Hasil untuk "Practical religion. The Christian life"

N. Penxa-Matholeni

This article revisits the South African project of truth and reconciliation through the lens of inxeba elingaphakathi, the inner wound, and reflects on it through indigenous storytelling pastoral theology. This invisible wound is carried by individuals and communities in the aftermath of historical violence and systemic injustice caused by apartheid. Drawing on African indigenous perspectives, the article explores truth and reconciliation beyond institutional processes, framing them as spiritual, ethical, and communal acts. It interrogates the limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in addressing the depth of grief and trauma from this era and reflects on how indigenous storytelling pastoral theology may offer healing, restore dignity, and nurture relational wholeness. Ultimately, it argues for an indigenous storytelling approach to healing – one that focuses on embodied care, collective memory, and the ongoing recognition of wounds shaping South Africa’s moral and spiritual landscape.

James Butler

Ganga P. Sharma, Shantanu Chakraborty, Bilas Paul

Physics has a reputation among majority of life sciences students for being very complicated and tough. If we leave students with this impression, it is likely that students see physics class as useless and irrelevant to life sciences. Concepts of physics are vital in oder to understand physics based technological tools and biophysical topics essential and relevant for life sciences. This review summarizes approaches for improving teaching and learning in introductory physics courses to life science students in the SCALE- UP style. We also discuss our experiences in adapting IPLS Courses to better meet the needs of life sciences students. to better meet the needs of life sciences students.

J. Mokhutso

A book review  of "Bibles in Africa through European eyes" by Nyirenda, M. (Bukuru, Hippo Books, 2023) pp. 176, ISBN: 978 1839732522

Amedeo Balbi, Manasvi Lingam

The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further complicated by the existence of selection biases. Appealing uncritically to some version of the ``Principle of Mediocrity'' -- namely, the supposed typicality of what transpired on Earth -- is problematic on empirical or logical grounds. In this paper, we adopt a Bayesian statistical approach to put on rigorous footing the inference of lower bounds for the probability of abiogenesis, based on current and future evidence. We demonstrate that the single datum that life has appeared at least once on Earth merely sets weak constraints on the minimal probability of abiogenesis. In fact, the {\it a priori} probability assigned to this event (viz., optimistic, pessimistic or agnostic prior) exerts the strongest influence on the final result. We also show that the existence of a large number of habitable worlds does not necessarily imply, by itself, a high probability that life should be common in the universe. Instead, as delineated before, the choice of prior, which is subject to uncertainty (i.e., admits multiple scenarios), strongly influences the likelihood of life being common. If habitable worlds are uncommon, for an agnostic prior, a deterministic scenario for the origin of life might be favoured over one where abiogenesis is a fluke event.

Christian Mattjie, Luis Vinicius de Moura, Rafaela Cappelari Ravazio et al.

Segmentation in medical imaging is a critical component for the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of various diseases and medical conditions. Presently, the medical segmentation landscape is dominated by numerous specialized deep learning models, each fine-tuned for specific segmentation tasks and image modalities. The recently-introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) employs the ViT neural architecture and harnesses a massive training dataset to segment nearly any object; however, its suitability to the medical domain has not yet been investigated. In this study, we explore the zero-shot performance of SAM in medical imaging by implementing eight distinct prompt strategies across six datasets from four imaging modalities, including X-ray, ultrasound, dermatoscopy, and colonoscopy. Our findings reveal that SAM's zero-shot performance is not only comparable to, but in certain cases, surpasses the current state-of-the-art. Based on these results, we propose practical guidelines that require minimal interaction while consistently yielding robust outcomes across all assessed contexts. The source code, along with a demonstration of the recommended guidelines, can be accessed at https://github.com/Malta-Lab/SAM-zero-shot-in-Medical-Imaging.

William Bains, Janusz J. Petkowski, Sara Seager

Venus is Earth's sister planet, with similar mass and density but an uninhabitably hot surface, an atmosphere with a water activity 50-100 times lower than anywhere on Earths' surface, and clouds believed to be made of concentrated sulfuric acid. These features have been taken to imply that the chances of finding life on Venus are vanishingly small, with several authors describing Venus' clouds as "uninhabitable", and that apparent signs of life there must therefore be abiotic, or artefactual. In this article, we argue that although many features of Venus can rule out the possibility that Earth life could live there, none rule out the possibility of all life based on what we know of the physical principle of life on Earth. Specifically, there is abundant energy, the energy requirements for retaining water and capturing hydrogen atoms to build biomass are not excessive, defenses against sulfuric acid are conceivable and have terrestrial precedent, and the speculative possibility that life uses concentrated sulfuric acid as a solvent instead of water remains. Metals are likely to be available in limited supply, and the radiation environment is benign. The clouds can support a biomass that could readily be detectable by future astrobiology-focused space missions from its impact on the atmosphere. Although we consider the prospects for finding life on Venus to be speculative, they are not absent. The scientific reward from finding life in such an un-Earthlike environment justifies considering how observations and missions should be designed to be capable of detecting life if it is there.

Özlem Güler Aydın

The objective of this article is to conduct a systematic review of empirical research focused on the concept of God image within the context of Türkiye. The multidimensional nature of the God image is explored, and its associations with various variables, encompassing sociodemographic and psychological aspects, are thoroughly examined. The review also considers the correlation between God image and psychopathology, as well as spiritual care. The findings from this review, specific to the Turkish sample, suggest that the God image doesn't consistently vary with age, but a positive relationship is evident, indicating a tendency for a more positive God image with age. Women tend to have a more love-oriented God image than men. However, no significant distinctions were found in terms of income and educational levels. Moreover, variations of God image may be influenced by the type of school (religious or secular) and parental attitudes. Studies suggest that individuals raised in environments characterized by oppressive, authoritarian, or neglectful parenting are prone to form fear-oriented God images, while those with democratic parenting tend toward love-oriented God images. Subjective religiosity and positive religious coping are also proposed to have a positive correlation with the perception of God. Alongside sociodemographic variables, it is argued that a more positive and love-oriented God image is positively associated with enhanced psychological health, greater well-being, effective coping, positive self-esteem, lower depression, and fewer psychopathological symptoms. Despite the insights from the review of 55 studies, the diversity of examined variables necessitates more extensive research to draw general conclusions for each variable within the Turkish sample. Finally, fields requiring further investigation were also identified.

Julian Wörmann, Daniel Bogdoll, Christian Brunner et al.

The availability of representative datasets is an essential prerequisite for many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, in real life applications these models often encounter scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. There are various reasons for the absence of sufficient data, ranging from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable usage of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is still a tremendous challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches. Knowledge augmented machine learning approaches offer the possibility of compensating for deficiencies, errors, or ambiguities in the data, thus increasing the generalization capability of the applied models. Even more, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-driven models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories knowledge integration, extraction and conformity. In particular, we address the application of the presented methods in the field of autonomous driving.

Ankur Betageri

I propose that quality of life can be compared despite the difference in values across cultures when it is experienced at the sensory and perceptual level. I argue that an approach to assessing quality of life which focuses on an individual's ability to organize his or her context by perceiving positive constellations of factors in the environment and his or her ability to achieve valuable acts and realize valuable states of being is more meaningful than the approaches of metrics which focus directly, and often solely, on the means of living and the means of freedom. Because the felt experience of quality of life is derived from a constellation of factors which make up the indivisible structure of a milieu, the experience of quality of life cannot be regarded as a subjective experience. Through the example of how different frequencies, and mixtures of frequencies, of light are perceived as colour by the eye, I demonstrate that the human cognitive apparatus, because of its relation to the object that is measured, apprehends different scales of quantity as degrees of quality. I show that lived experience is the result of a selective relationality with one's environment and that the experience of quality has something to do with the perception of entities in their interrelated and networked nature as wholes.

Piotr Majer

The aim of this paper is to answer the question: How should the bishop act towards his presbyterate so that its members would not commit sexual offences, particularly the most serious ones? The following issues are presented: the relationship between a bishop and his presbyterate, the bishop’s responsibility for the admission of proper candidates to ordination, the assignment of offices and functions in the diocese, the bishop’s obligation to watch over the discipline of the clergy, the bishop’s responsibility for granting the faculty of hearing the confessions.

Sabrina Müller

Luke A. Barnes

When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of fine-tuning is particularly striking. The data in question are not the precise measurements of cosmology or particle physics, but a more general feature of our universe: it supports the existence of life. This chapter reviews this Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Life.

Scott J. Hagley

Yasuji Sawada, Yasukazu Daigaku, Kenji Toma

The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the theory of birth should be the one known for the unanimated world, and that the life processes are irreversibly selective, we showed by a deductive inference that the maximum entropy production principle plays an essential role for the birth and the evolution of life in a fertile environment. In order to explain the survival strategy of life in a barren period of environment, we also proposed that life had simultaneously developed a reversible on and off switching mechanism of the chemical reactions by the dynamics of equilibrium thermodynamics. Thus, the birth and evolution of life have been achieved by the cooperation between the driving force due to the non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the protective force due to the equilibrium thermodynamics in the alternating environmental conditions.

Cemal Tosun

Bu makale, Almanya odaklı olarak, Avrupa’da Yükseköğretimde İslam İlahiyatı konusunda yaşanan gelişmeleri konu edinmektedir. Amaç, son yıllarda Avrupa üniversitelerinde İslam İlahiyatı ile ilgili yaşanmakta olan gelişmeleri tespit ederek imkânlar ve sorunlar bağlamında değerlendirmektir. Yahudi-Hıristiyan-Batı değerlerine sahip olan Avrupa devletleri ve milletleri, birlikte yaşamak durumunda oldukları ve sayıları giderek artan Müslümanların kendileriyle uyum içinde yaşayabilmelerinin yollarını aramaktadır. Konu Avrupa’da İslam’ın ve Müslümanların geleceği açısından önem arz etmektedir. Bu arayışların bir boyutu da Avrupa üniversitelerinde İslam ilahiyatı programı oluşturma çalışmalarıdır. Acaba Avrupa değerleriyle uyumlu yaşayacak bir İslam yorumu üretmek mümkün müdür? sorusu, başta Almanya olmak üzere Avrupa genelinde üzerinde durulan önemli bir meseledir. İki binli yıllarda başlayan ve son on yıldır hız kazanan İslam ilahiyatı akademik arayışı ve çalışmaları bu soruya cevap üretmek amacındadır. Batı Avrupa değerleri ile barışık yaşayabilecek bir İslam anlayışını üretmek ve bu İslam anlayışıyla İslam din eğitimi ve din hizmetleri verecek insanları yetiştirmek Avrupa’daki İslam İlahiyatı girişimlerinin temel amacını oluşturmaktadır. Konu, ilgili literatüre dayalı olarak metin analizi ve uzun yıllara dayalı tecrübeler ışığında otobiyografik yöntemlerle ele alınmaktadır.

Jacek Jan Pawlik

Artykuł dotyczy kościołów i grup religijnych, które powstawały w Afryce na bazie chrześcijaństwa w XX w. Przykładem jest tu religijność ludności zamieszkującej rejon Basenu Dolnego Konga. Początkowo aktywność religijna była tu wyrazem protestu przeciw segregacji rasowej i wyzyskowi kolonialnemu. Powstające kościoły niezależne były często kuźnią rodzących się nacjonalizmów. Ożywiane duchem mesjańskim przy­rzekały lepszą przyszłość wraz z uzyskaniem niepodległości. Z czasem kościoły te się zinstytucjonalizowały, a państwa uzyskały niepodległość, ale nie oznaczało to obiecanej świetlanej rzeczywistości. Wręcz przeciwnie. Kryzys lat osiemdziesiątych i dziewięć­dziesiątych XX w. spowodował wzrost ubóstwa i zakwestionowanie dotychczasowego rozwoju. Na tym podatnym gruncie powstawały nowe ruchy religijne o charakterze neopentekostalnym, które głoszą teologię dobrobytu i praktyczne zbawienie, w ramach którego możliwe jest wyjście z biedy przez osobiste nawrócenie i zaangażowanie religij­ne. W związku z wielką popularnością tych ruchów, niezależne kościoły afrykańskie zmuszone są do znacznych adaptacji.

Christos H Skiadas, Charilaos Skiadas

The analytic derivation of a more general model of survival-mortality and the estimation of a parameter bx related to the Healthy Life Years Lost (HLYL) is followed with the formulation of a computer program providing results similar to those of the World Health Organization for the Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) and the corresponding HLYL estimates. This program is an extension of the classical life table including more columns to estimate the cumulative mortality, the average mortality, the person life years lost and finally the HLYL parameter bx. Evenmore, a further extension of the Excel program based on the Sullivan method provides estimates of the Healthy Life Expectancy at every year of the lifespan for five different types of estimates that are the Direct, WHO, Eurostat, Equal and Other. Estimates for several countries are presented. It is also presented a methodology and a program to bridge the gap between the World Health Organization (HALE) and Eurostat (HLE) healthy life expectancy estimates. The latest version of this program (SKI-6) appear in the Demographics2020 website.

Hunter York

As a career cross-cultural missionary in Southeast Asia, the author has seen first-hand and has personally experienced the devastating effects of colleagues, families, leaders, clinicians, and the sufferers themselves misunderstanding the symptoms and the reality of major depressive disorder, an increasing global health problem. This autobiographical case report reflects on twenty years of treatment-resistant depression and a journey through pharmacological approaches, psychotherapy treatment, Christian prayer counselling, and electro convulsive therapy without improvement in this condition. The primary concern is how to remain faithful and effective with this condition in a service-oriented occupation that requires regular emotional expenditure. In lieu of effective conventional and non-conventional therapies, the remaining option is to find a way to manage chronic depression; identify personal trends, weaknesses, and triggers; and find a personalized way to live that minimizes the effects of the condition. In any chronic, incurable disorder, the sufferer must inevitably come to terms with his or her reality and find peace in the acceptance of that reality. By expressing the journey through treatment-resistant depression, the author encourages readers to persevere in ministry and to respond more appropriately to the afflicted with clearer understanding and empathy. A companion article on mitigating depression symptoms through the spiritual discipline of identifying with Christ and His experience of human emotional pain during His passion is available.

David A. Baum

Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states can arise through chance changes in local chemical concentration (=mutations) that move points in space into the basin of attraction of a life state - the attractor being an autocatalytic sets whose essential (=keystone) species are produced at a higher rate than they are lost to the environment by diffusion, such that growth in expected. This conception of life yields several new insights and conjectures. (1) This framework suggests that the first new life states to arise are likely at interfaces where the rate of diffusion of keystone species is tied to a low-diffusion regime, while precursors and waste products diffuse at a higher rate. (2) There are reasons to expect that once the first life state arises, most likely on a mineral surface, additional mutations will generate derived life states with which the original state will compete. (3) I propose that in the resulting adaptive process there is a general tendency for higher complexity life states (i.e., ones that are further from being at equilibrium with the environment) to dominate a given mineral surface. (4) The framework suggests a simple and predictable path by which cells evolve and provides pointers on why such cells are likely to acquire particulate inheritance. Overall, the dynamical systems theoretical framework developed provides an integrated view of the origin and early evolution of life and supports novel empirical approaches.