Download or read book Science Culture and the Reconciliation of Knowledge and Understanding written by Arthur Pontynen and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In daily life we consciously attempt to reconcile what with why, factual knowledge with understanding. Currently, it is commonplace to presume that understanding is limited to the production of facts, which we place into narratives of understanding. We exist in a world of facts with no why to find, living in a culture that vacillates between identity and tolerance, authoritarianism and anarchism. Neglected is the importance of seeking good judgments in daily life, that is, of being wise. This book analyzes the millennial shift from seeking Truth to asserting subjective meanings, so that we can escape that sordid condition. It is necessary to challenge current dominant modes of thought and interpretation in order to live intelligently and peacefully. Western Civilization and the Enlightenment are historically associated with seeking to understand, with the goal of being right with an intelligible and therefore meaningful reality. That goal remains worthy of our efforts.
Download or read book Research Is Ceremony written by Shawn Wilson and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-27T00:00:00Z with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don’t just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.
Download or read book Science Creation and the Bible written by Richard F. Carlson and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physicist Richard Carlson and biblical scholar Tremper Longman address the long-standing problem of how to relate scientific description of the beginnings of the universe with the biblical creation passages found in Genesis. Experts in their respective fields, these two authors provide a way to resolve seeming conflicting descriptions.
Download or read book Science Democracy and the American University written by Andrew Jewett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America. Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture - a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy.
Download or read book Faith and Wisdom in Science written by Tom McLeish and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Can you Count the Clouds?" asks the voice of God from the whirlwind in the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions from the Old Testament Book of Job. Tom McLeish takes a scientist's reading of this ancient text as a centrepiece to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, Faith and Wisdom in Science challenges much of the current 'science and religion' debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. Its narrative approach develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy - the 'love of wisdom of natural things' - that can draw on theological and cultural roots. Following the theme of pain in human confrontation with nature, it develops a 'Theology of Science', recognising that both scientific and theological worldviews must be 'of' each other, not holding separate domains. Science finds its place within an old story of participative reconciliation with a nature, of which we start ignorant and fearful, but learn to perceive and work with in wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity. There are urgent lessons for education, the political process of decision-making on science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, and the way that both religious and secular communities alike celebrate and govern science.
Download or read book Women Education and Science within the Arab Islamic Socio Cultural History written by Zakia Belhachmi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a rationale of multiculturalism and a based on systemic approach grounded in the Arab-Islamic tradition, this book integrates history, education, science, and feminism to understand the implications of culture in social change, cultural identity, and cultural exchange.
Download or read book Social Justice and Cultural Competency written by Marcia A. Mardis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in partnership with the International Association of School Librarianship, this work gathers together the latest and most important research on the topics of social justice and cultural competency in school libraries. Education systems today are expected to advance national goals related to fairness, equity, and social cohesion. Comprising articles written and collected in the journal of the International Association of School Librarianship and new articles written especially for this anthology, this book documents both empirical research and promising practices to help school librarians and teachers work together to promote social justice and develop learners' and educators' cultural competence. Both coeditors are experienced in working with authors from around the world and have participated in the development of effective and ethical standards and guidelines for school library practitioners. Brief real-life case studies of school librarians and teachers in action showcase efforts to improve the lives of marginalized or under-served students. School librarians inside and outside of the United States, school library educators and policymakers, and academic librarians building school librarianship collections will find this guide valuable.
Download or read book Culture and Conservation written by Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, there is growing interest in conservation and anthropologists have an important role to play in helping conservation succeed for the sake of humanity and for the sake of other species. Equally important, however, is the fact that we, as the species that causes extinctions, have a moral responsibility to those whose evolutionary unfolding and very future we threaten. This volume is an examination of the relationship between conservation and the social sciences, particularly anthropology. It calls for increased collaboration between anthropologists, conservationists and environmental scientists, and advocates for a shift towards an environmentally focused perspective that embraces not only cultural values and human rights, but also the intrinsic value and rights to life of nonhuman species. This book demonstrates that cultural and biological diversity are intimately interlinked, and equally threatened by the industrialism that endangers the planet's life-giving processes. The consideration of ecological data, as well as an expansion of ethics that embraces more than one species, is essential to a well-rounded understanding of the connections between human behavior and environmental wellbeing. This book gives students and researchers in anthropology, conservation, environmental ethics and across the social sciences an invaluable insight into how innovative and intensive new interdisciplinary approaches, questions, ethics and subject pools can close the gap between culture and conservation.
Download or read book Sceptics of Islam written by Ralph M. Coury and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arab debates about the critical relationship between religion and modernity began in the early nineteenth century. Such debates are now integral to the struggle for power between a variety of political groups and their opponents, and are vital to understanding the modern Middle East. This unique volume introduces writings of Arab Christian and Muslim revisionist and radical "free thinkers" who have tried to redefine the relationship. It challenges the deeply entrenched idea that the contemporary Islamic world has been impermeable to a critique of religious ideas and practices. Authors from the nineteenth century to the present are included. Some are avowed believers, even if they adopt positions many might regard as heretical; others are openly agnostic and atheistic. Despite their differences, all have been united in disputing the notion that life should conform exclusively to a system of values and laws based upon the Qur'an or the Bible, or, in some cases less radically, upon these as they were widely understood before the onset of modernity. They have also rejected many of the standard religious 'liberal' assumptions that are regularly invoked against traditionalism. The book's originality lies in its evaluation of the social and cultural impact of these thinkers.
Download or read book Green Religion written by Sylvester L Steffen and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-09-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep-heart cosmic communication radiates truths of relationships in-common and the fact that “common ground” is wave/ particle pulsation sustaining and transforming all at the same time. The “light of the world” is wave/ particle, electromagnetic photon. We are the shining self-understanding of the cosmos, the scintillating light of Divine Instance in nature. Shine on. Shine on, Oh Cosmic Christ. The common anointing of universal priesthood is the Christic consciousness of universal transformation. “Green” religion is the essential consciousness of existence-in-common and the human distinction of self-aware purpose in transformation and in the fleeting reality of individual existence. The beauty, the glory, this ictus in time is to be savored in the moment, for all individual realization is in the moment. The past is non-reality, the future is non-reality; reality is in the moment; accomplishments and failures of the past project into the future. The ascendant consciousness of self-reflection is the conscionable responsibility of living mindfully, in the moment, grateful for the beauty and the glory of being a crowning achievement of the past as well as the hope for the future. The “cultural spectrum” is nothing other than the grand evolution of the electromagnetic spectrum—the ground-being and becoming of life. The greening of religion is about the florescence of all life, always in process of self-justification. Conscionable living is justified living.
Download or read book Beyond Physicalism written by Edward F. Kelly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of modern science has brought with it increasing acceptance among intellectual elites of a worldview that conflicts sharply both with everyday human experience and with beliefs widely shared among the world’s great cultural traditions. Most contemporary scientists and philosophers believe that reality is at bottom purely physical, and that human beings are nothing more than extremely complicated biological machines. On such views our everyday experiences of conscious decision-making, free will, and the self are illusory by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. It follows that mind and personality are necessarily extinguished at death, and that there exists no deeper transpersonal or spiritual reality of any sort. Beyond Physicalism is the product of an unusual fellowship of scientists and humanities scholars who dispute these views. In their previous publication, Irreducible Mind, they argued that physicalism cannot accommodate various well-evidenced empirical phenomena including paranormal or psi phenomena, postmortem survival, and mystical experiences. In this new theory-oriented companion volume they go further by attempting to understand how the world must be constituted in order that these “rogue” phenomena can occur. Drawing upon empirical science, metaphysical philosophy, and the mystical traditions, the authors work toward an improved “big picture” of the general character of reality, one which strongly overlaps territory traditionally occupied by the world’s institutional religions, and which attempts to reconcile science and spirituality by finding a middle path between the polarized fundamentalisms, religious and scientific, that have dominated recent public discourse. Contributions by: Harald Atmanspacher, Loriliai Biernacki, Bernard Carr, Wolfgang Fach, Michael Grosso, Michael Murphy, David E. Presti, Gregory Shaw, Henry P. Stapp, Eric M. Weiss, and Ian Whicher
Download or read book Why Conserve Nature written by Stephen Trudgill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical discussion about the meanings of nature which can give rise to our motivations to conserve nature.
Download or read book Digital Culture Society DCS written by Pablo Abend and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory and provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation. The second issue »Quantified Selves | Statistical Bodies« provides methodological and theoretical reflections on technologically generated knowledge about the body and socio-cultural practices that are subsumed, discussed, and criticized using the key concept »Quantified Self«.
Download or read book Social and Cultural Dynamics written by Emiliana Mangone and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marking the 50th anniversary of Pitirim A. Sorokin’s death, this Brief offers a critical analysis of the renowned sociologist’s theories while highlighting some of his more overlooked ones. Topics explored include cultural dynamics; the relationship between culture, society, and personality; social mobility; and the socio-cultural causality of time and space. In addition, this book updates these theories by discussing their relevance in current cultural contexts. The Brief aims to extend the work started by Sorokin on the promotion and application of “integralism”, an approach that conceives the change of any sociocultural phenomena as the result of the combination of external and internal forces. It uses this method to analyse socio-cultural phenomena, propose new policy, and enhance the development of humanity from the point of view of culture. This book also discusses sociology’s relationship with other sciences. In particular, it touches upon the interplay between sociology and psychology and pushes for a new scientific awareness that is transdisciplinary. The end point is a new vision of humanity and its development from a cultural context. Social and Cultural Dynamics will be of interest to social scientists, sociologists, and psychologists as well as professionals in these disciplines.
Download or read book Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous Settler Relations written by Nadia Ferrara and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations: An Applied Anthropological Perspective presents a unique and honest account of an applied anthropologist’s experience in working with Indigenous peoples of Canada. It illustrates Dr. Nadia Ferrara’s efforts in reconciliation and rehumanization, showing that it is all about recognizing our shared humanity. In this self-reflective narrative, the author describes her personal experience of marginalization and how it contributed to a more in-depth understanding of how others are marginalized, as well as the fundamental sense of belongingness and connectedness. The book is enriched with stories and insights from her fieldwork as a clinician, a university professor, and a bureaucrat. Dr. Ferrara shows how she has applied her experience as an art therapist in Indigenous communities to her current work in policy development to ensure the policies created reflect their current realities. Reconciling and Rehumanizing Indigenous-Settler Relations describes the cultural competency course for public servants Dr. Ferrara is leading, as a means to break down stereotypes and showcase the resilience of Indigenous peoples. She makes a compassionate and urgent call to all North Americans to connect with their responsibility and compassion, and acknowledge the injustices that the original peoples of this land have faced and continue to face. Reconciliation requires concrete action and it starts with the individual’s self-reflection, engagement in authentic human-to-human dialogue, learning from one another, and working together towards a better future, all of which is chronicled in this insightful book.
Download or read book Environmental Expertise written by Esther Turnhout and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important goal of environmental research is to inform policy and decision making. However, environmental experts working at the interface between science, policy and society face complex challenges, including how to identify sources of disagreement over environmental issues, communicate uncertainties and limitations of knowledge, and tackle controversial topics such as genetic modification and the use of biofuels. This book discusses the problems environmental experts encounter in the interaction between knowledge, society, and policy on both a practical and conceptual level. Key findings from social science research are illustrated with a range of case studies, from fisheries to fracking. The book offers guidance on how to tackle these challenges, equipping readers with tools to better understand the diversity of environmental knowledge and its role in complex environmental issues. Written by leading natural and social scientists, this text provides an essential resource for students, scientists and professionals working at the science-policy interface.
Download or read book Cultural Renewal written by Arthur Pontynen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The decline of interest in the liberal and fine arts is widely lamented. At issue is why this decline happened and how we might restore qualitative standards by which to live. Arthur Pontynen argues that cultural decline is the consequence of a tragically anti-intellectual academic tradition—and its alternative is the cosmopolitan pursuit of wisdom and beauty. Pontynen writes that the liberal and fine arts are justified by their attempt to understand the material realization of wisdom, of that which is true and good in reality and life. The current decline marks a denial that such qualitative aspirations are realistic. Instead of understanding art as the intellectual pursuit of ontological perfection, perfection is subjectified as willful preference or experience. Consequently, the liberal and fine arts have been displaced by a naturalistic social science and a relational existentialism. This reduction denies qualitive thoughts, words, and deeds. Pontynen establishes that the arts are not obsolete, merely subjectivist, or limited to a brutal (de)constructivism. He argues for a renewed idealism that is neither reductionist, trivializing, or brutalized. Pontynen offers an alternative, global narrative that is both realistic and idealistic; one that permits us to distinguish between the trivial, the brutal, and the profound.