Hasil untuk "The Bible"

Nobuntu Penxa-Matholeni

This article explored the significance of the upper room where Jesus invited his 12 disciples for a meal, focussing on the specific selection of both the men and the space. It investigated the potential contributions of the eziko [fireplace] in terms of inclusivity and decentralising the power dynamics of the Lord’s Supper. Asking how the eziko, as a site, can deconstruct gender biases and decentralise the power vested in the upper room. Using the indigenous storytelling methodology, nuancing the space of the eziko and juxtaposing it with the events described in Luke 22:14–20. Contribution: Among its key contributions, this article presents an interdisciplinary approach that integrates indigenous storytelling methodology with African indigenous knowledge systems, while also bridging theology with these cultural frameworks. This approach enhances academic discussions on contextual theology and promotes meaningful dialogue between Christian traditions and African indigenous religious practices.

Call for Papers for the First Annual International Hybrid Conference 2024 held at the Center of Biblical Studies, Research, and Development, West African Advanced School of Theology, Owerri, Nigeria, 4–6 December 2024.  Abstracts due by 10 November 2024.

Paola Dal Toso

Robert Baden-Powell is well known as the founder of Scouting, an educational movement that spread rapidly around the world after 1907. This article aims to analyse an aspect of his writings that has been little studied: the religious dimension. A deeply religious man, Baden-Powell recognised the presence of God not only in the Bible but also in nature. It is interesting that some of his convictions are now, almost a hundred years later, topical educational insights. Baden-Powell encourages all Scouts in the world to cultivate religious practice by saying: “There can be no atheist Scout”. He offers concrete insights that commit the scout educator to take on the innate religious need that many young people express in a personal search for faith motivation.

C. Zabin, L. Jurgens, Jillian Bible et al.

Daniel O. Orogun

This paper examined the integrity, impact and good governance value of election prophecies (EPs) in the last 20 years in selected African countries juxtaposed with President Donald Trump’s EPs in America. As a primary source, empirical research was conducted alongside a historical survey. The data collected from 519 respondents revealed that a majority believe in prophecies, but they queried the integrity, impact and value of EPs due to the inconsistency, inaccuracy, confusion and unhealthy public panics engendered. Despite the adverse effects, many adherents still subscribe to the phenomenon due to the psychological and emotional influence. Subsequently, this article critiqued the research outcome through Biblical Theology. It held that EPs remain vital in the public life of nations, but the current approach in Africa needs some review. These include: (1) the need to revisit the tasks of prophets as Hope givers, Reformers and those who speak truth to power in pre- and post-election seasons; (2) the scrutiny of EPs by the plurality of Prophets, ecumenical leaders and the public, with the four suggested evaluation indices; and (3) the need to curb the negative effect of EPs on healthy electoral processes using enacted public account policies. Contribution: This article contributes to an interdisciplinary religious aspect of research covering Biblical theology, psephology and politics.

Ernestina Afriyie

There is a view that African Instituted Churches (AICs) are Christian churches with a spirituality which is similar to traditional spirituality. Scholars have claimed that AICs came up as a response to the spirituality of the churches started by missionaries from the West. The latter churches seemed to ignore the spiritual world, the activities of the Spirit and also the fact that physical occurrences have spiritual causes. As such, the spiritual needs of African converts were not being met. In research to ascertain the validity of this assertion, this researcher looks into the circumstances surrounding the founding of AICs in Ghana, paying particular attention to the Church of the Twelve Apostles, the OSSAH-Madih Church, and the Musama Disco Christo Church. The research was done through participant observations in the AICs mentioned. Secondary data was gathered from articles, books and other research materials written by members of AICs. The research concluded that while some AICs may have started as a reaction to the operation of the mission churches, the spirituality expressed is not a “copying” of African spirituality, but one that comes about with the awareness of the existence of the spiritual realm.

Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour

Two Qurʾānic concepts have largely defined how the Qurʾān related to previous revelations. Those two concepts are <i>taḥrīf</i> (alteration) and <i>naskh</i> (abrogation). Appealing to those two concepts, the mainstream understating of the Qurʾān was that it superseded pre-Islamic scriptures and that, after its revelation, such scriptures had limited epistemic value. With this in mind, this article aims to achieve descriptive and prescriptive goals. With the descriptive goal, it problematizes the theories of <i>taḥrīf</i> and <i>naskh</i>, with a view to showing how such concepts influenced Muslim understanding of the Straight Path (<i>al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm</i>). With the prescriptive goal, it proposes the concept of <i>taṣdīq</i> (confirmation) as an alternative. In doing so, this article demonstrates how, despite the fact that the Qurʾān never shied away from critiquing what it believes to be forms of deviation in the Bible, it never introduced itself as an “abrogator” (<i>nāsikh</i>) to it but rather as a “confirmer” (<i>muṣaddiq</i>) in no less than 12 occurrences in the Qurʾān, but the concept of <i>taṣdīq</i> was largely overshadowed by the overemphasis on <i>taḥrīf</i> and <i>naskh</i>.

Megan R. Remington

Throughout Daniel 8–10, Daniel is touched five times by human-like figures. By these touch interventions, he receives both physical and emotional strength which allow him to continue participating in the revelatory experience. This essay argues that embodied participation marked by the sense of touch not only legitimates an authentic revelation but allows Daniel to make meaning—or make sense—of his experiences. Through embodied affect, repeated interaction, and bodily likeness between the subjects involved, Daniel is an active participant in the revelatory process rather than merely a passive recipient, a feature that provides further nuance for the definition of a literary apocalypse.

Siphiwe Ndlovu, Angelo Nicolaides

Jesus Christ is central to Christianity as God and Saviour and He taught concerning the existence of angels, so as Orthodox Christians we ought to embrace the belief in angels. This article approaches the themes from a mainly Orthodox perspective and contends that angels are important, not only as part of a prescriptive Biblical world-view, but also as creatures serving God. Angelology or the study of angels such as this one, is part of systematic theology and is a key category of theology in Orthodoxy and Catholicism. It is metaphysical in that it studies being and all reality in the physical and spiritual realms. Angels as God’s agents, are considered from a biblical vantage point and the teachings of early Church Fathers who believed that God fashioned the angels long before He created the observable world. It is clear from Holy Scripture that angels protect people under the authority of the creator. Angels are non-corporeal despite manifesting at times in human form. They are messengers and ambassadors of the Most High. Their core function is to devote their existence to doing God’s will and they are assigned various missions on earth. They play a crucial role in reconciling fallen humanity with God as they praise Him and call on people to worship and adore Him. Angels are ordered in specific ranks in which diverse roles are played by them. As Orthodox adherents we believe they have been with us since the very creation and have helped to guide the Church as the ‘Bride of Christ’ who is its head. Angels will play an essential role when Christ returns at the Second Coming. People can be elevated above angels by responding to God’s saving work and may even get to judge angels. There are also fallen angels, headed by Lucifer, thus they are not infallible. Either way, angels form part of a significant component of divine revelation and should never be ignored. Angels should not be worshipped but rather venerated for their excellence as ministering spirits and servants of the Most High. According to Orthodoxy, human beings in the Christian faith need to make the Holy Bible, Holy Tradition and teachings of the early Church Fathers, their authority on all matters of spirituality and seek the support of the Paraclete. In African traditional cosmology (ATC) there is a shared spiritual belief in ancestors, which is also worth briefly touching on. A study such as this then serves to widen our understanding of God, and how He operates in His Creation.

Irimie Marga

What is the relation between love and justice? In God, love and justice are in perfect harmony. In humans, this harmony depreciates as a result of the sins committed by them. Christ restores harmony between love and justice by tying them to a common element: sacrifice. The Church continues Christ’s work and, through all its Mysteries, especially Confession and Liturgy, it searches to raise man to a sacrificial statute, which leads to a harmonisation in love and justice. Apocatastasis and inquisition are the extremes people fell in by the exaggeration of love and justice. Contribution: Some theologians say that God is more loving than righteous. Others say the opposite. The answer is that in God, love and justice are in absolute harmony. In humans, love and justice are inequitable. Christ restores this lost harmony through a common element: sacrifice. The Day of Judgement will show how much people harmonised love and justice, through Christian sacrifice.

CMS Collaboration

A search for electroweak production of supersymmetric (SUSY) particles in final states with one lepton, a Higgs boson decaying to a pair of bottom quarks, and large missing transverse momentum is presented. The search uses data from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV collected using the CMS detector at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$. The observed yields are consistent with backgrounds expected from the standard model. The results are interpreted in the context of a simplified SUSY model of chargino-neutralino production, with the chargino decaying to a W boson and the lightest SUSY particle (LSP) and the neutralino decaying to a Higgs boson and the LSP. Charginos and neutralinos with masses up to 820 GeV are excluded at 95% confidence level when the LSP mass is small, and LSPs with mass up to 350 GeV are excluded when the masses of the chargino and neutralino are approximately 700 GeV.

CMS Collaboration

A search for new top quark interactions is performed within the framework of an effective field theory using the associated production of either one or two top quarks with a Z boson in multilepton final states. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. Five dimension-six operators modifying the electroweak interactions of the top quark are considered. Novel machine-learning techniques are used to enhance the sensitivity to effects arising from these operators. Distributions used for the signal extraction are parameterized in terms of Wilson coefficients describing the interaction strengths of the operators. All five Wilson coefficients are simultaneously fit to data and 95% confidence level intervals are computed. All results are consistent with the SM expectations.

ATLAS Collaboration

A search for new phenomena in final states with hadronically decaying tau leptons, $b$-jets, and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analyzed dataset comprises $pp$~collision data at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt s = 13$ TeV with an integrated luminosity of 139/fb, delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector from 2015 to 2018. The observed data are compatible with the expected Standard Model background. The results are interpreted in simplified models for two different scenarios. The first model is based on supersymmetry and considers pair production of top squarks, each of which decays into a $b$-quark, a neutrino and a tau slepton. Each tau slepton in turn decays into a tau lepton and a nearly massless gravitino. Within this model, top-squark masses up to 1.4 TeV can be excluded at the 95% confidence level over a wide range of tau-slepton masses. The second model considers pair production of leptoquarks with decays into third-generation leptons and quarks. Depending on the branching fraction into charged leptons, leptoquarks with masses up to around 1.25 TeV can be excluded at the 95% confidence level for the case of scalar leptoquarks and up to 1.8 TeV (1.5 TeV) for vector leptoquarks in a Yang--Mills (minimal-coupling) scenario. In addition, model-independent upper limits are set on the cross section of processes beyond the Standard Model.

ATLAS collaboration

The production of dark matter in association with Higgs bosons is predicted in several extensions of the Standard Model. An exploration of such scenarios is presented, considering final states with missing transverse momentum and $b$-tagged jets consistent with a Higgs boson. The analysis uses proton-proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC during Run 2, amounting to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb$^{-1}$. The analysis, when compared with previous searches, benefits from a larger dataset, but also has further improvements providing sensitivity to a wider spectrum of signal scenarios. These improvements include both an optimised event selection and advances in the object identification, such as the use of the likelihood-based significance of the missing transverse momentum and variable-radius track-jets. No significant deviation from Standard Model expectations is observed. Limits are set, at 95% confidence level, in two benchmark models with two Higgs doublets extended by either a heavy vector boson $Z'$ or a pseudoscalar singlet $a$ and which both provide a dark matter candidate $χ$. In the case of the two-Higgs-doublet model with an additional vector boson $Z'$, the observed limits extend up to a $Z'$ mass of 3 TeV for a mass of 100 GeV for the dark matter candidate. The two-Higgs-doublet model with a dark matter particle mass of 10 GeV and an additional pseudoscalar $a$ is excluded for masses of the $a$ up to 520 GeV and 240 GeV for $\tan β= 1$ and $\tan β= 10$ respectively. Limits on the visible cross-sections are set and range from 0.05 fb to 3.26 fb, depending on the missing transverse momentum and $b$-quark jet multiplicity requirements.

ATLAS Collaboration

During LHC Run 2 (2015-2018) the ATLAS Level-1 topological trigger allowed efficient data-taking by the ATLAS experiment at luminosities up to 2.1x10$^{34}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$, which exceeds the design value by a factor of two. The system was installed in 2016 and operated in 2017 and 2018. It uses Field Programmable Gate Array processors to select interesting events by placing kinematic and angular requirements on electromagnetic clusters, jets, $τ$-leptons, muons and the total energy. It significantly improves the background event rejection and signal event acceptance, in particular for Higgs boson and $B$-physics measurements.

CMS Collaboration

Studies of $CP$ violation and anomalous couplings of the Higgs boson to vector bosons and fermions are presented. The data were acquired by the CMS experiment at the LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$ at a proton-proton collision energy of 13 TeV. The kinematic effects in the Higgs boson's four-lepton decay H $\to$ 4$\ell$ and its production in association with two jets, a vector boson, or top quarks are analyzed, using a full detector simulation and matrix element techniques to identify the production mechanisms and to increase sensitivity to the Higgs boson tensor structure of the Higgs boson interactions. A simultaneous measurement is performed of up to five Higgs boson couplings to electroweak vector bosons (HVV), two couplings to gluons (Hgg), and two couplings to top quarks (Htt). The $CP$ measurement in the Htt interaction is combined with the recent measurement in the H $\to$ $γγ$ channel. The results are presented in the framework of anomalous couplings and are also interpreted in the framework of effective field theory, including the first study of $CP$ properties of the Htt and effective Hgg couplings from a simultaneous analysis of the gluon fusion and top-associated processes. The results are consistent with the standard model of particle physics.

CMS Collaboration

A search is performed for W' bosons decaying to a top and a bottom quark in the all-hadronic final state, in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. The analyzed data were collected by the CMS experiment between 2016 and 2018 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$. Deep neural network algorithms are used to identify the jet initiated by the bottom quark and the jet containing the decay products of the top quark when the W boson from the top quark decays hadronically. No excess above the estimated standard model background is observed. Upper limits on the production cross sections of W' bosons decaying to a top and a bottom quark are set. Both left- and right-handed W' bosons with masses below 3.4 TeV are excluded at 95% confidence level, and the most stringent limits to date on W' bosons decaying to a top and a bottom quark in the all-hadronic final state are obtained.

CMS Collaboration

Measurements of Higgs boson production cross sections and couplings in events where the Higgs boson decays into a pair of photons are reported. Events are selected from a sample of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} =$ 13 TeV collected by the CMS detector at the LHC from 2016 to 2018, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{-1}$. Analysis categories enriched in Higgs boson events produced via gluon fusion, vector boson fusion, vector boson associated production, and production associated with top quarks are constructed. The total Higgs boson signal strength, relative to the standard model (SM) prediction, is measured to be 1.12 $\pm$ 0.09. Other properties of the Higgs boson are measured, including SM signal strength modifiers, production cross sections, and its couplings to other particles. These include the most precise measurements of gluon fusion and vector boson fusion Higgs boson production in several different kinematic regions, the first measurement of Higgs boson production in association with a top quark pair in five regions of the Higgs boson transverse momentum, and an upper limit on the rate of Higgs boson production in association with a single top quark. All results are found to be in agreement with the SM expectations.

Irene Dias de Oliveira

Este trabalho é a narrativa em primeira pessoa das experiências e memórias que teceram a minha vida de educadora e pesquisadora na Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás ao longo de 20 anos. Embora tenha a consciência da necessidade de uma escrita acadêmica procurei deixar-me levar por uma escrita mais pessoal, pois se trata de deixar-se embalar pelas minhas memórias sem preocupar-me demais com kronos, o tempo implacável que tudo obriga e pressiona para um desfecho implacável. Hoje ouso acolher as surpresas do dia a dia e viver os momentos e instantes do kairós, o tempo de graça e gratidão que ganha asas nas emoções que embalam as memórias. E agora mais distante de kronos e mais próxima do kairós posso perceber quantos instantes de graça, beleza e leveza estiveram presentes durante os 20 anos de kronos na PUC Goiás. É nas asas de kronos e kairós que vou mergulhar em busca das memórias de um tempo que teci com meus e minhas colegas. Histórias de graça e leveza; histórias de construção coletiva de saber; histórias de um colegiado que vive graças a ousadia e persistência de seus pesquisadores/as.

Tadeusz Stanisław Reroń