The cornerstone of any religion is its anthropological concept, which seeks to determine the essential orientations of man, to outline the ideological framework of its existence, to represent the idea of ​​its essence, purpose in earthly life. The main task of the religious system is the act of involving and subordinating man to the spiritual divine realm as the realm of the transcendental existence of God. Belief in the real presence of the latter implies a new understanding of oneself, (...) which ultimately leads the religious individual to the desire to be involved in this transcendental existence, to have intimate relations with him, to have a consciousness inherent in God. Note that in this context, all human being is interpreted as a certain arena for this realization. Therefore, the religious life of the individual acquires the status of religious activity. (shrink)

Prolonged conflict on the southern Thailand border still continues, especially in four provinces – Pattani, Yala, Narathivat, and Satun. These four provinces are the home base of the Malay-Muslim community. However, conflicts have almost never occurred in the province of Phattalung, particularly in the region called ‘Two Religion Community Life’. This is because people can find solutions to every problem using cultural negotiation. This research aims to describe the results of cultural negotiation and social learning between Muslims (...) and Buddhists in solving daily life problems. The most important data collection techniques are in-depth interviews and observations. There are five critical informants chosen purposively: Islamic and Buddhist religious leaders, community leaders, school principals, and community members in the Tamot and Khaocan regions. The results found that there are several forms of cultural negotiation in Phattalung, including annual ritual prayers conducted together by Muslims and Buddhists, agreement on how to slaughter animals to be served during ceremonies, tradition of food bartering, and agreement on animal caring. Furthermore, social learning to preserve the results of the negotiations is carried out through the establishment of voluntary medical groups whose members consist of young men and women from the Muslim and the Buddhist community, sports and arts activities, commemorations of national holidays, and conducting annual religious rituals at the same place and time. This study also found four important aspects to strengthen the social learning in multireligious society – moderate values derived from their respective religious teachings, moderate values taught by the country, the existence of trust among citizens, and win-win solutions to the emerging problems. Contribution: This research promotes the world that there is a heterogeneous religious community in the Phattalung province, Thailand which has a building construction of tolerance and harmony of locality namely the ‘Two Religion Community Life’ by preserving the cultural negotiation values through social learning. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to prove the thesis that the attempts to transpose the cultural differentiation into the social and economical universalism and globalism must lead to repressive psychosocial totalitarianism on a large scale. Modern human sciences and politics tend to classify the individual in respect to his adaptive efficiency in interactive relation with programmed environment and to qualify him according to given imposed criteria of social functionalism. The correctly socialized individual is expected to be an exchangeable (...) functional unit assessed according to its usefulness in performing a set of particular tasks, despite his cultural background being considered as a second-rate factor, which may affect the social acceptance and correctness of his behavior. However, no community is an exact representation of society because it is held together not by functions but by the values aswell as the forms of their actualization and implementation into the common organization and their way of life. The community is not a contract upon which society is based. The identity of the individual must not be removed from the culture of the community in which he lives and from its constitutive values. It is also rooted in the past and history of striving for self-determination and cultural as well as personal subjectivity. Without these significant cultural and historical components the individual identity is nothing but an operational, programmable algorithm of functional living unit assigned to perform short-term utilitarian tasks. This approach stands in contradiction to the Aristotelian concept of wellbeing and happiness considered as striving for the common good of spiritual values by individuals as well as by human communities. Any extensive and effective civilization neglecting the higher values of moral, symbolic and religious sense of the individual, must face totalitarianism or extinction. (shrink)

This paper argues that in Augustine rationality in religion depends in important respects on religious social practice. This point is developed in reference to the questions of the reasonableness of a commitment to a particular religion, the meaningfulness of religious terms and concepts, and the truth and falsity of religious claims. In a concluding section, I contend that Augustine, while giving rationality in religion a basis in religious practice. succeeds in avoiding the tendency, found in some otherwise similar contemporary positions. (...) to sever rationality in religion from rationality in other domains of inquiry. (shrink)

I review José Medina's The Epistemology of Protest: Silencing, Epistemic Activism, and the Communicative Life of Resistance, and raise some questions about the felicity, legitimacy and civility of protest.

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

This book offers a polyphonic theory of protest as a mechanism for political communication, group constitution, and epistemic empowerment. The book analyzes the communicative power of protest to break social silences and disrupt insensitivity and complicity with injustice. Medina also elucidates the power of protest movements to transform social sensibilities and change the political imagination. Medina’s theory of protest examines the obligations that citizens and institutions have to give proper uptake to protests and to communicatively engage with protesting publics in (...) all their diversity, without excluding or marginalizing radical voices and perspectives. Throughout the book, communicative and epistemic arguments are given for the value of imagining with protest movements and for taking seriously the radical political imagination exercised in social movements of liberation. Medina’s theory sheds light on the different ways in which protest can be silenced and the different communicative and epistemic injustices that protest movements can face, arguing for forms of epistemic activism that resist silencing and communicative/epistemic injustices while empowering protesting voices. While arguing for democratic obligations to give proper uptake to protest, the book underscores how demanding listening to protesting voices can be under conditions of oppression and epistemic injustice. A central claim of the book is that responsible citizens have an obligation to echo (or express communicative solidarity with) the protests of oppressed groups that have been silenced and epistemically marginalized. Studying social uprisings, the book further argues that citizens have a duty to join protesting publics when grave injustices are in the public eye. (shrink)

The void deck, originally developed for housing projects in Singapore, refers to the open space located on the ground floor of a residential building. The model of the void deck was exported to Suzhou Industrial Park and later used in a growing number of high-rise residential developments in China. Taking community interiority as a new perspective, the discussion of void decks and everyday life investigates whether the void deck endows a new layer of interiority to communal life (...) as a special type of threshold space in China’s highly dense and high-rise residential environments. The growing number of domestic objects in the void decks represents a consensual reconstruction of community interiority, allowing the reflection and rediscovery of the resonant membrane that mediates every relationship between people and things living in a substantially enclosed community. The study of void deck, its status and its transformation reflects how neo-liberal community spaces and new social relations in the communities in China have been changing: the communities are evolving from a consumption-based and top–down designed space, circling back to a deeper relationship between people and community within the urban transformation. (shrink)

This edited volume examines women's voices in phenomenology, many of which had a formative impact on the movement but have be kept relatively silent for many years. It features papers that truly extend the canonical scope of phenomenological research. Readers will discover the rich philosophical output of such scholars as Edith Stein, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and Gerda Walther. They will also come to see how the phenomenological movement allowed its female proponents to achieve a position in the academic world few women (...) could enjoy at the time. The book explores the intersection of social ontology, phenomenology, and women scholars in phenomenology. The papers offer a fresh look at such topics as the nature of communities, shared values, feelings, and other mental content. In addition, coverage examines the contributions of Jewish women to the science, who were present at the beginning of the phenomenological movement. This remarkable anthology also features a paper on Gerda Walther written by Linda Lopez McAlister, former editor of the feminist journal Hypatia, who had met Walther in 1976. This book features work from the conference “Women Phenomenologists on Social Ontology,” held at the University of Paderborn. Overall, it collects profiles and analysis that unveil a hidden history of phenomenology. (shrink)

The American Country LifeAssociation was heir to Theodore Roosevelt'sCountry Life Commission, which examined the“general conditions of farming life in the opencountry, and...its larger problems.” In1919, Kenyon Butterfield, a member ofRoosevelt's Commission, met withrepresentatives from 30 states and 25 nationalorganizations to form the American Country LifeAssociation. In that year, Butterfield, ACLA'sfirst president, published a book, TheFarmer and the New Day, whose defining chapterwas “The Making of Communities: The CommunityIdea.” The ACLA was educator created and led.Solutions to rural problems were (...) seen aseducational matters. But educational philosophywas undergoing scrutiny and new educationalconcepts were arising from the bustling,industrializing, urbanizing times of late19th century. The experimental,unconstrained spirit of the nation at the turnof the century was formalized as pragmatism. Aleading pragmatist and educator of the time wasJohn Dewey, a contemporary of Butterfield.The communitarianism of Butterfield and Deweycarried throughout the life of ACLA in avariety of forms. Even after ACLA ended as anorganization in 1976, the concerns and idealscontinued in successor organizations, and canbe found in environmental, sustainableagriculture, and rural life organizationstoday. This paper traces one of continuingthemes of the ACLA, the community idea as a wayof adding a social dimension to agriculture'seconomic policies and development. The ACLAstory is a metaphor for country life throughmuch of 20th century America. ACLA is alsoa lesson in how organizations come into being,flourish, falter, die, and leave their legaciesto future generations. (shrink)

Communication Theories for Everyday Life introduces readers to the complexities of theories in communication studies, mass communication, and public relations, emphasizing their connection to everyday life. Instead of utilizing a "theory-a-day" approach, this text cuts across content areas and clusters related theories, making them easier for readers to process and apply to real-life situations. Communication Theories for Everyday Life also addresses theories in emerging areas and growing fields, such as media research, organizational communication, and computer-mediated communication, (...) while still featuring the traditional theories that always have defined the field. Features: Contextualizes theory with an introductory chapter in each of the main content areas that introduces the theories and research in the field, showing students how the theories developed. Features new theories and subject areas not present in most traditional communication theory textbooks, including new interactive technologies, feminist scholarship, British cultural studies, semiotics, postmodernism, and critical race theory. Emphasizes the application of some theories across many subject areas through headings in the form of questions that encourage students to process material and explore for themselves how theories and content apply to their lives. Uses case-study chapters that demonstrate to students how each subject area would use theory to solve or understand issues in everyday life. Reviews theories for the three main genres of communication - communication studies, mass communication, and public relations - with balanced coverage, examining the unique contributions each area has made to the field of communication as a whole. Page 1 of 1. (shrink)

Manfred Eigen extended Erwin Schroedinger’s concept of “life is physics and chemistry” through the introduction of information theory and cybernetic systems theory into “life is physics and chemistry and information.” Based on this assumption, Eigen developed the concepts of quasispecies and hypercycles, which have been dominant in molecular biology and virology ever since. He insisted that the genetic code is not just used metaphorically: it represents a real natural language.However, the basics of scientific knowledge changed dramatically within the (...) second half of the 20th century.Unfortunately, Eigen ignored the results of the philosophy of science discourse on essential features of natural languages and codes: a natural language or code emerges from populations of living agents that communicate. This contribution will look at some of the highlights of this historical development and the results relevant for biological theories about life. (shrink)

This present article explores the effects of cultural value, economic prosperity, and community mental wellbeing through multi-sectoral infrastructure growth projects under the Belt and Road Initiative. The implications of the social exchange theory are applied to observe the support of the local community for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. This study explores the CPEC initiative, it’s direct social, cultural, economic development, and risk of environmental factors that affect residents’ lives and the local community’s wellbeing. CPEC is a multibillion-dollar (...) project to uplift economic growth and free trade between Pakistan, China, and other regional stakeholders. Although CPEC is still in its initial phases with partial startups, policymakers and government officials claim this mega project as a “game-changer” in the region, mainly for Pakistan and China. This gigantic project offers the significant potential to generate business slews and employment opportunities with international outreach. Due to the term’s newness, numerous studies have recently explored the macro and microeconomic benefits of the CPEC initiatives; still, these projects are theoretical. The existing literature insufficiently explored how helpful CPEC would be to a specific group and how residents perceive its advantages. This study fills in the literature gaps and explores the likely advantageous potential of the CPEC for the regional states. The study applied a convenient sampling technique for the data collection process. It used a mixed-method approach to gain scientific results, with a standardized questionnaire survey of 459 people from five major cities of Pakistan. The study results designate that residents believe that CPEC infrastructure projects will significantly improve residents’ life quality through more job openings and community poverty reduction. Still, they raised their concerns regarding environmental protection issues in the region. The findings specified that residents had an optimistic approach to better educational productivity by adopting environment-oriented policies. Policymakers should establish new CPEC study centers in different areas, and investors should be encouraged to participate in the industrial sector. Officials can overwhelm community worries about environmental degradation. Government officials in both countries can utilize the findings to raise public awareness about CPEC’s social, economic, cultural, mental wellbeing, and ecological implications. (shrink)

This paper offers a new philosophical account of vocations as deeply personal but at the same time also communal and generational forms of multimodal intending. It provides a reconstruction and a systematic development of Edmund Husserl’s scattered discussions on vocations. On these grounds, the paper argues that vocational life is a general human possibility and not determined by any set of material values, religious, epistemic or moral. Rather, vocations are distinguished from other complexes of intentional acts and attitudes by (...) certain structural features of their core valuations and volitions. (shrink)

My question is whether a phenomenology of community is possible. Phenomenology starts from experience, in the Husserlian sense of Erlebnis. Now, can a community be experienced, and not empirically but rather phenomenologically understood? What is a community from the viewpoint of experience? In this text, I will respond to, and elaborate on, this question. More specifically, I will attempt to understand community from the perspective of life by drawing on the work of Michel Henry.

Religious teachings express the fact that a human is a social being and associates with various people. In order to have a successful and safe life, we should refrain from any selfishness, harming others, malice and humiliating people and should always be forgiving, selfless and humble in relationships. Interpersonal relationships are one of the most important components of human life from birth to death; none of the potential capabilities of humans grow except in the shadow of interpersonal relationships. (...) Learning correct interpersonal relationships is very important in creating mental health, personality development, identity finding, increasing job productivity, increasing quality of life, increasing adaptability and self-fulfilment. The current research was conducted with the aim of explaining the relationship between communication skills based on Islamic teachings and students’ life skills. In this research, Ayats [verses] from the Holy Quran that are related to communication skills and relationships between people in Islamic society have been discussed, and then the components of effective communication and its role in students’ life skills have been explained. This research discusses the following factors: human dignity and self-esteem, tolerance and compromise skills, forgiveness skills, accountability skills, justice orientation skills and individual behaviour skills. Contribution: The results of this research indicate that according to students’ imitation of teachers, paying special attention to the components of communication skills according to Islamic teachings in schools can affect students’ life skills. Therefore, by improving the mental health of the youth, and consequently the health of the society will be affected and it will bring excellence to the society. (shrink)

The connotations attached to the concept of 'risk' have changed over the last several decades. In particular, the image of risk, at least in the word's most economically advanced countries, has turned from predominantly positive to highly critical. A sociological look at this historic change reveals the emergence of a plurality of risk definitions that can be attributed to different risk cultures. We can distinguish risk cultures by their proximity to the dominant social practice of risk taking ; namely risk (...) cultures belong either to the centre or the periphery of society. Social movements that resist risky technologies are examples of a peripheral risk culture. Due to a certain concept of social community their perception of risk differs fundamentally from that of the centre. In addition, cultural variation across countries leads to different representations of risk-avoidance in social movements. This contribution illustrates these differences by comparing the American and German anti-nuclear movements. (shrink)

Douglas Sturm, a major ethical thinker, here presents ten intriguing essays that lay the groundwork for a communitarian political theory. Drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Bernard E. Meland, Sturm brings the implications of process thought, especially its principle of internal relations, to bear on the interpretation and evaluation of our social and political life. He argues that American individualism, including its curious transmutations into the forms of corporativism, racism, and nationalism is a constraint that deprives (...) us of a deeper, more complex understanding of ourselves and a richer sense of the goodness of our lives. The essays contrast a communitarian political theory with alternative traditions of social thought, particularly those forms of individualism generated by Hobbes, Locke, and Bentham. Political realities of power, rights, and interests are not to be dismissed, according to Sturm, but they need to be cast within a concept of politics that sustains a community as a whole; thus public good and justice are defined as the central principles of public life. He isolates alternative theoretical perspectives and demonstrates how they deal with several current social and political dilemmas. Sturm applies the principles of the communitarian political theory to a broad range of contemporary concerns: the character and legitimacy of the modern business corporation; the idea of democratic capitalism; legal realism as the prevailing jurisprudence of the practicing lawyer; the scope and focus of bioethics as a discipline. In doing so, he affirms both the inescapability of public life in our existence and the radical character of the evil that it often creates. (shrink)

I argue that the metaphysical capacity of autonomy is not intrinsically valuable; it is valuable only when used in relation to a community's values and instrumentally for making the proper choices that will promote one's own and the community's well-being. I use the example of the choice to take one's life by suicide to illuminate this view. I articulate a plausible African conception of personhood as a basis for the idea of relational autonomy. I argue that this (...) conception is better understood as a social-moral thesis, and not a metaphysical thesis. A metaphysical thesis gives an account of the abstract nature of an atomic individual, his agency, and rational choice. The social-moral thesis indicates that personhood and autonomy are positive and relational to the life plans, well-being, material conditions, and the best means for achieving them that are made available and possible by harmonious living in a community. This idea of autonomy is not just having the capacity of freewill; it also involves how such freewill is used, in terms of how an individual's choices are guided by internalized communal values. (shrink)

All the conserved detailed results of evolution stored in DNA must be read, transcribed, and translated via an RNAmediated process. This is required for the development and growth of each individual cell. Thus, all known living organisms fundamentally depend on these RNA-mediated processes. In most cases, they are interconnected with other RNAs and their associated protein complexes and function in a strictly coordinated hierarchy of temporal and spatial steps (i.e., an RNA network). Clearly, all cellular life as we know (...) it could not function without these key agents of DNA replication, namely rRNA, tRNA, and mRNA. Thus, any definition of life that lacks RNA functions and their networks misses an essential requirement for RNA agents that inherently regulate and coordinate (communicate to) cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. The precellular evolution of RNAs occurred at the core of the emergence of cellular life and the question remained of how both precellular and cellular levels are interconnected historically and functionally. RNA-networks andRNA-communication can interconnect these levels.With the reemergence of virology in evolution, it became clear that communicating viruses and subviral infectious genetic parasites are bridging these two levels by invading, integrating, coadapting, exapting, and recombining constituent parts in host genomes for cellular requirements in gene regulation and coordination aims. Therefore, a 21st century understanding of life is of an inherently social process based on communicating RNA networks, in which viruses and cells continuously interact. (shrink)

How can sport community involvement influence life satisfaction during a pandemic? Self-expansion theory posits that individuals seek to gain resources such as positive interpersonal relationships for growth and achievement. By considering psychological capital as a dispositional resource intervening between sport community involvement and life satisfaction, we examined an empirical model to test the chain of effects. Based on the stress process model, distress and generational group were tested as moderators. Participants responded to the scale item questionnaire (...) for model assessment. Supporting the hypothesized relationships, the model was supported with a significant moderated-moderated mediation. The mediation effect of PsyCap was stronger when distress level was lower and such interaction effect was amplified for Generation Z. Whereas the global sport communities and Gen Z were found to be more particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, our findings suggest that there are psychological pathways for fans to maintain their resilience. It is foremost imperative to lower the stress level of sport fans for their community involvement to positively affect life satisfaction. Gen Z were more stressed during the pandemic but individuals who managed to cope with stress were able to leverage community involvement to boost positive psychological resources. Acknowledgment of these effects brings implications for better management strategies and provides avenues for new research. (shrink)

This book is about the liberation of the concept of life from the bondage fashioned by the interpreters of life ever since biology began, and about the liberation of the life of humans and non-humans alike from the bondage of social structures and behaviour, which now threatens the fullness of life's possibilities if not survival itself. It falls into a tradition of writings about human problems from a perspective informed by biology. It rejects the mechanistic model (...) of life dominant in the Western world and develops an alternative 'ecological model' which is applicable to the life of the cell and the life of the human community. For the first time it brings together in one work the insights of modern biology with those of a modern holistic philosophy and a liberal theology in a way which challenges conventional approaches to science, agriculture, sociology, politics, economics, development and liberation movements. (shrink)

A novel theoretical framework for an embodied, non-representational approach to language that extends and deepens enactive theory, bridging the gap between sensorimotor skills and language. -/- Linguistic Bodies offers a fully embodied and fully social treatment of human language without positing mental representations. The authors present the first coherent, overarching theory that connects dynamical explanations of action and perception with language. Arguing from the assumption of a deep continuity between life and mind, they show that this continuity extends to (...) language. Expanding and deepening enactive theory, they offer a constitutive account of language and the co-emergent phenomena of personhood, reflexivity, social normativity, and ideality. Language, they argue, is not something we add to a range of existing cognitive capacities but a new way of being embodied. Each of us is a linguistic body in a community of other linguistic bodies. The book describes three distinct yet entangled kinds of human embodiment, organic, sensorimotor, and intersubjective; it traces the emergence of linguistic sensitivities and introduces the novel concept of linguistic bodies; and it explores the implications of living as linguistic bodies in perpetual becoming, applying the concept of linguistic bodies to questions of language acquisition, parenting, autism, grammar, symbol, narrative, and gesture, and to such ethical concerns as microaggression, institutional speech, and pedagogy. (shrink)

This article establishes the relevance of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s work for understanding human communication. Tymieniecka’s cosmology, available in her four-volume series Logos and Life (1988–2000) and supplemented by prolific writings across several decades, articulates a ‘third phenomenology’ – a phenomenology of life. Her work fulfils Edmund Husserl’s original phenomenology of consciousness and Roman Ingarden’s second phenomenology of realism/idealism. Tymieniecka’s ontopoietic cosmology, which strenuously resists linear form, is interwoven with the possibilities of human communication. Her works explain life as (...) the expansion of logos: recursively the vital sphere initiates logos, forcing the existential sphere, concurrently prompting the social sphere of the human condition. The human station reveals meaning-bestowing functions: the creative-imaginative origin urges the aesthetic, moral, and intellective senses. Self-individualizing development concurrently desires communicative participation in life. The lived-body and sign/word allow one to re-establish ties to communal life after self-individualization. At the human ‘crown’, life recedes through an individual quest for spiritual development, inspired by a desire for transcendence. (shrink)

Public health strategies recommend isolating patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. But compassionate care in the intensive care unit (ICU) is an ethical obligation of modern medicine that cannot be justified by the risk of infection or the lack of personal protective equipment. This article describes the experiences of clinicians in ICUs in the south of Spain promoted by the Andalusian Society of Intensive Care SAMIUC, in the hope it will serve to improve the conditions in which these patients die, and to (...) help their families who suffer when they cannot say good-bye to their loved ones.In the south of Spain, healthcare professionals use daily videoconferencing to improve communication between clinicians, patients, and their relatives who cannot visit them in the ICU. This close communication allows families to see their loved ones and extends communication between healthcare professionals, patients, and their relatives. To allow family members to accompany patients at the end of life, it is possible to adapt public health rules to the epidemic situation. (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity (...) and that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)