Kωμασία (“procesión”) y sus derivados (como κωμαστής, “persona que transporta imágenes”) son términos que aparecieron de una manera completamente nueva en el Egipto grecorromano. Aunque la κωμασία pertenezca al ámbito de las procesiones, en lengua griega en Egipto se conocen igualmente otras palabras que hacen referencia al rito procesional, como πομπή, πομπαγωγία ο ἐξοδεία, por lo que hoy día existe un debate sobre el significado concreto de κωμασία. Hay, así, quien considera que se trataba de una ceremonia celebrada con ocasión del adventus o llegada de un personaje importante, mientras que otros defienden que la κωμασία sería una procesión en la que se transportaban las imágenes de los dioses. Finalmente, algunos autores hacen hincapié en su posible vertiente oracular. De todos estos planteamientos, me centraré en particular en la definición de κωμασία como la procesión que transporta imágenes de los dioses. La movilidad de las estatuas de los dioses en Egipto, en torno a la cual se articularon algunas de sus fiestas religiosas más significativas (como el festival de Opet o la Bella Fiesta del Valle, entre muchas otras), permiten interrogarse sobre la originalidad de la κωμασία y de sus derivados. Para tratar de contribuir a aclarar su significado, en el siguiente artículo analizaré la κωμασία y sus derivados en varios frentes: su origen etimológico, su contextualización en el ámbito general de las procesiones en Egipto, el debate acerca de su significado y su evolución diacrónica, en la que pudo intervenir la convivencia entre las costumbres egipcias y la progresiva adopción de rasgos grecorromanos vinculados al culto de los dioses y de los gobernantes.
Hany M. Hassan, Hesham E. Abdel Hafiez, Mariam A. Sallam
et al.
Old Cairo, also known as Islamic Cairo, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site representing a rich tapestry of history and culture. Today, among various significant aspects, its cultural heritage necessitates the elaboration of a proactive conservation strategy, which should take advantage of the intrinsic support provided by the efforts documented in the literature that have been made in several scientific fields, disciplines, and directions over the years. Most historic religious monumental buildings in Old Cairo, in particular, not only face the effects of local seismic hazards, which are emphasized by damage by past earthquakes, but also suffer the consequences of several influencing parameters that are unique to the Cairo city context. In this sense, it is known that the structural retrofitting of these monumental buildings requires sound knowledge of technical details and criticalities, based on inspections, numerical simulations, the in-field integration of technologies, and laboratory tests. Many other gaps should also be addressed, and a sound conservation strategy should be elaborated on the basis of a multi-target approach, which could account for the structural engineering perspective but also contextualize the retrofit within the state of the art and the evolution of past events. This is the target of the contemporary “Particular Relevance” bilateral Italy–Egypt “CoReng” project, seeking to define a multidisciplinary strategy for conserving Old Cairo’s cultural heritage and focusing primarily on the case study of the Religions Complex. To this end, a review analysis of major oversights and challenges relating to historic monuments in Old Cairo is presented in this paper. Learning from past accidents and experiences is, in fact, the primary supporting basis for elaborating new operational steps and efficient approaches to mitigating challenges and minimizing the consequences of emergency events. As such, this review contribution specifically focuses on the structural vulnerability of historic monumental buildings in Old Cairo, reporting on past efforts, past strategy proposals, research experiences, and trends.
Kamshat Kindikbayeva, Berik Tulemissov, Yerkebulan Yerzhanov
et al.
In the era of globalization, the spiritual and cultural self consciousness of Kazakh youth is undergoing profound transformations. The notions of cognitive identification and poetic consciousness have become decisive frameworks through which young people reinterpret their spiritual identity. The present study aims to analyse the cultural–cognitive identification of Kazakh youth and its interaction with national and global cultural codes. Using cognitive, cultural anthropological and hermeneutic methodologies the research examines the psychological structures of young people and the mechanisms by which they perceive national culture. It also explores questions of cultural relevance and the preservation of spiritual integrity. Scientific results reveal psychological, social and cultural aspects of maintaining national culture and spiritual values in a globalising world. Practically, the work informs strategies and programmes in youth policy and cultural development aimed at preserving the authenticity of national culture. Cognitive analysis examines psychological structures and perception of cultural codes; a cultural anthropological overview explains interactions between national culture and global influences; and a hermeneutic approach allows a deeper analysis of the symbolic world and the structures of poetic consciousness. The study identifies a dynamic relationship between the cultural identification of Kazakh youth and global culture: while young people are open to global cultural flows, internal psychological mechanisms and the values of their social environment play an essential role in preserving the core codes of national culture. The paper proposes mechanisms to safeguard national consciousness and cultural integrity against the pressures of globalization and offers new perspectives on balancing national and global cultures. Its findings will help to identify youth’s cultural cognitive orientations and to develop psychological and social support mechanisms to improve their attitudes towards national culture. Finally, the article proposes concrete steps for national education programmes and cultural policy aimed at fostering spiritual unity among young people.
Understanding and replicating the real world is a critical challenge in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research. To achieve this, many existing approaches, such as world models, aim to capture the fundamental principles governing the physical world, enabling more accurate simulations and meaningful interactions. However, current methods often treat different modalities, including 2D (images), videos, 3D, and 4D representations, as independent domains, overlooking their interdependencies. Additionally, these methods typically focus on isolated dimensions of reality without systematically integrating their connections. In this survey, we present a unified survey for multimodal generative models that investigate the progression of data dimensionality in real-world simulation. Specifically, this survey starts from 2D generation (appearance), then moves to video (appearance+dynamics) and 3D generation (appearance+geometry), and finally culminates in 4D generation that integrate all dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to systematically unify the study of 2D, video, 3D and 4D generation within a single framework. To guide future research, we provide a comprehensive review of datasets, evaluation metrics and future directions, and fostering insights for newcomers. This survey serves as a bridge to advance the study of multimodal generative models and real-world simulation within a unified framework.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require multi-view understanding and embodied perspective shifts. Recent approaches such as MindJourney attempt to mitigate this gap through test-time scaling where a world model imagines action-conditioned trajectories and a heuristic verifier selects helpful views from such trajectories. In this work, we systematically examine how such test-time verifiers behave across benchmarks, uncovering both their promise and their pitfalls. Our uncertainty-based analyses show that MindJourney's verifier provides little meaningful calibration, and that random scoring often reduces answer entropy equally well, thus exposing systematic action biases and unreliable reward signals. To mitigate these, we introduce a Verification through Spatial Assertions (ViSA) framework that grounds the test-time reward in verifiable, frame-anchored micro-claims. This principled verifier consistently improves spatial reasoning on the SAT-Real benchmark and corrects trajectory-selection biases through more balanced exploratory behavior. However, on the challenging MMSI-Bench, none of the verifiers, including ours, achieve consistent scaling, suggesting that the current world models form an information bottleneck where imagined views fail to enrich fine-grained reasoning. Together, these findings chart the bad, good, and ugly aspects of test-time verification for world-model-based reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/chandar-lab/visa-for-mindjourney.
Lancelot Da Costa, Sanjeev Namjoshi, Mohammed Abbas Ansari
et al.
The field of world modeling is fragmented, with researchers developing bespoke architectures that rarely build upon each other. We propose a framework that specifies the natural building blocks for structured world models based on the fundamental stochastic processes that any world model must capture: discrete processes (logic, symbols) and continuous processes (physics, dynamics); the world model is then defined by the hierarchical composition of these building blocks. We examine Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and switching linear dynamical systems (sLDS) as natural building blocks for discrete and continuous modeling--which become partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and controlled sLDS when augmented with actions. This modular approach supports both passive modeling (generation, forecasting) and active control (planning, decision-making) within the same architecture. We avoid the combinatorial explosion of traditional structure learning by largely fixing the causal architecture and searching over only four depth parameters. We review practical expressiveness through multimodal generative modeling (passive) and planning from pixels (active), with performance competitive to neural approaches while maintaining interpretability. The core outstanding challenge is scalable joint structure-parameter learning; current methods finesse this by cleverly growing structure and parameters incrementally, but are limited in their scalability. If solved, these natural building blocks could provide foundational infrastructure for world modeling, analogous to how standardized layers enabled progress in deep learning.
World models are emerging as a foundational paradigm for scalable, data-efficient embodied AI. In this work, we present GigaWorld-0, a unified world model framework designed explicitly as a data engine for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) learning. GigaWorld-0 integrates two synergistic components: GigaWorld-0-Video, which leverages large-scale video generation to produce diverse, texture-rich, and temporally coherent embodied sequences under fine-grained control of appearance, camera viewpoint, and action semantics; and GigaWorld-0-3D, which combines 3D generative modeling, 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction, physically differentiable system identification, and executable motion planning to ensure geometric consistency and physical realism. Their joint optimization enables the scalable synthesis of embodied interaction data that is visually compelling, spatially coherent, physically plausible, and instruction-aligned. Training at scale is made feasible through our efficient GigaTrain framework, which exploits FP8-precision and sparse attention to drastically reduce memory and compute requirements. We conduct comprehensive evaluations showing that GigaWorld-0 generates high-quality, diverse, and controllable data across multiple dimensions. Critically, VLA model (e.g., GigaBrain-0) trained on GigaWorld-0-generated data achieve strong real-world performance, significantly improving generalization and task success on physical robots without any real-world interaction during training.
World models aim to learn action-controlled future prediction and have proven essential for the development of intelligent agents. However, most existing world models rely heavily on substantial action-labeled data and costly training, making it challenging to adapt to novel environments with heterogeneous actions through limited interactions. This limitation can hinder their applicability across broader domains. To overcome this limitation, we propose AdaWorld, an innovative world model learning approach that enables efficient adaptation. The key idea is to incorporate action information during the pretraining of world models. This is achieved by extracting latent actions from videos in a self-supervised manner, capturing the most critical transitions between frames. We then develop an autoregressive world model that conditions on these latent actions. This learning paradigm enables highly adaptable world models, facilitating efficient transfer and learning of new actions even with limited interactions and finetuning. Our comprehensive experiments across multiple environments demonstrate that AdaWorld achieves superior performance in both simulation quality and visual planning.
Creating immersive and playable 3D worlds from texts or images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Existing world generation approaches typically fall into two categories: video-based methods that offer rich diversity but lack 3D consistency and rendering efficiency, and 3D-based methods that provide geometric consistency but struggle with limited training data and memory-inefficient representations. To address these limitations, we present HunyuanWorld 1.0, a novel framework that combines the best of both worlds for generating immersive, explorable, and interactive 3D scenes from text and image conditions. Our approach features three key advantages: 1) 360° immersive experiences via panoramic world proxies; 2) mesh export capabilities for seamless compatibility with existing computer graphics pipelines; 3) disentangled object representations for augmented interactivity. The core of our framework is a semantically layered 3D mesh representation that leverages panoramic images as 360° world proxies for semantic-aware world decomposition and reconstruction, enabling the generation of diverse 3D worlds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating coherent, explorable, and interactive 3D worlds while enabling versatile applications in virtual reality, physical simulation, game development, and interactive content creation.
Humans develop world models that capture the underlying generation process of data. Whether neural networks can learn similar world models remains an open problem. In this work, we present the first theoretical results for this problem, showing that in a multi-task setting, models with a low-degree bias provably recover latent data-generating variables under mild assumptions--even if proxy tasks involve complex, non-linear functions of the latents. However, such recovery is sensitive to model architecture. Our analysis leverages Boolean models of task solutions via the Fourier-Walsh transform and introduces new techniques for analyzing invertible Boolean transforms, which may be of independent interest. We illustrate the algorithmic implications of our results and connect them to related research areas, including self-supervised learning, out-of-distribution generalization, and the linear representation hypothesis in large language models.
Matthieu Destrade, Oumayma Bounou, Quentin Le Lidec
et al.
Building deep learning models that can reason about their environment requires capturing its underlying dynamics. Joint-Embedded Predictive Architectures (JEPA) provide a promising framework to model such dynamics by learning representations and predictors through a self-supervised prediction objective. However, their ability to support effective action planning remains limited. We propose an approach to enhance planning with JEPA world models by shaping their representation space so that the negative goal-conditioned value function for a reaching cost in a given environment is approximated by a distance (or quasi-distance) between state embeddings. We introduce a practical method to enforce this constraint during training and show that it leads to significantly improved planning performance compared to standard JEPA models on simple control tasks.
Birinci Dünya müharibəsi və onun nəticələri Almaniyada yalnız siyasi və sosial istiqamətlərdə deyil, həmçinin din sahəsində də böhrana səbəb olmuşdu. Teoloq F.Qoqarten 1920-ci ildə qələmə aldığı məqaləsinin başlığına çıxardığı “zamanlar arasında” ifadəsi ilə sözügedən mənəvi-ruhani böhranı səciyyələndirmişdi. “Zamanlar arasında” anlayışı Allahın dərk olunmasında yaranmış böhrandan məyusluğu, eyni zamanda, bu şəraitdən çıxmağa ümidi ehtiva edirdi. Çıxış yolu isə ilahi sözün təfsirini Allah və insan arasında dialoq məcrasına yönəldən dialektik, yaxud böhran teologiyası oldu. Dialektik teologiya liberal teologiyaya reaksiya olaraq yaranmışdı. Bununla da o, protestant teologiyasında yeni qeyri-ortodoksal meyillərin yaranmasına təkan vermiş, teoloji hermenevtikanı ontoloji müstəviyə keçirib onun inkişafını yeni səmtə yönəltmişdir.
Məqalədə bu nəzəriyyənin məşhur nümayəndələri, – protestant filosoflar, – Karl Bart, Rudolf Bultman, Herhard Ebelinq və digərlərinin hermenevtik konsepsiyalarının özəllikləri təhlil edilir. K.Bart vəhyin dərk olunmasını imanın gücü və İlahi ruhun köməyi ilə Bibliyanın daxili sözünü eşitmək kimi başa düşürdüsə, Bultman onu keçici tarixi şərtlərin öyrənilməsi və tənqid olunması vasitəsilə ekzistensial təfsirdə görür, bu yolla Əhdi-Ətiqi miflərdən təmizləməyə çalışırdı. Ebelinq isə ümumiyyətlə, bütün ilahiyyatın anlayışlar sistemini dəyişib təzələməyə çağırırdı.
Donald G.Bloş xristoloji hermenevtikanın tərəfdarı kimi çıxış edir, Bibliyanı, ilk növbədə, İsa Məsihin xaçı işığında anlamağın mümkün olduğunu göstərirdi. Müəllifin fikrincə, bütün bu konseptləri birləşdirən əsas cəhət ilahi sözün aktuallaşdırılması, onu yeni təfsirlər vasitəsilə müasir dilə çevirib, anlaşıqlı etmək səyləridir ki, proses bu gün də davam edir.
Religion (General), Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
Examining the Introduction to Religion module, RELG 101, offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, reveals a rigid adherence to the World Religions Paradigm (WRP) in structure and content. This article assesses the alignment of the RELG 101 module with the content, context, and intellectual growth objectives of Clingerman and O'Brien (2015). It also highlights the limitations of the current framework in meeting the specified objectives, providing insights into the challenges which the students face, and proposes a shift from the current adapted WRP approach to a thematic approach.
Large-scale generative models have achieved remarkable success in a number of domains. However, for sequential decision-making problems, such as robotics, action-labelled data is often scarce and therefore scaling-up foundation models for decision-making remains a challenge. A potential solution lies in leveraging widely-available unlabelled videos to train world models that simulate the consequences of actions. If the world model is accurate, it can be used to optimize decision-making in downstream tasks. Image-to-video diffusion models are already capable of generating highly realistic synthetic videos. However, these models are not action-conditioned, and the most powerful models are closed-source which means they cannot be finetuned. In this work, we propose to adapt pretrained video diffusion models to action-conditioned world models, without access to the parameters of the pretrained model. Our approach, AVID, trains an adapter on a small domain-specific dataset of action-labelled videos. AVID uses a learned mask to modify the intermediate outputs of the pretrained model and generate accurate action-conditioned videos. We evaluate AVID on video game and real-world robotics data, and show that it outperforms existing baselines for diffusion model adaptation.1 Our results demonstrate that if utilized correctly, pretrained video models have the potential to be powerful tools for embodied AI.
Haoyu Xiong, Russell Mendonca, Kenneth Shaw
et al.
Deploying robots in open-ended unstructured environments such as homes has been a long-standing research problem. However, robots are often studied only in closed-off lab settings, and prior mobile manipulation work is restricted to pick-move-place, which is arguably just the tip of the iceberg in this area. In this paper, we introduce Open-World Mobile Manipulation System, a full-stack approach to tackle realistic articulated object operation, e.g. real-world doors, cabinets, drawers, and refrigerators in open-ended unstructured environments. The robot utilizes an adaptive learning framework to initially learns from a small set of data through behavior cloning, followed by learning from online practice on novel objects that fall outside the training distribution. We also develop a low-cost mobile manipulation hardware platform capable of safe and autonomous online adaptation in unstructured environments with a cost of around 20,000 USD. In our experiments we utilize 20 articulate objects across 4 buildings in the CMU campus. With less than an hour of online learning for each object, the system is able to increase success rate from 50% of BC pre-training to 95% using online adaptation. Video results at https://open-world-mobilemanip.github.io/
Symbolism is a cryptic and effective way of conveying meaning, handled by Iranian painters in different periods. During the Safavid period, the use of symbolic elements became more prominent with the recognition of the Shiite religion and the tendency of art workshops to portray mystical and religious themes. Among these workshops was the royal workshop of Prince Ibrahim Mirza in Mashhad, which is recognized both for its religious and cultural significance of Khorasan and for its illustration of magnificent manuscripts such as the Jami’s Haft Awrang. Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Awrang paintings are based on Jami’s stories and have different themes, such as the story of "Yusuf and Zuleykha" mentioned in the Qur’an and other books of the monotheistic religions, or the often told story of "Leily and Majnoon". It is reflected in Iranian literature and culture. The aim of this study is to comparatively examine the symbolism in the paintings of these two stories, to determine their relationship with the religious and cultural beliefs of this period, and to answer the following questions: 1. How were the culture and religious beliefs of the Safavid period reflected in the symbolism of the two stories? 2. What is the connection between the symbolism in the paintings of the two stories and religious and cultural beliefs of the Iranians during the Safavid era? The research method is comparative-analytical, and the information collection method is library research. We start with symbols classifications: One of the types of symbols classification is the placement of symbols into the type of human symbols and transcendent symbols, based on the theory of symbolism by Charles Chadwick (1996). "Human symbols" is a personal aspect of symbolism that can be considered the art of expressing thoughts and feelings by referring to how they are expressed by the artist; like a jar in Khayyam's poems. In this sense, it is the artist who brings a symbolic concept to the symbol and uses it in a certain sense in his works, and this requires the examination of all the works of an artist that are outside the scope of this study. But, in "transcendent symbolism" symbols are broad, general and ideally objective images of the world, of which the present world is only an incomplete representation, mystical symbols, and cultural symbols may be considered of this type. Transcendent religious symbols refer to religious content, and transcendental cultural symbols refer to literature and culture, and transcendent artistic symbols are derived from the principles of Iranian painting and elements of nature. We examine artistic symbols in two sub-categories of geometric and natural in 6 paintings of Haft Awrang. What can be deduced from the analysis of the research findings and the comparison of the two categories of painting is that the painters of Ibrahim Mirza’s Haft Awrang paid attention to the belief and culture of their period in the painting of religious and cultural content. The use of symbols such as the Ghezelbash Hat of the main characters of the story, Islimi, Greh, lotus, green and blue colors, mountain -tree, and the golden sky is in accordance with religious and cultural beliefs and principles. In response to the second question from the painting tradition of this period, despite the similarities in the use of some transcendent artistic symbols in both categories of painting originating from the Iranian painting tradition and originating from the seven principles of painting during the Safavids period, symbolism is different in the pantings of two stories. It is clear that in the Iranian painting tradition, symbols, like other nations, have a cultural and doctrinal basis, which is immortalized to express deep and cryptic concepts in the literature and culture of the nations. Therefore, the formation of principles based on this deep connection between religion and culture in the Iranian painting tradition has led to the use of some similar transcendent artistic symbols. As the winged angel and phoenix are combined symbols, rooted in the ancient myths of ancient Iran, and after Islam, under the influence of the common concepts of religions, the winged angel became a symbol for Gabriel and angels close to God, and phoenix found a sacred and spiritual role. Therefore, the painters paid attention to the religious and cultural context of the story in symbolism, and used symbols accordingly in their paintings. Despite the influence of religion and culture on each other and the art of the Safavid period, it can be said that some mythological symbols such as phoenix and dragon from the rich culture of ancient Iran remained strong and alive. The painters also used symbols like Lutus, Greh, etc. and they became the common ground and basic principles of Iranian painting. Some symbols such as the winged angel and the phoenix, retained their mythological forms, but took on a religious color and were used in a new sense.
From 1966 to 1989, the South African Defence Force (SADF) was involved in a low-intensity war in Namibia, the so-called ‘Border War’. To secure sufficient manpower to defend themselves against internal and external threats from liberation movements, often supported by the Soviet Union, the National Party introduced increasingly comprehensive systems of conscription for white males. In the main, though there was opposition from English-speaking churches, the war and conscription was supported by the mainstream Afrikaans churches in South Africa. As such, they supported a comprehensive Chaplain’s Service that reached all corners of the SADF. However, the SADF also made use of units that were not primarily made up of white South Africans. Once such unit was 32 Battalion, constituted from soldiers that used to belong to the National Front for the Liberation of Angola. When they joined the SADF, the soldiers brought their families with them, necessitating the SADF to care, physically and
spiritually, for both soldiers and civilians. This article examines the role that chaplains played in a unit that fell on the periphery of the SADF’s commitment; though they were almost continuously involved in fighting for the SADF, to a large extent they fell outside of the normal military structures. Drawing extensively on primary sources, often recently declassified, the study provides an ecclesiological perspective on the influence of chaplains and religion on the men and women associated with 32 Battalion and contributes to the larger discourse about the relationship between religion and the military. Extant primary and secondary sources have been consulted including interviews with relevant anonymised respondents.
Faithful persons tend to relate to their religious beliefs as truth claims, particularly inasmuch as their beliefs have soteriological implications for those of different religions. For Christians the particular claims which matter most in this regard are those made by Jesus of Nazareth and his claims are primarily relational in nature. I propose a model in which we understand divine grace from Jesus as being mediated through relational knowledge of him on a compassionately exclusivist basis, including post-mortem. Supporting this model, I draw from Eleonore Stump’s hypothesis in her 2018 Atonement that the crucifixion of Jesus opens the divine psyche to all human psyches sufficiently for salvific mutual indwelling to occur, and from Gavin D’Costa’s conception of the descensus Christi ad inferos as the mechanism for grace’s accessibility post-mortem presented in his 2009 Christianity and World Religions. This model seeks to address ongoing, justified pastoral concern for the soteriological status of non-Christians while still treating Christianity as objectively true.
The incorporation of creative assignments in the form of digital stories and artistic assignments in undergraduate and graduate World Religions courses has resulted in positive feedback from the students, and these courses were considered the favorite of the semester. They have given students, many of which identify as “spiritual but not religious”, or “non-practicing”, an opportunity to connect themes from various world religions to their own life stories, implicitly or explicitly. The purpose of this article is to encourage educators in both a secondary and a college/university/seminary setting to consider digital stories as a creative assignment that deepens their understanding of world religions within the context of a World Religions course, or other religion and religious education courses. This article will present the institutional support provided by Mercy College (Dobbs Ferry, New York) and the context for the World Religions class in which the digital stories are assigned. It will be followed by the process of making a digital story, the directions given to the students, the different platforms that students can choose to make the digital stories, and examples of digital stories created by the students. The paper will conclude with a summary of comments made by the students about the assignment and connections with additional articles on the benefits of digital stories to increase empathy and replace the dominant stories that cause oppression and injustice, like racism and white supremacy, with stories that offer resistance and counter the status quo of oppression and injustice.