Encourages Christian teenage girls to explore and discover Truth.

Narcolepsy type 1 deeply impacts on quality of life, especially during adolescence, with NT1 children and adolescents that frequently report difficulties in integration with peers and decreased participation in after-school activities. Here we describe the case of NT1 teenager girl presenting with severe physical and social withdrawal, fulfilling the proposed diagnostic criteria for hikikomori, together with the classic NT1 symptoms. Social withdrawal is an overlooked phenomenon among NT1 children and adolescents that, if present, require a multidisciplinary approach and personalized (...) interventions, but patients can benefit from NT1 pharmacological treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 39-41 [Access article in PDF] Wishing I Were Here:Postcards from My Religious Journey Grace G. Burford Prescott College Summer 1966, Bowling Green, Kentucky An energetic ten-year-old, sitting on a red-cushioned wooden pew in a Presbyterian church leans over to her mother to whisper, "Which is it? Are we supposed to be like little children, or leave behind our childish ways?" After church, her mother (...) does a reasonably good job at answering the question.Later, perhaps even later that day, this little girl has gleefully exchanged her dress and going-to-church shoes for a cotton shirt and shorts and blue Keds, and has escaped to her favorite spot in the woods behind her house. There she swings on vines in imitation of Tarzan and plays contentedly on her own for hours, feeling utterly at home.In this scene, we see that the little girl has discovered that she can best deal with a certain type of recurring physical pain by focusing her entire attention on her breath, as she silently repeats "breathing in, breathing out." Fall 1971, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania A group of eight or so teenagers attend their English literature class at an elite college-preparatory school for girls. Our hero, recently arrived, southern accent still quite in evidence, revels in real education; this a delightfully stark contrast to what she got from Kentucky public schools, then forty-ninth in the nation according to some poll or other—only Mississippi's were worse. In this particular class she finds herself defending Presbyterians against what she considers simply inaccurate descriptions of them by James Joyce. At the same time, she is waking up to the realization that she does not believe—and the suspicion that she never really has believed—the Christian doctrines she has been raised on. Indeed, she feels quite foolish for never having properly examined what exactly she had bought into when she participated in all those church activities. She can't recall ever actually believing in "God the Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth," much less in "Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord," and all the rest of it. [End Page 39] Spring 1975, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Having thoroughly rejected religion—for she knows none other than the one she grew up with—our hero pursues study of astronomy, math, language, and music, quite intent on becoming a college professor of some subject or another. Somewhat annoyed that she must take two courses in the curricular area that includes religion, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, but encouraged by her friends' assertions that religion courses are "not too bad," she signs up for religion and science, figuring that at least half of it will be rational. At the same time, she takes a course on Asian religions. Sometime in the middle of a clear spring night we find her engaged in her part-time job, seated at the eyepiece end of a twenty-meter-long, twenty-four-inch refracting telescope, patiently keeping a star placed just so on the cross-hairs in the siting scope, making fine adjustments to the telescope's precise tracking while the light of stars collects on glass plates coated with very fast photographic emulsion. Between clicks of the shutter she ponders the curiously attractive ideas she is encountering in her religion courses this term. Spring 1983, Evanston, Illinois Our hero earns a Ph.D. in the history and literature of religions, with a focus on Buddhism and Hinduism, and heads for Washington, D.C., to become what she had always aspired to be—a college professor. Summer 1997, Interstate 40 Having experienced a denial of tenure, the challenges of part-time college teaching, training and freelance work in the field of copyediting, life as a wildlife-wielding teacher of auditoria full of elementary school children, an administrative job as second-in-command to a self-described megalomaniac, and the vagaries of teaching two hundred students a term—this lifelong seeker eagerly moves across the country to start a job teaching at an alternative, experiential learning-based... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth in WritingAmandaAn excerpt from my journal during a dark period in my life reads:I am a survivor of sexual mutilation, of coerced gender roles, and of perpetual lies all in the name of normalization. Sometimes I have a hard time even thinking about the true extent of what all happened. It’s like my mind doesn’t have that type of scope, like when I think about the (...) word “eternity.”I wrote this after combing through old medical records, reading comments like “her introitus has healed nicely and looks normal, but my exam suggests that her vagina is shortened,” and “reduction clitoroplasty... removal of testes.” The records go on to say that my “external genitalia is quite satisfactory,” and “on perineal exam, her neovaginal orifice is quite compliant and easily accepts my second and third digits.”My journal continues:I chose this fake hole when I was a teenager because I didn’t know there was another option. I was told from day one to be a female, to be heteronormative, to act like all the other girls, and the only way I could fully accomplish this is by looking the part. A fake hole would be necessary, I thought, to go along with the rest of the lies. Sometimes I think about how the doctors told me to lie about my surgeries and my scars. Sometimes I wonder what my parents would have told the world if I had died during one of surgeries. Maybe they would have said “we were just trying to make her fuckable.”My strength is growing from the stories and experiences I write and share. My journal started about four years ago, when I was in my early 20s, near the beginning of medical school. My initial purpose in writing the journal was to help sort through my feelings and experiences related to a newly discovered sexuality and a changing gender identity. Medical school was thousands of miles away from my previous life, my family, and my friends. Away from my old social network, I was free to self–discover on my own terms. In the first journal entry, I lay out reasons why I decided to get in contact with a therapist, something I had not done previously. Some of the reasons were fairly standard reasons one seeks out a therapist, such as moving away from home. But the fundamental reasons I sought out a therapist, and why I chose to journal, had to do with exploring feelings after my first sexual encounter with a woman, and then [End Page 98] accepting my intersexuality. My relationship with that therapist did not last, but the journaling did.In the beginning of the journal, I write:I am from a small, religious, white, non–diverse, family oriented suburb of Milwaukee. I was raised to be the picture–perfect daughter in a household that did not talk about feelings, sex, cultural or religious differences, etc. My brother and I also never talked about personal issues (and still don’t), which is quite remarkable since we are twins, and have grown up doing most everything together, from sharing birthday parties, to being locker buddies... [When my mother told me about having Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS)] knowing this little fact about my body kept me wanting to become as perfectly female in all ways possible.Growing up without being able to talk about having AIS was stifling to say the least. Closing communication implied great shame, and with the shame came even greater repression. My skate-boarding, baseball card collecting, and model car building interests disappeared after learning about my AIS, which I believe was when I was 12 years old, but I cannot remember exactly. Granted, it’s tough to say whether my interests just changed as I grew older, but I do remember having a fear of portraying any masculine tendencies that other girls in my town weren’t displaying (for example, playing soccer was okay, but I had to shave my legs). I also had crafted some pretty good covers for my AIS, including stories about when I first had my (fake) period, or how I acted fearful about a... (shrink)

Even strong, fearless, and badass Black girls and Black women need affirmations-- now more than ever. Fievre shares inspirational words of wisdom through fabulous Black female trailblazers who changed the world. You don't always have to be strong. Sometimes taking a break to focus on your mental health is bravery in itself. We find ourselves needing reminders that we are incredible and more than enough. Fievre shares strategies that will give you the dose of radical self-affirmation you deserve. -- (...) adapted from back cover. (shrink)

Emerging Adults' Religiousness and Spirituality seeks to understand how the developmental process of meaning-making encompasses American emerging adults' religiousness and spirituality. This volume does not focus on disentangling religion and spirituality conceptually, but rather emphasizes their centrality in the psychology of human development. It highlights the range of experiences and perspectives of emerging adults in the U.S. grounded in social context, social position, and religious or spiritual identification. Chapters are written by an interdisciplinary group of authors and explore topics (...) such as the benefits and detriments of religiousness and spirituality to emerging adults; contexts and socializing agents such as parents and peers, the media, religious communities, and universities; and variations of religiousness and spirituality concerning gender, sexuality, culture, and social position. (shrink)

Should society intervene to prevent the risky behavior of precocious teenagers even if it would be impermissible to intervene with adults who engage in the same risky behavior? The problem is well illustrated by the legal case of the 13-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker, who set out in 2009 to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone, succeeding in January 2012. In this paper we use her case as a point of entry for discussing the fundamental (...) question of how to demarcate childhood from adulthood. After summarizing the case, we identify a ‘demarcation dilemma’ that frames much of the public and expert debate. On the one hand, it seems morally imperative ‘to treat like alike’, which means that both children and adults should be allowed to undertake all actions for which they have the relevant competences. On the other hand, requiring proportional treatment of children and adults seems to neglect the special nature of childhood as a distinct stage in life that ends at a specific age. We introduce the notion of a ‘regime of childhood’ to deal with this problem. This regime includes several dimensions, including the limited liability for children, the supervisory responsibilities of parents, the role of age-based thresholds, and the overarching purpose of childhood as a context for developing autonomy. We argue that, all things considered, there are good reasons not to shift to a regime that offers individual children the option of qualifying for adulthood on the basis of age-neutral criteria. (shrink)

The perpetual decline of Zimbabwe’s socio-economic situation can be found in the country legalising prostitution, which it used to regard as an act of criminality. This legalisation promoted the trade from being an offense to a lifestyle and from being an act of immorality to a profession. Prostitutes were also advanced from being social outcasts to commercial sex workers. Although the law appeared to financially empower prostitutes, its negative impact is seen in the level it dehumanises teen girls as (...) they turn themselves into sex objects. Cases of school dropouts among teen girls and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) are some of the evidences of the negative impact of prostitution, caused by their belief that ‘unprotected sex pays more’. The location of the study was Epworth Booster in Harare, Zimbabwe. Using an African feminist theology framework, this article aims to analyse how women’s theology can be used as a panacea to restore dignity and hunhu-ism to the teen girls whose bodies have been exposed to abuse by their purported fathers. The article uses both unstructured and focus group interviews to collect data from three health personnel and 10 teen girls, respectively. The article grapples with the fact that the legalisation of prostitution in Zimbabwe seriously affected both the social and religious life of teen girls as they risk their lives in order to earn a living, and African feminist theology should be applied to defend these vulnerable girls.Contribution: In the context of socio-economic depletion and laws that suppress women in the name of empowering them, rereading and application of women’s theology should protect women and offer them a future with hope. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 157-158 [Access article in PDF] Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet: A Buddhist-Christian Conversation. By Rita M.Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether. New York: Continuum, 2001. 229 pp. This is a delightful book with many strengths. One strength is the framework of questions that organize the book: "What is Most Problematic about My Tradition?" "What is Most Liberating about My Tradition?" "What is (...) Most Inspiring for Me about the Other Tradition?" Gross and Ruether answer these questions in turn both succinctly and powerfully and respond to each other's answers in illuminating ways. These questions are framed by three other sections: an introduction to the nature of the kind of interfaith dialogue that Ruether and Gross have engaged in for many years and that they reproduce in this book; two autobiographies; and an essay by each on what her tradition offers to the task of attaining ecologically sustainable societies so essential to the future of the planet. All of the writing in response to these topics and questions is admirably clear, deep, and engaging. It leads the reader into the heart of the thinking of both Ruether and Gross.Which of the many strengths of the book is the most important to one as a reader depends on whether or not she or he is coming fresh to the thought and scholarship of Ruether or Gross. In my case, although I have read and taught books and articles by Rosemary Ruether over the years, I am not thoroughly familiar with her theological and ethical thought. I learned a great deal from her short, accessible presentations of Christian history and of her theology in this book.On the other hand, I have been very interested for a long time in how gender is [End Page 157] constructed in Buddhism and how women and men have expressed themselves, taught, and acted in Buddhist cultures. I have read all of Rita Gross's past work with great appreciation. I have assigned her book Buddhism after Patriarchy in dozens of courses on Women and Religion and on Buddhism at my university. I found familiar from Rita's other work the arguments, visions, and imaginative reconstructions in this book in answer to the core questions. It is still the case that many Buddhist lineages and communities, particularly where non-Western teachers are in charge, are slow to open the full range of practices and positions of responsibility to women. Yet Buddhist practice has a great deal to offer women. Rita Gross writes eloquently on these topics, with clarity, accuracy, passion, and balance. You can trust her on these subjects.I thus found Rita's autobiographical piece to be the most illuminating offering of the Buddhist part of the book. She tells of the suffering a girl of her nature had to endure in the environment in which she grew up. The facts of her life make evident the extraordinary courage, determination, and commitment she called forth from herself as she forged her own identity and her own pioneering path. She tells of the many roadblocks she encountered from those in authority in her graduate school when she insisted that studying the religion of women was an important task of the History of Religions. Her story illustrates just how powerful the blindness that we academics nourish unchallenged in ourselves can be. It also shows how badly we can act when students demand that we open our eyes. She recounts the difference she believes Buddhist practice made in her ability to sustain her feminist scholarship in the face of persistent lack of academic support.In Rita's autobiography, as also in Rosemary's, one can see how a particular intellectual and moral direction emerged for each woman out of her response to the particular practices and convictions of her social world. Rita's autobiographical piece is very helpful in understanding this great scholar and her times and what Buddhist practice came to mean in the life of a Western feminist scholar of religion. Rosemary's liberal Roman Catholic upbringing... (shrink)

This paper explores the values of girls who affiliate themselves with Christianity, in comparison with the values of girls of no religious affiliation, in the context of the ongoing debate regarding the social significance of religious affiliation. The values of 9,447 Christian-affiliated girls, and 7,185 girls of no religious affiliation are explored over the six value areas of: myself; my worries; school; religion and society; moral issues; and societal and world concerns. The data (...) demonstrate that Christianaffiliated girls as a group have a distinct identity as expressed through their values, in that they are more positive in their outlook on life, yet also more anxious, and more conservative in their values than girls of no religious affiliation. This finding supports the concept of religious affiliation is a key part of a person's identity, and has important implications for policy regarding young people, specifically Christian-affiliated girls. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims (...) that religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Changed Life: Becoming True to Who I amJay Kyle PetersenI was born intersex in 1952 in the county hospital of a very small, ultraconservative town in rural Southwestern Minnesota. My biological parents and paternal grandparents raised me on a small family farm nearby. I knew by age four I was a boy. No one told me. There was nothing to decide. I have always known I am (...) male. My parents never discussed my unusual condition with me and died having never accepted me. They denied my true identity and instead chose to give me a girl’s name and raise me as a girl.My paternal grandmother knew I was different. She lived on the farm with us and, as she explained to me later on in life, changed my diapers and helped take care of me as an infant and toddler. She also was a Certified Nurse’s Aide in the pediatric ward of the county hospital where I was born and could see that anatomically I was different from other infants. She remained my lifelong ally and friend until her death in 1993. She and Grandpa provided an oasis in their farmhouse where I felt accepted. I felt relaxed and comfortable in their company, and could just be myself. Grandpa took me fishing. Grandma drove me to 4–H State Fair demonstrations and supported me in the audience for which she had helped prepare me. My grandmother taught me good humor, excellence and how it was okay to make mistakes. Much later, in 1977, she drove four hours alone to Minneapolis in blizzard conditions to be my “concerned family person” during chemical dependency treatment, when my mother and dad refused and she also celebrated with me after my successful completion of the program. I loved her and she loved me and she showed it. With her I found refuge away from the pressure and abuse in our farmhouse.But my grandparents and parents did not show me affection physically. The only touch I felt from my family, except my paternal grandparents, was abusive including certain religious figures outside our family. Farm animals and pets provided warmth, love, acceptance, and companionship. I loved riding around the farm on the back of my pet pig, Lucy. Nature, especially trees, wild weather, and local lakes provided rest for my stretched, weary nerves and stimulation for my imagination. There was something about the vivid and contrasting colors, even the sounds and livingness about it all—rich deep moist greens, clean pure vast open blues, dark warm earth which I laid upon and felt in my hands. These and the soothing sounds of the wind gently moving through tree leaves and corn leaves and the lake water lapping calmly upon sandy shores, as Grandpa cast out his line: all this I found both relaxing and energizing and allowed for me the safety and environment to rest, let go and expand so my natural inclinations to express myself creatively could open up. Otherwise, I had a very lonely, frustrated, painful, humiliating childhood and adolescence filled with mounting anger and a sense of futility because I could not be or express my real male self—including my attraction to girls.The cultural and religious pressure I felt, the increased abuse and social lies I was forced to live with—including being forced to wear girls’ clothing against my will—became unbearable. I sought [End Page 106] refuge in addiction early on—food for comfort, nicotine for mood alteration, alcohol given to me by my dad, and more. I became suicidal, and remained for a long time terribly depressed.The geneticist I have consulted for the last four years says that physicians who examined me prior to my genital surgeries described my genitals as “male structures formed without enough testosterone,” rather than female structures formed in the presence of excess androgen. She told me that the features recorded in my medical records, and that she had observed, indicate androgen exposure in utero along with an inherited genetic condition such that she says my condition began at conception. I was born with XX karyotype and testing for usual causes for androgen excess with someone... (shrink)

Physically frail, badly educated girls, brought up to lead useless lives as idle gentlewomen, married to dominant husbands, and relegated to "separate spheres" of life—these phrases have often been used to describe Victorian upper-middle-class women. M. Jeanne Peterson rejects such formulations and the received wisdom they embody in favor of a careful examination of Victorian ladies and their lives. Focusing on a network of urban professional families over three generations, this book examines the scope and quality of gentlewomen's (...) education, their physical lives, their relationship to money, their experience of family illness and death, and their relationships to men (brothers and friends as well as fathers and husbands). Peterson also examines the prominent place of work in the lives of these "leisured" Victorian ladies, both single and married. Far from idle, the mothers, wives, and daughters of Victorian clergymen, doctors, lawyers, university dons, and others were accomplished and productive members of society who made substantial public and private contributions to virtually every sphere of Victorian life. (shrink)

Political and social commentators regularly bemoan the decline of morality in the modern world. They claim that the norms and values that held society together in the past are rapidly eroding, to be replaced by permissiveness and empty hedonism. But as Edward Rubin demonstrates in this powerful account of moral transformations, these prophets of doom are missing the point. Morality is not diminishing; instead, a new morality, centered on an ethos of human self-fulfillment, is arising to replace the old one. (...) As Rubin explains, changes in morality have gone hand in hand with changes in the prevailing mode of governance throughout the course of Western history. During the Early Middle Ages, a moral system based on honor gradually developed. In a dangerous world where state power was declining, people relied on bonds of personal loyalty that were secured by generosity to their followers and violence against their enemies. That moral order, exemplified in the early feudal system and in sagas like The Song of Roland, The Song of the Cid, and the Arthurian legends has faded, but its remnants exist today in criminal organizations like the Mafia and in the rap music of the urban ghettos. When state power began to revive in the High Middle Ages through the efforts of the European monarchies, and Christianity became more institutionally effective and more spiritually intense, a new morality emerged. Described by Rubin as the morality of higher purposes, it demanded that people devote their personal efforts to achieving salvation and their social efforts to serving the emerging nation-states. It insisted on social hierarchy, confined women to subordinate roles, restricted sex to procreation, centered child-rearing on moral inculcation, and countenanced slavery and the marriage of pre-teenage girls to older men. Our modern era, which began in the late 18th century, has seen the gradual erosion of this morality of higher purposes and the rise of a new morality of self-fulfillment, one that encourages individuals to pursue the most meaningful and rewarding life-path. Far from being permissive or a moral abdication, it demands that people respect each other's choices, that sex be mutually enjoyable, that public positions be allocated according to merit, and that society provide all its members with their minimum needs so that they have the opportunity to fulfill themselves. Where people once served the state, the state now functions to serve the people. The clash between this ascending morality and the declining morality of higher purposes is the primary driver of contemporary political and cultural conflict. A sweeping, big-idea book in the vein of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, Charles Taylor's The Secular Age, and Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, Edward Rubin's new volume promises to reshape our understanding of morality, its relationship to government, and its role in shaping the emerging world of High Modernity. (shrink)

The II. constitutional period is a period of renewal in many areas. Political, social and educational changes also had influences in the field of religious education. One of the examples of these changes is the ʻAmelī I҆lmiḥal textbook written by Halim Sabit (DOD. 1946) in five volumes for both teachers and student. This study particularly aims to assess this textbook in terms of religious education. Accordingly, the following questions are addressed: “What are the topics covered in the ilmihal (...) books written for students and teachers? Is the content of the subjects taught appropriate for the religious education? Which methods, techniques, and essential matters are discussed in the ilmihal books for teachers? As having first grade elementary school textbooks for both teachers and students, the research is made just based on these books. Data were collected through the examination of the document, and the texts in Ottoman Turkish were transcribed into Turkish. Content analysis method was used in the analysis of the data. By examining both books, this study shows that belief, worship, and social issues were taught, and prayers and sūras were addressed as need to be memorized knowledge in the book. The books included inappropriate contents for first grade children regarding the belief issues such as fear of Allah, hell, and the hereafter. Summary: Education I҅lmiḥal, occupies an important place in the history of Islamic religious education. According to the religion of both adults and children to learn the principles of faith and worship, it is aimed to shape the daily life. In this context, for example, during the Ottoman period, In the period of II. Mahmut, boys were required to attend the primary school. Thus, it was ensured that children could learn I҅lmiḥal and Islamic sharia properly. Children are taught alif ba for Qurʾān readings in primary schools, as simple as required by religious duties, writing skills have been acquired and the four processing rules are memorized. The II. constitutional period is a period of renewal in many areas. Extreme innovative thinking is also reflected in education. Especially after the Balkan wars, the idea that the collapsing state would be saved through education was dominant. For the first time, a higher education institution for girls and a kindergarten for young children were opened. By recognizing the importance of pedagogy knowledge in teaching, the students have switched to a system where they can search for observation and experiment. Innovations in educational methods have started to be seen. It was seriously opposed to memorization, and the question and answer was seen as old methods. Instead, it was proposed to use sightseeing observation and discovery. Political, social and educational changes are also reflected in the field of religious education. As a reflection of the newly introduced methods, there have been changes in the ʻAmelī I҆lmiḥal books prepared for children. One of the examples of this is the ʻAmelī ʻIlmiḥal textbook, which was written by Halim Sabit in five volumes. This ʻAmelī I҆lmiḥal was prepared in 5 volumes for teachers and students.The main purpose of this study is to evaluate ʻAmelī I҆lmiḥal textbook in terms of religious education This study particularly aims to assess this textbook in terms of reigious education. Accordingly, the following questions are addressed: “What are the topics covered in the ilmihal books written for students and teachers? Is the content of the subjects taught appropriate for the religious education? Which methods, techniques, and essential matters are discussed in the ilmihal books for teachers? As having first grade elementary school textbooks for both teachers and students, the research is made just based on these books. Data were collected through the examination of the document, and the texts in Ottoman Turkish were transcribed into Turkish. The textbook prepared for the students of the first year consists of 21 boards/sheets. The sentences are quite self and short. The contents of the board/sheet are well suited to be discussed and explained. There are no headlines on the boards/sheets. The language of text is Ottoman. It is possible to express the topics covered in the book under the following themes:Prayer and Sūras: Basmala, Kalima Tawḥīd, Kalima Shahāda, Fātiḥa, Subḥana Rabbiyal Aʿala, Subhana rabbiyal ʿAẓim, As-salāmu ʿalaykum va Raḥmatullah, Taḥiyyat, Salawat Sharif, Iḥlas, Kawthar, Subḥanaka Prayer, Qunut Prayers.Faith Issues: Allāh, the fear of Allāh, thanks to Allāh, the Qurʾān, Prophets, Prophet Muḥammad, The Hereafter, Heaven Hell, Angels.ʿIbādat Issues: Zakāt, Ablution, Prayer, Adhān, worship in General (Salāt, Ṣawm, Zakāt, Ḥajj)Social Issues: Friendship, affection for minors, affection for parents, Muslims are Brother, human love, respect for the elderly, respect for scholars.The textbook prepared for the teachers of the first year; consists of 21 pages, 69 pages and Ottoman. As the students do not include the topics in the textbook, it is appropriate to mention the names of the subjects in the textbook of the teacher:1. Subject: Memorization of the Word of Tawḥīd and word of Shahāda; 2. Topic: Raising ideas about the nation in children; 3. Subject: The adjectives of Allāh Almighty; 4. Subject: Love of Allāh; 5. Subject: Angels; 6. Subject: The Divine Books; 7. Subject: Prophets 8. Subject: The Hereafter; 9. Subject: Thank Allāh; 10. Subject: Repentance; 11. Topic: Protecting the language from bad words and threats; 12. Subject: Zakāt and charity; 13. Subject: Riya҆ and his goodness engrave; 14. Subject: Love to the prophet Muḥammad; 15. Subject: Parental love; 16. Subject: The brotherhood of Islam; Subject: Human love; 18. Subject: Ablution; Subject: Prayer; 20. Subject: Respect for the elderly; 21. Subject: Love to ʿulamāʾ; 22. Subject: Fear of Allāh.Halim Sabit also gave information about the methods and techniques to be used in the course and emphasized that the teacher told his / her not by looking at the book. He thought it would be only influence the student in this way. It is recommended to use the appropriate language for the child, to make an introduction in the subjects that will be learned in the new subjects and to draw attention to the subject and to teach the subject gradually. An important advice is the knowledge that the teacher wants him / her to do in the long-term memory in the present sense. The teacher must repeat a subject several times while teaching a subject, and should not immediately remind a student of forgotten subjects, talk to a student and has finded to him. A subject should not be passed without being thoroughly understood, and the classroom needs to be opened by the teacher in order not to forget the learned subjects. The first fifteen minutes of each course should be reserved for the repetition of previously learned subjects. Content analysis method was used in the analysis of the data. By examining both books, this study shows that belief, worship, and social issues were taught, and prayers and sūras were addressed as need to be memorized knowledge in the book. The books included inappropriate contents for first grade children regarding the belief issues such as fear of Allah, hell, and the hereafter. (shrink)

RESUMEN El trabajo tiene como objetivo revelar la contribución social de médicos camagüeyanos negros a la educación católica, a partir de su relación con los colegios regentados por la Iglesia, en un contexto marcado por desigualdades raciales. Se utilizaron métodos teóricos como la revisión documental y bibliográfica, también fueron aplicadas historias de vida y entrevistas. La investigación se centra en el quehacer asistencial de médicos camagüeyanos, vinculados a las Hermanas Oblatas de la Providencia, en particular a los colegios a cargo (...) de estas monjas negras, que educaban a niñas y niños de ese color de piel. Se pudo esclarecer quiénes fueron los doctores más vinculados a esas instituciones y establecer cuál fue su labor en ellas en las décadas del 40- 50 del siglo XX. Queda valorada su contribución social en la asistencia brindada a ese segmento poblacional y al significado de esta sin la mediación de prejuicios raciales. ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is reveal the social contribution of black Camagüey doctors to the Catholic education from it relation with the schools occupied by the church in a context marked by racials ineguality. It put in practical use theoric methods such as documentary an bibliographical revisión; it also were aplyed life history and entreviews. The research it focus in the assistance job of the Camaguey doctor linked to the Sisters Providence Oblates, especially the schools of these black nuns who give education to black girls and boys. The paper show who were the doctors most linked to these religious institution and to situate their Jobs in these schools in the ´40 and ´50 of the 20 th century. Their social contribution is valved in this type of population and the meaning of this contribution with out racial prejudice. (shrink)

This book focuses on social phenomenon that impact the lives of adolescent females of color. The authors highlight the daily challenges that African-American, Chicana, and Puerto Rican teenage girls face with respect to peer and family influences, media stereotyping, body image, community violence, pregnancy, and education. The authors also emphasize the incredible resiliency that young women possess in countering many of the social barriers confronting them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims (...) that religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This article examines the regulation of Latina youth sexualities in the context of sexual and reproductive health care provision. In-depth interviews with health care providers working in two Latino-serving community health centers are analyzed for how they interpret and respond to the sexual and reproductive practices of their low-income Latina teen patients. The author finds that providers emphasize teenage pregnancy as a social problem among this population to the exclusion of other dimensions of youth sexualities and encourage Latina (...) class='Hi'>girls’ adherence to a life course trajectory that conforms to middle-class, heteronormative ideals as a solution to this problem. By relying on such understandings, providers construct meanings of sexual citizenship that require participation in bourgeois heteronormativity. These findings suggest that Latino-serving community health centers, their providers, and their teen patients could benefit from questioning the assumptions that inform providers’ appraisals of Latina youth and developing a more inclusive approach to Latina youth sexualities beyond a discourse of pregnancy prevention. Such efforts could allow community health centers to actively participate in disrupting the structural inequalities that shape their young patients’ lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feeding Tiger, Finding GodScience, Religion, and "the Better Story" in Life of PiGregory Stephens (bio)Yann Martel's Life of Pi is an allegorical castaway story about a sixteen-year-old Indian polytheist who survives 227 days on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Martel frames this postmodern variant on the Noah's ark tale as "a story that will make you believe in God" (viii). But these words are neither Martel's, (...) nor those of the semifictional "Martel-like" narrator one encounters in the "Author's Note" (Innes 25). Rather, they are voiced by Mr. Adirubasamy, an elderly Indian man whom the Canadian quasi-author meets at a coffee house in Pondicherry. The virtual author, like the real Martel, is the author of two failed books, and looking for a capital-S "Story."1 Yet after tracking down the primary narrator of the novel (Pi Patel) in Toronto, reading his diaries of his Pacific Ocean ordeal, and listening to taped interviews with Pi, the quasi-author agreed with Mr. Adirubasamy that "this was, indeed, a story to make you believe in God" (x).That apparently "evangelical premise" could awaken resistance among readers who take this "explicit but deceptive statement" too literally (Ishmael). As one reviewer notes, "Martel's statement is likely to have the opposite effect on his reader, provoking a determined counter-reaction not to succumb to a didactic religious agenda."2 Although the novel has its didactic moments, most reviewers seem to have taken a measured view of the author's "religious agenda." In interviews, Martel notes that he comes from a secular background in Quebec. There are no indications that writing this book represented a Damascus conversion experience for him. Life of Pi is not a conversion narrative perse, but it is in part an ascent narrative (a journey toward enlightenment) that also contains elements of descent narratives.3 As a secular writer with sympathies for the religious imagination, Martel can pitch his revisioning of comparative religion to readers who have what Salman Rushdie once called a "God-shaped hole" in their heart.4 These "implied readers" (Iser) would have a hunger for some of the animating power of faith, if not a capacity for blind commitment to dogmatic faith itself.Reviewing Life of Pi for the Nation, Charlotte Innes describes it as "a religious book that makes sense to a nonreligious person" (25). In similar fashion, the Pequod argues that Martel's book "achieves something more quietly spectacular" than a literal conversion, or a restoring of one's faith in God: "it makes the reader want to believe in God. Martel gives the reader the democratic choice: the desire to believe rather than the belief itself" (Ishmael).Those responses of the secular left contrast sharply with the responses of my first-year students at the University of the West Indies, to whom I have twice taught Life of Pi. For students from a fundamentalist background, it is a challenge to buy into a narrative [End Page 41] that proclaims a God that transcends the imaginations of most believers in the three faiths in which the young Pi has been trained (Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam). In analyzing the theme of finding God, I position the text at a midway point between two different kinds of reception: secular readers for whom the notion of religious belief is at best metaphorical, and religious readers who may resist the narrative's conceit that the true God exists outside the confines of institutional religion.Life of Pi is suffused by a pervasive liminality.5 The teenaged Pi is in motion between continents, between faiths, and between childhood and adulthood, which means that the novel is also a bildungsroman.6 I here focus above all on the text's and Pi's location in the contested space between believers and nonbelievers, and on the novel's attempted mediation between those seeming binary opposites. I ask two perhaps paradoxical questions: In what ways would this be seen by the nonreligious as a religious book with appeal? Put differently, to what degree and in what ways might this text actually give secular readers a desire to believe, even if it does... (shrink)

A funny, touching look at the life of a social media influencer who starts to question the #goals life she has created for herself. Every day, Élie motivates her hundreds of thousands of followers to become the best versions of themselves by posting videos of exercise routines and high-protein breakfast recipes. Far from the shy teenager that she was, she is now in a very public relationship with singer Samuel Vanasse, and together they have become one of the (...) most popular influencer couples in the country. She has succeeded. She shines. And yet, Élie worries that her life is not as flawless as she makes it seem on YouTube and Instagram. Between her obsession with the "ideal weight," her growing attraction to another man, her family's disdain for her career as a content creator and a collaboration with another influencer who Élie can't stand, a thought haunts her. What if, by trying to become everything she wanted to be, she's lost herself along the way? Suck it In and Smile is an intimate exploration of our obsession with appearances and the hypocrisies that appear when you must craft the perfect online life. (shrink)

This paper describes some of the experiences of working with teenage girls' friendship groups at 'Hilltop', a large urban comprehensive school in the north of England. Working between and within multiple friendship groups in a variety of spaces and places raises ethical and moral responsibilities for the feminist researcher. This paper explores the ethical dilemmas raised when confronted with oppressive behaviour when 'hanging out' with groups of teenage girls, as well as the implications this has for (...) the researcher's feminist 'politics of intervention'. Finally, I call for a (re)politicisation of the geographies of children and youth. (shrink)

This paper describes some of the experiences of working with teenage girls' friendship groups at 'Hilltop', a large urban comprehensive school in the north of England. Working between and within mu...

Guided by principles of life history strategy development, this study tested the hypothesis that sexual precocity and violence are influenced by sensitivities to local environmental conditions. Two models of strategy development were compared: The first is based on indirect perception of ecological cues through family disruption and the second is based on both direct and indirect perception of ecological stressors. Results showed a moderate correlation between rates of violence and sexual precocity (r = 0.59). Although a model incorporating direct (...) and indirect effects provided a better fit than one based on family mediation alone, significant improvements were made by linking some ecological factors directly to behavior independently of strategy development. The models support the contention that violence and teenage pregnancy are part of an ecologically determined pattern of strategy development and suggest that while the family unit is critical in affecting behavior, individuals’ direct experiences of the environment are also important. (shrink)

William James called his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, "a study in human nature." This volume recognizes that a fundamental feature of human nature for James is that we have a conscious and a subconscious mind and that the subconscious mind is deeply implicated in the religious life, especially in conversion and other experiences of spiritual enlightenment. In this volume, Capps addresses religious melancholy, the divided self and discordant personality, religious conversion, the saintly (...) character, and the prayerful consciousness. In addition, the cases of two clergymen--one deeply troubled, the other exemplary of the spiritual person--are also presented. A brief discussion of James's view of religion as the generator of hope concludes this introduction to his insights into the religious life. Given that James was a popular writer in his own day, this book is intended to make his insights accessible to general readers. (shrink)

Purpose New media is reshaping mediated communication. This paper aims to examine whether the online community is concerned about ethical issues in citizen journalism. Design/methodology/approach The study uses critical thematic analyses to examine 1,402 comments posted in response to two YouTube videos of teenage girl molestation in India. This method was appropriate, as it will show how public reacts to information disseminated by common citizens and also show whether ethics are related to citizen journalism. Findings Results show that although (...) some viewers questioned the cameraperson’s and the passerby’s morality, several supportive comments praised the cameraperson’s presence of mind and courage. Furthermore, it shows that while some viewers vilified the victim, others advocated a more prudent response. This shows ambiguity regarding ethics in cyberspace. The mixed reactions present strong evidence to challenge the idealistic and exceedingly rational original notion of the public sphere as homogenous or integrated on issues of public concern. Instead, result exhibits an emergence of pluralistic, intersecting and contending publics that are created by new communication technologies like the internet. Research limitations/implications The study was specific to a particular context thereby lacking generalizability. However, it implies further investigation of social agency and the underlying politics in the move from local to global. Originality/value These findings necessitate a reconceptualization of cyberspace ethics to accommodate the new publics that have materialized from new media technologies. (shrink)

Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity (...) are reinscribed but also reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article investigates which epistemological considerations justify how religious life fits into the school life, and examines the debate on the participation of religiosity in the education system. I do this, first, by addressing the pedagogical implications of the distinction between public and private as maintained by Richard Rorty and, second, by reconsidering the pluralist metaphysics held by William James as an alternative path to understanding and re-addressing the question of religious life in school (...) class='Hi'>life. The article analyzes how the strict separation of projects of individual self-creation and the public sphere, as defended by Rorty, poses problems in implementing pluralism in democratic societies and their educational institutions. (shrink)

Cresp, Mary Some months ago while driving I heard an interview with writer Alan Moore on the radio and was so captured by his comments about trends in modern society that I had to pull over to the side of the road and stop to concentrate on what he was saying. I ordered his book, No Straight Lines, and found he presents an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world, more able organisations and more vibrant and equitable economies relevant to (...) the world we live in today. His descriptions so correspond with my experience that, although the changes in Religious Life over the past fifty years are often seen as something that occurred only in church circles, I conclude that they are part of a world-wide search for ways to serve humanity better, to search for meaning in the work people do and to find viable alternatives for the ways that things were done in the past. Because my immediate experience of Religious Life is confined to the Sisters of St Joseph, my comments are framed around that experience. However, through interaction with members of other Congregations, I know their journey parallels that of Josephites in many respects. (shrink)

TWEEN POP examines the creation of the "tween" in the early 2000s as a gendered and raced consumer audience. The tween, aged nine to twelve, and usually thought of as a white girl, occupies a temporality between childhood and adolescence: she has aged out of children's products but is too young to fully engage in marketing directed at teenagers. But, as Tyler Bickford argues, this seemingly narrow market grew to broadly include four to fifteen year olds, with producers and marketers (...) pulling upwards and downwards by creating material that would attract younger viewers and teenagers, thereby creating a demographic that expanded, rather than limited, the traditional reach of child and teenage markets. According to Bickford, the key to this expansion was pop music, as it provided an intensity of experience that mirrored childhood in its investments in emotional authenticity, cultural value, and relational intimacies. In other words, pop music needed to be both intimate and public--a tension that Bickford argues defined the tween's positionality as well--and tween pop did so by pairing the mainstream pop of adulthood with images and lyrics suitable for younger audiences. Throughout the book, Bickford reveals how childhood's status as a private domestic position outside of politics was not a hindrance to the cultivation of children as a mass audience but rather was the very foundation of that project. By creating an intimate public of tween pop, the tween music industry was able to position tweens as still within the private domestic sphere of family life, but connected in a broader public of other tween-pop-listening tweens. Chapter 1 looks at Kidz Bop music videos to argue that the tween music industry framed childhood domesticity as complementary to participation in a public culture. Chapter 2 focuses on Disney Channel's popular music programs' efforts to engage older children, particularly older girls, in their marketing tactics. Chapter 3 analyzes the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana and its foregrounding of tensions between girlhood, public culture, and family. Chapter 4 attends to how whiteness served as central to the tween construction of innocence and childhood. Bickford concludes the book by periodizing the tween moment as the decade from 2001 to 2011, and then outlines the developments in popular culture for children since that time. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnomusicology, feminism and gender studies, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" (...) that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: God and I God and the Teenage I – The Theodicy Fiasco God and the Adult I – Harmful Religious Beliefs at Life's Beginning God and the Adult I – Harmful Religious Beliefs During Our Lives God and the Adult I – Harmful Religious Beliefs at Life's End Why I Speak Out Notes.

The development of all-digital technology has made Generation Z have a pattern of thought that tends to be unique and creative in terms of socializing and thinking. This uniqueness tends to be followed by the amount of information on the timeline that can be accessed through any platform. This affects how Generation Z acts in their social and religious lives. The influence of this information can lead to perceptions resulting from their thinking in processing an event. This research aims (...) to find the relationship between the teachings of stoicism and Generation Z’s social and religious life in creating a wiser life and the ability for self-control. Generation Z’s social and religious life cannot be separated from digital advances that can influence their religious mindset. Meanwhile, the philosophy of stoicism is a form of teaching self-control through rational thinking behavior. This research uses qualitative methods with data collection through interviews and observations. In-depth interviews were conducted with Generation Z who have known the concept of stoicism in the age range of 18–23 years old and live in Kudus City. Secondary data was obtained through various journals related to the topic. The results of this study show that in carrying out social and religious life, Generation Z has been able to understand how to act properly without involving emotions and trying to think rationally. Furthermore, Generation Z can accustom themselves to doing spiritual activities in religion both personally and in groups, to provide religious awareness through self-control of the development of negative emotions. This is because there are similar indicators to achieve happiness in religious teachings and philosophy. In religion, the Qur’an is prioritized as the word of God with the main function of showing humans the essence of truth, while philosophy uses rationality as a tool to find truth without being bound by emotional factors. It can be concluded that the Qur’an and the philosophy of stoicism have the same concept related to gratitude and patience. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger’s important 1920–21 lectures on religion. The volume consists of the famous lecture course Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, a course on Augustine and Neoplatonism, and notes for a course on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism that was never delivered. Heidegger’s engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in the mature expression of his thought. Heidegger (...) reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. (shrink)

In a further bit of irony, disaffection with higher education has shifted that peculiar mode of understanding that we call religious into a rather privileged position. To be sure, many of those people who call themselves religious would not engage in this sort of understanding, but that need not detain us here. The central point of these reflections will be an attempt to display a mode of understanding which one might properly call religious. I shall undertake this (...) from a frankly philosophical perspective, but one which remains conscious that philosophic reason also stands in need of illumination. My own conviction holds that attempts of men to delineate the mode of understanding called religious have often been most useful in recalling us to that style of living called philosophic. I think this will prove to be more and more true today, as we try to understand what it means to do philosophy after its demise has been announced and celebrated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Game ChangeMaximo CortezOn November 17, 1983, I was born with a condition called mixed gonadal dysgenesis, and ambiguous genitalia. My gender was not of a big concern at that time. The more urgent matter was that I had a heart murmur, which was repaired when I was twelve months old. [End Page E5]It was not until I turned five, and by issue of the Texas Children’s Protective Services (CPS), (...) that my mother was forced to authorize providers to perform normalization surgeries on me. An anonymous caller tipped the CPS that my mother was raising a boy as a girl. The state intervened and explained to my mother that she would have to consent to these surgeries or else she would lose custody of me. This included a gonadectomy and a clitorectomy. Without any consent, these surgeries were performed “in my best interests.” My mother was an epileptic, Hispanic, Mormon, single parent.I was raised to be a socially acceptable female, though as early as five, I played with “boy” toys and enjoyed TV programs aimed at male youth, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was not until I had those normalization surgeries performed on me that I felt different. I knew that something major had happened to me. I woke up in a hospital bed in a gown. I raised the covers and noticed that I had an “X” carved in my groin area. Doctors mutilated my clitoris by reducing its size, which made me feel alienated and angry that something was wrong with my body.I had a surgery performed on me that was to be kept secret and never talked about. This sense of fear and shame was instilled in me shortly after the surgery. I do not recall any psychological evaluations or counseling to help me cope with such surgeries. Seeing everyone else my age going through puberty during my teenage years, I felt behind. I wasn’t becoming a boy with a deep voice or facial hair. Instead, I visited the doctor’s office with my mom and was told that I would be taking oral estrogen to become a woman. I wasn’t until that moment that I understood I was seeing a doctor to foster the development of female secondary characteristics. I felt betrayed by the medical community and by my own mother.Just a few years later, I saw a urologist to find out whether I was ready for a vaginal construction surgery (vaginoplasty). Thankfully the urologist suggested that I was not ready to move forward with an invasive and irreversible vaginal construction surgery. I never pursued it as an adult, as I have always felt male gendered.Social sexual relationships have always been difficult for me but more so with my attraction to women. I first realized my attraction to women in early middle school. Being raised Mexican and a Mormon and knowing that I was homosexual created a lot of conflict for me. I felt that I was a male–gendered person forced into a castrated, mutilated, and medically created female body. I suffered through depression from an early age and it continues today. My conservative Mormon upbringing brought me much shame. The Mormon religion, as most people understand it, expresses a great intolerance to homosexuals and transgender people. I felt like I was a heterosexual male in a female’s body, but the Mormons would never accept me.My later teenage years and mid–twenties were a dark time in my life. I even attempted suicide in my early twenties. My depression was treated with antidepressants and talk therapy. Once I began testosterone, I gradually stopped taking antidepressants. When I was only on estrogen, I felt very moody, angry, and in an emotional funk. I would cry easily and would become very irritable and emotional without cause. With testosterone therapy, I began to think more clearly, had balanced emotions, and began to think more logically.I began to research intersex online and found a women’s androgen insensitivity (AIS) support group. At one of their national conferences, I met another intersex individual who was raised as a female and who had transitioned to male. Like me... (shrink)

Ukraine has left a prominent mark in world religious history. I will not begin to substantiate my opinion here broadly, but I believe that it was Ukraine that gave way to Eastern Christianity, which ensured the preservation of Orthodoxy as its specific denomination. Moreover, in the thirteenth century, through its resistance to the invasion of the Tatar-Mongols, it preserved the Christian world from the onset of Islam. Through the Vladimir tradition, Ukraine has maintained the desire of the two branches (...) of Christianity to fulfill the covenant of Christ so that they all may be one, and may offer a possible path to this by their Union of Brest. Ukraine gave an example of the survivability of oncational Christianity, because no matter how much our souls died, our Ukrainian Christianity and the Poles with the Vatican and Muscovy did not die from our nation. Ukraine has exemplified poetic, artistic rather than holo-socialized Christianity through its organic union with the popular beliefs of the day before it. Ukraine gave the example of living, unskilled Christianity, which corresponded to the mentality of the Ukrainian as a creator, a hard worker. Ukraine gave in to somewhat feminized Christianity, given the significant role that women played in the lives of their people at the level of household and housewives. (shrink)

The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life: Translated From The French By Joseph Ward Swain, M.A. This book is a result of an effort made by us towards making a contribution to the preservation and repair of original classic literature. In an attempt to preserve, improve and recreate the original content, we have worked towards: 1. Type-setting & Reformatting: The complete work has been re-designed via professional layout, formatting and type-setting tools to re-create the same edition with rich (...) typography, graphics, high quality images, and table elements, giving our readers the feel of holding a 'fresh and newly' reprinted and/or revised edition, as opposed to other scanned & printed (Optical Character Recognition - OCR) reproductions. 2. Correction of imperfections: As the work was re-created from the scratch, therefore, it was vetted to rectify certain conventional norms with regard to typographical mistakes, hyphenations, punctuations, blurred images, missing content/pages, and/or other related subject matters, upon our consideration. Every attempt was made to rectify the imperfections related to omitted constructs in the original edition via other references. However, a few of such imperfections which could not be rectified due to intentional\unintentional omission of content in the original edition, were inherited and preserved from the original work to maintain the authenticity and construct, relevant to the work. We believe that this work holds historical, cultural and/or intellectual importance in the literary works community, therefore despite the oddities, we accounted the work for print as a part of our continuing effort towards preservation of literary work and our contribution towards the development of the society as a whole, driven by our beliefs. We are grateful to our readers for putting their faith in us and accepting our imperfections with regard to preservation of the historical content. HAPPY READING! (shrink)