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Revitalization of religious and cultural traditions is taking place in nearly all contemporary Asian societies and beyond. This book provides a comparative analysis of the key features and aspirations of revitalization movements and assesses their scope for shaping the future.
This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning.
Contextualising the seemingly esoteric and exotic aspects of Tibetan Buddhist culture within the everyday, embodied and sensual sphere of religious praxis, this book centres on the social and religious lives of deceased Tibetan Buddhist lamas. It explores how posterior forms – corpses, relics, reincarnations and hagiographical representations – extend a lama’s trajectory of lives and manipulate biological imperatives of birth and death. The book looks closely at previously unexamined figures whose history is relevant to a better understanding of how Tibetan culture navigates its own understanding of reincarnation, the veneration of relics and different social roles of different types o...
Dragons are everywhere, seemingly hidden in plain sight. These mythological reptilian monsters date far into known human history in nearly every part of the world and are still prevalent in today's media and entertainment. The wide cultural, geographical, and linguistic diffusion of dragons or dragon-like creatures shows how modern humans have influenced each other through shared tales of monsters while simultaneously hinting at a shared genesis. This book introduces dragon myths and legends from around the world by following human culture's shared evolutionary past via language, folklore, the arts, and commerce. Dragons in folklore, literature, and pop culture are analyzed from Eastern and Western perspectives, leading to a dual analysis of dragons in today's popular culture and media. While other books on the topic have focused primarily on classical sources, or on cataloging various dragon tales in general, this work identifies the subtle yet profound ways in which the dragon figure or related motifs have slyly entered into our collective psyche as participants in the modern, interconnected world.
Volume I, entitled “Augmentation of Brain Functions: Brain-Machine Interfaces”, is a collection of articles on neuroprosthetic technologies that utilize brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). BMIs strive to augment the brain by linking neural activity, recorded invasively or noninvasively, to external devices, such as arm prostheses, exoskeletons that enable bipedal walking, means of communication and technologies that augment attention. In addition to many practical applications, BMIs provide useful research tools for basic science. Several articles cover challenges and controversies in this rapidly developing field, such as ways to improve information transfer rate. BMIs can be applied to th...
"Abject Relations presents an alternative approach to anorexia, through detailed ethnographic investigations. Megan Warin looks at the heart of what it means to live with anorexia on a daily basis. Unraveling anorexia's complex relationships and contradictions, Warin provides a new theoretical perspective rooted in a socio-cultural context of bodies and gender. Abject Relations departs from conventional psychotherapy approaches and offers a different logic, one that involves the shifting forces of power, disgust, and desire and provides new ways of thinking that may have implications for future treatment regimes." --Publisher.
This book examines the normative debates around the American use of targeted killings. It questions whether the Obama administration’s defence of its use of targeted killings is cohesive or hypocritical. In doing so, the book departs from the disciplinary purpose of international law, constitutional law and the just war tradition and instead examines discipline-specific defences of targeted killings to identify their requisite normative principles in order to compare these norms across disciplines. The methodology used in this book means that it argues that targeted killings are only defensible as acts of war, but it also highlights the normative role of accountability and responsibility i...
The application of the evolutionary approach to the history of nature and society has remained one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our growing knowledge of the Universe, life, society and human thought. The present volume demonstrates this in a rather convincing way. This is the third issue of the Almanac series titled ‘Evolution’. The first volume came out with the sub-heading ‘Cosmic, Biological, and Social’, the second was entitled ‘Evolution: A Big History Perspective’. The present volume is subtitled Development within Big History, Evolutionary and World-System Paradigms. In addition to the straightforward evolutionary approach, it also reflects suc...
Islam in the Western imagination -- The Muslim monster -- Medieval Muslim monsters -- Turkish monsters -- The monsters of Orientalism -- Muslim monsters in the Americas -- The monsters of September 11th.
someone asked a question on Catholic.com, “Do animals have souls like human beings?” Their answer is as follows. “The soul is the principle of life. Since animals and plants are living things, they have souls, but not in the sense in which human beings have souls. Our souls are rational–theirs aren’t–and ours are rational because they’re spiritual, not material. Animals and plants also lack a moral sense. Animal and vegetable souls are dependent entirely on matter for their operation and being. They cease to exist at death. We know human souls are spiritual since humans can know and love.