Religion, Welfare, and Social Service Provision: Common Ground delves deeply into the partnerships forged between religious communities, government agencies and nonprofits to deliver social services ...to the needy. These pages offer a considered examination of how local faith entities have served those in their midst, and how the provision of those services has been impacted by evolving social policies. This foundational volume brings together the work of more than two dozen leading researchers, each providing long overdue scholarly inquiry into religiously affiliated helping and the many possibilities that it holds for effective cooperation.
In this paper, we study distortion in the group A of affine interval exchange transformations (AIET). We prove that any distorted element f of A has an iterate fk that is conjugate by an element of A ...to a product of infinite order restricted rotations, with pairwise disjoint supports. As consequences, we prove that no Baumslag-Solitar group, BS(m,n) with |m| not equal to |n|, acts faith fully by elements of A; every finitely generated nilpotent group of A is virtually abelian and there is no distortion element in A.sub.Q, the subgroup of A consisting of rational AIETs. Mathematics Subject Classification (2010). 37E05, 37C15, 37C85, 20E07. Keywords. Affine interval exchange transformations, distortion, conjugacy, subgroups.
Big gods Norenzayan, Ara
2013., 20130825, 2013, 2013-08-25
eBook
How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today--even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did ...organized religions with "Big Gods"--the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths--spread to colonize most minds in the world? InBig Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.
Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods--powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups.
In some parts of the world, such as northern Europe, secular institutions have precipitated religion's decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world--climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. So whileBig Godsanswers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions, it also helps us understand another, more recent social transition--the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
African Americans, especially women, have higher obesity rates than the general US population. Because of the importance of faith to many African Americans, faith‐based organizations (FBOs) may be ...effective venues for delivering health messages and promoting adoption of healthy behaviours. This article systematically reviews interventions targeting weight and related behaviours in faith settings. We searched literature published through July 2012 for interventions in FBOs targeting weight loss, diet and/or physical activity (PA) in African Americans. Of 27 relevant articles identified, 12 were randomized controlled trials; seven of these reported a statistically significant change in an outcome. Four of the five quasi‐experimental and single‐group design studies reported a statistically significant outcome. All 10 pilot studies reported improvement in at least one outcome, but most did not have a comparison group. Overall, 70% of interventions reported success in reducing weight, 60% reported increased fruit and vegetable intake and 38% reported increased PA. These results suggest that interventions in African American FBOs can successfully improve weight and related behaviours. However, not all of the findings about the success of certain approaches were as expected. This review identifies gaps in knowledge and recommends more rigorous studies be conducted to strengthen the comparative methodology and evidence.
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This work is the first detailed study of the concept of faith in the early Kierkegaard. It not only examines his writings and relevant notes from his student days, but also the ...philosophical-theological sources and presuppositions that formed the basis for his thinking. The study clearly shows that many important aspects and elements of the philosopher's later theories of faith had already taken form during the time of Kierkegaard's studies as a theology student.
What does it mean to be a compassionate, caring person in Russia, which has become a country of stark income inequalities and political restrictions? How might ethics and practices of kindness ...constitute a mode of civic participation in which "doing good"-helping, caring for, and loving one another in a world marked by many problems and few easy solutions-is a necessary part of being an active citizen?Living Faithfully in an Unjust Worldexplores how, following the retreat of the Russian state from social welfare services, Russians' efforts to "do the right thing" for their communities have forged new modes of social justice and civic engagement. Through vivid ethnography based on twenty years of research within a thriving Moscow-based network of religious and secular charitable service providers, Melissa L. Caldwell examines how community members care for a broad range of Russia's population, in Moscow and beyond, through programs that range from basic health services to human rights advocacy. As the experiences of assistance workers, government officials, recipients, and supporters reveal, their work and beliefs are shaped by a practical philosophy of goodness and kindness. Despite the hardships these individuals witness on a regular basis, there is a pervasive sense of optimism that human kindness will prevail over poverty, injury, and injustice. Ultimately, what connects members of this diverse group is a shared belief that caring for others is not simply a practical matter or an idealistic vision but a project of faith and hope. Together care-seekers and care-givers destabilize and remake the meaning of "faith" and "faith-based" by putting into practice a vision of humanitarianism that transcends the boundaries between state and private, religious and secular.
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