Looking at Bapedi ancestor veneration constructively, one finds it a source of communication that enhances the community’s norms, values and personal well-being. The Bapedi community has a belief system that is based on the spiritual world, and this includes ancestor veneration. Communication with the spiritual world happens through sacrifices, songs and dance. Malopo is a ritual that not only binds the people to their ancestors but also provides a healing therapy. The purpose of this study was (...) to investigate the religious and social functions of ancestor veneration in the Bapedi society, as well as the relationship between culture, music and identity in veneration in the traditional healing Sepedi context. To achieve this aim, the study employed a naturalistic approach and data were collected through video recordings of malopo rituals, interviews and observations. The main questions the study addressed are what are the religious and social functions of ancestor veneration in the Bapedi society? and what is the relationship between culture, music and identity in veneration in Sepedi traditional healing context? The results demonstrated that ancestors are vital to Bapedi society, and the most effective ways of reaching them are through music and dance – malopo rituals, as well as divination bones. (shrink)

Culturally inherited institutional norms structure much of human social life. Successfully replicating institutions train their current members to behave in the generally adaptive ways that served past members. Ancestor veneration is a well-known manifestation of this phenomenon whereby deference is conferred to prestigious past members who are used as cultural models. Such norms of respect may be maintained by punishment based on evidence from theory and laboratory experiments, but there is little observational evidence to show that punishment is (...) commonly used. To test for punishment as a mechanism that maintains these norms, we examine a norm of ancestor veneration in a natural field experiment at the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M University. The MSC is a memorial to university war dead, and the expectation is that all who enter the building remove their hats out of respect. Observations reveal that hat removal is significantly more common at the MSC than at two control locations. Survey data indicate that most, but not all, subjects understand the norm to be veneration of the dead, and most expect others to follow the norm. Many report a strong negative emotional response when asked to imagine the norm being violated. Sixty-two percent report they would definitely or probably ask the noncompliant to uncover. Focal follow data show that punishment is relatively rare, however, with the majority of behatted subjects going unreproached as they pass through the building. Both survey and observational data indicate there is a motivated minority that enthusiastically enforces the norm. (shrink)

Through the ages, ritual dances have been part of human culture. Although artistic, the _umxhentso_ dance is a ritual dance performed by the Xhosa _amagqirha _(traditional healers) to establish connections with supernatural beings. During the dance performance, the amagqirha enter a state of trance and connect with the spiritual realm. During this state of trance, they seek guidance and vision from their ancestors. The _amagqirha_, in all the Xhosa communities, perform these dance rituals at initiation and healing ceremonies. The objectives (...) of this study were to examine the religious and social purposes of _umxhentso_ dance in amagqirha rituals and determine how it assists amagqirha in establishing connections with their ancestors during ceremonies. This study adopted the naturalistic research approach in studying the _umxhentso_ dance during the amagqirha ceremonies. The researchers examined, evaluated and assessed the research participants’ actions and behaviours in a natural setting within a societal and cultural framework. (shrink)

Spiritual insecurity among African Christians is a huge challenge. The insecurity among other things arises from African people’s former traditional African ancestral world view of ancestral veneration. The ancestors promote or hinder African Christians’ reliance on Christ because they have presupposedly acquired the supernatural power that enables them to provide diagnoses and solutions to life challenges. The inherent problem in the ancestral world view, however, is that the ancestors are both respected and feared by their descendants because they can (...) either bless or harm depending on the state of the relationship between the surviving human beings and the ancestors. The basis of the unpredictable influence of ancestors lies in the fact that they are considered as human beings who carry their human qualities to the spiritual world. In light of this situation, one constructive approach that can be advanced to address the challenges of African Christians’ spiritual insecurity is a proper understanding of Christ as a sinless representative of humanity. This approach maintains that healing and coping with life within the challenge of African spirituality in the context of threatening life issues can be addressed by an appropriate understanding of Christ’s sinlessness. The article argues for the foundational status of Christ as a sinless representative of humanity as the controlling framework. In doing so, Christ’s sinlessness and the sinfulness of natural ancestors are juxtaposed to compare the two ontologies in order to draw some pastoral guidelines for African Christians. This approach pays close attention to the factors and mindset that sustain people who adhere to ancestral worship and assess them through a lens of Christology focusing on Christ’s sinlessness as an exemplary doctrine. (shrink)

This article reflects on the impact of the inculturation of liturgy in the Ethiopian Episcopal Church (EEC) on identity formation within the context of African Christianity. In the EEC, the quest for African Christian identity formation is essential in understanding the role of black culture at the advent of the inculturation of liturgy. Inculturation can be viewed as the meeting and interaction of the Christian gospel and local cultures where neither the liturgy nor the cultures are superior than the other. (...) Thus, it is vital to understand the inculturation of liturgy and its implications for African Christian identity in the EEC. There is a need for an official guiding principle or doctrinal and theological position on use of language and instruments associated with ancestor veneration at all levels of the EEC. The aim of this article is to clarify how the transformation of the EEC liturgy shaped the African Christianity’s identity of its members. It also attempts to provide clarification on the use of language, symbols, and instruments associated with traditional healers in the liturgy and how it creates identity confusion within the EEC. Lastly, we discuss some of the limitations in the liturgical inculturation endeavour in the EEC.Contribution: This article contributes to a wider discourse of Christian identity formation from the perspective of the coming together of Christianity and African culture. It also contributes to the quest of EEC members for being authentic Christians while also being proud Africans. Specifically, it contributes to the EEC’s quest for African identity through the inculturation of liturgy. (shrink)

The research focuses on the patterns of traditional religious and cultural practices of the Idoma People of Nigeria. The study also seeks to investigate the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma traditional society which were affected by the advent of Christianity in the area. Some of the cultural beliefs and practices of the Idoma people before the advent of Christianity will be examined, as well as the people response to the new faith and the propelling factors behind the responses (...) of the people. The study adopted qualitative phenomenological research design and descriptive method of data analysis. Personal interview forms a primary source of data collection while the secondary source includes library sources. The study reveals that the advent of Christianity in the Idoma traditional society had some impact and consequences on their traditional and cultural practices. Some of the Idoma beliefs and practices affected include ancestor veneration, polygamous marriage, burial rites, widowhood practices, naming ceremony among others which are no longer practiced the way it used to be practiced before the advent of Christianity. The study recommends among other things that, there should be a synergy between Idoma traditional beliefs and practices and Christianity for peaceful co-existence, progress and developments in the area. (shrink)

Darwin's inner voice -- Living the virtuous life -- Of altruism and free riders -- Knowing our immediate predecessors -- Resurrecting some venerable ancestors -- A natural Garden of Eden -- The positive side of social selection -- Learning morals across the generations -- Work of the moral majority -- Pleistocene ups, downs, and crashes -- Testing the selection-by-reputation hypothesis -- The evolution of morals -- Epilogue: humanity's moral future.

In 1995 the People's Republic of China passed a controversial Eugenics Law, which, after a torrent of international criticism, was euphemistically renamed the Maternal and Infant Health Law. Aimed at "the implementation of premarital medical checkups" to ensure that neither partner has any hereditary, venereal, reproductive, or mental disorders, the ordinance implies that those deemed "unsuitable for reproduction" should undergo sterilization or abortion or remain celibate in order to prevent "inferior births." Using this recent statute as a springboard, Frank Dikötter (...) explores the contexts and history of eugenics in both Communist China and Taiwan. Dikötter shows how beginning in Late Imperial China, Western eugenics was imported and combined with existing fears of cultural, racial, or biological degeneration in Chinese society, leading to government regulation of sexual reproduction. _Imperfect Conceptions_ is a revealing look at the cultural history of medical explanations of birth defects that demonstrates how Chinese assumptions about the relationship of the individual to society form the very core of their attitudes toward procreation. Dikötter explains the patrilineal model of descent, where a person is viewed as the culmination of his or her ancestors and is held responsible for the health of all future generations. By this logic, a pregnant woman's behavior and attitude directly influence the well-being of her baby, and a deformed or retarded child reflects a moral failing on the part of the parents. Dikötter also shows how the holistic medicine practiced in China blurs any distinction between individual and environment so that people are held responsible for illness. Drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political approaches, Dikötter goes beyond a simple authoritarian model to provide a more complex view of eugenic policy, showing how a variety of voices including those of popular journalists, social reformers, medical writers, sex educators, university professors, and politicians all disseminate information that supports rather than questions the state's program. _Imperfect Conceptions_ reveals how Chinese cultural currents--fear and fascination with the deviant and the urge to draw clear boundaries between the normal and the abnormal--have combined with medical discourse to form a program of eugenics that is viewed with alarm by the rest of the world. (shrink)

This article explores the debate between partiality and impartiality from an African perspective. I take one influential instance of a defence of impartiality in the African tradition, ‘sympathetic impartiality’, by Kwasi Wiredu, as a foil to represent African ethics. I argue that impartiality fails to cohere with three centrally defining features of African moral thought: the high regard attributed to the family, the veneration of ancestors and the notion of personhood. I merely highlight the first two aspects of African (...) thought; I base my argument largely on the latter feature. (shrink)

Fustel de Coulanges' thesis that ancient society was founded upon the cult of ancestral tombs has had, for a thoroughly self-contradictory argument, a remarkably successful career. Neither Fustel himself nor the many subsequent scholars who have quoted his views with approval faced clearly the difficulty of deriving a social structure dominated by corporate descent groups from the veneration of tombs placed in individually owned landed property. On the whole, historians have tended to play down Fustel's insistence on the relation (...) between ancestor-cult and property and to exaggerate the role of the corporate kin group. This tendency, which assimilates Fustel to Sir Henry Maine and other lawyers interested in the reconstruction of Indo-European institutions has in my view considerably impeded understanding of the role of kinship in early Greek society; it also obscures one of the most individual aspects of Fustel's work which, thanks to the researches of Philippe Ariès on the development of the modern tomb-cult in the nineteenth century, can now be placed in its historical context. (shrink)

The article defects priority idiological and centenary positions of the Ukrainian society in the 19th century. The acceptance of consciousness and self-relevant is characterized by a comprehensive analysis. The aim and the tasks: вy working out ethical and philosophical literature, to justify the establishment of dignity of personality in the conditions of domestic cultural and socio-political selfdetermination of the late twentieth century.Research methods are the main methods of research are historical, structuralfunctional, systemic and comparative. To solve specific research tasks also (...) used the principles of systemicity, objectivity, ascension from abstract to concrete, etcEmphades of a new state in ethical and phylosophic keys, analyzes the values of Ukrainians, slogans, native ideas are analyzed. Research results: Scientifically illustrated embodies of the national self-release of the Ukrainian society: Selfrelease of the Naziological State Ukraine: Sovereignty of Ukraine (1985-1991 gg.); Nassional State Formation of Ukraine in the conditions of socio-purity and socioeconomic neoperedelenost (1992-1996 gg.); Creation of oligarchata as a diverse manifestation of a democratic regime in Ukraine (1996-2004 gg.); Polarization of the Farility (2005-2014 gg.); Thick ethape, which is purely formally defined as "post-revolutionary". The author exemplary aspects of the social realities of the reorganization, and the presentation of honor and dignity of the license. Discussion. It is condemned that for the self-release of the national state, the slide of restructuring of steel, the significant income from the public discourse of the topics of repressions, reversed to the families of the species of culture, science, public expressions, popularization of the creativity of the dyspasses and diaspree Figur. Conclusion. In such a way, the protest in the second half of the 1980s is Pastepeno Gladenna, which has received the introduction of privacy in its own participants.Many were re-enriched, rising from the laurel of the prison establishment, the inside of the country, and in the finishing of the bobs for Naziovnoye venereal, the rule of law and market economy. The dignity of a person on the day of restructuring, in the whole, was disturbed from the ancestors of the historical objects of the maintenance of the specialty – Ego Simbiosis with such categories, as freedom, will be, independence. (shrink)

This paper concerns a collection of rough-hewn flat stelae excavated from the precinct of Zeus Meilichios in Selinus, Sicily between 1915 and 1926, a majority with two heads or busts, one male and one female, carved at their tops. These crudely fashioned idols are unique in their iconography. They combine the flat inscribed Punic stela with the Greek figural tradition, with some indigenous features. Their meaning is totally obscure – especially since they lack any literary reference. No comparable monuments have (...) been found in ancient Mediterranean cult. The twin stelae were often set up above a collection of burnt rodent and bird bones, ashes, lamps, broken and burnt pottery and terracotta figurines, as a memorial of a sacrifice. The stelae were the objects of a gentilicial cult, similar to that posited for the inscribed “Meilichios stones” with which they shared the Field of Stelae of Zeus Meilichios. The theory advanced here interprets these diminutive stelae as the objects of domestic cult. It was customary in many parts of the ancient Mediterranean, from the Bronze Age down to the Roman period, to venerate household or family gods who protected the health and the wealth of the family. They were thought to embody the spirits of the ancestors and could at times be identified with the gods of the state religion. This divine couple whose effigies were dedicated in the Field of Stelae over a period of four centuries, into the third century, cannot be claimed as Greek or Punic deities. What these nameless protectors of the family were called we cannot say: Meilichios and Meilichia, Father and Mother, or Lord and Lady of the household? As the objects of such a personal domestic cult, their names might have differed with each family. (shrink)

It should be clear that Lyell's scientific contemporaries would hardly have agreed with Robert Munro's remark that Antiquity of Man created a full-fledged discipline. Only later historians have judged the work a synthesis; those closer to the discoveries and events saw it as a compilation — perhaps a “capital compilation,”95 but a compilation none the less. Its heterogeneity made it difficult to judge as a unity, and most reviewers, like Forbes, concentrated on the first part of Lyell's trilogy. The chapters (...) on glaciation were admired by Lyell's friends but had relatively little appeal to more general readers. His discussion of the species question hedged far too much to please those who accepted the cogency of Darwin's evidence and arguments. This last section of the book blatantly lacks originality or commitment and certainly has no claim to classical status in anthropology.We are left, then, with the first twelve chapters, for it was this portion that dictated the book's title and that amassed the available evidence favoring the antiquity of the human species. Did it do anything more than marshall the evidence that others had discovered? I think not. Lyell could write with style and verve. Principles of Geology is a remarkably readable book. But Antiquity is the work of a geologist, not of a systematic student of man. Despite its occasional touches of power, it never captures the freshness and immediacy of Lubbock's Pre-historic Times nor the theoretical brilliance of E. B. Tylor's Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865).96 Antiquity utilizes little of the comparative method whereby Lyell's contemporaries used data from modern “savagery” to elaborate the possible social functions of the prehistoric remains being uncovered. It contains little social theory and has virtually no integrated framework. Even the first twelve chapters do not really hang together. As Hooker, commenting to Darwin on Lubbock's review, sadly wrote: “Lubbock in [the] N[atural] H[istory] Review, had in a note called attention to Lyell's ... ‘doing injustice’ to Prestwich & Falconer. I modified this expression ‘injustice’ in Lubbock's paper (which was friendly and apologetic). I am deeply sorry for it, but what can one do? I do think Lyell's first XII chapters a complete mess.”97 In another letter to Darwin, Hooker described this first portion of Antiquity as “confused and confusing.”98Part of the problem, of course, lay in the subject's novelty for Lyell and for most of his contemporaries. At a deeper level, however, I believe that the book accurately reflects Lyell's uncertainties about Darwin's work and its implications for man.99 Leonard Wilson's edition of Lyell's Scientific Journals provides a unique insight into Lyell's mind during the years just before he began to write Antiquity.100 Preoccupied with the human implications of evolutionary biology, Lyell was not clear how many of those implications were compatible with his deep convictions about the dignity of man's place in the cosmos. With a certain naiveté, Lyell complained in 1873 that many of his readers had failed to see the “natural connections” among the three portions of Antiquity.101 Connections could indeed be drawn between man's antiquity and his evolutionary origins; Lyell's private Scientific Journals movingly demonstrate that he was well aware of this fact. But he never fully made the connections in his published writings. Antiquity of Man is more appropriately seen as the last gasp of the heroic period in British geology than as the opening salvo in a new, post-Darwinian anthropological synthesis. Between the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and the middle of the nineteenth century, geology was recognized as one of the most exciting and innovative scientific fields in Britain.102 Lyell himself had contributed much to that drama, and by the 1860's he was a public figure of venerable proportions. More then any other man he represented a geology that had extended the boundaries of process, time, and life. The fundamental achievements of Lyell and his colleagues had been assimilated into the wider Victorian consciousness, yet the earlier public debates about “genesis and geology” had left untouched in its essentials the concept of Man as a moral, responsible, created being.103Lyell never abandoned this view of his own species, and in 1863 it was a completely responsible creature which, under the weight of empirical evidence, Lyell admitted had lived on earth far longer than had previously been thought. Certainly this more generous allowance for human existence was constitutive to what Burrow calls the evolutionary social theory of midcentury Britain.104 Unlike Lyell, the younger representatives of this anthropology quietly accepted both man's antiquity and his aboriginal animality. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Psychology (1855), as well as the other volumes of his grand Synthetic Philosophy, presented as part of the cosmic process the development of human from prehuman beings.105 Tylor's discussion of what in his Researches (1865) he called the “gesture-language” presupposed the gradual and de novo origin of language in early human populations.106 Lubbock's young and polished mind was untroubled by the human implications of Darwin's work, and he cast his Prehistoric Times into such a perfect mold that it and its companionpiece (On the Origin of Civilization, 1870) went through seven editions each between 1865 and World War I, with their original theoretical structures intact. In a way that Lyell could not grasp, Lubbock was intrigued by questions concerning the origins of moral and religious beliefs and did not flinch at the thought of an amoral, atheistic creature as an ancestor.107 Indeed, as the German naturalist Carl Vogt pointed out in his Lectures on Man, translated into English the year after Antiquity, both Darwin's theories and the primitive flint knives of the Stone Age bore witness to a time beyond that imaginable from the condition of the lowest present-day “savage”:From such a low condition [little better than anthropomorphous apes], compared to which that of the so-called savages of the old and new world is a refined civilisation, has the human species gradually extricated itself, in a bitter struggle for existence, which it was well able to maintain, by being gifted with a larger amount of brain and intelligence than that possessed by the surrounding animal world.108The easy integration of biological and social themes was perhaps the distinguishing hallmark of Victorian anthropology of the 1850's and 1860's. After his fashion, Lyell got both themes into Antiquity, but he carefully separated them with a seven-chapter wall of glacial ice. Lyell's anthropology was not that of a thoroughgoing evolutionist like Lubbock, Tylor, or Spencer. For Lyell prehistoric man was not a product of biological evolution. Rude and superstitious he may have been, but he possessed ritual and a belief in a future state, and thus deserved “the epithet of ‘noble,’ which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race: as Nature first made man/when wild in woods the noble savage ran.”109As a systematic argument, Lyell's book was at best a significant failure. As a popularization, it was a success — largely because of the personal stature of its author and the particular moment of its appearance. It helped establish the fact of man's antiquity with a wider Victorian audience, in itself no mean achievement. But Lyell was unable to exploit the fuller implications of his material in the service of a secular science of man. Ironically, he exploited only his colleagues' discoveries. Though the aging Lyell, with failing eyesight but unfailing mental powers, can still be seen as a man of considerable importance, his Antiquity belongs to the carefully circumscribed world of British geology rather than to the less disciplined world of Victorian anthropology. (shrink)

This is the only edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History which also offers the Greater Chronicle as well as his Letter to Egbert. The Chronicle and the Letter have been newly translated, and both they and the authoritative Colgrave translation of the Ecclesiastical History are supported by a detailed introduction and notes.

Cross Veneration in the Medieval Islamic World: Christian Identity and Practice under Muslim Rule. By Charles Tieszen. The Early and Medieval Islam World, vol. 1. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017. Pp. x + 229. $95.

The Venerable Master's vision was as vast as the Dharma Realm, and he taught and transformed all beings without regard to path of rebirth, country, ethnic origin, religion, and so forth. There are two countries, however, where he had special affinities in this life: China and the United States. Although the majority of his disciples are Chinese, history will probably remember him primarily for his work in bringing the teachings of the Buddha to the people of the West.

The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims (...) swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way. It also lets him shed bright new light on the most compelling aspects of evolutionary history and theory: sexual selection, speciation, convergent evolution, extinction, genetics, plate tectonics, geographical dispersal, and more. The Ancestor's Tale is at once a far-reaching survey of the latest, best thinking on biology and a fascinating history of life on Earth. Here Dawkins shows us how remarkable we are, how astonishing our history, and how intimate our relationship with the rest of the living world. (shrink)

Over a century ago European explorers in Eastern Turkestan (southern Xinjiang) made a remarkable discovery: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Shiʿi twelve Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region. This paper investigates Khotan’s net work of holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present. While the political landscape of the present may sometimes make the Sunni-Shiʿi (...) divide appear natural, the case of Eastern Turkestan, which had its own, idiosyncratic approach to sectarian identity, reminds us that the maintenance of such a Sunni-Shiʿi consensus on sectarian designation was dependent on networks of knowledge reproduction that did not embrace the entirety of the Muslim world. Pre-Islamic sacred geographies, the power of locally networked holy sites, the phenomenon of textual appropriation, and a popular and eclectic manuscript tradition overwhelmed weak sectarian distinctions, bringing Muslim followers of the Hanafi legal tradition to pray at the purported tombs of Twelver Imams. (shrink)

Un Vénérable et un Philosophe se rencontrent... L'" initié " et le " profane " disputent en amitié. Ils s'interrogent sans concession sur les mythes fondateurs de l'Ordre, sur la laïcité aux prises avec le religieux et, peut-être aujourd'hui, avec le politique, l'économique, le médiatique. Ils réfléchissent sur l'histoire maçonnique. Ils constatent que, défiant tout humanisme, l'économie prétend s'installer mondialement, réduisant les identités nationales. Les francs-maçons ont-ils pleinement conscience des dangers qui contredisent leurs valeurs : croissance des inégalités, crise de (...) l'écologie planétaire...? Ont-ils la volonté et les moyens d'y faire face? Récusant langue de bois et angélisme - y compris maçonniques - le Vénérable et le Philosophe s'entretiennent sur les indispensables mutations de l'action et de la pensée humaines. Ils soulignent la nécessité de s'ouvrir à la pensée antagoniste, seule capable d'analyser, au cœur des sociétés différentes, le règne actuel de l'économisme et de conjurer " les identités meurtrières ". (shrink)

Ancestor worship is a diffusive religion. Different nationalities may have different ideas about ancestors, but ancestor worship plays the same role. In the development of modern society, Ancestor worship still plays an important role in the demand for human psychology, the shaping of individuals, the stable development of families, and the cohesion of ethnic groups. The development and inheritance basis of ancestor worship is closely related to Chinese religion and culture, and the integration of the two (...) has also promoted the continuous inheritance and development of Chinese religion and culture. At the same time, ancestor worship is also the concrete manifestation of filial piety advocated by Confucianism and Taoism in Chinese traditional culture. By analyzing the basis of the formation of ancestor worship and its inheritance characteristics, this paper discusses the important role of ancestor worship in Chinses religion and culture and further discusses the influence of Confucianism and Taoism on the inheritance of ancestor worship by combining the relationship between filial piety and ancestor worship in Confucianism and Taoism. (shrink)

Various strands of religious thought distinguish veneration from worship. According to these traditions, believers ought to worship God alone. To worship anything else, they say, is idolatry. And yet many of these same believers also claim to venerate—but not worship—saints, angels, images, relics, tombs, and even each other. But what's the difference? Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa (2006: 302) are correct that “it seems to be extremely difficult to distinguish veneration from worship.” Many have argued throughout history that (...) veneration collapses into worship and that those who venerate saints or icons are guilty of idolatry. In this essay, we distinguish worship from veneration in two stages. First, we give a formal account of their difference. Drawing from St. John of Damascus (c. 675-749 AD), we argue that worship is a determinate of the determinable veneration. Second, we give more substantive accounts of both that explain their differences and similarities. Drawing again from St John, we argue that acts of veneration and worship signify subordination. Their difference, however, lies in the fact that worship alone requires absolute subordination. (shrink)

Volgendo l’attenzione alla problematica traduzione del cosiddetto basilicus iactus menzionato nella commedia Curculio di Plauto questo articolo cerca di fornire un nuovo contributo allo studio della cultura ludica latina. Sulla scorta di evidenze interne al testo, in particolare a proposito dell’identità drammatica dei suoi protagonisti e delle isotopie narrative presenti, e grazie a testimonianze esterne alla commedia, nello specifico alcune tradizioni cultuali greche e magno-greche, questa ricerca propone di intendere l’espressione basilicus iactus non come “colpo del re” bensì come “colpo (...) della regina”, con un rinvio implicito alla dea Venus e al colpo degli astragali che dalla divinità prendeva il nome. (shrink)

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguish able from magic. " The language of magic is evident in much of popular discourse about computers. A content analysis of Time magazine reporting on computers and related technologies over a ten-year period revealed that 36 percent of all these stories used explicitly magical or religious language. Together with a qualitative analysis of implic itly magical themes, the patterns in Time's reporting reveal how magic language was used as (...) one strategy to stabilize and close the technological frame of personal computers in the mid-1980s. (shrink)

As tentativas de desenvolver uma cristologia a partir de uma perspectiva exclusivamente africana podem ser consideradas uma das expressões contextuais do empreendimento teológico cristão. É claro que, no contexto do Cristianismo mundial, toda teologia é contextual. Este artigo, explora criticamente as ideias cristológicas de um dos principais teólogos africanos, Bénézet Bujo, situa as muitas reflexões sobre Cristo no contexto africano. O artigo argumenta consistentemente a favor da necessidade da cristologia africana e de uma compreensão aprofundada do argumento de Bujo, para (...) tornar a pessoa de Cristo inteligível na África, empregando a categoria tradicional africana de ancestral. O ancestral como paradigma cristológico permanece controverso, pois levanta muitas questões quanto à sua adequação na compreensão de Cristo para os cristãos africanos. No entanto, a avaliação do paradigma deve ir além da busca de uma interpretação lógica que o vincule às formulações cristológicas predominantes do Ocidente, para buscar o significado da revelação dentro da cosmovisão africana. Este artigo, portanto, avalia as percepções de Bujo e destaca as deficiências de seus argumentos, ao mesmo tempo, chama mais atenção para seu alcance ético e catequético. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 24 Heft: 2 Seiten: 127-152.

In this paper, I am concerned with elucidating and expanding our attitudes toward our own death. As it is, our common attitudes toward our death are the following: we fear our premature death, and we dread our inevitable death. These attitudes are rational, but I want to argue that our attitudes toward death should be more complicated than this. A condition upon our value, our preciousness, as creatures is that we are vulnerable, and our vulnerability is, at bottom, a vulnerability (...) to death. A corollary of this is that we could not be loved, either by ourselves or by others, for one cannot love—be concerned for—a being invulnerable to death. As a consequence, death plays a deep and abiding role in our value systems. Our susceptibility to premature and inevitable death is a condition upon our being valuable creatures and, in turn, it is a condition upon our being loved. Given the high value that we place on being valuable creatures who deserve love, we should equally place a high value on the const.. (shrink)

Current issues concerning the nature of ancestry and homology are discussed with reference to the evolutionary origin of the tetrapod limb. Homologies are argued to be complex conjectural inferences dependant upon a pre-existing phylogenetic analysisand a theoretical model of the evolutionary development of ontogenetic information. Ancestral conditions are inferred primarily from character (synapomorphy/homology) distributions within phylogeny, because of the deficiencies of palaeontological data. Recent analyses of tetrapod limb ontogeny, and the diverse, earliest morphologies known from the fossil record, are inconsistent (...) with typological concepts such as fixed ancestral patterns or bauplans, emphasising the incompatibility of these with evolutionary continuity. The evolutionary origin of the tetrapod limb is also examined in the light of its recent discussion in developmental genetics. While this field promises to reveal more of the fundamental ontogenetic content of homology (identity), at present it is concerned mostly with the abstraction of a new set of types, rather than investigating diversity and change. (shrink)

The Brou people, whom we shall be discussing here, belong to the ancient Austro-Asiatic stock of the Indochinese peninsula. They are spread out on either side of the border separating Vietnam and Laos and settled in particular to the north of Route Nine, which joins Savannakhet (Laos) to Dong Ha (the Vietnamese provinces of Quang Binh and Quang Tri), with their area of the greatest concentration being the district of Huyen Huong Hoa (Khe Sanh) where we studied them.

Catholicism's precarious position in twentieth-century Scotland was in part a reflection of continued anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments, but it was also the result of new political doctrines, growing worker movements and the introduction of complete female suffrage. These challenges were met, in part, by Margaret Sinclair, in religion Sister Mary Francis of the Five Wounds. The cause for her beatification and canonization was unofficially launched in 1926 and met with a groundswell of support, extending beyond Scotland to Europe and North (...) America as the working-classes embraced her as one of their own. Not only was she declared `Angel of the Factory', thereby extending the Church's influence to the factory floor, but her image was grafted to that of the nation as `Scotland's Little Flower'. She was to symbolize feminine piety, the working-class struggle and the epitome of Scottish Catholicism. (shrink)

The distribution pattern of the meiotic machinery in known eukaryotes is most parsimoniously explained by the hypothesis that all eukaryotes are ancestrally sexual. However, this assumption is questioned by preliminary results, in culture conditions. These suggested that Acanthamoeba, an organism considered to be largely asexual, constitutively expresses meiosis genes nevertheless—at least in the lab. This apparent disconnect between the “meiosis toolkit” and sexual processes in Acanthamoeba led to the conclusion that the eukaryotic ancestor is asexual. In this review, the (...) “meiosis toolkit” is rigorously defended, drawing on numerous research articles. Additionally, the claim of constitutive meiotic gene expression is probed in Acanthamoeba via the same transcriptomics data. The results show that the expression of the meiotic machinery is not constitutive in Acanthamoeba as claimed before. Furthermore, it is argued that this would have no implications for understanding the nature of the eukaryotic ancestor, regardless of the result. (shrink)

In Part I of this book, I argued that preta narratives participated in a larger world-building process that negotiated the contours of the Buddhist cosmos and, with it, the place of the departed. Through stories about encounters between humans and pretas, Buddhist authors explored the place of the departed in a karmic cosmological system, worked out how to best assist them, and advocated for the importance of the sangha in facilitating these offerings. These tales do not merely reflect the process (...) through which the preta as a specific entity and rebirth category became distinguished from the ancestral departed, but also participated in this process. This illustrates the importance of viewing narratives, in Rob Campany's terms, as argumentative. Stories are not merely the distillation of more abstract doctrine but are sites for the construction of religious worldviews. This illustrates that religious cosmologies are not laid down fully formed in doctrinal treatises. They are cumulatively built over time, and "popular culture" can do important work in the aggregative construction of cosmologies. (shrink)

We are Ancestors or The Age of Responsibility by Rudolf Jordan CAPE TIMES LIMITED CAPE TOWN 1941 PREFACE THIS treatise outlines the Philosophy of Responsibility...

This first-person essay explores wonder in the medical encounter from a patient’s point of view, considering times when medical technology has given the author insight into her body and the wonder that has been evoked by these experiences. Two medical encounters are detailed: one in which post-polio vocal cord weakness was explored using a miniature camera, which evoked a sense of wonder at the process of evolution; and the second in which an MRI of the author’s skull became a memento (...) mori. The author reflects on the long processes of genetic mutation from single-celled organism to human being, and on the devolution after death to food for bacteria and insects. (shrink)

The question of the simultaneity of relatives is one of the most debated aspects of Aristotle’s theory of relational properties. Are they exceptions to the rules of co-introduction and co-suppression for a pair of relatives? The present article studies a particular chapter of the long history of this problem, the contribution of three Byzantine thinkers of the ninth century. Their discussion is embedded in the complex phenomenon of the Iconoclast crisis. For reinvigorating their discourse on icons, these iconophiles thinkers deployed (...) Aristotelian logic, notably by treating the model and the image as Aristotelian relatives. This move implies tackling the issue of the simultaneity of relatives. Metrophanes, Nicephorus and Theodore solved it in three different ways which the present article reconstructs. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Dolores's case of collective spirit possession as a paroxysmic form of possession idiom, serving as a powerful and creative internal mechanism that both safeguards and revitalizes the core structure of ancestor worship. Drawing on my ethnographic research in North Honduras since 2009, my study reveals that rather than leading to the erosion of possession rituals, entropic forces, such as resistance, modernity, and impiety serve as vital resources, reinforcing the foundations of ancestor worship. This paper explores (...) possession idioms and striking events, such as contagion, abduction, dramatization, illness, and death to highlight the resilience of a possession-based religion as a self-sustaining total social system rooted in “tradition,” yet shaped by a dynamic interplay of historical, cultural, and personal experiences. While traditional interpretations of spirit possession have viewed possession cults as forms of protest against hegemonic power—“a weapon of the weak” used to gain respect and process trauma—I suggest that spirit possession is multifaceted, ambiguous and underdetermined, operating within a social theater where critique, social irony, impiety, historical consciousness, and the carnivalesque intersect. (shrink)

As tentativas de desenvolver uma cristologia a partir de uma perspectiva exclusivamente africana podem ser consideradas uma das expressões contextuais do empreendimento teológico cristão. É claro que, no contexto do Cristianismo mundial, toda teologia é contextual. Este artigo, explora criticamente as ideias cristológicas de um dos principais teólogos africanos, Bénézet Bujo, situa as muitas reflexões sobre Cristo no contexto africano. O artigo argumenta consistentemente a favor da necessidade da cristologia africana e de uma compreensão aprofundada do argumento de Bujo, para (...) tornar a pessoa de Cristo inteligível na África, empregando a categoria tradicional africana de ancestral. O ancestral como paradigma cristológico permanece controverso, pois levanta muitas questões quanto à sua adequação na compreensão de Cristo para os cristãos africanos. No entanto, a avaliação do paradigma deve ir além da busca de uma interpretação lógica que o vincule às formulações cristológicas predominantes do Ocidente, para buscar o significado da revelação dentro da cosmovisão africana. Este artigo, portanto, avalia as percepções de Bujo e destaca as deficiências de seus argumentos, ao mesmo tempo, chama mais atenção para seu alcance ético e catequético. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of responsibility‐sensitive justice for one set of intergenerational rights and duties. It focuses on the distinctive set of rights and duties, pertaining to procreation and parenting, that can be derived from Left Libertarianism's foundational entitlements. Broadly speaking, those implied rights and duties are such that all children's ability levels should be of equal value at the threshold of adulthood.