religious dogmas and doctrines as the church and the faithful continuously study, dialogue, and fully experience life in the pursuit of approaching authenticity in faith, beliefs, and religions.

Untidying the Image

This chapter argues that discontinuous editing in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) produces an eccentric critique of bourgeois narrative- and myth-making. The film employs many of the startling collisions and confusions—the dépaysements—that characterize the director’s earlier surrealist films. Editing is used to create jarring juxtapositions in a montage that complicates, and does not produce, meaning. Criticism on the film, however, has often dismissed many of the achievements of this editing as untidiness, suggesting the director’s lack of care. The complicated articulated form that cannot be dismissed as untidiness has been routinely explained away through reference to Séverine, the central character, but accounts of her trauma depend on speculation and readings of the film’s source novel. This chapter argues that the form does not articulate on behalf of the inarticulate Séverine, and that Catherine Deneuve’s performance resists efforts to translate the character’s enigma into clear sense.

Carnivalized Adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray on Screen

Contributor Emine Akkülag Doğan investigates a series of filmic adaptations of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), to reveal the ways in which The Picture obtains its own agency and performs a clear sense of Bakhtinian carnival. Doğan settles on this view of the picture after breaking each of the adaptations she discusses from the normal view brought to adaptations of Wilde's book. Rather than fixating on perceived homosexuality in Wilde's novel, Doğan sees the adaptations that follow as instances of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque. Doğan justifies this shift through a sustained interest in the use of The Picture, which she assigns an unmistakable agency, across three adaptations, Albert Lewin’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray (2009), and John Logan’s Penny Dreadful (2014–16).

The English World View

Linking together the analysis in the previous three chapters, Chapter 5 delineates what we term the ‘English world view’. Our argument is that English attitudes towards England’s place in the union and Britain’s place in the world are underpinned by a distinctive understanding of what constitutes legitimate government. Devolution and European integration offend, in part at least, because they offend against it. There is a clear sense among English identifiers that they no longer live in a state that is interested in them or acts on their behalves. Low levels of efficacy help to explain this world view. We go on to demarcate more clearly those parts of England’s population that hold such views.

Applying Learning Analytics to Detect Sequences of Actions and Common Errors in a Geometry Game

Games have become one of the most popular activities across cultures and ages. There is ample evidence that supports the benefits of using games for learning and assessment. However, incorporating game activities as part of the curriculum in schools remains limited. Some of the barriers for broader adoption in classrooms is the lack of actionable assessment data, the fact that teachers often do not have a clear sense of how students are interacting with the game, and it is unclear if the gameplay is leading to productive learning. To address this gap, we seek to provide sequence and process mining metrics to teachers that are easily interpretable and actionable. More specifically, we build our work on top of Shadowspect, a three-dimensional geometry game that has been developed to measure geometry skills as well other cognitive and noncognitive skills. We use data from its implementation across schools in the U.S. to implement two sequence and process mining metrics in an interactive dashboard for teachers. The final objective is to facilitate that teachers can understand the sequence of actions and common errors of students using Shadowspect so they can better understand the process, make proper assessment, and conduct personalized interventions when appropriate.

Propositionalism

Propositionalism is the claim that all logical relations can be captured by propositional logic. It is usually regarded as obviously false, because propositional logic seems too weak to capture the rich logical structure of language. I show that there is a clear sense in which propositional logic can match first-order logic, by producing formalizations that (i) are valid iff their first-order counterparts are, and (ii) also respect grammatical form as the propositionalist construes it. I explain the real reason propositionalism fails, which is more subtle and more interesting.

Personal goal setting behavior and professional outlooks of academic library employees

Studies indicate correlations between personal goal-setting behaviors, performance and attitude in professional roles. An online study was developed and conducted in 2016 with academic library employees to better understand the goal-setting behavior of library employees in a particular context, via setting New Year’s resolutions, which is defined as "a decision to do something or to behave in a certain manner". Results show that nearly half (49.6 percent) of all respondents set New Year’s resolutions in 2016. Goals related to health and fitness topped the list of goals that were set, followed by occupational goals. Of those who felt unclear about their purpose in life, 57 percent felt they were somewhat to very likely able to accomplish their top goals. Comparatively, 82 percent of those who had a clear sense of purpose in life felt the same.

Tories and the Language of ‘Liberalism’ in the 1820s*

This article reconsiders the problem of ‘liberal Toryism’ in the 1820s not by looking at the government’s policies, but instead at the very ‘liberal’ language through which they were expressed. It argues that an existing domestic language of ‘liberality’—which was associated with religious toleration and with freer trade—was quite distinct from the new political movements on the Continent. Canning and Huskisson used this well-established, and generally well-esteemed, language to enhance and extend their appeal to ‘public opinion’. However, many Tories were coming to view this terminology with increased suspicion in the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1820. The article stresses the way that the Tory press popularised a negative typology of the ‘liberal system’ which ran together religious, economic and foreign affairs, and depicted Canning and Huskisson as ‘theorists’ content to ruin the moral fibre and economic health of the nation in quest of an abstract metaphysics. By 1826 ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ were increasingly seen as distinct positions that could not be bridged. Although Canning’s brief ministry was not able to bring about a reconfiguration of parties, the final years of decade saw a clear sense among many Tories that ‘liberalism’ was a powerful threat to traditional religious, political and economic practices.

Trust Management

Trust and identity are the fundamental issues to both the social as well as digital environments. An individual or a group require both of these identities to recognize, interact, and communicate in the present day social and digital worlds. In the social environment, the concept of trust and identity are different than in digital environments, but without a clear sense of identity, there can be a no ground for building the trust. Trust is helpful in supporting the identity to survive and to build relations with other identity in a particular environment. Trust management on the other hand provides a basis to establish the trust and ensure its continuity and longevity. This article compares the social and digital identities with respect to trust issues in the present-day digital scenario. Characteristics, identification process, and lifecycle of both the identities have been presented along with the threats. The work is very helpful in mapping the social scenario to the digital scenario.

Creating Revolutionary Justice

The first chapter provides the foundation for the rest of the book by charting the establishment of revolutionary justice. Although the Bolsheviks had a clear sense of the role of law in society and a clear desire to oversee legal reform, they did not have a coherent plan on exactly what they would do. Consequently, the new system emerged steadily through the year after October with the development of tribunals shaped by the Bolsheviks’ experiences of early trials and the intensifying civil war. This chapter examines the decrees that outlined the official role of tribunals, explores the experiences of the early trials, and looks at how tribunals started to operate in practice, both nationally and locally. It examines various reforms of the tribunal system and various types of tribunals, including press tribunals, provincial tribunals, and the Supreme Tribunal. From the start, tribunals were pitted against the secret police, the Cheka, and this too shaped how tribunals took shape. By late 1918, however, tribunals were firmly in place, with a structure that only changed minimally thereafter and a distinct role alongside the Cheka.