A Theological Assessment of the Covenant between Judas Maccabeus and Rome: an Intertextual Analysis of 1 Macc 8:17–20

What was the biblical interpretation of the Jews’ conduct in the final stage of the history of Israel in the context of the Law of Moses right before the times of the New Testament? The proposed exegesis of 1 Macc 8:17–20, which describes the covenant between Judas Maccabeus and the Roman republic, strives to discover the theological evaluation of the behavior of the revolt’s leader conducted by the author of the book. The intertextual method is particularly helpful in discovering the right understanding of the text. This method enables one to purposefully combine the expressions found in the consecutive verses with the same expressions found in the earlier biblical books. The theology that underlies these books will reveal the right sense of the studied passage of 1 Macc. It turns out that the theological evaluation is totally different than the political evaluation, the latter being solely taken into consideration in historical-literary analyses and commentaries. The biblical author has a restrained stance toward the political success of the Maccabees. He wants to reveal their conduct in the context of the Lord’s Law, which strongly proves that the First Book of Maccabees should belong to the canon of the inspired texts.

Research on the model of college students’ ideological and political evaluation based on data mining

In the whole educational system of our country, ideological and political education is an important component, and contains very rich content. With the development of the times, a variety of new information technology methods have been actively applied to the ideological and political practical teaching. At present, the group of college students is growing up with the rapid development of Internet. The “95 after generation” network “indigenous people” has undergone great changes in the evaluation body of Ideological and political education. Evaluation of Ideological and political education of the traditional value orientation gradually deconstructed, a new multi value orientation to penetrate into the body of all aspects of the behavior, must be established in accordance with the characteristics of the times subject evaluation system, the evaluation of “down to earth” and easy to be operated, rather than a mere formality. Based on the actual situation, this paper analyzes the close relationship between data mining technology and the evaluation of College Students’ Ideological and political education, and then focuses on the related problems of College Students’ Ideological and political evaluation model based on data

Political uncertainty moderates neural evaluation of incongruent policy positions

Uncertainty has been shown to impact political evaluation, yet the exact mechanisms by which uncertainty affects the minds of citizens remain unclear. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of uncertainty in political evaluation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Policy positions were either congruent or incongruent with candidates' political party affiliation and presented with varying levels of certainty. Neural activity was modelled as a function of uncertainty and incongruence. Analyses suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in affective and evaluative processing (anterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex) differed as a function of the interaction between uncertainty and incongruence, such that activation in these areas was greatest when information was both certain and incongruent, and uncertainty influenced processing differently as a function of the valence of the attached information. These findings suggest that individuals are attuned to uncertainty in the stated issue positions of politicians, and that the neural processing of this uncertainty is dependent on congruence of these positions with expectations based on political party identification. Implications for the study of emotion and politics and political cognition are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

MODERN ASPECT OF UKRAINIAN POPULISM: POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECT

The study of populism is actualized by the presence of a social order from interested political actors who use populism to implement their programs and in the struggle for power, focusing on the possibilities of change and reform. The relevance of the study is obvious given the lack of comprehensive study of populism in Ukraine, proper political evaluation of previous studies, rethinking some theses of individual researchers, and especially in connection with its actualization as one of the popular principles in action, behavior in modern political practice and our state. Today in Ukraine, the intensification and emergence of new manifestations of populism have become a sign of a general long-term failure on the path of technological modernization, in efforts to achieve rapid economic growth and in the fight against corruption. The tendency to the increasingly negative attitude of many citizens to complex and compromise procedures of democratic institutions, the desire for quick and simple solutions, intolerance of different views contain a double threat - to roll into anarchy or establish an authoritarian regime. Thus, populism can be considered an inevitable companion of political freedom and democracy. In some places, it is a force that promotes political participation and reform in the interests of many low-status social groups. By inclining to oppose the rights of the majority to the interests and rights of certain minorities, populism can be a threat to the rule of law and basic political and civil liberties. Wherever populist leaders gained power, it became authoritarian, accompanied by abuses and oppression (but not destruction) of the opposition.

Research on ideological and political evaluation model of university students based on data mining artificial intelligence technology

The teaching evaluation index system based on artificial intelligence not only evaluates and reflects the teaching situation of ideological and political theory courses in universities as a whole, but also provides specific feasible goals and direction guidance for the construction of ideological and political theory courses in universities. Based on data mining technology, this paper combines machine learning algorithms and dimensional analysis to study the ideological and political evaluation model of colleges and universities and builds an artificial intelligence teaching evaluation model based on actual needs. Moreover, this study transforms the model selection problem into a hybrid optimization algorithm optimization problem, and the algorithm attempts to find the optimal model from the model set. In addition, this study designs a control experiment to perform model performance analysis. The results of the study show that the performance of the model meets the expected goals and can be applied to practice.

Political Uncertainty Moderates Neural Evaluation of Incongruent Policy Positions

Uncertainty has been shown to impact political evaluation, yet the exact mechanisms by which uncertainty affects the minds of citizens remain unclear. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of uncertainty in political evaluation using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Policy positions were either congruent or incongruent with candidates’ political party affiliation and presented with varying levels of certainty. Neural activity was modeled as a function of uncertainty and incongruence. Analyses suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in affective and evaluative processing (anterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex) differed as a function of the interaction between uncertainty and incongruence, such that activation in these areas was greatest when information was both certain and incongruent and uncertainty influenced processing differently as a function of the valence of the attached information. These findings suggest that individuals are attuned to uncertainty in the stated issue positions of politicians, and that the neural processing of this uncertainty is dependent on congruence of these positions with expectations based on political party identification. Implications for the study of emotion and politics and political cognition are discussed.