O FUNDAMENTALISMO RELIGIOSO E SUA APROXIMAÇÃO DO MONOTEÍSMO

Addressing the policy challenges and opportunities of “Big data”

A Public Sphere Revolution? Social Media versus Authoritarian Regimes

Recent findings in epigenetics have been attracting much attention from social scientists and bioethicists because they reveal the molecular mechanisms by which exposure to socioenvironmental factors, such as pollutants and social adversity, can influence the expression of genesthroughout life. Most surprisingly, some epigenetic modifications may also be heritable via germ cells across generations. Epigenetics may be the missing molecular evidence of the importance of using preventive strategies at the policy level to reduce the incidence and prevalence of common diseases. But while this "policy translation" of epigenetics introduces new arguments in favor of public health strategies and policy-making, a more "clinical translation" of epigenetics is also emerging. It focuses on the biochemical mechanisms and epigenetic variants at the origin of disease, leading to novel biomedical means of assessing epigenetic susceptibility and reversing detrimental epigenetic variants. In this paper, we argue that the impetus to create new biomedical interventions to manipulate and reverse epigenetic variants is likely to garner more attention than effective social and public health interventions and therefore also to garner a greater share of limited public resources. This is likely to happen because of the current biopolitical context in which scientific findings are translated. This contemporary neoliberal "regime of truth," to use a term from Michel Foucault, greatly influences the ways in which knowledge is being interpreted and implemented. Building on sociologist Thomas Lemke's Foucauldian "analytics of biopolitics" and on literature from the field of science and technology studies, we present two sociological trends that may impede the policy translation of epigenetics: molecularization and biomedicalization. These trends, we argue, are likely to favor the clinical translation of epigenetics-in other words, the development of new clinical tools fostering what has been called "personalized" or "precision" medicine. In addition, we argue that an overemphasized clinical translation of epigenetics may further reinforce this biopolitical landscape through four processes closely related to neoliberal pathways of thinking: the internalization and isolation (aspects of liberal individualism) of socioenvironmental determinants of health and increased opportunities for commodification and technologicalization (aspects of economic liberalism) of health care interventions.

Imagined Globalization - by Garía Canclini, Néstor

Against Patriarchy

In the year of his death, Patrick Chabal, a leading scholar of modern African history, politics, and literature, wrote the forward to this edited volume, which celebrates the everyday resilience, strength, and global consciousness of the continent’s citizenry. His contribution is a testament to the work’s scholarly importance as a beacon of interdisciplinary synergy that promotes ongoing dialogue and understanding by paving empirical pathways that lead to the facts about African resistances. Chabal praised the book’s scope—“the myriad ways ordinary people cope with and undermine the politics of hegemony pursued by the political elite” (xv)—as well as its approach: “It is because the exercise of power in Africa is largely informal, that we need to turn to the informal if we are to understand what resistance means” (xvi).Obadare and Willems bring together eleven chapters that each draw on critical theory to bridge the humanities and social sciences by reimagining “resistance by tracking its ‘parallel infrastructures’, i.e. the subtle ways in which it is mobilised, plotted and enacted” (2). They abandon the dichotomous trope of domination and resistance often enacted in the scholarly debates about structural violence. Instead, through a selection of interdisciplinary, contextually grounded case studies from South Africa (Bettina von Lieres, Innocentia J. Mhlambi, Grace A. Musila, and Daniel Hammett), Angola (Bettina von Lieres), Kenya (Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen), Nigeria (Basile Ndjio and Jendele Hungbo), Cameroon (Ndjio), Rwanda (Susan Thomson), and Mali (Dorothea Schulz), the editors and contributors bring to light “informal modes of civic agency” that illuminate how everyday political action in Africa Works (4–5).1 Not only are the people in these cases studied outside institutional settings, with attention being paid to everyday lives rather than formal civil society, but the nation-state is also decentered and deconstructed as the object of resistance; the chapter authors oppose power in many forms, what the editors label “fractured sovereignty” (6–7).The chapters in Civic Agency in Africa exemplify this social action in a number of creative ways. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for example, engages “coloniality as a global power structure that dilutes, truncates and influences the direction of resistance away from direct confrontation with global imperial designs” (28). Postcolonial Africa is rife with tensions or latent resistance that has the potential to manifest outwardly as direct resistance, as seen in the Arab Spring. Von Lieres discusses “mediated forms of citizen action” in both Angola and South Africa as a way to mobilize society or “deepen democracy” (50, 52).2 Lindell and Ihalainen’s chapter explores the logic of subaltern urban hawkers in Nairobi, Kenya, to show the processual and emergent nature of “space-making from below” (66). Ndjio’s study focuses on Nigerian and Cameroonian conmen who refashioned the conventions of global capitalism, supplanting Weber’s Protestant-based ethics with new forms of African capitalism.3Thomson’s chapter exposes an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the Rwandan state’s handling of reconciliation after the genocide. She presents various opportunities for resistance that instill political consciousness, such as one of her interviewee’s ability to speak out and inspire the voiceless because she is classified as abasazi (foolish). In her words, “In Rwanda, everyone is broken so no-one pays attention to people like me” (116). Mhlambi’s, Musila’s, and Hammet’s chapters discuss “Cultural sites of opinion-making” in South Africa (127), analyzing, respectively, how neoliberal commercialization has stunted satire, how comedic ambivalence has created spaces for social commentary on race and sexuality, and how controversial political cartoons have been used as a form of dysphemism to re-engage public dialogue and debate. In his chapter, Hungbo offers a compelling argument about African music’s contribution to a popular ideological struggle through interpretive textual analysis. Finally, Schulz surveys the proliferation of local radio programs in Mali that attempt to establish imagined communities.4 Schulz employs the concept of “resonance” to elucidate “the working of the ‘forming forms’ of music broadcasts, that is, how they inform listeners’ recognition, and contestations of certain broadcasts as their ‘truly own’ tradition” (198).Critically, Chabal points out that “agency is usually understood as directed, meaningful, intentional and self-reflective social or political action” (xv). But he suggests that “it is not just the reflex opposition, a mere ‘re-action’ to the actions of the agents of the state” (xv–xvi). The reader must ask if the “arts of resistance” presented in this volume are embodied conscious choices or reflections of an already extant and embedded structural system of violence.5 Only the former has implications toward real societal transformation.6

This article is a study on dignity and the politics of dignity in postcolonial Egypt, and focuses on the historicity and socioeconomic background of two events: the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis during the rise of post-independence nationalism and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution during the Arab Spring. This study reviews the importance of the concept of dignity in philosophy and the social sciences, specifically pertaining to the development and postcolonial need for dignity and recognition, which the author terms ‘dignition.’ The central question here is how the conception of dignity has evolved between the two events and what the implications are for the consequent understanding of dignity.

This chapter analyzes specific configurations of the civil societies of Arab countries which launched “the Arab Spring”. Political and social science academics have wondered whether civil societies existed in Arab countries, mainly because of the longevity of authoritarianism and the characteristics of the States’ founding pacts in this region. The “Arab Spring” was the sign of a crisis of these founding pacts in the region, mainly because of neoliberal policies. From 2004, Egypt witnessed a series of social and political protests that foreshadowed the 25 January 2011 revolution. The phenomenon was supported by a myriad of non-governmental organizations (NGO) and diverse groups but also by a process of de-monopolization of media sphere, including independent media, political talk shows on satellite television channels and social media. The different parts of the Tunisian civil society are considered–quite rightly–as the main actors of the political pacification in the country and the resulting successive compromises.

The purpose of this article is to comprehend the feast of the Intercession of the Theotokos, based on an axiological approach to the study of cultural phenomena. The methodology. The research is based on an axiological approach in the context of a secular cultural science. The axiological comprehension of texts is organically combined with elements of semiotic analysis and the phenomenology of the sacred. The results. The role of values in the formation of the Mariological cult in the content of the feast in question has been studied. It is based on the idea of patronage in its global and multifunctional aspects. It has been established that the key importance is attached to the ethical values of love and mercy in their sacred expression. The aim of axiology is demonstrated to form in the minds of people a view of the Mother of God as a solid life support and a guarantor of genuine human welfare. The essential context for understanding the feast of the Interces-sion is the requirement for the implementation of a person’s spiritual transformation. The Mariological image is positioned as an unconditional spiritual standard that determines the indicated transformation in the aspects of liberation from carnal dependence and the achievement of spiritual purity in its sacred sense. The value-orienting and regulatory functions of this feast, as well as the relationship between the informative and performance functions of Mariological apologetics, are highlighted. At the same time, it is emphasized that the meaning of the eorthological text is not limited to the development of information about the sacred. Through endowing the sacred image with special aesthetic effects, the text seeks to encourage the reader to carry out a spiritual transformation in relation to the Christian ideal. The semiotic effect of the majesty and glory of the Mother of God forms the corresponding effect of the figure of the righteous man and, at the same time, the cultural space of the Christian tradition with the Mariological cult. The scientific novelty. The proposal substantiates an axiological approach to the study of the feast of the Intercession in the secular culturological paradigm. This approach is closely linked with the analysis of the semiotic effects of the constitution of the sacred image of the majesty of the Mother of God as an object of worship. The undertaken methodology makes it possible to pay attention to the efficiency of using the undertaken approach in the system of culturological eortology, the subject of which is a comprehensive study of holidays, including religious ones. The practical significance. The results of this publication can be used in reading religious studies, cultural studies and theological disciplines, as well as in the practice of forming a humanistic culture in relation to the Orthodox tradition.

For some years, social scientists have been unable to agree on the extent to which experiencing a natural disaster is related to the presence of psychopathological symptoms Indeed, social scientists appear to be well-polarized, some arguing that disasters cause severe negative psychological reactions in victims, with others claiming that any psychological effects, if they exist at all, are minor and transient This paper reviews the controversy and identifies numerous conceptual and methodological difficulties associated with the competing positions. It is argued that the preoccupation of researchers with documenting positive or negative instances of psychological effects has lead them to ignore the issue of identifying processes through which disasters might impinge upon an individual's emotional stability. As a first step toward sketching out these processes, an extensive review of the literature on human response to natural disasters is undertaken. Eleven variables—level of community preparedness, scope of impact, duration of impact, destruction of kin and friendship networks, property damage, pre-impact psychological stability, social support, grief reactions, availability of institutional help, and successful coping skills—are identified as important in determining the psychological impact of disasters. These variables are operationalized and arranged into an interpretative framework that postulates the nature and magnitude of the interrelationships among them based upon the existing research literature

From the fourth chapter of Institutes onwards, John Calvin explores the church governance in a historical perspective. After studying the way that the New Testament offices functioned in the early church (chapter IV) and their subsequent degeneration (V), he contemplates the assumptions for the papal primacy (VI) and its historic growth (VII), and concludes by assessing the mandates to teach (VIII-IX), pass laws (X) and act with legal authority (XI-XII). The thirteenth chapter on making vows - in particular, by monks - is a transitional chapter that leads into the doctrine of the sacraments. Calvin attaches great importance to church tradition. He does not want to be taken for a modernist, who founds a church with a new structure of ministry based solely on an appeal to the Bible.Keywords: church tradition; John Calvin; sacrament

The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis still reverberate throughout the globe. Markets are down, unemployment is up, and nations from Greece to Ireland find their very infrastructure on the brink of collapse. There is also a crisis in the management of global affairs, with the institutions of global governance challenged as never before, accompanied by conflicts ranging from Syria, to Iran, to Mali. Domestically, the bases for democratic legitimacy, social sustainability, and environmental adaptability are also changing. In this unique volume from the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations and the Social Science Research Council, some of the world’s greatest minds—from Nobel Prize winners to long-time activists—explore what the prolonged instability of the so-called Great Recession means for our traditional understanding of how governments can and should function. Through interviews that are sure to spark lively debate, 22 Ideas to Fix the World presents both analysis of past geopolitical events and possible solutions and predictions for the future. The book surveys issues relevant to the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Speaking from a variety of perspectives, including economic, social, developmental, and political, the discussions here increase our understanding of what’s wrong with the world and how to get it right. Interviewees explore topics like the Arab Spring, the influence of international financial organizations, the possibilities for the growth of democracy, the acceleration of global warming, and how to develop enforceable standards for market and social regulation. These inspiring exchanges from some of our most sophisticated thinkers on world policy are honest, brief, and easily understood, presenting thought-provoking ideas in a clear and accessible manner that cuts through the academic jargon that too often obscures more than it reveals. 22 Ideas to Fix the World is living history in the finest sense—a lasting chronicle of the state of the global community today.

This article proposes a theological framework for integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into the issue of Christian discipleship by presenting a three-layer model of formation: foundational, aggregated, and individual. While rooted in the evangelical tradition, the model is adaptable across faith communities, each defining its own sources of authority, communal practices, and individual expressions. Drawing on insights from contextual theology, the framework emphasizes that meaning arises in the dynamic interplay between Scripture, church tradition, and cultural context. It also highlights the central role of the Holy Spirit in communal discernment, ensuring that AI remains a tool for information rather than transformation. The model is designed to facilitate both top-down and bottom-up communication within ecclesial life, fostering resonance between foundational truth, communal practice, and lived experience. By situating the issue of digital discipleship within wider theological conversations on authority, anthropology, and resonance, this article contributes to the emerging field of digital theology and invites dialogue across diverse Christian and interfaith traditions.

This work is an attempt to extend and strengthen missiological method from an evangelical perspective in the area of contextualisation. My thesis is that a missiological methodology that is governed by Scripture, while also drawing from the church Fathers, the social sciences and practical theology, is not only consistent with the nature of evangelicalism but also consistent with the nature of missiology itself. The critical observation that the contextualisation debate has been predominantly driven by insights gained from the social sciences (particularly anthropology) and practical theology, with comparatively little insight drawn from Scripture or the writings of the church Fathers has informed this thesis. The investigation here challenges the imbalance of the relative contributions of these four disciplines for contextualisation and offers new ways of thinking about mission, with implications for future evangelical missiological praxis. My thesis is tested through an examination of contextualisation from missiological, biblical, and historical perspectives, seeking to identify and develop contextual principles that are consistent with the nature of evangelicalism. A survey of the literature on contextualisation reveals many contextual principles that have informed missiological praxis over since the word was first introduced into missiological vocabulary in 1972. A biblical examination of representative passages from the book of Acts of the early church engaged in contextualisation to both Jewish and Gentile audiences reveals various contextual principles which confirm, critique, or are unique to those identified in the literature. Following the establishment of the legitimacy of John Chrysostom informing the contextualisation debate, an examination of representative homilies of Chrysostom reveals contextual principles which confirm, critique, or are unique to those identified in the literature or in the study of Acts. The research’s conclusion is that an examination of contextualisation that draws from biblical studies, the church Fathers, the social sciences, and practical theology is consistent with the nature of the discipline of missiology from an evangelical perspective.

Humility stands out as one of the foremost virtues in Christian spirituality. It counters a foundational vice, pride, and a strong psychological tendency, narcissism. It is an essential disposition for the Christian imperative of service and compassion for others. It is considered a foundational virtue since it builds other virtues like patience, obedience, and faith. It helps build mature and healthy interpersonal relationships. Humble individuals are almost always admired and respected. Despite its fundamental character as a virtue, there is still much to understand about humility especially in the context of today’s world. Many still understand it negatively, confusing it with low self-esteem and self-denigration. Many still wonder how humility is possible amid a world dominated by proud and arrogant behavior. Still, for many, humility is hardly noticed due to its quiet and unobtrusive character. Christian tradition has much to contribute to this need for greater understanding and appropriation of humility. The centrality of humility in Christian ethics is embedded in the Gospels, the very life of Jesus Christ, and His proclamation of the Kingdom of God. It is also contained in the teachings of Paul, the apostles, and the Fathers of the Church. The lives of the saints witness to humility and their works138 San Juan propagate its practice. In the history of the Church, two such saints and their respective works have emerged as classics in spiritual life—the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. They were written in two different epochs of Church history, by two leaders espousing two different ways of living the Christian vocation. Yet both the Rule and the Exercises teach humility. The Rule contains the so-called “Twelve Ladders to Humility,” while the Exercises include “The Three Kinds of Humility.” This article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of humility by reflecting on the Rule and the Exercises particularly in the context of today’s world. First, it will ask how humility is understood today, and how it could be understood more properly with the help of the social sciences and Christian spirituality. Second, it will look into how humility is understood in the Rule and the Exercises , how their writers envision the formation of this virtue, and how the two works converge given their different perspectives and contextual origins. Lastly, this article will show that these two classics of Christian literature still remain relevant to the challenge of forming humility in today’s world.