Apophaticism in mainstream analytic theology and philosophy of religion has come to denote a metaphysical and semantic thesis: that, due to divine transcendence, God is ineffable, inconceivable, or incomprehensible. But this conception fails to properly take account of the central claim of apophaticism as a special type of _mystical _theology. As such, the apophatic commitments to divine ineffability are instrumental. More fundamental is the function of theological ignorance to uniquely inform the task of theology and transform the theologian in union (...) with God. Taking Jonathan Jacobs’ recent account as a test case, I argue that reconstructions of apophaticism need to be supplemented by an account of this informational and personally transformative value that apophatic mysticism places on its commitment to divine incomprehensibility. I supply the needed account of apophatic valuing in terms of wonder as the appropriate emotional attitude toward divine transcendence. (shrink)

While the intersection between race and religion has been an important site for research for the sociology of religion and religious studies (in its descriptive dimensions) as well s theology (in its religiously normative dimensions), neither of these disciplines has incorporated recent work in the analytic philosophy of race. Analytic philosophy of race, for its part, has largely neglected the race/religion intersection, while analytic theologians by and large ignore the theological significance of race altogether. In this paper I am to (...) draw together these distinct disciplinary contributions—social-historical, philosophical and normative-theological—into a single integrated framework for a research program in analytic theology. I call that framework “religious racial formation theory,” and I claim that the work of specifying a determinate religious racial formation theory is not merely a (normatively driven) sociological and historical task but a necessarily philosophical one. I then detail what sorts of metaphysical determinations are required in order to yield an adequate explanation of the intersection uncovered by the socio-historical data summarized in the first section. (shrink)

Humans have always been and still are fascinated by the elusive phenomenon of soul and have devised various approaches to interpret it and attribute different names to it; depending on which part, which religion, which tribe and which sect of the world they belong to. Theologians to philosophers to spiritual thinkers to literary authors and critics to scientists—all seem to be researching and explaining its nature and place in the universal scheme of things. Interestingly, there is a unanimity among all, (...) regarding the eternity and indestructibility of soul. The ancient Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita establishes soul as a triad of Self, Nature and God. The inner self is Soul which bears reflections of both, the physical nature and God. Malleable in ignorance, it identifies with the sense-perception dominated body but once realising its true nature, it is capable of governing the body and its actions. With the support mechanisms and persistence, it traverses across individual body consciousness to universal consciousness. This article strives to make a hermeneutic study of this metaphysical text; inquiring how awareness of the duality of nature; transient and permanent, triggers a gradual process of evolution, leading to a complete transformation when a soul resides within a body as a unifying factor; not for exploiting it or others or vice versa but for bringing about universal harmony. (shrink)

This paper studies the representation of human corporeal reality in the discourses of selected Bhakti poets of the late medieval period in India. Considering the historical background of the Bhakti movement and contemporary cultural milieu in which these mystic poets lived, their unique appropriation of the ancient concept of body is reviewed as revolutionary. The focus of the study is the Kabir Bijak, Surdas’s Vinay-Patrika, and Tulsidas’s Vinay-Patrika, wherein they look at and beyond the organic corporeality and encounter human body (...) not as a socially, religiously, economically stamped noble body or lowly body; male body or female body, but a human body. This paper explores how, like existential phenomenologists, these poet/singers decode the material reality of human beings and link it to the highest goal of achieving Moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth-death) by making body a vulnerable but essential instrument towards spiritual awakening. The paper also reflects upon how these poets have suggested a middle path of absolute devotion to God while performing all earthly duties, seek spiritual enlightenment and avoid the extremities of asceticism and hedonism. (shrink)

This exploratory study investigates the manifold conceptions of the internal auditing of risk culture prevalent among four influential actors of the financial sector—regulators, normalizers, consultants, and implementers. By inductive analysis of 20 interviews and 295 documents, we illustrate a two-step interpretive scheme utilized by the four actors in their IA approaches of risk culture: defining broad goals and designing visibility schemes. The visibility schemes were tied to the demarcation, measurement, as well as the IA data collection techniques of risk culture. (...) Our results indicate two dichotomous interpretations among the four actors concerning the IA of risk culture. The first interpretation, prevalent among regulators and implementers, promotes the control of risk culture primarily through verification. The second interpretation, adopted by consultants and normalizers, promotes the control of risk culture by IA along with the empowerment of employees through training programs. Our results not only contribute to understanding IA expansions, specifically to non-tangible domains such as risk culture but also enrich the literature exploring the mechanisms different stakeholders utilize to shape weakly professionalized IA practices. (shrink)

This article analyzes the significance of the Rāmāyaṇa, a serial telecast on state-controlled television in 1987-88, to the neo-liberal shift and the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. Analyzing the inter-subjective structure of the TV serial and the audience it created, the article teases out the complex play of commodity fetishism and mythopoeic investment in the experience of the audience, and how the political right capitalized on these processes. It argues that the human compulsion to repetition and a jouissance consequent (...) to a pre-existing collective unconscious were harnessed as able allies in this transformative process. The Rāmāyaṇa serial metonymically represents the ideological appropriation of the hysteric’s scream for god at the traumatic moment of neo-liberal arrival, both as a flood of commodities and as discursive hegemony. The religious discourse, I argue, was necessary to this transitional structure –the new economic order could only be ushered in the name of God. God was the necessary supplement of a culture apropos the new economy. (shrink)

. With an overall objective of establishing association between air pollutants and incidence of respiratory diseases, the environmental professionals and medical practitioners have made significant contribution, using statistical mechanics in modelling epidemiological data, population characteristics, and pollution parameters. Broadly speaking, the studies have shown that the increase in vehicular traffic has been one of the causes of respiratory diseases. However, the WHO Centre for Environment and Health, Europe in its 2005 document states: “There is little evidence for a causal relationship (...) between asthma prevalence/incidence and air pollution in general, though the evidence is suggestive of a causal association between the prevalence/incidence of asthma symptoms and living in close proximity to traffic”. Decision making process in a real world is invariably based on perceptions which are expressed in words or may be in numeric terms and not in probability terms. In the paper, we made an attempt to model the perceptions of experienced pulmonologists in arriving at their combined degree of belief/plausibility/ignorance for all the possible combinations of identified respiratory diseases, using evidence theory and fuzzy relational calculus without collecting sizeable parametric data accumulated over a period of years. Tightening pollution norms by the regulatory authorities is an overall objective of the global efforts on greenhouse gases reduction in general, and air pollution mitigation in particular. The concept of solar battery operated electric vehicles for road transport is advocated, initially for two/three wheelers, and extending it to four wheelers, especially in the developing countries. (shrink)

This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms and traditions, experts from the UK, US, and India apply different approaches to engagement with beliefs and themes, including identity, ritual, and emotion.

While previous studies have examined the impact of informal institutions to determine entrepreneurial activities, this paper explores the different configurational paths of informal institutions to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities across factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. We collected data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 56 countries for the years 2008-2013 and employed fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to conduct the empirical analysis. The results confirm that a single antecedent condition is unable to produce an outcome while combination of different conditions (...) can produce an outcome. We find that cultural-cognitive institutional antecedents in combination with social-normative antecedents create configurations of conditions that lead to the higher levels of men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. Moreover, this study shows that these causal conditions configure differently to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven nations. This paper may create awareness in potential entrepreneurs regarding specific sets of institutional antecedents that can increase the emergence of entrepreneurship in different economic clusters. We show that institutional antecedents which are essential to promote entrepreneurship combine distinctly for men’s and women’s entrepreneurship and this combination varies in different stages of economic development. (shrink)

In _Divine Holiness and Divine Action _Mark Murphy seeks to establish four key claims: first, that divine holiness consists in a supreme desirability of creaturely union with God and a commensurately supreme creaturely unfittingness for that union; second, that this holiness-concept is grounded in a value-gap between God and creatures which by default motivates God to withdraw from creatures rather than love us or seek our welfare; third, that the love and concern for creaturely welfare exhibited in God’s creating and (...) redeeming is a contingent and freely chosen override of the default stance of holiness; and fourth, that God should be thanked and emulated in virtue of exhibiting a kind of humility in overriding the demands of holiness for our sakes, though not worshipped or praised for this humility, since these latter attitudes should be reserved for necessary rather than contingent features of God. I argue that each of these four claims is mistaken, and further that it is a good thing they are mistaken, because if Murphy’s account were right the appropriate response to God would be neither worship nor thanks but rather abject despair. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has recently argued that there is a logical incompatibility between God’s being perfectly loving and there being non-resistant nonbelievers in the proposition that God exists. In this paper I highlight the parallel between this claim and the claim made by the logical problem of evil. Following Plantinga’s strategy in undermining the logical problem of evil, I argue that all that is needed to undermine the alleged incompatibility of divine love with non-resistant non-belief is a counterexample showing how (...) the two might possibly co-exist. But whereas most attempts to show this have been grounded anthropologically, by drawing on forms of love-relationship that God and humans have in common, I offer a defense of the compatibility of perfect divine love with human non-resistant non-belief in God’s existence grounded theologically, in the unique sort of love relationship that God wants with us, which is the relationship of “imaging.”. (shrink)

One of the disadvantages of the point estimate in survey sampling is that it fluctuates from sample to sample due to sampling error, as the estimator only provides a point value for the parameter under discussion. The neutrosophic approach, pioneered by Florentin Smarandache, is an excellent tool for estimating the parameters under consideration in sampling theory since it yields interval estimates in which the parameter lies with a very high probability. As a result, the neutrosophic technique, which is a generalization (...) of classical approach, is used to deal with ambiguous, indeterminate, and uncertain data. In this investigation, we suggest a new general family of ratio and exponential ratio type estimators for the elevated estimation of neutrosophic population mean of the primary variable utilizing known neutrosophic auxiliary parameters. For the first degree approximation, the bias and Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the suggested estimators are computed. The neutrosophic optimum values of the characterizing constants are determined, as well as the minimum value of the neutrosophic MSE of the suggested estimator is obtained for these optimum values of the characterizing scalars. Because the minimum MSE of the classical estimators of population mean lies inside the estimated interval of the neutrosophic estimators, the neutrosophic estimators are better than the equivalent classical estimators. The empirical investigation, which used both real and simulated data sets, backs up the theoretical findings. For practical utility in various areas of applications, the estimator with the lowest MSE or highest Percentage Relative Efficiency (PRE) is recommended. (shrink)

The open secret of analytic philosophy of religion since its 20th century revival has been that it is for the most part a revival of philosophical theology, and particularly Christian philosophical theology. More recently, Christian analytic philosophers and theologians sympathetic to them have transformed this open secret into a research program by explicitly thematizing the use of analytic philosophical tools for the particular work of Christian theology. Dubbing this work as “analytic theology” (AT) Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea have succeeded (...) in inaugurating AT as a distinct subregion in the philosophy of religion. Besides prompting a spate of first-rate philosophical work theorizing a variety of Christian theological commitments, the advent of AT has also prompted a good deal of meta-theological reflection: Is AT more conducive for certain conceptions of Christian theology than others? Among the various kinds of theology produced by AT, liberation theology is notably absent. In this paper, I offer a diagnosis of why that might be, outline an argument for analytic engagement with liberation theology, and sketch what such an engagement might consist in. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis is the field of natural language processing to analyze opinionated data, for the purpose of decision making. An opinion is a statement about a subject which expresses the sentiments as well as the emotions of the opinion makers on the topic. In this paper, we develop a sentiment analysis tool namely SENTI-METER. This tool estimates the success rate of social campaigns based on the algorithms we developed that analyze the sentiment of word as well as blog. Social campaigns (...) have a huge impact on the mindset of people. One such campaign was launched in India on October 2, 2014, named Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Our tool computes an elaborated analysis of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which examines the success rate of this social campaign. Here, we performed the location-wise analysis of the campaign and predict the degree of polarity of tweets along with the monthly and weekly analysis of the tweets. The experiments were conducted in five phases namely extraction and preprocessing of tweets, tokenization, sentiment evaluation of a line, sentiment evaluation of a blog and analysis. Our tool is also capable of handling transliterated words. Unbiased tweets were extracted from Twitter related to this specific campaign, and on comparing with manual tagging we were able to achieve 84.47 % accuracy using unigram machine learning approach. This approach helps the government to implement the social campaigns effectively for the betterment of the society. (shrink)

Initial evaluation structures (IESs) currently proposed as the earliest detectors of affective stimuli (e.g., amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, or insula) are high-order structures (a) whose response latency cannot account for the first visual cortex emotion-related response (~80 ms), and (b) lack the necessary infrastructure to locally analyze the visual features that define emotional stimuli. Several thalamic structures accomplish both criteria. The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), a first-order thalamic nucleus that actively processes visual information, with the complement of the thalamic reticular nucleus (...) (TRN) are proposed as core IESs. This LGN–TRN tandem could be supported by the pulvinar, a second-order thalamic structure, and by other extrathalamic nuclei. The visual thalamus, scarcely explored in affective neurosciences, seems crucial in early emotional evaluation. (shrink)

A fundamental problem in Christian theology has been that of determining whether God can be an object of experience and how we should account for God's empirical availability to us. Can experiences of God serve to inform and justify our theological beliefs and practices? The central claim in this work is that there is a radical mistake in many contemporary accounts that require grounding a theological story of Gods availability to us in experience in a prior general philosophical theory of (...) perception. Instead, it is argued that the philosophical problem of perception is a pseudoproblem and that in virtue of their entanglement with that pseudoproblem, the influential accounts of Christian religious experience, such as in Jean-Luc Marion, Kevin Hector, or William P. Alston, are at bottom incoherent. The study concludes with a new reading of Gregory of Nyssa and his theology of the spiritual senses, which is free from the bewitchment of the problem of perception. This critical retrieval of Nyssen opens the path toward a viable contemporary theological empiricism, one that characterizes both tasks of theological contemplation and spiritual formation in terms of a receptivity and responsiveness to the perceptible presence and agency of God in the world. (shrink)

Much previous work has suggested that word order preferences across languages can be explained by the dependency distance minimization constraint (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2008, 2015; Hawkins, 1994). Consistent with this claim, corpus studies have shown that the average distance between a head (e.g., verb) and its dependent (e.g., noun) tends to be short cross‐linguistically (Ferrer‐i Cancho, 2014; Futrell, Mahowald, & Gibson, 2015; Liu, Xu, & Liang, 2017). This implies that on average languages avoid inefficient or complex structures for simpler structures. But (...) a number of studies in psycholinguistics (Konieczny, 2000; Levy & Keller, 2013; Vasishth, Suckow, Lewis, & Kern, 2010) show that the comprehension system can adapt to the typological properties of a language, for example, verb‐final order, leading to more complex structures, for example, having longer linear distance between a head and its dependent. In this paper, we conduct a corpus study for a group of 38 languages, which were either Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) or Subject–Object–Verb (SOV), in order to investigate the role of word order typology in determining syntactic complexity. We present results aggregated across all dependency types, as well as for specific verbal (objects, indirect objects, and adjuncts) and nonverbal (nominal, adjectival, and adverbial) dependencies. The results suggest that dependency distance in a language is determined by the default word order of a language, and crucially, the direction of a dependency (whether the head precedes the dependent or follows it; e.g., whether the noun precedes the verb or follows it). Particularly we show that in SOV languages (e.g., Hindi, Korean) as well as SVO languages (e.g., English, Spanish), longer linear distance (measured as number of words) between head and dependent arises in structures when they mirror the default word order of the language. In addition to showing results on linear distance, we also investigate the influence of word order typology on hierarchical distance (HD; measured as number of heads between head and dependent). The results for HD are similar to that of linear distance. At the same time, in comparison to linear distance, the influence of adaptability on HD seems less strong. In particular, the results show that most languages tend to avoid greater structural depth. Together, these results show evidence for “limited adaptability” to the default word order preferences in a language. Our results support a large body of work in the processing literature that highlights the importance of linguistic exposure and its interaction with working memory constraints in determining sentence complexity. Our results also point to the possible role of other factors such as the morphological richness of a language and a multifactor account of sentence complexity remains a promising area for future investigation. (shrink)

Dennett (_Synthese,_ _53_(2), 159–180, 1982, 1991, _Journal of Consciousness Studies,_ _10_(9–10), 19–30, 2003, _Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _6_, 247–270, 2007 ) proposes and defends a method called _heterophenomenology_. Heterophenomenology is a method to study consciousness _from a third-person objective point of view_ as opposed to a first-person subjective point of view or (auto)-phenomenology. The method of heterophenomenology serves a necessary role in Dennett’s schema of bridging the gap between the manifest and the scientific image of the world. In this (...) paper, I attempt to present a limited critique of the method of heterophenomenology. The objection raised in this paper is limited to one of the steps involved in the method, i.e., the interpretation of the heterophenomenological text as analogous to novelist fiction. I attempt to show that the assumptions made by Dennett about the interpretation of fiction are contradictory in nature and therefore the same cannot be applied to the interpretation of a heterophenomenological text. The assumptions fail in justifying the interpretation of fiction itself and hence exporting them by analogy to interpret a heterophenomenological text is a mistake. (shrink)

A study was carried out from October, 2020 to September, 2021to investigate the diversity of fishes and the conservation status of Chittaura Jheel (Bahraich), Uttar Pradesh. During the study period, 38 fish species belonging to 28 genera, 14 families and 7 orders have been identified. The order Cypriniformes was found the dominated order with 15 species(39.47%) followed by Siluriformes 10 species (26.31%), Perciformes 4 species (10.52%), Ophiocephaliformes 4 species (10.52%), Synbranchiformes2 species (5.26%), Osteoglossiformes 2 species (5.26%) and Clupiformes 1 species (...) (2.63 %), The present investigation showed that the wetland, Chittaura Jheel possesses rich fish biodiversity but proper conservation measures are required to maintain sustainability and richness of the fish species diversity of that wetland of U.P. According to IUCN, 30 were enlisted as Least Concern (LC), 2 species as near endangered (NE), 3 species as near threatened (NT), 2 listed as Endangered (EN) and 1 species was listed as Vulnerable (VU). There is a need of conservation of fish diversity of this natural wetland. The pressure is increasing day by day due to increasing population, leading to loss of fish diversity hence identifying the problem and making a better management plan is the way for conservation of the fish diversity of the Chittaura Jheel, a wetland of Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh. (shrink)

Young academics have been facing a problem of high turnover rate due to missing links between the institutions’ policies and the performance. This study explores the effect of job embeddedness and community embeddedness on creative work performance and intentions to leave of young teaching staff in academic institutions in Pakistan. In this study, 300 qualified young academics from public and private universities were selected as subjects and asked to complete a questionnaire. Data were collected via mail-survey. A variance-based structural equation (...) model is employed to measure the path model. The results show that the fit-dimension of organizational- and community-embeddedness, along with the moderating effect of organization size and the availability of nearby alternative jobs have a significant impact on improving perceived creative performance and reducing staff turnover intentions. This study suggests that organizations should focus on organizational-fit and community-fit constructs in their nurturing strategies to embed young teachers in their academic institutions. This study also suggests that monetary rewards only are relatively ineffective to improve retention. Hence, public and private sector universities should facilitate meaningful contributions from young teachers in creative work and provide opportunities for social interactions and personal development. (shrink)

This article discusses the importance of ‘public conscience’ in B. R. Ambedkar’s political thought. Ambedkar consistently defended public conscience as a democratic value in his writings and speeches. Public conscience referred to collective responsibility, social justice and the public deliberation of what constitutes the social good. Ambedkar consistently expressed the unequivocal belief that public conscience would bring about a moral transformation in Indian society through a collective ethical stance against all forms of social oppression. He conceptualized public conscience as a (...) method by which a democratic and ethical Indian society could come about and flourish. This article interrogates his ideas concerning public conscience through a detailed reading of his works, focusing particularly on his 1943 speech, Ranade, Gandhi and Jinnah. (shrink)

Writing about “self” as an autobiography became an elite device in the hands of many Indian women post independence, who wished to write about their lives and exerted strenuously to break the restrictions imposed on them within the “four-walled peripheries” to construct their own identity and exhibit their individuality in various fields such as sports, business, film industry, defense, and in various other professions. They assertively voiced in the form of writing their life narratives to discard the burden of patriarchal (...) dominance where with a prevalent sense of gender discrimination, they are considered feeble, inept, or subjugated. This article explores and cognizes the course of an inspirational and tear-jerking narrative, A Life Apart, crafted by a well-off industrialist and writer, Prabha Khaitan who flouted her community codes and stated against injustices and hypocrisies prevalent in the male-dominated society. It analyses how Prabha footsteps the arduous trail between the passion for love, work, and independence and the pull of traditions and family restrictions to be her own woman creating her own identity. (shrink)

Discussions of ethics within in-service teacher education tend to focus on microethical concerns (e.g., discipline) that deal with decision making at interpersonal levels. Issues concerning educational technology are no exception. Yet, as teachers choose and are expected to integrate technological devices (e.g., laptops) and sociotechnical systems (e.g., learning management systems) into pedagogical practices, their classrooms and schools may become implicated in macroethical issues (e.g., electronic waste) that reach beyond the local consequences of their direct actions. Necessitated by tight couplings of (...) technology and education, this article presents the concept of macroethics for teacher educators by grounding it in three areas of concern: obsolescence, automation, and big data. These three areas offer opportunities to make economic and environmental issues more central to case studies on technology in teacher education. At the same time, teacher educators will need to put emphasis on critical reflection and collective action in units on macroethics since the limited impact of individual decision-making on these issues may put teachers in double binds (i.e., dilemmas with contradictory demands). (shrink)

Employee wellbeing as a central aspect of organizational growth has been widely regarded and accepted. Therefore, a considerable growth in the number of researches focusing on employee wellbeing has been comprehended in recent years. Employee wellbeing characterizes the individual’s own cognitive interpretation of his/her life at work. The present study made an attempt to examine how workplace spirituality, empathic concern and organizational politics influences employee wellbeing. It was hypothesized that empathic concern mediates the relationship between workplace spirituality and employee wellbeing (...) while organizational politics act as a moderator in this relationship. A survey was conducted on 253 employees working in Uttar Pradesh Police department. The results obtained revealed that workplace spirituality, empathic concern and employee wellbeing carries a positive association among them whereas these variables were found to be negatively correlated with organizational politics. Results also depicted that empathic concern significantly mediates between workplace spirituality and employee wellbeing. Further, moderated mediation analysis confirmed employee wellbeing as a function of workplace spirituality, empathic concern and organizational politics. The present study has put forward several practical implications for business practitioners and research directions for academicians, emphasizing upon the need to investigate the comprehensive impact of employee wellbeing in organization and the society as a whole. (shrink)

The paper investigates the ideas of solidarity and social hope textured in critiquing western epistemology and politics of knowledge production. Richard Rorty’s anti-foundationalist, anti-representationalist critique argues for the de-hierarchization of knowledge-claims. The cultural-conversational turn to knowledge and social hope in the creation of democratic community finds its rationale in the conception of human solidarity, in the most praiseworthy human abilities of trust and cooperation. The idea of social hope, a critical engagement of the knower with knowledge production in the feminist (...) discourse, however, is another anti-essentialist stance that illuminates the various axes of domination, which the pragmatization of knowledge and methods does not account for. It is in this context, that the paper examines the politics of solidarity vis-à-vis knowledge construction in Donna Haraway, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Marnia Lazreg and argues that solidarity as dissent provides the knower a chance to articulate hope in the transformative goals of knowledge and education. Keywords: critique of epistemology, Rorty, politics of knowledge, politics of solidarity, social hope. (shrink)