1,720,966 research outputs found
White shaykhs from the American counterculture
No full textThe experiences of white Muslims are often missing from scholarship on Islam in America, which tends to focus on black and immigrant Muslims. Yet conversion narratives of white American Muslims offer insights into how Islam addresses the spiritual needs of a cohort of white men who, though small in number, exert significant influence over Islam in the United States. This dissertation examines the experiences of several white men who converted to Islam during the 1960s and 1970s, in part in response to the social, political, and cultural upheaval of the time. Their conversion narratives touch on a number of common themes: disaffection with traditional American values, attraction to the counterculture ethos, and a longing for spiritual fulfillment outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream. This study focuses on the lives of Hamza Yusuf and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. Biographical chapters explore the family histories of these two men as well as their early lives, journeys toward Islam, conversions, and later lives as Muslims. The dissertation also provides brief biographies of six additional white American male converts. All of these subjects joined a community of converts led by Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a charismatic Scottish Muslim who was a convert himself. For them, as-Sufi embodied counterculture ideals even as he creatively translated Islam into an American idiom. All eventually left as-Sufi’s community yet remained Muslims. These men demonstrate that Islam in the United States has not been indigenized solely by African Americans and immigrants, but also by white Muslims. White converts add important dimensions to the history of Islam in America not present in the scholarly literature concerning other Muslim Americans. First, they bring together whiteness and Islam in a way that directly challenges how white Americans have historically constructed Islam in opposition to whiteness. Second, because the paths to Islam taken by these men were all heavily influenced by and rooted in the counterculture, their lives demonstrate how the Islamic tradition has interacted with and reacted to American cultural realities in ways that address the spiritual concerns not only of African Americans and immigrants from Muslim countries but also of white Americans.2027-01-31T00:00:00
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
God is not one: the eight rival religions that run the world and why their difference matter
No full textIn this book, the author argues that persistent attempts to portray all religions as different paths to the same God overlook the distinct problem that each tradition seeks to solve. Delving into the different problems and solutions that Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, Yoruba Religion, Daoism and Atheism strive to combat, God is Not One is an indispensable guide to the questions human beings have asked for millennia?and to the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Saving history: white evangelical identity and Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C.
Get PDFIn the contemporary United States, power is exerted at both the center of society and its margins. Americans seeking political and cultural capital can cast themselves as insiders, claiming the authority of tradition, or as outsiders, claiming the prophetic voice of the oppressed. Previous scholarship has tended to portray white American evangelicals either as insiders, a theocracy-in-waiting, or as outsiders, a marginalized subculture. In practice, however, white evangelicals claim both positions and move strategically between them. Under certain circumstances, they appeal to the Christian Right’s revisionist history to claim a position at the center of the nation. Under other circumstances, they invoke threats to “Christian America” to claim a position on the margins. This ethnographic study of Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C., examines how white evangelical tourists use American history to construct four identities vis-à-vis the nation. Like white American evangelicals more broadly, they see themselves as founders, exiles, victims, and saviors. In addition to ethnography, I draw on intellectual history and material culture studies to account for the dynamic, contradictory, and strategic ways my subjects understand who they are. Written, verbal, and material stories about the American past are key resources white evangelicals use in shaping their identities. On Christian heritage tours and beyond, white evangelicals do history as they plot themselves into narratives about their communities and their nation. This approach, which combines “lived religion” and “lived history,” shows that white evangelicals are political shapeshifters, playing whichever part gives them the most power in a given situation. Their ability to act as both insiders and outsiders is a source of power in a nation that reveres tradition yet cheers for underdogs. While they may talk about leaving behind their outsider roles of exiles and victims, in practice white American evangelicals embrace and defend those roles just as much as they do their insider roles as founders and saviors. Their creative and strategic movement between these roles is a potent political resource that we must understand if we are to make sense of white evangelicals’ political power today.2020-11-13T00:00:00
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Pure bodies, sacred authority: a religious history of vaccine hesitancy in the United States
Get PDFSince the first vaccine was invented in the late eighteenth century, vaccines revolutionized biomedical approaches to infectious disease prevention and saved hundreds of millions of lives from smallpox, influenza, measles, whooping cough, and Covid-19. Despite the undeniable success of this medical technology, vaccines have always given some people pause, and others have steadfastly rejected vaccinations for themselves and their children. Although historians and social scientists have explained many causes of vaccine hesitancy in the United States, this dissertation is the first analysis of vaccine hesitancy that treats it as a part of United States religious history.
Covering three hundred years of vaccine history, this dissertation charts and analyzes the religious concepts and bodily practices that informed increasing vaccine skepticism over four different historical periods, culminating in the Covid-19 era. It explains how vaccine skeptics crafted their arguments, worldviews, and bodily practices and why their skepticism was often subtly religious. Vaccine skeptics routinely placed religious ideas––purity vs. pollution, sacralized motherhood and childhood, divine sovereignty, and moral individualism––at the center of their arguments against vaccines. To protect bodily sovereignty and purity, they enacted rituals to stave off corruption. These rituals included self-education, holistic healing, intensive mothering, and detoxing bodies and environments. In different eras, skeptics created moral communities that coalesced behind shared values about bodies, health, and wellness. They negotiated the limits of bodily and medical authority, the responsibility of the individual to the collective, and the connection between the worldly physical body and the transcendent soul. Skeptics perceived the standardizations required of biomedicine and public health as immoral, so they agitated against state-mandated vaccinations. Their moral communities were prevalent on both the Left and the Right of the religious and political spectrums in the United States. From the debates over smallpox inoculations in colonial Boston to the furor over Covid-19, they have found common ground where few other movements have
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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