America's Favorite Holidaysexplores how five of America's culturally important holidays-Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving-came to be what they are today, seasonal and ...religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture. Deftly distilling information from a wide range of sources, Bruce David Forbes reveals often-surprising answers to questions about each holiday's traditions. Was Christmas always as commercialized as it is today? Is Thanksgiving a religious or secular holiday? When did we begin trick-or-treating on Halloween? Appealing and insightful,America's Favorite Holidayssatisfies our curiosity about the origins of our holidays and the fascinating ways in which religion and culture mix.
In this volume, Bible Studies scholar Yitzhak (Itzik) Peleg
offers an educational, values-based approach to the cycle of Jewish
holidays-festivals and holy days-as found in the Jewish calendar.
These ...special days play a dual role: they reflect a sense of
identity with, and belonging to, the Jewish people, while
simultaneously shaping that identity and sense of belonging. The
biblical command "And you shall tell your son" (Exodus 13:8) is
meant to ensure that children will become familiar with the history
of their people via the experience of celebrating the holidays. It
is the author's claim, however, that this command must be preceded
by another educational command: "And you shall listen to your son
and your daughter."
The book examines the various Jewish holidays and ways in which
they are celebrated, while focusing on three general topics:
identity, belonging, memory. Throughout the generations, observance
of the holidays has developed and changed, from time to time and
place to place. These changes have enabled generations of Jews, in
their various communities, to define their own Jewish identity and
sense of belonging.
Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase ...violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate societal disapproval of violence, predictably inducing restraint on these days. We assess our theory using innovative parallel analysis of multiple datasets and qualitative evidence from Islamic insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. Consistent with our theory, we find that important Islamic holidays witness systematic declines in violence—as much as 41%—and provide evidence that anticipation of societal disapproval is producing these results. Significantly, we find no systematic evidence for surges of violence associated with any Islamic holiday, including Ramadan.
Living the Dream tells the history behind the
establishment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the battle over
King's legacy that continued through the decades that followed.
Creating the first ...national holiday to honor an African American
was a formidable achievement and an act of resistance against
conservative and segregationist opposition. Congressional efforts
to commemorate King began shortly after his assassination. The
ensuing political battles slowed the progress of granting him a
namesake holiday and crucially defined how his legacy would be
received. Though Coretta Scott King's mission to honor her
husband's commitment to nonviolence was upheld, conservative
politicians sought to use the holiday to advance a whitewashed,
nationalistic, and even reactionary vision of King's life and
thought. This book reveals the lengths that activists had to go to
elevate an African American man to the pantheon of national heroes,
how conservatives took advantage of the commemoration to bend the
arc of King's legacy toward something he never would have expected,
and how grassroots causes, unions, and antiwar demonstrators
continued to try to claim this sanctified day as their own.
Introduction: The goal of the present study is to test whether social norms, given their power to justify behaviors, can protect the subjective well-being of group members when they engage in ...unhealthy eating. Method: A three-wave longitudinal study (before T1, during T2, and after the Christmas holidays T3) was conducted (N = 318). Results: Results demonstrated that changes in pro-unhealthy eating norms play a moderating role in the relationship between changes in unhealthy eating and changes in subjective well-being from T1 to T2, but not from T2 to T3. Specifically, when unhealthy eating increased from T1 to T2, a parallel increase in the strength of social norms buffered against a decrease in group members' subjective well-being. The absence of moderation between T2 and T3 could be due to the fact that pro-unhealthy eating norms became less salient at T3. Discussion: These results confirm that when unhealthy eating is salient in a social context, social norms can buffer against its negative impacts.
Highlights and Implications
*
During the Christmas holidays period, individuals eat more unhealthy food and perceive that groups to which they belong eat more unhealthy food and encourage more consumption of this type of food compared to approximately 1 month and after the Holiday period.
*
When individuals perceive that groups to which they belong encourage more unhealthy food consumption from 1 month before to the Christmas holidays period (i.e., a social context where junk food consumption is salient and socially acceptable), their subjective well-being suffers less as a result of more unhealthy food consumption during this time period.
*
When individuals increase unhealthy food consumption from the Christmas holidays to 1 month after, they still experience an overall decrease in subjective well-being over the same time frame.
*
Overall, the social context in which eating takes place plays a vital role in shaping individuals' eating behaviors and the relationship of eating behaviors to well-being.
