The digital age has significantly disrupted traditional church service models, presenting unique challenges in reaching Generation Z, a cohort of digital natives with a high prevalence of mental health issues. This study aims to analyze the contextual and theoretical effectiveness, ethical challenges, and theological implications of using WhatsApp as a pastoral counseling medium. Employing a qualitative method grounded in a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach, this research synthesizes data from scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings published between 2021 and 2025. The analysis identifies three key thematic areas. First, regarding opportunities, WhatsApp offers increased accessibility, platform familiarity, and reduced psychological barriers for Gen Z seeking help. Second, regarding challenges, the study highlights data confidentiality risks, ambiguous professional boundaries, and limitations in building deep therapeutic alliances due to the loss of non-verbal cues. Third, the findings emphasize the urgent need for counselors to develop new competencies, specifically 'digital empathy' and cyber-ethical literacy. It is concluded that while WhatsApp cannot replace clinical intervention, it holds significant potential as an innovative support tool within a hybrid pastoral ministry model. However, its success relies heavily on the implementation of strict ethical guidelines and comprehensive counselor training.
The rapid evolution of video generation has enabled models to simulate complex physical dynamics and long-horizon causalities, positioning them as potential world simulators. However, a critical gap still remains between the theoretical capacity for world simulation and the heavy computational costs of spatiotemporal modeling. To address this, we comprehensively and systematically review video generation frameworks and techniques that consider efficiency as a crucial requirement for practical world modeling. We introduce a novel taxonomy in three dimensions: efficient modeling paradigms, efficient network architectures, and efficient inference algorithms. We further show that bridging this efficiency gap directly empowers interactive applications such as autonomous driving, embodied AI, and game simulation. Finally, we identify emerging research frontiers in efficient video-based world modeling, arguing that efficiency is a fundamental prerequisite for evolving video generators into general-purpose, real-time, and robust world simulators.
Anri Naldi, Lestari Dara Cinta Utami Ginting, Rahmansyah Fadlul Al Karim Rambe
et al.
This study explores the theological reflections of Medan city's residents following a natural disaster, focusing on the application of tawhid of the sky (the relationship between humans and God) and tawhid of the earth (the relationship between humans, others, and nature) in addressing ecological and social crises. It emphasizes the need for a holistic religious understanding to mitigate the impacts of increasingly frequent natural disasters and to enhance community ties with God and nature, thereby fostering social solidarity. The research uses a qualitative case study design with in-depth interviews with religious leaders, local officials, volunteers, and affected residents, supplemented by literature studies including the Qur'an, Hadith, and relevant Tafsir. Data analysis employs the interactive model by Miles, Huberman, and Saldana, with source triangulation to validate findings. Results reveal that the flood disaster in Medan prompted deep theological reflections, increasing awareness of the importance of spiritual relationships with God and responsibilities towards nature and others. The disaster is seen as a divine test and an opportunity to boost social and ecological awareness, also strengthening social solidarity through actions based on religious values. Challenges remain in implementing these principles in public policy and sustainable practices. Integration of tawhid values into disaster mitigation policies, environmental management, and community empowerment is recommended. Additionally, the study underscores the importance of SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals in enhancing disaster response and resilience strategies, highlighting that effective multi-sector partnerships are crucial for comprehensive recovery and long-term community resilience.
For decades, Computer Vision has aimed at enabling machines to perceive the external world. Initial limitations led to the development of highly specialized niches. As success in each task accrued and research progressed, increasingly complex perception tasks emerged. This survey charts the convergence of these tasks and, in doing so, introduces Open World Detection (OWD), an umbrella term we propose to unify class-agnostic and generally applicable detection models in the vision domain. We start from the history of foundational vision subdomains and cover key concepts, methodologies and datasets making up today's state-of-the-art landscape. This traverses topics starting from early saliency detection, foreground/background separation, out of distribution detection and leading up to open world object detection, zero-shot detection and Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). We explore the overlap between these subdomains, their increasing convergence, and their potential to unify into a singular domain in the future, perception.
In embodied AI, a persistent challenge is enabling agents to robustly adapt to novel domains without requiring extensive data collection or retraining. To address this, we present a world model implanting framework (WorMI) that combines the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with independently learned, domain-specific world models through test-time composition. By allowing seamless implantation and removal of the world models, the embodied agent's policy achieves and maintains cross-domain adaptability. In the WorMI framework, we employ a prototype-based world model retrieval approach, utilizing efficient trajectory-based abstract representation matching, to incorporate relevant models into test-time composition. We also develop a world-wise compound attention method that not only integrates the knowledge from the retrieved world models but also aligns their intermediate representations with the reasoning model's representation within the agent's policy. This framework design effectively fuses domain-specific knowledge from multiple world models, ensuring robust adaptation to unseen domains. We evaluate our WorMI on the VirtualHome and ALFWorld benchmarks, demonstrating superior zero-shot and few-shot performance compared to several LLM-based approaches across a range of unseen domains. These results highlight the frameworks potential for scalable, real-world deployment in embodied agent scenarios where adaptability and data efficiency are essential.
With the rapid advancement of autonomous driving technology, a lack of data has become a major obstacle to enhancing perception model accuracy. Researchers are now exploring controllable data generation using world models to diversify datasets. However, previous work has been limited to studying image generation quality on specific public datasets. There is still relatively little research on how to build data generation engines for real-world application scenes to achieve large-scale data generation for challenging scenes. In this paper, a simulator-conditioned scene generation engine based on world model is proposed. By constructing a simulation system consistent with real-world scenes, simulation data and labels, which serve as the conditions for data generation in the world model, for any scenes can be collected. It is a novel data generation pipeline by combining the powerful scene simulation capabilities of the simulation engine with the robust data generation capabilities of the world model. In addition, a benchmark with proportionally constructed virtual and real data, is provided for exploring the capabilities of world models in real-world scenes. Quantitative results show that these generated images significantly improve downstream perception models performance. Finally, we explored the generative performance of the world model in urban autonomous driving scenarios. All the data and code will be available at https://github.com/Li-Zn-H/SimWorld.
The DreamerV3 algorithm recently obtained remarkable performance across diverse environment domains by learning an accurate world model based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Following the success of model-based reinforcement learning algorithms and the rapid adoption of the Transformer architecture for its superior training efficiency and favorable scaling properties, recent works such as STORM have proposed replacing RNN-based world models with Transformer-based world models using masked self-attention. However, despite the improved training efficiency of these methods, their impact on performance remains limited compared to the Dreamer algorithm, struggling to learn competitive Transformer-based world models. In this work, we show that the next state prediction objective adopted in previous approaches is insufficient to fully exploit the representation capabilities of Transformers. We propose to extend world model predictions to longer time horizons by introducing TWISTER (Transformer-based World model wIth contraSTivE Representations), a world model using action-conditioned Contrastive Predictive Coding to learn high-level temporal feature representations and improve the agent performance. TWISTER achieves a human-normalized mean score of 162% on the Atari 100k benchmark, setting a new record among state-of-the-art methods that do not employ look-ahead search.
Iman Nematollahi, Branton DeMoss, Akshay L Chandra
et al.
We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
This essay explores the philosophical core of Susan Taubes’ thought through her diasporic ontology—a philosophy of becoming that does not derive from statics but precedes and reconfigures them. Instead of treating exile as loss or as a deviation from origin, Taubes roots her thinking in displacement, challenging fixed identities, theological certainties, and static notions of belonging. Although overshadowed by her husband Jacob and, due to the fragmentation of her work and her tragic death, largely neglected—with the important exception of the work of Elliot R. Wolfson, who in recent years has contributed enormously to her discovery in the field of Jewish philosophy—Taubes’ writings offer a radical rethinking of Jewish thought as a diasporic identity grounded in hermeneutic openness. Through a close reading of her letters and novel Divorcing, this paper reveals how her diasporic thinking—also evident in her critical engagement with Heidegger—forms the basis for rejecting theological dogma, Zionist ideologies, and the reification of meaning, while opening space for a lived understanding of Judaism. Moreover, I show how, by accepting worldliness as brokenness, her post-apocalyptic hopelessness does not collapse into nihilism but instead clears the ground for radical openness, where meaning emerges not from redemption but from the refusal to close the interpretive horizon. More than a thinker to be studied, Taubes enables a change of perspective: through her lens, concepts like Heimat or identity lose their static authority and are re-seen from the standpoint of exile.
World models play a crucial role in decision-making within embodied environments, enabling cost-free explorations that would otherwise be expensive in the real world. To facilitate effective decision-making, world models must be equipped with strong generalizability to support faithful imagination in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions and provide reliable uncertainty estimation to assess the credibility of the simulated experiences, both of which present significant challenges for prior scalable approaches. This paper introduces WHALE, a framework for learning generalizable world models, consisting of two key techniques: behavior-conditioning and retracing-rollout. Behavior-conditioning addresses the policy distribution shift, one of the primary sources of the world model generalization error, while retracing-rollout enables efficient uncertainty estimation without the necessity of model ensembles. These techniques are universal and can be combined with any neural network architecture for world model learning. Incorporating these two techniques, we present Whale-ST, a scalable spatial-temporal transformer-based world model with enhanced generalizability. We demonstrate the superiority of Whale-ST in simulation tasks by evaluating both value estimation accuracy and video generation fidelity. Additionally, we examine the effectiveness of our uncertainty estimation technique, which enhances model-based policy optimization in fully offline scenarios. Furthermore, we propose Whale-X, a 414M parameter world model trained on 970K trajectories from Open X-Embodiment datasets. We show that Whale-X exhibits promising scalability and strong generalizability in real-world manipulation scenarios using minimal demonstrations.
Quentin Garrido, Mahmoud Assran, Nicolas Ballas
et al.
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.
To solve control problems via model-based reasoning or planning, an agent needs to know how its actions affect the state of the world. The actions an agent has at its disposal often change the state of the environment in systematic ways. However, existing techniques for world modelling do not guarantee that the effect of actions are represented in such systematic ways. We introduce the Parsimonious Latent Space Model (PLSM), a world model that regularizes the latent dynamics to make the effect of the agent's actions more predictable. Our approach minimizes the mutual information between latent states and the change that an action produces in the agent's latent state, in turn minimizing the dependence the state has on the dynamics. This makes the world model softly state-invariant. We combine PLSM with different model classes used for i) future latent state prediction, ii) planning, and iii) model-free reinforcement learning. We find that our regularization improves accuracy, generalization, and performance in downstream tasks, highlighting the importance of systematic treatment of actions in world models.
While it is generally accepted that the environmental crisis that the world is experiencing is a direct result of human activity, what is less obvious is that this depends on the nature of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment. This, in turn, is shaped by how human beings mentally construct the relationship between themselves and the world. I have been reflecting on this phenomenon for more than a decade, paying particular attention to the dynamics around an enchanted way of being in the world, typical of indigenous communities, compared with those of a disenchanted way of being in the world, typical of modernity. This essay attempts to summarize and condense some of these reflections. Enchantment brings with it the experience of an intersubjective, personal world with porous boundaries in the relationship between beings, and is typically characterized by interdependence and vulnerability. Disenchantment objectifies this world, disengages the self from it, and rids it of any agency other than that exercised by the autonomous self, thus gearing it toward mastery and control. This increases exponentially the ability of human beings to impact and change the world around them in ways that are eventually destructive for the environment.
This paper revisits one of the most difficult theological issues, namely God’s infinite goodness and the presence of pain and suffering in the natural world. We deepen the understanding of this problem by referring to the philosophical notion of the intelligibility of the world. We argue that pain and suffering are present in biological evolution as a “structural necessity” for the development of more complex structures from simpler ones. The struggle for existence works as a necessary condition for the development of a sophisticated order of nature at the expense of an increase in pain and suffering. If this is so, arguments justifying the ways of a good, omniscient, and omnipotent God in a world where evil and suffering are widespread seem to be undercut. Therefore, we argue that the astonishing intelligibility of nature may help to open our understanding of whatever nature may reveal of itself. This notion—analyzed from ontic and epistemic perspectives—seems to be crucial in reflecting the evolving world, not only from the scientific point of view but also from the theological one.
It is a matter to ponder that, among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam places the greatest ontotheological distance between the human and the divine. While God is the ground of being Muslim, Islam excludes theophany and prohibits any tangible association between the divine and anything in the material world. God’s mode of manifesting Himself to His creatures has consisted of the most fleeting and discorporate of all means of communication, namely, sound. His words gathered in the Qur’an thus form a non-solid verbal bridge crossing over that unfathomable distance. One could then think that the relationship between the unique Creator and His creatures relies only on the strength of a blind faith founded on a dry, discursive pact. Arguing his “idea of an anthropology of Islam”, Talal Asad did posit that this religion and its culture form “a discursive tradition”. Exclusively focused on the mental modes of knowledge acquisition, this cognitivist verbalist characterization has become a certitude in Islamic studies at large. Yet, it is only a half-truth, for it overlooks the emphatic involvement, in the definition of this tradition of Islam, of the non-linguistic phenomenality of experience that implicates the pre-logical non-cognitive double agency of affect and sensation in the pursuit of divine knowledge. This article expounds this phenomenology of the Qur’an in using an innovative combination of philosophical and literary conceptualities, and in addressing some hermeneutical problems posed by the established Quranic studies.
Adeyinka Samson Adewumi, Abiola A. Olaniyi, Funke E. Oyekan
The paper entitled “The Utilization of the Old Testament in the Book of Acts of the Apostles” arose from the need to contextualize the scripture in contemporary usage as it relates to Africans. The study examines the Book of Acts in perspective, the engagement of the Old Testament in Acts of the Apostles, and the implications of the usage of the Old Testament in the contextual delivery of the Gospel for theological enterprise on the African continent. The paper employed an analytical method with descriptive and comparative approaches to analyze the usage of the Old Testament in the New Testament document under study and utilized a contextual comparison of the references in the selected verses of the Book of Acts. Findings show that the usage of the Old Testament by the writer of Acts was unique. In the book of Acts
of the Apostles, a number of portions engage with the Old Testament using historical, thematic, theological, cultural, and other elements. Examples include 1:20-21; 2:17-21; 4:25 and 7:49-50. Findings show that the engagement of the Old Testament by the author of Acts was quite systematic and exploratory. These findings have implications for African theological enterprise, particularly in Nigeria. The delivery of the Gospel should engage the elements of culture and sociological peculiarities. It is recommended that theological educators should make efforts to reach and develop the faith of Africans with the wealth of their cultural and social peculiarities
without compromising the centrality of Christ in the gospel delivery as typified by the usage of the Old Testament in Acts of the Apostles. In conclusion, the usage of the Old Testament in Acts of the Apostles could be further explored in contextualizing theological knowledge .
God calls his ecclesial church to go out to proclaim his Gospel to all creation and baptise, teach, and make all nations his disciples. Local churches, particularly in Indonesia, commonly carry on the calling by using the so-called One Duty (the Missio Dei)-Three Tasks (koinonia, martyria, diakonia) tasks. Reality shows of not uncommon partial and unbalanced implementations of the three tasks, mostly heavy focused on koinonia but less in both martyria and diakonia. The study objective is to assess implementation of the church missions view of drawing general lessons for a more effective implementation. The study was conducted at a small-sized church congregation in an indigenous community in a remote rural local area, using a mixed literature review, field observation and interviews, and conceptual synthesis methodology. The key findings are that mission fields are diverse and wide and requires contextual missions, the diakonia task plays a pivotal role, and a small
size of congregation is good for quality-oriented missions, the Strength Gift Based
Community Development conducted in a holistic integrated transformational mission is an appropriate approach. The study contributes to interdisciplinary understanding and formulation of basic principles in doing integrated missions by local churches, particularly in rural areas with indigenous community, remote location, and poverty-stricken mission fields.
Regarding the way of facing the West and modernity, Ahmed Fardid is among the thinkers who, by adopting a philosophical and judgmental approach, rejects modernity, philosophy, and western civilization in its entirety. Fardid considers modernity and the West to have an inherent crisis and considers any attempt to patch up modernity with Eastern religions or cultures futile. Fardid, who is the creator of the word “Gharbzadegi (Westoxification)”, considers human sciences and Western civilization to be nothing more than the inciting soul vanities and blasphemy. By adopting an essentialist and negative approach towards the modern world, he calls for a complete break from the subjectivism and humanism associated with the modern world and a return to Islamic-oriented philosophy (Hekmat-e Onsi). Seyyed Hossein Nasr, as a traditionalist thinker, rejects Western civilization and modernity as a unified whole. He wants to incorporate modern science and reason and take perennial philosophy. In this paper, via a comparative analysis method, this hypothesis is examined that although Fardid and Nasr are sympathizers in the complete negation and rejection of the modern world, Fardid confronts modernity and its consequent subjectivism using Heidegger’s western thought. This is when Nasr confronts modernity from the perspective of a traditionalist thinker who believes in the foundations of tradition. Nasr considers the return to the perennial philosophy to solve confronting the Western world and modernity, but Fardid faced with the modern world, emphasizes that although modernity is the exposure of self-fulfillment, one must strive to overcome it. It is difficult to return to the past.
The article analyzes the Fundamental Theology heritage of Bishop Chrysanth (Retivtsev; 1832–1883). It is shown that, being a teacher of Basic Theology at the Kazan and St. Petersburg Theological Academies, Bishop Chrysanth, for the first time in Russian theological science, applied the historical-philosophical method of studying religions to substantiate both the truth of the Christian religion and its divinely revealed character. At the same time, the main difficulty in the study of his method lies in the fact that Bishop Chrysanth’s lecture texts on Fundamental Theology have not been preserved, therefore, one can judge the method, subject structure and the content of his course only on the basis of: 1) a brief testimony of Professor P. V. Znamensky, 2) the analysis of some journal publications of Bishop Chrysanth, 3) the program on fundamental theology compiled by him and 4) the author’s three-volume work “The Religions of the Ancient World in their Relation to Christianity”. It is noted that Bishop Chrysanth’s methodology turned out to be more suitable in solving the key apologetic task of the second section of Fundamental Theology — “On Revelation” — in comparison with the traditional scholastic approach used by Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov; 1816–1882) in his “Introduction to Orthodox Theology”. On the whole, this methodology found some support both in the theological academy and university fundamental theology of the synodal period. At the same time, the considered structural change in Fundamental Theology was not something original for this discipline as such, and was in full accordance with the architectonics of German Catholic courses on Fundamental Theology of those years. It is concluded that the contribution of Bishop Chrysanth to the formation and development of the national theological academy and university fundamental theology of the synodal period should be called outstanding, since the historical-philosophical method of the fundamental theology work applied by him made it possible to significantly strengthen the apologetic component of Fundamental Theology as a basic theological discipline.
The Bible emphasizes the role of the Holy Spirit which is so important for Church believers because through it, Church believers can become new creations and offer ministry for their churches. The role of the Holy Spirit is included in terms of interpreting the Bible. This article discusses and
answers the question of what is the role of the Holy Spirit in the realm of hermeneutics. First, the role of the Holy Spirit in the relationship with the inspiration of the Bible makes the Bible authoritative. Second, showing the role of the Holy Spirit that illuminates one when interpreting the Bible. Third, it shows that the Holy Spirit plays a pivotal role in guiding each interpreter to live in the work of sanctification. The goal of the role of the Holy Spirit in these three relationships is to make Church believers more like Christ before His second coming. The role of the Holy Spirit is one of the basic life needs for Church believers, especially in the hermeneutic context between biblical authority, illumination, and interpretation. The findings of this study indicated that the role of the Holy Spirit in these three areas or contexts of biblical authority, illumination, and interpretation is to
make Church believers more Christ-like before His return.