Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World A Global Introduction by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

New edition review: Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World. A Global Introduction. Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. Grand-Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2019. 684 p.; ISBN 978-0-8028-07465-8

Western Hegemony and Russia’s Eurasian Turn

According to some perspectives, it is difficult to imagine the collective West developing further relations with Russia beyond the regulatory and systemic – rather than the social – so long as their political systems remain divergent. At the same time, continued elements of Russian “Europeanness” raise fundamental questions about the future role and pre-eminence of liberal states – including Canada – in the contemporary international order, seeing as the Western-led liberal order appears to have failed to become synonymous with global order itself. As such, Russia remains a good case study for probing the extent to which a future world order must root itself in a monist frame in today's pluralistic world. This paper will seek to explore this question from a perspective rooted in the English School of international relations, with the aim of deriving conclusions regarding the liberal international order's ability to maintain its hegemonic position in global international society.

Semantic Dimensions of Sound Mass Music

We combine perceptual research and acoustic analysis to probe the messy, pluralistic world of musical semantics, focusing on sound mass music. Composers and scholars describe sound mass with many semantic associations. We designed an experiment to evaluate to what extent these associations are experienced by other listeners. Thirty-eight participants heard 40 excerpts of sound mass music and related contemporary genres and rated them along batteries of semantic scales. Participants also described their rating strategies for some categories. A combination of qualitative stimulus analyses, Cronbach’s alpha tests, and principal component analyses suggest that cross-domain mappings between semantic categories and musical properties are statistically coherent between participants, implying non-arbitrary relations. Some aspects of participants’ descriptions of their rating strategies appear to be reflected in their numerical ratings. We sought quantitative bases for these associations in the acoustic signals. After attempts to correlate semantic ratings with classical audio descriptors failed, we pursued a neuromimetic representation called spectrotemporal modulations (STMs), which explains much more of the variance in semantic ratings. This result suggests that semantic interpretations of music may involve qualities or attributes that are objectively present in the music, since computer simulation can use sound signals to partially reconstruct human semantic ratings.

The Body Speaks Society, School and Culture

How can we help all children, since birth, become effective communicators and interpreters? Why should nonverbal behaviour be of interest? The aim of this research is to reflect on the importance of every element of the analogical language, related to a target audience of preschool and school children aged between 0 and 8 years that is always little studied. The ability to communicate is an essential skill that has roots in early childhood; preschool children especially prefer the body as means of communication, from birth. Children learn to know the analogical language by observing the one of the parents and by imitating him. It is worth to underline the essential role of school that, beyond the family context, is the privileged environment for the development and learning of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. However, non-verbal languages are determined by cultures, that is, they are not equal for all regardless of cultures, but they change depending on cultures themselves; understand cultural foundations of the communication, in today’s multicultural and pluralistic world, is an essential help to handle an appropriate conversation.