Hasil untuk "Practical religion. The Christian life"

J. Botha

This article explores how a reimagined social imagination of Inreach can impact whiteness as a cultural imagination among White Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) students at Stellenbosch University. Racialised identity formation within the DRC has historically reinforced a missional imagination shaped by whiteness. Inreach is a programme designed to address White fragility and White fatigue, and sought to cultivate transformative, cross-cultural engagement among students born post-1994. Findings show a significant shift in participants’ imagination of outreach to inreach – from individualistic and monocultural to more collective and inclusive. In particular, the collective external dimension of identity expanded, suggesting a redefinition of “us” that includes Black South Africans. The study contributes to reconciliation discourse and theological education by offering Inreach as a meaningful alternative to traditional outreach, promoting mutual, transformative engagement.

Serkan Çetin

Bu çalışmada, Fahreddin er-Râzî (ö. 606/1210) tarafından mütekaddimîn dönem kelâmında kullanılan istidlâl yöntemlerine yöneltilen kapsamlı eleştiriler karşısında, geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî geleneğin önde gelen temsilcilerinden İbnü’l-Murtazâ’nın (ö. 840/1437) ortaya koyduğu yöntemsel müdafaa ve istidlâl ilkelerini tahkim etmeye yönelik yaklaşımı analiz edilecektir. Erken dönem kelâmcılarının benimsedikleri istidlâl biçimlerine dair ilk eleştiriler, İmamü’l-Haremeyn el-Cüveynî’nin (ö. 478/1085) el-Burhân fî uṣûli’l-fıḳh adlı eserinde yer almıştır. Cüveynî, kelâmcıların bilgi üretiminde başvurduğu aklî çıkarım biçimlerini tanıtmakla kalmamış, aynı zamanda bu yöntemlerin metafizik alana ilişkin bilgiye ulaştırma yeterliliklerini sorgulayarak yöntem temelli eleştirel düşüncenin önünü açmıştır. Bu düşünsel yönelim, Fahreddin er-Râzî’nin Nihâyetü’l-ʿuḳūl fî dirâyeti’l-uṣûl adlı eserinde sistematik ve teorik bir çerçeveye kavuşmuştur. Râzî, klasik kelâm geleneğinde yerleşik hâle gelen, “hakkında delil bulunmayanın nefyedilmesi”, “kıyas”, “ilzam” ve “kelâmcılar arasında meşhur iki öncül” gibi akıl yürütme türlerini ayrıntılı biçimde tahlil ederek, bu yöntemlerin tutarlılığı ve geçerliliği hususunda ciddi eleştiriler dile getirmiştir. Râzî’nin bu eleştirilerine ise Mu‘tezilî düşüncenin epistemolojik ilkelerini ve istidlâl sistematiğini koruma ve tahkim hedefiyle İbnü’l-Murtazâ, Râzî’nin Nihâyetü’l-ʿuḳūl’ü üzerine yazdığı el-Hidâye ilâ ḥalli şübehi’n-Nihâye isimli reddiyesinde cevap vermiştir. Ona göre Râzî, aklî ve naklî yönlerden her bir konuyu detaylı biçimde incelemiş ve özellikle Mu‘tezile’nin görüşlerinin dayandığı teorik zemine yönelik, çözümü oldukça zor itirazlar yöneltmiştir. İbnü’l-Murtazâ, bu tenkitleri esasen Mu‘tezilî metodolojinin temel ilkelerine dönük bir meydan okuma olarak değerlendirmiş ve bu çerçevede hem kullanılan yöntemleri temellendirmeye çalışmış hem de Râzî’nin itirazlarını kavramsal olarak çürütmeye gayret etmiştir. Onun bu tutumu, bir yandan geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî âlimlerin klasik kelâm yöntemlerini ne şekilde savunduklarını ve bu savunuların hangi teorik esaslara yaslandığını ortaya koymakta, diğer yandan ise mütekaddimîn döneme ait istidlâl türlerinin nasıl işlediğini anlamaya katkı sunmaktadır. Çalışmada öncelikle Cüveynî’nin eş-Şâmil fî uṣûli’d-dîn adlı eseri merkez alınarak istidlâl yöntemleri bağlamında Mu‘tezile’ye yönelttiği eleştiriler kısaca tasvire ve değerlendirmeye tabi tutulacak; ardından metinler arası karşılaştırmalı çözümleme yöntemiyle, Râzî’nin eleştirileri ile İbnü’l-Murtazâ’nın bu eleştirilere karşı geliştirdiği epistemolojik savunu çabası kavramsal boyutlarıyla incelenecektir. Böylece iki düşünürün, ortak bir tartışma zemininde nasıl karşılaştıkları tespit edilmeye çalışılacaktır. Bu yönüyle çalışma, geç dönem Zeydî-Mu‘tezilî düşüncenin klasik kelâm mirasıyla kurduğu ilişkiyi ve erken dönem tartışmalarına sağladığı katkıları ortaya koymayı; aynı zamanda yönteme ilişkin süreklilikleri ve kopuşları kavramaya imkân veren bir perspektif sunmayı amaçlamaktadır.

Ishaya Anthony

Faith Lelei, Matt Kynes, Ansley Kyne et al.

The Faith and Medicine Summit, held on October 31st and November 1st, 2024, at AIC Kijabe, Kenya, brought together 55 participants from diverse healthcare sectors to explore the integration of spiritual care within the African healthcare context. The summit addressed the unique spiritual needs of patients, emphasizing a holistic approach to healthcare that encompasses physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Key sessions included discussions on defining spiritual needs, understanding African theology of pain, suffering & evil, the importance of spiritual engagement for both patients and healthcare providers, spiritual care training and research, and institutionalization of spiritual care. Participants highlighted the necessity of culturally relevant training and institutional support to effectively incorporate spiritual care as standard healthcare practice. The summit concluded with a commitment to advancing spiritual care through collaborative efforts, research, and training.

Sukrit Ranjan, Martin Schlecker, Nicholas Wogan et al.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to telescopically constrain the frequency and abundance of biospheres in the solar neighborhood. Origin-of-life theories vary in their predictions for the environmental requirements and the expected frequency of abiogenesis, meaning that constraints on the frequency and distribution of life on exoplanets from HWO can in principle directly test theories of abiogenesis. We categorize origin-of-life theories into three broad classes and discuss how HWO could potentially test them. Nondetection of biology on a large sample of habitable planets would provide prior-independent evidence in favor of the class of abiogenesis theory which holds that the origin of life is a contingent, vanishingly unlikely event, whereas detection of event a single biosphere would falsify this class of theories. Correlations of candidate biospheres with planetary parameters such as UV irradiation, the presence of oceans, and the presence of continents can test specific origin-of-life theories. Simulated surveys with Bayesian analysis are required to quantify the ability of HWO to execute this science case. However, a clear theme from the limited such studies that have already been conducted is the need for large sample sizes ($\gtrsim50$ planets characterized) to provide meaningful constraints on abiogenesis theories, favoring a larger design sample for HWO.

Felix Fießinger, Mitja Stadje

We adapt Leland's dynamic capital structure model to the context of an insurance company selling participating life insurance contracts explaining the existence of life insurance contracts which provide both a guaranteed payment and surplus participation to the policyholders. Our derivation of the optimal participation rate reveals its pronounced sensitivity to the contract duration and the associated tax rate. Moreover, the asset substitution effect, which describes the tendency of equity holders to increase the riskiness of a company's investment decisions, decreases when adding surplus participation.

Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas et al.

The question of "what is life?" has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature vectors, followed by agglomerative clustering, intra-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection to reveal underlying conceptual archetypes. This methodology revealed a continuous landscape of the themes relating to the definition of life, suggesting that what has historically been approached as a binary taxonomic problem should be instead conceived as differentiated perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. We offer a new methodological bridge between reductionist and holistic approaches to fundamental questions in science and philosophy, demonstrating how computational semantic analysis can reveal conceptual patterns across disciplinary boundaries, and opening similar pathways for addressing other contested definitional territories across the sciences.

William Bialek

Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we engage with more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this complexity, I explore the optimization of information flow as a potentially general theoretical principle. The primary example is a genetic network guiding development of the fly embryo, but each idea also is illustrated by examples from neural systems. In each case, optimization makes detailed, largely parameter-free predictions that connect quantitatively with experiment

Wenyuan Li, Pengyu Wei

This paper considers the constrained portfolio optimization in a generalized life-cycle model. The individual with a stochastic income manages a portfolio consisting of stocks, a bond, and life insurance to maximize his or her consumption level, death benefit, and terminal wealth. Meanwhile, the individual faces a convex-set trading constraint, of which the non-tradeable asset constraint, no short-selling constraint, and no borrowing constraint are special cases. Following Cuoco (1997), we build the artificial markets to derive the dual problem and prove the existence of the original problem. With additional discussions, we extend his uniformly bounded assumption on the interest rate to an almost surely finite expectation condition and enlarge his uniformly bounded assumption on the income process to a bounded expectation condition. Moreover, we propose a dual control neural network approach to compute tight lower and upper bounds for the original problem, which can be utilized in more general cases than the simulation of artificial markets strategies (SAMS) approach in Bick et al. (2013). Finally, we conclude that when considering the trading constraints, the individual will reduce his or her demand for life insurance.

Ryan Boukrouche, Rodrigo Caballero, Markus Janson

Non-transiting terrestrial planets will be accessible by upcoming observatories of which LIFE is an example. Planet b orbiting Teegarden's Star is one of the optimal targets for such missions. We use a one-dimensional atmospheric model with real-gas radiation, a multi-species pseudo-adiabatic convection-condensation scheme, and a water cloud scheme, to estimate the impact of the cloud coverage on the emission spectrum of the target, as well as to assess how sensitive LIFE could be to changes in outgoing flux caused by these clouds. Though the emergent flux decreases with a higher cloud coverage, it does not decrease by more than one order of magnitude as the coverage increases from 0% to 90%. This allows LIFE to retain a high sensitivity to the cloud cover fraction for wavelengths longer than 7 microns. In this spectral range, with at least 1 bar of N2, LIFE is able to distinguish cloud cover fractions as small as 10% given an integration time of 24 hours, and yields much better precision with a week-long integration. An integration time of one week also allows the resolution of local variations in spectral flux, which can lead to an easier molecule identification. This ability remains if the planet is a CO2-dominated Venus analog. Partial pressures of N2 lower than 1 bar may create a degeneracy with the cloud cover fraction. LIFE shows promising potential for detecting and characterizing atmospheres even with a high cloud coverage, and retaining a fine sensitivity to relatively small differences in cloud cover fractions.

The Person and the Challenges

Skya Abbate

Through a historical perusal of Church teaching this essay explores the question of the ethical permissibility of xenotransplantation in light of Laudato Si’. This timely encyclical acknowledges the dignity of human beings and other animal creatures and deserves formal church articulation before the technocratic paradigm of scientific possibility replaces the integrity of creation. Grounded in the Catholic tradition and building upon Sacred Scripture and Catholic social teaching, Laudato Si’ constitutes the most mature and promising, albeit incomplete articulation of human and non-animal relationships within the integral wholeness of all creation. The ethical permissibility of xenotransplantation in the Catholic community requires further discussion and reconsideration in light of Laudato Si’ to meet the ethical obligations of safety, respect, and dignity owed to humans and living creatures.

Alexander M. T. L. Yiu, Torsten Kleinow, George Streftaris

In recent years, improvements in all-cause mortality rates and life expectancies for males and females in England and Wales have slowed down. In this paper, cause-specific mortality data for England and Wales from 2001 to 2018 are used to investigate the cause-specific contributions to the slowdown in improvements. Cause-specific death counts in England and Wales are modelled using negative binomial regression and a breakpoint in the linear temporal trend in log mortality rates is investigated. Cause-specific scenarios are generated, where the post-breakpoint temporal trends for certain causes are reverted to pre-breakpoint rates and the effect of these changes on age-standardised mortality rates and period life expectancies is explored. These scenarios are used to quantify cause-specific contributions to the mortality improvement slowdown. Reductions in improvements at older ages in circulatory system diseases, as well as the worsening of mortality rates due to mental and behavioural disorders and nervous system diseases, provide the greatest contributions to the reduction of improvements in age-standardised mortality rates and period life expectancies. Future period life expectancies scenarios are also generated, where cause-specific mortality rate trends are assumed to either persist or be reverted. In the majority of scenarios, the reversion of cause-specific mortality trends in a single cause of death results in the worsening of period life expectancies at birth and age 65 for both males and females. This work enhances the understanding of cause-specific contributions to the slowdown in all-cause mortality rate improvements from 2001 to 2018, while also providing insights into causes of death that are drivers of life expectancy improvements. The findings can be of benefit to researchers, policy-makers and insurance professionals.

Bradley M. Trout

The Bible continues to have a prominent place in the South African discourse. Unfortunately, however, it is often poorly interpreted. The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of the misinterpretation of the Bible. We aimed to uncover the specific interpretive methods responsible for this misinterpretation, considered generally in the South African milieu. Specifically, we discussed the role of biblical fundamentalism. Essentially fundamentalism fails to account for the reader’s place in the process of biblical interpretation and so operates under the guise of false objectivity. We then discussed three examples of this phenomenon: the way in which Scripture has been interpreted by the African Christian Democratic Party, Peter Hammond’s view in his Biblical principles for Africa, and the scriptural interpretation of Deuteronomy by Dutch Reformed theologians in the 1930s–1960s. This essay demonstrated that the primary problem with the fundamentalistic method is its failure to account for the reader’s role in the interpretive process. Fundamentalism presents itself in several ways as ‘biblical’ without recognising the problems inherent in such a formulation, especially in the assumption of objectivity. This result illustrated the necessity for a more reader-centred approach to Scripture that takes note of prior ideological commitments. As a result, it is imperative that we embrace a hermeneutic that is firstly ‘critical’, that means willing to interrogate ideological pre-commitments. Secondly, we proposed that the hermeneutic focus on ‘eschatology’, whereby Scripture is considered primarily based on its redemptive trajectory. The emphasis is then placed on the Christ event, especially the resurrection as the culmination of the story. Biblical ethics are then grounded in an understanding of the people of God as the eschatological community. This approach is also termed ‘redemptive-historical’. As one example of such an approach, we discussed N.T. Wright’s Five-act model. In this view, biblical ethics are grounded upon knowing where we find ourselves in the overall drama and what is appropriate within each act. God’s people are to imagine themselves as players in a later stage of the same grand drama of Scripture. This hermeneutic provides, so we argued, a better approach to applying Scripture in the modern context. If we wish to reduce the misinterpretation of Scripture in the South African milieu, we need to identify fundamentalist hermeneutics and continually strive towards a more reader-centred and eschatological approach to its interpretation. Contribution: This article attempted to contribute towards our understanding of the way Scripture is used in public discourse, and it also suggested a way forward to a better interpretation.

The Dang Vu, Hiroaki Shishido, Kazuya Aizawa et al.

Samples were examined using a superconducting (Nb) neutron imaging system employing a delay-line technique which in previous studies was shown to have high spatial resolution. We found excellent correspondence between neutron transmission and scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of Gd islands with sizes between 15 and 130 micrometer which were thermally-sprayed onto a Si substrate. Neutron transmission images could be used to identify tiny voids in a thermally-sprayed continuous Gd2O3 film on a Si substrate which could not be seen in SEM images. We also found that neutron transmission images revealed pattern formations, mosaic features and co-existing dendritic phases in Wood's metal samples with constituent elements Bi, Pb, Sn and Cd. These results demonstrate the merits of the current-biased kinetic inductance detector (CB-KID) system for practical studies in materials science. Moreover, we found that operating the detector at a more optimal temperature (7.9 K) appreciably improved the effective detection efficiency when compared to previous studies conducted at 4 K. This is because the effective size of hot-spots in the superconducting meanderline planes increases with temperature, which makes particle detections more likely.

Rajesh Kaluri, Dharmendra Singh Rajput, Qin Xin et al.

Internet of Things (IoT) and related applications have successfully contributed towards enhancing the value of life in this planet. The advanced wireless sensor networks and its revolutionary computational capabilities have enabled various IoT applications become the next frontier, touching almost all domains of life. With this enormous progress, energy optimization has also become a primary concern with the need to attend to green technologies. The present study focuses on the predictions pertinent to the sustainability of battery life in IoT frameworks in the marine environment. The data used is a publicly available dataset collected from the Chicago district beach water. Firstly, the missing values in the data are replaced with the attribute mean. Later, one-hot encoding technique is applied for achieving data homogeneity followed by the standard scalar technique to normalize the data. Then, rough set theory is used for feature extraction, and the resultant data is fed into a Deep Neural Network (DNN) model for the optimized prediction results. The proposed model is then compared with the state of the art machine learning models and the results justify its superiority on the basis of performance metrics such as Mean Squared Error, Mean Absolute Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and Test Variance Score.

Li Yin, Y. M. Zhou

The life detection method based on a single type of information source cannot meet the requirement of post-earthquake rescue due to its limitations in different scenes and bad robustness in life detection. This paper proposes a method based on deep neural network for multi-sensor decision-level fusion which concludes Convolutional Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory neural network (CNN+LSTM). Firstly, we calculate the value of the life detection probability of each sensor with various methods in the same scene simultaneously, which will be gathered to make samples for inputs of the deep neural network. Then we use Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract the distribution characteristics of the spatial domain from inputs which is the two-channel combination of the probability values and the smoothing probability values of each life detection sensor respectively. Furthermore, the sequence time relationship of the outputs from the last layers will be analyzed with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) layers, then we concatenate the results from three branches of LSTM layers. Finally, two sets of LSTM neural networks that is different from the previous layers are used to integrate the three branches of the features, and the results of the two classifications are output using the fully connected network with Binary Cross Entropy (BEC) loss function. Therefore, the classification results of the life detection can be concluded accurately with the proposed algorithm.

C. H. Lucas Patty, Inge Loes ten Kate, Wybren Jan Buma et al.

Homochirality is a generic and unique property of all biochemical life and the fractional circular polarization of light it induces therefore constitutes a potentially unambiguous biosignature.} However, while high-quality circular polarimetric spectra can be easily and quickly obtained in the laboratory, accurate measurements in the field are much more challenging due to large changes in illumination and target movement. In this study we have measured various targets in the field, up to distances of a few kilometers, using the dedicated circular spectropolarimeter TreePol. We show how photosynthetic life can readily be distinguished from abiotic matter. We underline the potential of circular polarization signals as a remotely accessible means to characterize and monitor terrestrial vegetation, e.g. for agriculture and forestry. Additionally, we discuss the potential of circular polarization for the remote detection of extraterrestrial life.

Kotaro Sakata, Yuta Tanaka, Daisuke Takahashi

We propose a max-plus equation which includes Conway's Game of Life (GoL) as a special case. There are some special solutions to the equation which include and unify those to GoL. Moreover, the multi-value extension of GoL is derived from the equation and the behavior of solutions is discussed.

Edward W. Schwieterman, Christopher T. Reinhard, Stephanie L. Olson et al.

Some atmospheric gases have been proposed as counter indicators to the presence of life on an exoplanet if remotely detectable at sufficient abundance (i.e., antibiosignatures), informing the search for biosignatures and potentially fingerprinting uninhabited habitats. However, the quantitative extent to which putative antibiosignatures could exist in the atmospheres of inhabited planets is not well understood. The most commonly referenced potential antibiosignature is CO, because it represents a source of free energy and reduced carbon that is readily exploited by life on Earth and is thus often assumed to accumulate only in the absence of life. Yet, biospheres actively produce CO through biomass burning, photooxidation processes, and release of gases that are photochemically converted into CO in the atmosphere. We demonstrate with a 1D ecosphere-atmosphere model that reducing biospheres can maintain CO levels of ~100 ppmv even at low H2 fluxes due to the impact of hybrid photosynthetic ecosystems. Additionally, we show that photochemistry around M dwarf stars is particularly favorable for the buildup of CO, with plausible concentrations for inhabited, oxygen-rich planets extending from hundreds of ppm to several percent. Since CH4 buildup is also favored on these worlds, and because O2 and O3 are likely not detectable with the James Webb Space Telescope, the presence of high CO (>100 ppmv) may discriminate between oxygen-rich and reducing biospheres with near-future transmission observations. These results suggest that spectroscopic detection of CO can be compatible with the presence of life and that a comprehensive contextual assessment is required to validate the significance of potential antibiosignatures.