This article analyzes the importance of building a tax culture in Latin America and the Caribbean from a theological perspective inspired by the biblical passage in Matthew 22:15-21, where Jesus teaches: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Using a qualitative approach, a documentary and hermeneutical methodology is employed to interpret this verse within its historical, social, and religious context, and to link it to the contemporary need to strengthen tax awareness in the region. The research posits that, beyond a separation between the political and the religious, this message proposes an ethic of civic and spiritual duty. The challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean regarding tax evasion, informality, and distrust of the state are examined, and it is argued that a robust tax culture must include values such as justice, solidarity, and transparency. Through a dialogue between Christian theology and public accounting, a framework is proposed that allows for the integration of Gospel principles with civic engagement in fulfilling tax obligations. This article presents carefully selected biblical and theological arguments for nurturing a responsible tax culture in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) grounded in Matthew 22:15–21. Using historical-critical exegesis and social-ethical analysis, the authors argue that Jesus’ response to the question of Roman taxation affirms the moral legitimacy of taxation, and furthermore it also establishes civic responsibility as compatible with faith. It additionally places ethical parameters on state authority. In many societies across the globe, that are manifestly having deep inequality, weak fiscal capacity, and especially widespread tax evasion, St. Matthew offers a normative framework for understanding taxation as contribution towards the common good. The study argues that a biblically informed tax culture requires both citizen accountability and state responsibility, assimilating faith, justice, and public life. The article concludes that fostering a tax culture from an ethical and spiritual perspective can significantly contribute to social equity and institutional strengthening in the region.
Julian Frank Rouw, Daniel Ronda, Robi Panggarra
et al.
This study explores the resurgence of the Manarmakeri myth among the Biak people in Papua, Indonesia, as a socio-religious phenomenon centered on Messianic hope. Using mixed methods—survey questionnaires (n=38) and ethnographic interviews—this research identifies 14 core indicators, with Messianic Expectation emerging as the dominant factor, accounting for over 25% of the variance. The findings demonstrate that the myth of Manarmakeri is not merely folklore but functions as a theological framework, cultural narrative, and coping mechanism for socio political marginalization. This belief system aligns local eschatological expectations with biblical motifs, constructing what can be described as “indigenous Christology.” The figure of Manarmakeri is perceived as both a liberator and a returning Messiah, with strong parallels to Jesus Christ in Christian theology. The study argues that the myth fosters communal identity, symbolic resistance, and social cohesion. It also highlights the limitations of formal theological rejection by mainstream churches, suggesting the need for inclusive and dialogical pastoral models. Practically, the study urges culturally sensitive development strategies that consider spiritual aspirations, involve local leaders, and integrate material and non-material needs. The research contributes to postcolonial theological discourse and invites further interdisciplinary inquiry into how indigenous narratives interface with global religious traditions.
Previous work has found a lack of research in HCI on religion, partly driven by misunderstandings of values and practices between religious and technical communities. To bridge this divide in an empirically rigorous way, we conducted an interview study with 48 religious people and/or experts from 11 faiths, and we document how religious people experience, understand, and imagine technologies. We show that religious stakeholders find non-neutral secular embeddings in technologies and the firms and people that design them, and how these manifest in unintended harms for religious and nonreligious users. Our findings reveal how users navigate technoreligious practices with religiously informed mental models and what they desire from technologies. Informed by this, we distill six design values -- wonder, humility, space, embodiedness, community, and eternity -- to guide technologists in considering and leveraging religion as an additional, valid sociocultural resource when designing for a holistic user. We further spell out directions for future research.
AgiBot-World-Contributors, Qingwen Bu, Jisong Cai
et al.
We explore how scalable robot data can address real-world challenges for generalized robotic manipulation. Introducing AgiBot World, a large-scale platform comprising over 1 million trajectories across 217 tasks in five deployment scenarios, we achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in data scale compared to existing datasets. Accelerated by a standardized collection pipeline with human-in-the-loop verification, AgiBot World guarantees high-quality and diverse data distribution. It is extensible from grippers to dexterous hands and visuo-tactile sensors for fine-grained skill acquisition. Building on top of data, we introduce Genie Operator-1 (GO-1), a novel generalist policy that leverages latent action representations to maximize data utilization, demonstrating predictable performance scaling with increased data volume. Policies pre-trained on our dataset achieve an average performance improvement of 30% over those trained on Open X-Embodiment, both in in-domain and out-of-distribution scenarios. GO-1 exhibits exceptional capability in real-world dexterous and long-horizon tasks, achieving over 60% success rate on complex tasks and outperforming prior RDT approach by 32%. By open-sourcing the dataset, tools, and models, we aim to democratize access to large-scale, high-quality robot data, advancing the pursuit of scalable and general-purpose intelligence.
This article examines how hybrid supernatural figures, most notably the Mesopotamian wind demon Pazuzu and the Islamic jinn, persist, transform, and adapt as symbolic technologies for mediating fear, moral ambiguity, and the unseen. It situates these beings within a transhistorical continuum linking ancient cosmologies, ritual practices, and contemporary digital cultures. By tracing their migration across both time and medium, from the tactile materiality of apotropaic amulets to the intangible circulation of algorithmically amplified memes, the study illuminates how their core functions endure even as their forms evolve. A focal case study analyzes the viral moral panic surrounding “Labubu,” a grotesque collectible toy whose exaggerated features and unsettling aesthetic have provoked online discourses describing it as “demonic.” This episode demonstrates how grotesque imagery is recontextualized in the digital age as a means of managing diffuse cultural anxieties, functioning much like ancient protective icons that evoke fear to ward off greater perceived threats. Drawing on religious texts, material archaeology, and media theory, the article argues that such figures are not inert relics of superstition but active cultural agents in humanity’s ongoing negotiation of disorder, belief, and imagination. By placing Pazuzu, the jinn, and Labubu within a shared analytical frame, it reveals how societies continually reinvent the visual and symbolic language of the supernatural to confront crisis, whether in the streets of ancient Nineveh or across the feeds of twenty-first-century social media.
Dialogical or interreligious theology is a new kind of theology that accepts and celebrates religious plurality and is grounded in dialogical praxis. Object and method of this theology are dialogical. Whereas confessional theology is the reflection upon one’s own religion, interreligious theology investigates the conditions for an interreligious dialogue in which partners learn from one other and appreciate each other. It is therefore a novel way of relating to different religious groups in society. It learns in ‘bookless moments’ from and with people who live and think differently.
Rather than operating with a fixed content, interreligious theology is open and contextual. In the emerging new discipline of dialogical theology, distinctness allows for communication. Interreligious theology investigates the incommensurability of religions as well as the comparability between them: it establishes connections through translations and creates bridges. It is prone to promote self-criticism and to stimulate creative interaction with religious others.
In an increasingly global world, foreign religions quickly became neighbour religions. In such a constellation, one may begin to recognize that people from other religions have their own access to what John Hick calls ‘the Ultimate Reality’.
Dialogical theology and dialogical philosophy emerged in the twentieth century. Dialogical thought departs from the objectivity of philosophers such as René Descartes, whose scientific rationalism began from the thinking ego who is confronted with objects outside. In a scientific view of the world, outside objects can be studied by the subject in an objective way. However, for Immanuel Kant, the numinous world is not accessible by our minds; we only know the phenomenal world. We only know the world as it appears to us. Dialogical philosophers continue to doubt that the only way to approach the world is through objective observation. With the dialogical turn in philosophy, the world is not objectively describable, nor is it an idealistic projection. Philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Franz Fischer argued that human beings are not merely knowable: one meets them (Meir 2015b). One may participate in their existence. Dialogical philosophers argue that we live in a network of relations. What is important for them is that there is a between-space; the apex of humanity would lie in the lofty possibility of meeting human and no-human others. Ferdinand Ebner, for instance, argued that through the relationship with human beings and God, one enters the ‘spiritual realities’ (Ebner 1921). Gabriel Marcel sharply distinguished between the problem (le problème), the sphere of knowledge, and the mystery (le mystère) which goes beyond knowledge: Being was being with others (Marcel 1951). In dialogical theology, existence is co-existence and togetherness – it is relationality. Recognition is approached as higher, more elevated than cognition. For religious dialogical thinkers, the dialogue between human beings is the basis of the relationship with the Divine. These insights on the relatedness of all with all are eminently present in Jewish dialogical theologies.
Džamonja Ignjatović Tamara, Petrović Danijela S., Kosić Ankica
et al.
This study explores the relationships among conflict management strategies, personality traits, and beliefs about social relations in Italy and Serbia. These two European countries are geographically close, but have different histories, traditions and religions, and they differ along the individualistic-collectivistic dimension. Goals: The study aims to explore and compare the way in which basic personality dimensions predict specific conflict management strategies, as well as the way in which the Competitive Jungle worldview and the beliefs about conflicts mediate their relationship in different cultures. Method: The sample comprised 764 young people, aged 18-30 (M=21.54, SD=2.80). The measures included the Dutch Test of Conflict Handling, Mini IPIP-6, Delta personality inventories, Competitive Jungle Worldview and Conflict Beliefs scales. Path analyses were applied with seven personality traits as predictors (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Honesty, and Disintegration), two social relation beliefs as mediators, and three conflict management strategies (Cooperative, Defensive, and Competitive) as criterion variables. Results: The results indicate that the common predictors are Openness and Agreeableness for the Cooperative strategies, Agreeableness and Disintegration for the Defensive strategies, and Extraversion for the Competitive strategies. Neuroticism and Conscientiousness are not implicated in conflict situations, while Honesty and Disintegration have a different impact on this form of behaviour in these two cultures. The results have confirmed different pathways of personality traits through the beliefs about the world as a competitive jungle and the beliefs about conflicts as threats or challenges. Conclusion: Basic personality traits, as universal dispositions for behaviour, have similar effects on conflict management strategies in both countries, while differences are observed in the mediating role of beliefs, which are shaped by the cultural differences existing between Serbia and Italy
Around the figure of Zöhre Ana, a contemporary female mystic in Ankara, Turkey, considered by her followers a saint and known for her healing powers, has grown a substantial cult followed by hundreds if not thousands of devotees, with its own mythology, cosmology, discursive tradition, and praxis. As with any religiocultural tradition, the cult of Zöhre Ana has developed a unique experiential world at the interface between her and her followers that engages all of the senses of participants. This study explores the visual dimension of this world, consisting specifically of the visions Zöhre Ana has had, the visible setting of the cult in specially arranged physical space, and the iconography of the saint. The visual elements of these dimensions reflect the Alevi cultural–historical milieu she and most of her followers come from, and this shapes the experience that occurs as participants interact with the visual world of Zöhre Ana.
Nicola Dainese, Matteo Merler, Minttu Alakuijala
et al.
In this work we consider Code World Models, world models generated by a Large Language Model (LLM) in the form of Python code for model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). Calling code instead of LLMs for planning has potential to be more precise, reliable, interpretable, and extremely efficient. However, writing appropriate Code World Models requires the ability to understand complex instructions, to generate exact code with non-trivial logic and to self-debug a long program with feedback from unit tests and environment trajectories. To address these challenges, we propose Generate, Improve and Fix with Monte Carlo Tree Search (GIF-MCTS), a new code generation strategy for LLMs. To test our approach in an offline RL setting, we introduce the Code World Models Benchmark (CWMB), a suite of program synthesis and planning tasks comprised of 18 diverse RL environments paired with corresponding textual descriptions and curated trajectories. GIF-MCTS surpasses all baselines on the CWMB and two other benchmarks, and we show that the Code World Models synthesized with it can be successfully used for planning, resulting in model-based RL agents with greatly improved sample efficiency and inference speed.
Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly enhanced image generation capabilities. However, customizing these models with new classes often leads to unintended consequences that compromise their reliability. We introduce the concept of open-world forgetting to characterize the vast scope of these unintended alterations. Our work presents the first systematic investigation into open-world forgetting in diffusion models, focusing on semantic and appearance drift of representations. Using zero-shot classification, we demonstrate that even minor model adaptations can lead to significant semantic drift affecting areas far beyond newly introduced concepts, with accuracy drops of up to 60% on previously learned concepts. Our analysis of appearance drift reveals substantial changes in texture and color distributions of generated content. To address these issues, we propose a functional regularization strategy that effectively preserves original capabilities while accommodating new concepts. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets and evaluation metrics, we demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces both semantic and appearance drift. Our study highlights the importance of considering open-world forgetting in future research on model customization and finetuning methods.
The You Only Look Once (YOLO) series of detectors have established themselves as efficient and practical tools. However, their reliance on predefined and trained object categories limits their applicability in open scenarios. Addressing this limitation, we introduce YOLO-World, an innovative approach that enhances YOLO with open-vocabulary detection capabilities through vision-language modeling and pre-training on large-scale datasets. Specifically, we propose a new Re-parameterizable Vision-Language Path Aggregation Network (RepVL-PAN) and region-text contrastive loss to facilitate the interaction between visual and linguistic information. Our method excels in detecting a wide range of objects in a zero-shot manner with high efficiency. On the challenging LVIS dataset, YOLO-World achieves 35.4 AP with 52.0 FPS on V100, which outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. Furthermore, the fine-tuned YOLO-World achieves remarkable performance on several downstream tasks, including object detection and open-vocabulary instance segmentation.
Tonny Ilham Prayogo, Westi Wiliyana Sari, Nadiyah Ayu Damayanti
The cross-religious debate that is most often discussed is about the claim of the apostle as the final Prophets, which is believed in Christianity that it never happened. The apostle was Muhammad Pbuh, an ordinary human being given advantages and privileges and elevated above all creatures. Contrary to the Christian belief that Isa or Jesus in the Christian belief is their greatest human being, the Bible is written about the arrival of a great figure that was promised. Therefore, this paper seeks to reveal the truth in Christian teachings regarding Muhammad as the complement of previous teachings. By including evidence from several figures from these two heavenly religions, namely Christianity and Islam, supported by evidence found in the Bible and al-Qur’an. The descriptive analysis method is used in this research to analyze the understanding of the two major religions of the world and related cross-religious teachings and doctrines. It’s supported by comparative methods that make it easier to see and know the comparisons found in both Islam and Christianity. A theological approach is used in this qualitative literature review, where the perspective of this writing is taken from studies that analyze scripts from holy books, discussing interfaith concepts and matters related to doctrine in religion. With this research it is hoped that further researchers will be able to take the value if necessary to be refined with an explanation broader and complete the deficiencies contained in this writing.
Background: A novel COVID-19 has spread worldwide and created a big threat for the public and their daily life. Due to its rapid transmission and the mortality rate, governments across the world had created many restrictions such as social isolation which leads to economic crisis that also leads to the source of fear, stress, anxiety, and mood conditions and negatively affects people’s mental health (Praveen et al. , 2021). Although the initiatives were prepared, the coronavirus may also cause mental defects. These defects also affected the medical students, since they were the backbone and the future of public health, hence the study would describe the quality of well-being by different domains. Materials and Methods: The study was designed by the questionnaire based on the World Health Organization Quality of life-BREL, Subjective Well-Being Inventory (SWBI), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) research tool. A total of 288 students were participated in the study. Results: A total of 288 medical students were participated in the study, according Cronbach Alpha method, all three domains had obtained a value of above 0.7, and the descriptive analysis showed the highest score of about 67.12 with physical activity. According to the BAI, 84% of medical students with low anxiety, the study also investigates the quality of well-being and compared with gender, with religion, with family type, place of living, religions, and among family’s monthly income. The results of the study were statistically defined, and it has a significant relationship with environment and SWBI. Conclusion: The quality of well-being was assessed on medical students and the study revealed that there is no impact with gender, religion, year of study, and family’s monthly income. Although the study also revealed that the mean score of social well-being is high with physical activity and considerably low with psychological and environmental activity.
This article examines the figure of Thomas Müntzer in Marxist historiography, as well as the “utopianisation” of Müntzer in Ernst Bloch’s 1921 study on Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution. I review some of the differences in Martin Luther and Müntzer in their competing views for the future after the break from Rome, and the theological thrust of Müntzer’s vision. This is then connected with elements from Bloch’s Müntzer, chiefly focussing on spirit and history.
With 70 million dead, World War II remains the most devastating conflict in history. Among the survivors, millions were displaced, returned maimed from the battlefield, or endured years of captivity. We examine the effects of such war exposures on labor market careers, showing that they often become apparent only at certain life stages. While war injuries reduced employment in old age, former prisoners of war prolonged their time in the workforce before retiring. Many displaced workers, especially women, never returned to employment. These responses align with standard life-cycle theory and thus likely hold relevance for other conflicts.
All our observations that characterise space and time are expressed in terms of non-local, bi-tensorial objects such as geodesic intervals between events and two-point (Green) functions. In this contribution, I highlight the importance of characterising spacetime geometry in terms of such non-local objects, focusing particularly on two important bi-tensors that play a particular fundamental role -- Synge's World function and the van Vleck determinant. I will first discuss how these bi-tensors help capture information about spacetime geometry, and then describe their role in characterising quantum spacetime endowed with a lower bound, say $\ell_0$, on spacetime intervals. Incorporating such a length scale in a Lorentz covariant manner necessitates a description of spacetime geometry in terms of above bi-tensors, and naturally replaces the conventional description based on the metric tensor $g_{ab}(x)$ with a description in terms of a non-local bi-tensor $q_{ab}(x, y)$. The non-analytic structure of $q_{ab}(x, y)$ which renders a perturbative expansion in $\ell_0$ meaningless, also generically leaves a non-trivial ``relic" in the limit $\ell_0 \to 0$. I present some results where such a relic term is manifest; specifically, I will discuss how this: (i) suggests a description of gravitational dynamics different from the one based on Einstein-Hilbert lagrangian, (ii) implies dimensional reduction to $2$ at small scales, (iii) connects with the notion of cosmological constant itself being a non-local vestige of the small scale structure of spacetime, (iv) helps address the issues of spacetime singularities. I will conclude by discussing the ramifications of these ideas for quantum gravity.
As research and practice in artificial intelligence (A.I.) grow in leaps and bounds, the resources necessary to sustain and support their operations also grow at an increasing pace. While innovations and applications from A.I. have brought significant advances, from applications to vision and natural language to improvements to fields like medical imaging and materials engineering, their costs should not be neglected. As we embrace a world with ever-increasing amounts of data as well as research and development of A.I. applications, we are sure to face an ever-mounting energy footprint to sustain these computational budgets, data storage needs, and more. But, is this sustainable and, more importantly, what kind of setting is best positioned to nurture such sustainable A.I. in both research and practice? In this paper, we outline our outlook for Green A.I. -- a more sustainable, energy-efficient and energy-aware ecosystem for developing A.I. across the research, computing, and practitioner communities alike -- and the steps required to arrive there. We present a bird's eye view of various areas for potential changes and improvements from the ground floor of AI's operational and hardware optimizations for datacenters/HPCs to the current incentive structures in the world of A.I. research and practice, and more. We hope these points will spur further discussion, and action, on some of these issues and their potential solutions.
At the beginning of the article, the author claims that many people pray today. This fact is evident in the various sanctuaries of the living world religions. In the following, the author asks about the reason, the purpose and the role of prayer in the life of a believer. People pray because they believe. Just as breathing is a sign and expression of physical human life, so prayer is a sign and expression of faith. Relational theory defines this activity as the ability to recognize the presence of (O)other in his absence. A person must develop and preserve his innate abilities. Prayer is a tool for developing and maintaining faith. Finally, there is the question of what believers pray for. Prayer does not make God a man's servant. The highest level of prayer is accepting God's will, especially when it contradicts our wishes. The purpose of prayer is to maintain a relationship with God and with other believers. To live means to be in a relationship.
Müasir psixologiya tarixinin formalaşmasında bir sıra cərəyan olub ki, bunlardan biri də humanistik psixologiyadır. Abraham Maslov və Rocers – bu iki şəxsiyyət birlikdə humanistik psixologiyanın banilərindən hesab olunurlar. Onların birgə əməyi sayəsində humanistik psixologiya sistemli vəziyyətə gəlmişdir. Rocers Mənlik nəzəriyyəsini şəxsiyyətin quruluşunun mühüm tərkib hissəsi hesab edirdi. Rocers üçün əsas olan “şəxsiyyət nəzəriyyəsi” mənlik və ya “mənlik” anlayışıdır. Bu, “özü haqqında mütəşəkkil, ardıcıl qavrayışlar və inanclar toplusu" kimi də müəyyən edilir. “Mən” – bir insan olaraq həqiqətdə kim olduğumuzu ifadə edən humanist termindir. Mənlik – daxili şəxsiyyətimizdir; onu ruha və ya Freydin psixikasına bənzətmək mümkündür. Mən – insanın həyatında keçirdiyi təcrübələrdən və bu praktikaların şərhlərindən təsirlənir. Mənlik anlayışımıza təsir edən iki əsas mənbə – uşaqlıq təcrübələri və başqaları tərəfindən qiymətləndirmədir. Rocersə görə, biz – öz imicimizə uyğun olan və necə olmaq istəyimiz, ideal mənliyimizi əks etdirən tərzi duymaq, təcrübə etmək və davranmaq arzumuzdur. Özümüz haqqında təsəvvürümüz və ideal mənliyimiz bir-birinə nə qədər yaxındırsa, bir o qədər ardıcılıq, uyğun gəlirik və özümüzə dəyərvermə duyğumuz da bir o qədər yüksəkdir. Rocersə görə, özümüz haqqında necə düşünməyimiz, özümüzə dəyərvermə duyğumuz – həm psixoloji sağlamlıq, həm də həyatda məqsəd və ambisiyalarımıza nail olmaq, özünüreallaşdırabilmə ehtimalımız üçün əsas əhəmiyyət kəsb edir. Özünədəyər çox yüksəkdən-çox aşağıyadək bir davamlılıq kimi görünə bilər. Karl Rocers üçün yüksək özünəinamlı, yəni özünəinamı və müsbət hissləri olan, həyatda çətinliklərlə üzləşən, uğursuzluqları və bədbəxtlikləri bəzən qəbul edən, insanlara açıq olan şəxsdir.
Religion (General), Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects