A participatory student workshop on climate change and sustainability: A comparative case study

Climate change is an environmental and existential issue of great urgency, especially for today’s youth. Until recently, the French national school curriculum had not given students much opportunity to learn about climate change (CC), its causes and repercussions, and mitigating measures to reach sustainable climate conditions. This article describes a six-week participatory, experiential workshop that brought together two groups of French students (one age 10 and the other age 16) to learn and teach each other about CC. Older students learned about the Conference of the Parties, COP21 Paris agreement and the IPCC climate findings and recommendations. Together the two groups developed greater understanding about CC, and proposed concrete environmental actions that they could undertake at home and in their local district to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We examine four products of their collaboration:● slide presentations that they created jointly, ● students’ written reflections on learning about sustainability and CC, ● the group’s list of proposed personal and family actions to decrease their carbon footprint, and ● notes from a meeting with local governmental officials. We draw inferences from these sources, and extract two recurrent themes in the students’ learning. These themes highlight a mismatch between youth’s sense of urgency to respond to the climate emergency and the older generation’s sluggish pace of addressing it. This article is a qualitative case study of a successful attempt to raise students’ awareness of sustainability and climatic issues, and to involve them in thinking collaboratively with others about the tasks ahead to address the problem of climate change from a local perspective.

Can politically oriented interventions in built heritage contribute to its authenticity? Erbil Citadel’s Babylonian Gate as a case study

Today, the concept of built heritage authenticity is a projection screen for conflicting demands and thus a ‘contested field’. Short-sighted readings started to drag the concept behind different ill-considered treatises, in which some heritage aspects loosely outweighed other aspects. Archaeological perspectives that tend to freeze heritage structures in time, such as those that are privileged upon other contemporary socio-cultural issues, while political takes also overshadowed other epistemological prospects, and vice versa. Repercussions have made inclusion of what is regarded as ‘inevitable changes’ within the built context problematic as to the re-interpretation and thus assessment of its authenticity. Despite their possible momentary threat to the latter, these changes may add to the cultural value of the context over time, granting new potential that may instead boost its authenticity. This paper investigates the potential continuity of Erbil Citadel’s Babylonian Gate as an inevitable change within the site’s built context by studying the Gate’s controversial political impacts on the context’s authenticity. This study affirms that authenticity is a transcendental value of an open-ended progressive nature, which cannot be reduced to a specific period or properties within the historical chronology of built heritage. Hence, authenticity should be approached as a meaningful existential issue, while revelation of its essence and thus its dimension entails precise scrutiny of both the tangibles and intangibles of the context. However, to be part of its authenticity, any change in the context should be adaptable and possibly incorporated as a new value within its cultural strata, thus enabling progressive support for site authenticity.

Finding Meaning Amidst COVID-19: An Existential Positive Psychology Model of Suffering

The global COVID-19 pandemic has created a crisis of suffering. We conceptualize suffering as a deeply existential issue that fundamentally changes people indelible ways and for which there are no easy solutions. To better understand its effects and how people can flourish in the midst of this crisis, we formally introduce and elaborate on an Existential Positive Psychology Model of Suffering (EPPMS) and apply that to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Our model has three core propositions: (a) suffering reveals existential concerns, (b) existential anxiety impairs one's ability to find meaning, and (c) cultivating meaning is the primary way to address suffering and allay existential anxiety, eventually leading to flourishing (and potentially growth). We apply this model to the COVID-19 pandemic, including how to build meaning, and discuss clinical implications.

Exploring the Theology of Selected Hymns: Towards an African Christian Theology of Mission

This paper explores the theological message embedded in the hymns: “The incarnate God appeared” and “Come Holy Spirit, come now”. Theological findings from these hymns are used to formulate an African Christian theology of mission based on thematic areas such as the trinitarian dimension of mission, the centrality of the cross in mission, mission as the core mandate of the Church and mission as incarnational agapaō. By this, the paper makes the message of the selected hymns accessible to the global Christian community, promotes the development of hymnody in the African church and at the same time provides a paradigm for Christian mission in the 21st century African society. This is a literature research that uses data from books, theses, journal articles, among others. The findings indicate that hymns constitute a great tool for the missionary enterprise of the church, therefore Christian hymns should be developed and promoted. It is recommended that, for Christian mission in Africa to be meaningful and relevant to Africans, it must endeavor to address the existential issue in African societies. Key Words: Africa, Hymns, Christology, Mission, Pneumatology, Theology

Need to Teach

This chapter examines interviews conducted with Muslim advocates whose work against domestic violence (DV) focuses on awareness and prevention. There is a shared story arch among many of the advocates that supports the primacy of an experienced and embodied ethic on non-abuse that is then translated into active work in the community and in a later step a search for religious discourse in order to further effective activism. Advocates often first recognized domestic abuse as wrong, then became critical of the ways in which Muslim communities address or do not address this issue, and responded by taking action and developing or finding religious arguments. It is in this last part of the story that religious authority, and with that status and authority in communities, became an existential issue for the effectiveness of anti-DV work. The chapter then reflects on the connection between feminist ideas about patriarchy and DV on the one hand and acceptance/rejection of such ideas in Muslim communities on the other.

Freedom and possession in the letters of Andrzej Bobkowski

For Bobkowski, to maintain personal freedom based on material independence achieved through his own work was a fundamental existential issue. Freedom and financial independence were: a declaration, a life’s motto and an economic programme. The writer’s concept was, eventually, reduced to a change of his status as a political exile to the situation of an economic migrant who also supported Poland’s freedom.

Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Migration und Integration als Themen theologischer Ethik

This contribution analyses how theological ethics deal with migration and integration as future topics of global relevance. It points out that it is prudent for society, theology and the churches to come to terms with these topics, and also shows their anthropological implications. Migration is considered an existential issue and visible manifestation of human vulnerability. Noting the abundance of motifs of migration in biblical texts, this essay suggests that in view of the social challenges ethics adopt a self-critical and modest attitude which respects individual life histories.

Heidegger’s Analysis of Dasein from the Perspective of Education

Having considered in the context of educational subject, Heidegger's «existential analytic of Dasein» indicates that the epistemological issue of explanation is changing to the existential issue of understanding in Heidegger's ontology. Therefore Heidegger considers «education» in the sense of existential relation as the ability of Dasein to reach own being in its genuineness and entirety, which Dasein always anticipates in understanding. On this basis Heidegger defines education as transcending being, which he names «openness», similarly to Scheler.

Nile river deal sets stage for Ethiopia mega dam

Subject The agreement between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan concerning the Grand Renaissance Dam. Significance On March 23 Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed an agreement on principles for the development of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile. In February all ten member states of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) met in Khartoum to mark 'Nile Day'. Egypt resumed its participation in the initiative, having frozen it in 2010. The latest agreement is significant because it reduces the scope for Egypt and Ethiopia to resort to escalatory and confrontational threats about the Blue Nile. It also boosts prospects for continued cooperation in the wider Nile Basin. Impacts Any future nationalistic rhetoric over the Nile waters from Egypt will not derail technical cooperation. However, Egypt's lack of cheap alternative sources of fresh water make the Nile an existential issue if flow is seriously compromised. Cooperation over use of the Nile is therefore set to proceed on a dam-by-dam basis, with impact studies necessary at every stage. Legal deadlocks over water rights will almost certainly continue.