2199 research outputs found
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Shamanic Knowledge: The Challenge to Information Science
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Accordance Bible Software in Reading and Teaching: The Difference a Digital Text Makes
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Scholarly Sustainability and Lifelong Learning
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/10/thumbnail.jpgScholarly sustainability is a useful term for the vital issues faced by theological educators today who are responsible for creating and providing resources for discovery and study. Developing lifelong learners among our students is an important aim; however, we still need to ask how we can aid these lifelong learners once they leave our institutions for an environment of constant change. The values of sustainable scholarship, what sustainability means, funding issues for sustainable projects particularly as they apply to those in religious education, theories of lifelong learning drawn from education, neuroscience, and theology, and intersection of the concepts of scholarly sustainability and lifelong learning are engaged in this paper.</p
Ram’s Search for Sita in the Ramayaṇa: Information Seeking in an Ancient Indian Epic
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/11/thumbnail.jpgIn understanding a person’s information seeking behavior and choice of information sources, it becomes very important to understand the context surrounding the search. This context gives rise to the information need and leads a person to look for information. Research in information seeking behavior, while concentrating on system and person centric research, has, so far, left out studying how information seeking behavior was documented in historical and mythological records, in religious and spiritual texts and in major epics of the world. In this theoretical study, frameworks of context and source choice when looking for information will be applied to a detailed examination of Ram’s inquiry on the whereabouts of his missing wife Sita in the Ramayaṇa, an ancient epic dating back to 5th-to-4th century B.C. The study should shed light on recorded information seeking behavior in one of the oldest epics of the world, and help towards understanding the historical evolution of information seeking behavior in context. Keywords. Information seeking behavior, context, source choice, religion and information, Ramayana.</p
Perception as Information: An East-West Dialogue
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/12/thumbnail.jpgWith the Enlightenment, philosophers in the West recognized that the immediate given of perception is a mental image or representation, not an extra-mental object. That insight raised a pressing, epistemological question: to what degree, if any, do those mental images represent an extra-mental state of affairs? To phrase the question in slightly different terms: in what manner (if any) and to what degree (if any) does perception convey information about reality? The purpose of this paper is to explore this question and clarify some of the epistemological issues associated with perception. This exploration will be aided by references to the epistemological views of a selective sampling of key Western and Asian philosophers: the Buddhist philosophers Dignāga (5th-6th centuries), Dharmakīrti (7th century), and Longchenpa (kLong-chen rab- ’byams-pa, 14th century) and the Western philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant (both 18th century). Keywords: perception, information, epistemology, Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, kLong-chen rab- ’byams-pa, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, rDzogs-chen</p
Pentecost in the Postbox: Theology, Ecclesiology, and Community in Early Pentecostal Periodicals
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/13/thumbnail.jpgNascent Pentecostalism was consciously unorganized and eschewed denominational identity, ecclesiastical hierarchy, and even (initially) dogmatic uniformity. As people of the Spirit, the earliest practitioners ostensibly relied upon Paracletic inspiration and spiritual discernment to guide the movement, and treated efforts to organize or even codify “Pentecostalism” with suspicion. In the absence of unified control, the Pentecostal periodical played an important part in the dissemination of the movement’s message and meaning and formed a neural network for the burgeoning movement as many publishers built extensive mailing lists representing a global readership. Without a central church clearinghouse, periodical literature served as the critical mode of communication, offering apologists and adherents some semblance of cohesiveness and prefiguring the formation of some of the earliest Pentecostal organizations. As information vehicles, these papers were seminal in developing theology, ecclesiology, and community among disparate groups of Pentecostal believers around the world.</p
Fusion Spring 2011
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Arguing Americanism: Franco Lobbyists, Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy, and the Spanish Civil War
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/new_foreign_relations/2/thumbnail.jpgThe struggle to define U.S. national identity through a political conflict in Spain “An unusually original book that challenges established assumptions and reveals the complexity of American reactions to the Spanish Civil War.”—Stanley G. Payne, University of Wisconsin-Madison In 1938 the United States was embroiled in a vicious debate between supporters of the two sides of the Spanish Civil War, who sought either to lift or to retain the U.S. arms embargo on Spain. The embargo, which favored Gen. Francisco Franco’s Nationalist regime over the ousted Republican government of the Loyalists, received heavy criticism for enabling a supposedly fascist-backed takeover during a time when the Nazi party in Germany was threatening the annexation of countries across Europe. Supporters of General Franco, however, saw the resistance of the Loyalists as being spurred on by the Soviet Union, which sought to establish a communist government abroad. Since World War II, American historians have traditionally sided with the Loyalist supporters, validating their arguments that the pro-Nationalists were un-American for backing an unpalatable dictator. In Arguing Americanism, author Michael E. Chapman examines the long-overlooked pro-Nationalist argument. Employing new archival sources, Chapman documents a small yet effective network of lobbyists—including engineer turned writer John Eoghan Kelly, publisher Ellery Sedgwick, homemaker Clare Dawes, muralist Hildreth Meière, and philanthropist Anne Morgan—who fought to promote General Franco’s Nationalist Spain and keep the embargo in place. Arguing Americanism also goes beyond the embargo debate to examine the underlying issues that gripped 1930s America. Chapman posits that the Spanish embargo argument was never really about Spain but rather about the soul of Americanism, the definition of democracy, and who should do the defining. Pro-Loyalists wanted the pure democracy of the ballot box; pro-Nationalists favored the checks and balances of indirect democracy. By pointing to what was happening in Spain, each side tried to defend its version of Americanism against the foreign forces that threatened it. For Franco supporters, it was the spread of international Marxism, toward which they felt Roosevelt and his New Deal were too sympathetic. The pro-Nationalists intensified an argument that became a precursor to a fundamental change in American national identity—a change that would usher in the Cold War era. Arguing Americanism will appeal to political scientists, cultural historians, and students of U.S. foreign relations.</p
Centennial Alumni Exhibition II: Nexts
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The Word and Words in the Abrahamic Faiths
No full texthttps://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/acir/2011/Papers/2/thumbnail.jpgConventional wisdom holds that primal cultures transmitted their religious beliefs and practices orally rather than by writing. While this was true of some cultures, it has not been the case with all. The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are all “word-based” faiths, having always emphasized written language. Indeed, both Christianity and Islam share the idea of “The Word” as a concept transcending mere linguistics. Both the Scriptures and the attendant writings of these faiths (i.e., the Talmud, creeds, catechisms, theological treatises and other such works) are all word-based documents which in many cases took centuries to forge. This is not to say that the Abrahamic faiths have never had oral traditions. The Hebrew religion, for instance, consisted of two streams: the written Torah and the oral Torah, or Midrash. Muslims developed their ahadith—traditions regarding the Prophet Muhammad’s life. But since the Hebrew and the Muslim oral traditions were eventually reduced to writing, our chief contention is further supported: in these religions, writing has always been preferred to orality.</p