This timely book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, and communities and sacred symbols. It presents parallels and contrasts between religious emotions in European and American history, in other cultures, and in contemporary western societies. By taking emotions seriously, A Sociology of Religious Emotion sheds new light on the power of religion to shape fundamental human orientations and motivations: hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds.
Can school teach us to master life? This book confronts what the author sees as an ongoing trend in many Western democracies where citizens are increasingly being held accountable for their health and happiness. The author believes that the introduction of life skills in school shows a tendency to place more responsibility on the individual rather than address fundamental societal flaws that really should be solved politically. It examines how such responsibility to psychologically deal with these problems affects our mental health and quality of life. This book questions the fundamentals of the life mastery curriculum where we might be risking the creation of just another arena where children have to perform, challenging readers to evaluate more closely the premises, consequences and limitations of life mastery. The book, one of the first to question ‘life mastery’ as an achievable goal with critical reviews of the 21st century skills movement, will be of interest to psychologists, school counsellors, teachers, students, politicians, and any reader evaluating school curriculums in relation to the decline in youth and adolescent mental health.
The poor and the sick-poor have always presented a problem to the governments and churches of Europe. Whose responsibility are they? Are they a wilful burden on the honest working population, or are they a necessary presence for the true Christian to live the true Christian life? In the 18th and 19th centuries what happened to the poor and the sick-poor in the north and south of Europe was different. In the north there occurred first the Reformation in the 16th century, which changed attitudes to the poor, and then the advent of industrialisation, with its far-reaching effects of pauperisation of people both in town and countryside. In the Catholic south, where industrialisation did not appear so soon, the Catholic Church introduced a programme of reform at all levels but along traditional lines. This included the founding of new orders dedicated to the care of the poor and sick, of new institutions within which to house and care for them. At all times it was taken for granted that it was a necessary aspect of being a Christian that one should give for the care of the needy, and that this was not the duty of the state or of secular institutions. The secularising movement did however reach the southern countries by way both of the Enlightenment and - more drastically - in the form of the Napoleonic invasions. But after the defeat of Napoleon, the Church reasserted its right to administer and control the support of the poor and sick, and this situation continued until 1900 in most areas. Moreover the effects of industrialisation and the concomitant increase in population did make itself felt in the south in the course of the 19th century, which put great stress on the institutions for poor relief and health care for the poor. All this is still relevant today, since the situations that governments and the Catholic Church found themselves confronted with, and the stark choices they had to make, are being replayed to some extent today. Who is responsible for the poor, who is to blame for their being poor? How should their poverty be relieved, how should the health care of the many be funded? These are still live issues today. While complete in itself the present volume also forms the fourth and last of a four-volume survey of health care and poor relief in Europe between 1500 and 1900, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham
Modern control theory and in particular state space or state variable methods can be adapted to the description of many different systems because it depends strongly on physical modeling and physical intuition. The laws of physics are in the form of differential equations and for this reason, this book concentrates on system descriptions in this form. This means coupled systems of linear or nonlinear differential equations. The physical approach is emphasized in this book because it is most natural for complex systems. It also makes what would ordinarily be a difficult mathematical subject into one which can straightforwardly be understood intuitively and which deals with concepts which engineering and science students are already familiar. In this way it is easy to immediately apply the theory to the understanding and control of ordinary systems. Application engineers, working in industry, will also find this book interesting and useful for this reason. In line with the approach set forth above, the book first deals with the modeling of systems in state space form. Both transfer function and differential equation modeling methods are treated with many examples. Linearization is treated and explained first for very simple nonlinear systems and then more complex systems. Because computer control is so fundamental to modern applications, discrete time modeling of systems as difference equations is introduced immediately after the more intuitive differential equation models. The conversion of differential equation models to difference equations is also discussed at length, including transfer function formulations. A vital problem in modern control is how to treat noise in control systems. Nevertheless this question is rarely treated in many control system textbooks because it is considered to be too mathematical and too difficult in a second course on controls. In this textbook a simple physical approach is made to the description of noise and stochastic disturbances which is easy to understand and apply to common systems. This requires only a few fundamental statistical concepts which are given in a simple introduction which lead naturally to the fundamental noise propagation equation for dynamic systems, the Lyapunov equation. This equation is given and exemplified both in its continuous and discrete time versions. With the Lyapunov equation available to describe state noise propagation, it is a very small step to add the effect of measurements and measurement noise. This gives immediately the Riccati equation for optimal state estimators or Kalman filters. These important observers are derived and illustrated using simulations in terms which make them easy to understand and easy to apply to real systems. The use of LQR regulators with Kalman filters give LQG (Linear Quadratic Gaussian) regulators which are introduced at the end of the book. Another important subject which is introduced is the use of Kalman filters as parameter estimations for unknown parameters. The textbook is divided into 7 chapters, 5 appendices, a table of contents, a table of examples, extensive index and extensive list of references. Each chapter is provided with a summary of the main points covered and a set of problems relevant to the material in that chapter. Moreover each of the more advanced chapters (3 - 7) are provided with notes describing the history of the mathematical and technical problems which lead to the control theory presented in that chapter. Continuous time methods are the main focus in the book because these provide the most direct connection to physics. This physical foundation allows a logical presentation and gives a good intuitive feel for control system construction. Nevertheless strong attention is also given to discrete time systems. Very few proofs are included in the book but most of the important results are derived. This method of presentation makes the text very readable and gives a good foundation for reading more rigorous texts. A complete set of solutions is available for all of the problems in the text. In addition a set of longer exercises is available for use as Matlab/Simulink ‘laboratory exercises’ in connection with lectures. There is material of this kind for 12 such exercises and each exercise requires about 3 hours for its solution. Full written solutions of all these exercises are available.
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