The increasing significance and visibility of relationships between religion and public arenas and institutions following the fall of communism in Europe provide the core focus of this fascinating book. Leading international scholars consider the religious and political role of Christian Orthodoxy in the Russian Federation, Romania, Georgia and Ukraine alongside the revival of old, indigenous religions, often referred to as 'shamanistic' and look at how, despite Islam’s long history and many adherents in the south, Islamophobic attitudes have increasingly been added to traditional anti-Semitic, anti-Western or anti-liberal elements of Russian nationalism. Contrasts between the church’s position in the post-communist nation building process of secular Estonia with its role in predominantly Catholic Poland are also explored. Religion, Politics and Nation-Building in Post-Communist Countries gives a broad overview of the political importance of religion in the Post-Soviet space but its interest and relevance extends far beyond the geographical focus, providing examples of the challenges in the spheres of public, religious and social policy for all transitional countries.
Today about 85 per cent of the world population of Muslims live in areas outside the Arab world, and due to population growth, missionary endeavours and migration, the number of Muslims in these areas is rising rapidly. This volume presents the spread and character of Islam in many non-Arab countries, focusing particularly on the contemporary situation. The book deals with the great variety and complexity that characterize Islam outside the Arab world, with Sufism (the predominant form of Islam in most non-Arab Muslim countries), and with the growing significance of Islamism which challenges secularism and Sufi forms of Islam.
This book is a comparative study of basic themes in Christian and Islamic fundamentalist discourses, analyzing and comparing texts from a wide variety of fundamentalist leaders and movements, looking for "family resemblances" and significant differences in order to better understand the contemporary phenomenon of religious resurgence. After placing fundamentalisms in a theoretical framework, the study looks at selected themes important to fundamentalists, noting resemblances and differences. These themes include their anti-secularist stance, their theocentric worldviews, their reliance on inerrant sacred scriptures, and their attitudes to politics, government, state and democracy. The study also looks at the fundamentalist view of the world as a perennial battlefield between the forces of good and those of evil, in the realm of ideologies as well as politics and the legitimation of violence.
This book argues that a primary purpose of theological discourses is to construct piety or spirituality. If this is the case, theologians need to constantly inquire into the kind of piety or spirituality which their work may construct. Drawing from some important moments in the development of Christian theology, such as the development of the Christian doctrine of God in the early church, the role of material things in the Christianity of medieval Europe, some elements of contemporary postliberal theology, and the theology of inculturation in Africa, the book argues that theological discourses that appear to be orthodox and innocuous may actually construct forms of piety that may diminish human flourishing. The book therefore calls for an ethics of theology intended to ensure that the theologies we construct help in developing a piety that is conducive to human flourishing in the modern world, especially for Africans, who have suffered and continue to suffer unspeakable dehumanization. The book proposes that a theology that may contribute to the flourishing of Africans in the modern world is one that constructs an interdisciplinary spirituality that takes both the spiritual and the scientific seriously.
Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa. Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities. Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.
This magnificent volume documents the printmaking career of leading pop artist, influential creator of public monuments, and bravura draftsman Claes Oldenburg. Includes an important essay on Oldenburg's career and a catalogue of his entire printed oeuvre, from limited editions to ephemera. A must for scholars and collectors. 55 b&w illustrations, 52 duotones, 381 colorplates (including 2 gatefolds.
The foreman is usually regarded as a filter in a chain of command in industrial organizations. In this book, however, the author suggests that this view is not adequate, and he proposes instead a model of analysis which employs a systems perspective. The role of the foreman is seen in terms of the interaction of three sub-systems representing the organization, the group and the individual. The book is based on the work of researchers from many disciplines and employs a sociological framework to account for the peculiar strains, conflict and ambiguities associated with the foreman’s role.
The first text to take a systems engineering approach to artificial intelligence (AI), from architecture principles to the development and deployment of AI capabilities. Most books on artificial intelligence (AI) focus on a single functional building block, such as machine learning or human-machine teaming. Artificial Intelligence takes a more holistic approach, addressing AI from the view of systems engineering. The book centers on the people-process-technology triad that is critical to successful development of AI products and services. Development starts with an AI design, based on the AI system architecture, and culminates with successful deployment of the AI capabilities. Directed toward AI developers and operational users, this accessibly written volume of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Series can also serve as a text for undergraduate seniors and graduate-level students and as a reference book. Key features: In-depth look at modern computing technologies Systems engineering description and means to successfully undertake an AI product or service development through deployment Existing methods for applying machine learning operations (MLOps) AI system architecture including a description of each of the AI pipeline building blocks Challenges and approaches to attend to responsible AI in practice Tools to develop a strategic roadmap and techniques to foster an innovative team environment Multiple use cases that stem from the authors’ MIT classes, as well as from AI practitioners, AI project managers, early-career AI team leaders, technical executives, and entrepreneurs Exercises and Jupyter notebook examples
In the 1980s, America was gripped by widespread panics about Satanic cults. Conspiracy theories abounded about groups who were allegedly abusing children in day-care centers, impregnating girls for infant sacrifice, brainwashing adults, and even controlling the highest levels of government. As historian of religions David Frankfurter listened to these sinister theories, it occurred to him how strikingly similar they were to those that swept parts of the early Christian world, early modern Europe, and postcolonial Africa. He began to investigate the social and psychological patterns that give rise to these myths. Thus was born Evil Incarnate, a riveting analysis of the mythology of evilconspiracy. The first work to provide an in-depth analysis of the topic, the book uses anthropology, the history of religion, sociology, and psychoanalytic theory, to answer the questions "What causes people collectively to envision evil and seek to exterminate it?" and "Why does the representation of evil recur in such typical patterns?" Frankfurter guides the reader through such diverse subjects as witch-hunting, the origins of demonology, cannibalism, and the rumors of Jewish ritual murder, demonstrating how societies have long expanded upon their fears of such atrocities to address a collective anxiety. Thus, he maintains, panics over modern-day infant sacrifice are really not so different from rumors about early Christians engaging in infant feasts during the second and third centuries in Rome. In Evil Incarnate, Frankfurter deepens historical awareness that stories of Satanic atrocities are both inventions of the mind and perennial phenomena, not authentic criminal events. True evil, as he so artfully demonstrates, is not something organized and corrupting, but rather a social construction that inspires people to brutal acts in the name of moral order.
In the interstellar medium - the space between the stars in galaxies - new stars are born from material that is replenished by the debris ejected by stars when they die. This book is a comprehensive manual for studying the collisional and radiative processes observed in the interstellar medium. This second edition has been thoroughly updated and extended to cover related topics in radiation theory. It considers the chemistry of the interstellar medium both at the present epoch and in the early Universe, and discusses the physics and chemistry of shock waves. The methods of calculation of the rates of collisional excitation of interstellar molecules and atoms are explained, emphasising the quantum mechanical method. This book will be ideal for researchers involved in the interstellar medium and star formation, and physical chemists specialising in collision theory or in the measurement of the rates of collision processes.
Pharmaceutical analysis determines the purity, concentration, active compounds, shelf life, rate of absorption in the body, identity, stability, rate of release etc. of a drug. Testing a pharmaceutical product involves a variety of chemical, physical and microbiological analyses. It is reckoned that over £10 billion is spent annually in the UK alone on pharmaceutical analysis, and the analytical processes described in this book are used in industries as diverse as food, beverages, cosmetics, detergents, metals, paints, water, agrochemicals, biotechnological products and pharmaceuticals. This is the key textbook in pharmaceutical analysis, now revised and updated for its fourth edition. Worked calculation examples Self-assessment Additional problems (self tests) Practical boxes Key points boxes New chapter on Biotech products. New chapter on electrochemical methods in diagnostics. Greatly extended chapter on molecular emission spectroscopy to accommodate developments and innovations in the area. Now on StudentConsult
The study of Islam since the advent of 9/11 has made a significant resurgence. However, much of the work produced since then has tended to focus on the movements that not only provide aid to their fellow Muslims, but also have political and at times violent agendas. This tendency has led to a dearth of research on the wider Muslim aid and development scene. Focusing on the role and impact of Islam and Islamic Faith Based Organisations (FBOs), an arena that has come to be regarded by some as the 'invisible aid economy', Islam and Development considers Islamic theology and its application to development and how Islamic teaching is actualized in case studies of Muslim FBOs. It brings together contributions from the disciplines of theology, sociology, politics and economics, aiming both to raise awareness and to function as a corrective step within the development studies literature.
Beginning with the colonial era, Western biomedicine has radically transformed African medical beliefs and practices. Conversely, in using Western biomedicine, Africans have also transformed it. The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange contends that contemporary African medical systems—no less “biomedical” than Western medicine—in fact greatly enrich and expand the notion of biomedicine, reframing it as a global cultural form deployed across global networks of cultural exchange. The book analyzes biomedicine as a complex and dynamic sociocultural form, the conceptual premises of which make it necessarily subject to ongoing change and development as it travels the globe. David Baronov captures the complexities of this cultural exchange by using world-systems analysis in a way that places global cultural processes on equal footing with political and economic processes. In doing so, he both allows the story of Africa’s transformation of “Western” biomedicine to be told and offers new insights into the capitalist world system.
This textbook describes the equipment, observational techniques, and analysis used in the investigation of stellar photospheres. Now in its fourth edition, the text has been thoroughly updated and revised to be more accessible to students. New figures have been added to illustrate key concepts, while diagrams have been redrawn and refreshed throughout. The book starts by developing the tools of analysis, and then demonstrates how they can be applied. Topics covered include radiation transfer, models of stellar photospheres, spectroscopic equipment, how to observe stellar spectra, and techniques for measuring stellar temperatures, radii, surface gravities, chemical composition, velocity fields, and rotation rates. Up-to-date results for real stars are included. Written for starting graduate students or advanced undergraduates, this textbook also includes a wealth of reference material useful to researchers. eBook formats include color imagery while print formats are greyscale only; a wide selection of the color images are available online.
Ever since the first Swedish-born immigrants to Oregon began settling in the 1850s, Swedes have had a big impact on its development. Among the first immigrants was shoemaker Carl M. Wiberg, who arrived in the summer of 1852 and settled in Portland. By 1930, roughly 45 percent of all Swedish immigrants were living in the Portland metro area. Other areas of Swedish settlement included Astoria, Coos Bay, Tillamook, southwestern Oregon, and Morrow County. At first, the Swedish language was the unifying force among the immigrants. Today, it is the celebration and sharing of Swedish traditions and culture. There are many reasons why Swedes were attracted to the United States, including religious freedom, better economic conditions, and, for young men, escaping compulsory military service. Many immigrant Swedes did not come directly to Oregon but were attracted to the state and its employment opportunities after the completion of the transcontinental railroad.
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