bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
12 Retrieving Information from Human Movement Patterns
Authors: Troje Nikolaus F.
Published: May 2008

This chapter discusses a computational framework used to retrieve stylistic information from visual human locomotion patterns over the past years. The algorithm was initially developed to identify and analyze sex-specific differences between walkers. It was then changed and further improved and applied to a number of different problems and questions in the context of pattern recognition from biological motion. The general framework and details of the algorithm are provided. Studies where the algorithm was applied are summarized. Finally, the role of the proposed framework in understanding the very complex class of stimuli that our visual system copes with so easily, its value as a model for human perception, and potential ways to generalize and improve it are discussed.
15 The Role of Segmentation in Perception and Understanding of Events
Authors: Schwan Stephan , Garsoffky Bärbel
Published: May 2008

Somewhere along the line of cognitive processes going from perception to recounting, a transition must take place by which this continuous stream of events is segmented into a sequence of discrete units. This chapter analyzes event segmentation. Darren Newtson's model of the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of event segmentation is discussed. According to this model, observers are not confined to one invariant type of segmenting over a given course of events. Instead, the definition of event segments results from a complex interplay of both characteristics of the observed event and of personal factors, the latter ranging from stable cognitive traits to observational goals, prior knowledge, and mood states. As a consequence, variations in segmentations have been shown to have a substantial impact on higher cognitive processes such as memorization, causal attribution, decision making, or experience of time.
16 Geometric Information for Event Segmentation
Authors: Shipley Thomas F. , Maguire Mandy J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines how perceptual processes help segment events, begin the complex process of giving meaning to the flux of change around each of us, and ultimately give us the social graces to differentiate friend from foe. It briefly considers the scope of this problem and then addresses in detail an analysis that focuses on how object paths play a vital role in event segmentation.
20 Dynamics and the Perception of Causal Events
Authors: Wolff Phillip
Published: May 2008

We use our knowledge of causal relationships to imagine possible events. We also use these relationships to look deep into the past and infer events that were not witnessed or to infer what can not be directly seen in the present. Knowledge of causal relationships allows us to go beyond the here and now. This chapter introduces a new theoretical framework for how this very basic concept might be mentally represented. It proposes an epistemological theory of causation — that is, a theory that specifies the nature of people's knowledge of causation, the notion of causation used in everyday language and reasoning.
2 “Censorship is Abhorrent to General Macarthur”
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

As soon as the first U.S. troops reached Korea, the U.S. military established guidelines for dealing with war correspondents. MacArthur set the tone. Convinced that he could control media coverage through a mixture of optimistic communiqués and blunt threats, MacArthur rejected a formal censorship regime. But it was a decision that soon caused problems. MacArthur's command was upset by much of the early reporting, which focused on the brutal realities of battlefield defeat. Correspondents, for their part, protested at the lack of official cooperation in all areas, from inadequate briefings to antiquated communications. And back in Washington, officials were deeply worried by the stories emanating from the front, especially the claims that the government was hiding the true level of casualties, not to mention the allegations that it had left the country dangerously exposed to the military challenge from the communist world.
7 Mobilizing with the Utmost Speed
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

In the middle of December, Truman and his senior advisers announced their broader policy response to the Chinese intervention. They would massively expand and expedite the nation's overall Cold War mobilization posture. They also proposed sending additional troops to Europe. And, to drive home the extent of the crisis, the president declared a state of emergency. In Congress, nationalist Republicans immediately challenged this new program, sparking a “great debate” that focused mainly on the desirability of sending additional U.S. troops to Europe. As mobilization gathered pace, labor unions also rebelled, convinced that the government had frozen them out of the policy process. These were serious challenges, but ultimately the administration was able to beat them away, helped partly by the more vigorous rhetoric senior officials adopted in the aftermath of China's intervention.
8 Why Korea?
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

The massive Chinese intervention also led many Americans to question the wisdom of the Korean War: in January 1951, one Gallup poll even found that two‐thirds of the public wanted to withdraw from Korea altogether. Although the administration had successfully defused the broader debate over Cold War mobilization, it had far more trouble explaining why it was necessary for Americans to continue fighting and dying in faraway Korea. In fact, the government's mobilization campaign was part of the problem: in the first months of 1951, senior officials spent so much time trying to win the “great debate” that they said very little about Korea. But even efforts to reach out to the mass public by using emotive letters or the power of Hollywood movies largely backfired.
10 Interminable Truce Talks
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

With the start of armistice negotiations in the summer of 1951, the Korean War entered a new phase. This chapter explores how officials formulated an information campaign during months of complex and protracted negotiations. At the armistice site, first at Kaesong then at Panmunjom, the military's public information officials had a difficult time trying to divulge enough material to keep the press happy without undermining the government's negotiating position. In Washington, senior officials faced an even more fraught task in trying to justify their stance on POWs. By 1952, the fate of prisoners was the main sticking point in the talks, mainly because Truman adhered to the principle of voluntary repatriation. Although many PR advisers fretted that Americans would not support the continuation of the war over this one esoteric issue, in the spring of 1952 the administration was able to fashion a remarkably effective public position, which helped generate a degree of support for the war, despite a year of stalemated negotiations.
12 The Advent of Eisenhower
Authors: Casey Steven
Published: May 2008

Initially, Eisenhower's emergence as the Republican nominee for president also helped to sustain a basic consensus behind the war, for Ike was a moderate who was prepared to defend Truman's decision to intervene in Korea. As the campaign progressed, Eisenhower's comments became more critical. But even his decisive promise to voters to “go to Korea” was ambiguous. It was intended to signal that something new had to be done to end the fighting, while leaving Ike free to decide precisely what—and, crucially, while also ensuring that he kept his distance from MacArthur and the Republican right. On becoming president, Eisenhower therefore retained a good deal of freedom. But in terms of public relations, he swiftly made many of the same mistakes that had plagued Truman's early efforts. And only Stalin's death, which in turn led to a thawing of the communist position, revived the armistice negotiations and resulted in an end to this long and costly war.
The Social and Religious Context of Early Confucian Practice
Authors: Csikszentmihalyi Mark
Published: May 2008

This chapter begins with an introduction that surveys some of the ways that the Confucian Analects has been read and argues that any attempt to reconstruct an original meaning of the text must locate it in its historical context. It proceeds to examine three quotations from the text—one on the Odes, one on sacrifice, and one on Confucius's relationship with his disciples—with some remarks on the way these quotations have been read. Once these aspects of the Analects are recontextualized, it becomes clear that despite the fact that these passages have been read in variety of ways, they originally expressed a religious vision that differed from the norm at the time of its composition.
Divination and Sacrifice in Song Neo-Confucianism
Authors: Adler Joseph A.
Published: May 2008

The earliest known form of Chinese religion is the ritual dyad of divination and sacrifice practiced by the rulers of the Shang Dynasty (fourteenth to eleventh centuries b.c.e.). This chapter explores how teachers can highlight the continuity of the Confucian tradition with this central core of Chinese religiosity. Sacrificial offerings to ancestors and sages, on the one hand, and divination using the Yijing (Scripture of Change), on the other, have been the major forms of these rituals practiced by Confucians. Introducing the theories and practices of Yijing divination of some of the leading Confucians of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 c.e.)—scholars whose philosophical re‐creation of the tradition is much better known today than their religious practices—can help students grasp the religious character of Confucianism.
The Dig and the Temple
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: May 2008

This chapter discusses the arrival of scientific archeology to India in the person of Mortimer Wheeler. The chapter discusses the distorting effects of colonialism on our knowledge of India. Using the archeology of Taxila and the Mt. Kailasa temple in Ellora, the chapter proposes a new way of approaching Hindu culture.
Performing Arts and Sacred Models
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: May 2008

This chapter looks at the Gupta Empire and in particular the career of Samudragupta. Hindu arts and sciences attained a high level of success, the earliest examples of north Indian temples date to this period and elaborate public rituals, including the horse sacrifice, were sponsored by the king. The chapter discusses the works of Kalidasa, in particular Shakuntala, examines temple architecture, and explains the governing rationality that encompassed both the arts and religion.
Shankara and Kumarila
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines two schools of Hindu philosophy and two philosophers from the eighth–ninth centuries: Shankara and Kumarila. The subject matter and methodology of philosophical work is explained, including the reliance on scriptural interpretation and modes of argumentation. The two schools, Advaita Vedanta and Purva Mimamsa, deal respectively with Brahman and dharma, and the chapter explores how a debate between the two would have proceeded. Other branches of Vedanta philosophy are also briefly discussed.
Devotion and Knowledge
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: May 2008

This chapter surveys some of the major religious and intellectual developments during the centuries in which Islamic rulers governed northern India. The devotional work of Shri Chaitanya is highlighted along with the songs of Kabir, Ravidas, the new Ramayana of Tulsidas, and others. The synthesis of Islam and Hinduism produced a rich tapestry of ideas, which translated a profound re‐examination of social reality and significant scientific developments.
The Eternal Dharma
Authors: Glucklich Ariel
Published: May 2008

The last chapter of the book looks at the religious and political developments in India after the arrival of the British colonialists. The chapter focuses primarily on the Hindu response to missionary and economic pressures and the changes introduced into Hindu theology as a result. Men such as Rammohun Roy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose receive the greatest attention in the discussion over religion, politics, and ethics. The chapter ends with the founding of India.
Marriage in Creation, Fall, and Redemption
Authors: Bennett Jana Marguerite
Published: May 2008

This chapter explores Augustine's views of marriage in light of his understanding of salvation history. Augustine suggests that humanity is created to be in friendship with God and with each other. The great tragedy of the fall is that both relationships were nearly destroyed. Many accounts of marriage focus almost solely on creation and fall, but Augustine also mentions marriage in relation to redemption. Through God's grace, the possibility for restored relationships occurs, before and after the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. Within the context of the entirety of salvation history, this chapter also takes up some of the concerns about gender and gendered roles that were raised in chapter 1.
1 U.S. EXPANSION AND THE WOMAN QUESTION, 1870–1929
Authors: Sneider Allison L.
Published: May 2008

This introductory chapter lays out the precise ways that U.S. expansion and empire raised the question of political rights for potential new citizens to the level of congressional debate. The discussion of voting rights for potential new citizens (Dominicans, Indians, Mormons, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans) created a political context for a national discussion of woman suffrage in an age of states' rights. Had the United States not been such an expansive nation after the Civil War, suffragists would have had a much harder time raising their question in Congress.
2 RECONSTRUCTION AND ANNEXATION
Authors: Sneider Allison L.
Published: May 2008

This chapter traces suffragists' engagement with the Republican effort to annex Santo Domingo to the United States in the 1870s during national Reconstruction after the Civil War. This investigation of the intersection of the “Santo Domingo Question” and the woman question demonstrates how discussions about the expansion of the physical boundaries of national territory inflected discussions about the gendered boundaries of physical space. It was during these discussions that suffragists first introduced the New Departure, a strategy for gaining votes for women based on their new status as national citizens under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
5 GETTING SUFFRAGE IN AN AGE OF EMPIRE
Authors: Sneider Allison L.
Published: May 2008

During the 1910s suffragists followed closely the congressional debates over political independence for men in the Philippines and Puerto Rico and were intent on juxtaposing national legislation that expanded political autonomy for men in these U.S. island possessions against Congress's failure to pass a woman suffrage amendment to the U.S. constitution. By 1916 it seemed, ironically, that the U.S. colonial possessions might be the next site for woman suffrage victories. The revival of the push for the federal woman suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), took place in the context of U.S. efforts to resolve the political status of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Epilogue
Authors: Sneider Allison L.
Published: May 2008

By 1929, when the U.S. congress pushed the colonial legislature of Puerto Rico to adopt woman suffrage, votes for women had become a benchmark for measuring the expansion of democratic values overseas. Conversely, woman suffrage was also part and parcel of U.S. colonial rule. Into the 20th century, votes for women and women's rights are part of the negotiation of imperial power relations across the globe.
The Religious Convictions of College and University Professors
Authors: Gross Neil , Simmons Solon
Published: May 2008

Gross and Simmons explain the results of a survey of college and university professors related to religious behavior and beliefs. They discover that there are not as many atheists and agnostics in the academy as an older view of secularization would have predicted. Still, the professoriate has fewer believers than the population as a whole, especially at the nation's most elite schools. The survey focused on political preferences of professors and found a strong link between evangelical religious belief and conservative political preferences.
Can Faith Be More Than a Sideshow in the Contemporary Academy?
Authors: Wuthnow Robert
Published: May 2008

Wuthnow describes changes in the way religion was treated in American higher education over the course of the twentieth century. He notes that religion has been largely eliminated from the sciences, but that attention to religion has actually increased in the humanities and social sciences. Wuthnow then argues that faculty and students who are committed to their religious faith have three possible options available to them, which he calls accommodation, resistance, and intentional reframing. He also suggests that humility is an important component in academic discussions about religion.
A Level Playing Field for Religion in Higher Education
Authors: DiIulio Jr. John J.
Published: May 2008

Since most academic disciplinary communities emphasize narrow expertise, talking about religion can easily be perceived (except for faculty credentialed in religious studies) as amateurish and unscholarly. Edwards argues that the professional formation of faculty, both in graduate schools and in the promotion and tenure process, encourages faculty to bracket personal religious convictions from their work as scholars and teachers. Yet there are important questions—questions about metaphysics, morality, and personal self‐disclosure—where religion is a natural component. As faculty work with students, it may not be necessary to automatically push religion aside.
Faculty Priorities: Where Does Faith Fit?
Authors: Rice Eugene R.
Published: May 2008

DiIulio argues that “nonsectarian” has sometimes been misconstrued to mean aggressively “secular.” But nonsectarian education does not have to be anti‐religious or devoid of religion. He uses the University of Pennsylvania as a case study, describing how it is slowly reclaiming its original nonsectarian identity, as first articulated by its founder Benjamin Franklin, in place of the strongly secular culture that defined the school in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Different Spiritualities of the Students We Teach
Authors: Nash Robert J. , Bradley DeMethra LaSha
Published: May 2008

Nash and Bradley offer an empirically‐based typology of student spirituality that includes orthodox believers, mainline believers, existential humanists, scientific empiricists, and skeptics. They assume that student spirituality is intertwined with student learning. Consequently, faculty must take student spiritualities into account in order to facilitate constructive and appropriate classroom dialogue.
Spirituality, Diversity, and Learner‐Centered Teaching: A Generative Paradox
Authors: Tisdell Elizabeth J.
Published: May 2008

Tisdell advocates a way of teaching that is learner‐centered, responsive to cultural identity, and socially transformative. In this kind of teaching, spirituality is always part of the mix, and the spirituality of many students is rooted in religion. The role of the teacher is to allow the diversity within the classroom, including the cultural and spiritual diversity of students, to enhance the learning process. Such learning almost always involves paradox, however, as secular and spiritual approaches interact.
The Meaning of Slave Religion
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter explores how the conversion of African slaves in the British North American colonies to Christianity became an object of analysis and how debates about the role that blacks would play in the American nation focused on their religion. The chapter examines the crucial connection between denials of African intellectual capacity and assertions of the uniqueness of slave religious expression. Romantic racialists like Harriet Beecher Stowe asserted that black slaves were naturally or peculiarly religious and their explanation of black religion as feeling or emotion became the dominant paradigm for understandings of black cultural contributions to the United States. Yet there was an inherent tension in this view of black religion because it linked black uniqueness to Africa and painted a rather hazy picture about the specific nature of black participation in America, if slavery were to be abolished. Romantic racialists left their legatees with a conflicted notion of intellectually inferior Africans in their midst with alleged special religious qualities as the locus of their potential contribution of an ambiguous “spiritual softness” to American culture.
Black Religion in the New Nation: Outside the Boundaries of Whiteness
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter traces the convergence of white northern critiques of black religion in the post‐Civil War period and demonstrate the ways in which they converged with white southern views of black religion as degenerate and immoral. My principal argument is that to the extent that northern and southern Protestants imagined the United States as a white (Protestant) Christian nation, black religion, which was seen as the crucial cultural achievement of blacks, was regarded as beyond the boundaries of whiteness, morality and propriety. Black religion was no longer regarded as exemplary or special, but rather as emotionalism and lacking in practical morality. African American leaders tried to attack southern white notions of black religion as retrogression to African bestiality by holding on tenaciously to the older romantic racialist version of black Christianity. Yet even black leaders like Booker T. Washington seemed to assure whites that something was profoundly awry in the religious practices of black southerners.
The Creation and the Burden of the Negro Church
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

W. E. B. Bu Bois and other black leaders played a crucial role in the creation of the “Negro Church.” By using the language and tools of the social sciences, black intellectuals and leaders hoped to incite and urge the black churches to use their resources to assist and uplift a people downtrodden by racism and economic oppression. Instrumentalists, those who wanted to use the church as a means or instrument for other ends (besides religion), came to dominate interpretations of black religion among African American leaders. Although Du Bois initially hoped to provide detailed local studies of black churches, his long‐term legacy (and that of other black leaders) was to foster longstanding debates about whether the “Black Church” supported or undermined a racist status quo.
The Drama of Black Life
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

Debates about instrumentalism or using the black churches as instruments of social and political reform deepened even as black leaders began emphasizing the drama of black life and religion. Drama was turned to because of high hopes that black contributions in the realm of arts, literature, and cultural achievements would help address racial problems in a way that a social scientific approach could not. An aesthetic appreciation of black religion and an emphasis on dramatizing black life proceeded apace even as black leaders continued to engage in scathing critiques of actual black churches in the North and South. The Great Migration heightened expectations and fears about how black churches could more authentically represent what were seen as the unique cultural contributions of blacks to American society. In the end, drama did not substantially solve the problem of contintuing traditional and stereotypical images of black culture, especially in the realm of religion.
The Religious and Cultural Meaning of The Green Pastures
Authors: Evans Curtis J.
Published: May 2008

This chapter examines the content of and responses to Marc Connelly's long‐running Broadway drama, Green Pastures. The chapter examines why the play was so popular and how this most popular image of black religion in the white mind from 1930 to 1935 evoked a host of debates about the representation of blacks and the state of religion in modern America. It argues that whites used the play, for the most part, to mediate their own spiritual experiences and to imaginatively reexperience the religion that many of them had lost in their move from a rural to a modern and urban environment. Black leaders, however, were conflicted about the play, worried that it portrayed blacks as outcasts in a modern world and as incurably and innately religious. Green Pastures once again provoked debates about the nature and meaning of black religion to American culture.
1 Saving Nature, Saving Grace
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

This chapter begins with a discussion of Christian environmental ethics. It then discusses religious environmentalism, cosmology and Christianity, pastoral strategies and environmental theologies, and three ecologies of grace. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.
2 Three Practical Strategies in Environmental Ethics
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

This chapter discusses environmental problems in relation to ethics (religious or otherwise). It describes criteria proposed in various strategies of environmental ethics. These include the strategy of nature's standing, the strategy of moral agency, and the strategy of ecological subjectivity. Environmental ethics is not an argument over what nature is (even when it is trying to establish that), nor over how nature is produced (even when it does that), nor a new radical anthropology (even when it includes one). Nor is it an intellectual consortium serving someone's environmentalist consensus. Environmental ethics is a domain marked out by several distinct strategies, each proposing a kind of practical rationality with its own criterion of adequacy. The three strategies together may adumbrate broadly shared criteria — together describing a complex sense practical rationality. It could be said that taken together the three strategies describe three crucial functions required for adequately understanding environmental issues and making them significant for moral experience.
3 The Strategy of Ecojustice
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

The strategy of ecojustice organizes Christian environmental ethics around the theological status of creation. In doing so, it follows the secular strategy of nature's standing: by illuminating the moral standing of nature within Christian experience, ecojustice integrates environmental issues into frameworks of obligatory respect. By recuperating creation itself “as an integral part of the Christian tradition's vision and concern”, ecojustice ethicists can extend traditional Christian concepts of respect to address the natural world's vulnerability. For with creation's integrity illuminating a kind of natural value, Christian moral practices must give the earth its due. By naming and theologically describing the “integrity of creation”, ecojustice secures modes of Christian respect for nature's standing.
5 The Strategy of Ecological Spirituality
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

This chapter uses the rubric of ecological spiritualities to gather together proposals united by their appropriation of deification themes, where communion with creation becomes part of union with God. It argues that theological variety proliferates within a so-called “strategy of ecological spirituality”, but its approaches share a common practical rationale: each makes environmental issues matter for Christian experience by appealing to the ecological dimensions of fully Christian personhood. Underlying creation's integrity and faithful stewardship (the other two strategies), say theorists, there is a radical relation of personhood and environment. Environmental lament and redress begin from a primary spiritual communion of humanity and earth, assumed into personal experience with God. As they describe how grace can heal that communion, restoring ecological dimensions to personhood as humans become closer to God, approaches within this strategy draw on a background pattern of grace as deification. The strategy illuminates the way of the world into divine participation, as it describes the cosmic significance of personal communion. Used more and less intensively, the deification pattern shapes multiple theologies that deploy cosmology and anthropology to diagnose and practically address environmental issues.
7 Environmental Virtues
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

In the previous chapter, looking at Thomas Aquinas showed us rudiments for an adequate ecojustice strategy: the integrity of creation intimately connected to Christian experience. This chapter discusses the development of the practical forms of that connection, the habits of graceful inhabitation on earth. In particular, it shows how ecological habits of friendship with God respond to natural evils. It turns to Aquinas on justice and virtue not for specific environmental prescriptions but for closer articulation of human membership. His virtues show humanity's natural agency set within creation's orderliness. The virtues report what John Bowlin calls “a kind of human moral ecology...a description of our species in its natural environment”. They comprise a set of successful responses to our habitat, ways toward flourishing in the midst of opportunity and difficulty.
8 Stewardship after the End of Nature
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

Stewardship needs to show how God's action makes nature matter for faithful practices. To investigate theological support for an answer, this chapter turns to Karl Barth, querying the thoughts of this theologian of redemption with regard to the problems of stewardship ethics. Since the strategy of stewardship appeals to the general pattern of grace Barth defended, his theology should display the liabilities and the promise of stewardship. It should also point stewardship theologies toward the most helpful resources within the pattern of redemptive grace. The chapter inquires especially after themes of place and reconciliation in Barth.
10 After Maximus
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

This chapter considers the promise of contemporary renditions of the Maximian tradition for developing environmental strategy and for working out its most serious problem — correlating divine grace and creaturely creativity. It discusses the mystery of createdness, the mystery of personhood, and the mystery of the theurgical church. It then considers the theologies of Dumitru Staniloae and Sergei Bulgakov.
11 Thinking Like a Transfigured Mountain
Authors: Jenkins Willis
Published: May 2008

This chapter focuses on Sergei Bulgakov's wisdom ecology. It argues that for the ethical strategy of ecological spirituality, Bulgakov demonstrates the possibility of making a theological place for creativity. Moreover, by making that place directly within his account of deifying grace, he helps contemporary ethicists work out the connection between their patterns of ecological personhood and their practical models of creativity.
Shalom Shar'abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

This book examines the history, teachings, and practices of a school of kabbalists who have flourished in the Middle East for the last two and a half centuries. The Beit El kabbalists center their practice around the teachings of Shalom Sharʾabi, an 18th century Yemenite kabbalist who came to prominence in Jerusalem. Sharʾabi is considered by his acolytes to be the recipient of divine inspiration from the prophet Elijah. The practice itself is a form of mystical prayer, utilizing a specific underlying linguistic theory. The application of this theory extends to the entire religious practice of the Beit El kabbalists. The school drew on the Rabbinic elite of Jerusalem, Syria, the present‐day Baghdad, Persia and to the east. Its influence in North Africa was less strong and although it accumulated European adherents, the Hasidic movement moved to negate many of its ideas and practices. It became a dominant force in the Jerusalem chief Rabbinate of the late Ottoman empire. There remain, however, desiderata in the religious thinking of the Beit El kabbalists. This missing aspects of the practice cast doubt on whether the Beit El kabbalists can properly be called mystics, and whether the academy's identification of Kabbalah with Jewish mysticism.
Sharʾabi and Beit El
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

This chapter introduces the spiritual progenitor of the Beit El School, Shalom Sharʾabi and presents the highlights of his picaresque career. Sharʾabi did not found Beit El, which predated his arrival by some years, but he galvanized the school to the extent that its members considered his interpretation of Kabbalah to be the only acceptable one. This position was adopted more widely in the kabbalistic world and even beyond it, so that many prominent Talmudists of the 19th century also accepted Sharʾabi's hegemony. In the contemporary period, there has been an upsurge of interest in Beit El kabbalah and it is widely recognized as a dominant and authoritative school of Kabbalah.
The Names of God in the Beit El Kavvanot
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

Sharʾabi's principal innovation in the development of his prayer intentions was to utilize a particular composition in the Lurianic canon, the “Gate of Names” which recast the entire kabbalistic mythos in terms of the development of sacred names. The actual texts of the Beit El kavvanot consist of sacred names of God to be meditated upon as the adherent's lips recite the prayer service. The traditions that underlie these sacred names are very ancient and in some respects predate the development of classical Kabbalah. The sacred names encompass a number of traditions: numerical coefficients, rewriting, substitution, and other linguistic strategies. Names are thought to represent aspects of the sefirotic mythos. Ultimately, the effect of the name traditions is to engender a kind of obscurantism, in which the technical construction and contemplation of the names overwhelms any other possibilities for noetic experience.
Kabbalists in the Community
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

The Beit El circles, from their inception to the present, have seen themselves as practicing the most essential and avant‐garde form of Judaism. To this end, the Beit El tradition developed specific models of behavior for its adepts. The contemporary Jerusalem kabbalist Yaʾakov Moshe Hillel has presented a revamped set of rules for the aspiring acolyte. There is an inherent tension in the role of the kabbalist in the community, as Beit El acolytes are drawn from an economic and social cross section of the Israeli religious community. In urban areas, the kabbalists live as mendicant pietists supported by the largesse of the public. Hillel also is compelled to resolve the role of the Yeshivah in the milieu of ultra‐orthodox Jerusalem, particularly the relationship to Talmud study, which is an article of power in the economic life of that community. Insofar as the kavvanot practice of Beit El is the apex of prayer, the kabbalists also have an ambivalent relationship to exoteric prayer.
Beit El Practice
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

Beit El thought and practice eschews “classical” Jewish mysticism in favor of a worldview entirely based on Lurianic Kabbalah. In some cases, Beit El kabbalists are at a loss when non‐Lurianic practices do enter their culture. One exception to this rule is the ongoing reference to the vicissitudes of the Shekhinah. Otherwise, Beit El is distinguished by their specific doctrines attached cycles of time, such as the atonement cycle. The Beit El kabbalists practiced flagellation and other mortifications, assuming a special responsibility for the fate of the people Israel. These rites of self‐mortification reflect an ancient pietistic suspicion of the efficacy of Halakhah. Another time‐based practice was the observance of the Sabbatical year, which was the object of much controversy in Beit El, and the counting of the Omer. The Beit El kabbalist are notable for their practice wearing double sets of phylacteries as an act of piety, and practice the rite of ascent through the four worlds of existence during their morning prayers.
Sharʾabi's School
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

The Beit El “school” consists of a particular lineage of sages, drawn from the Jews of the Orient, from Jerusalem to Aleppo and thence to Baghdad, with contributions from the “sages of Tunis.” Acolytes of Sharʾabi's teachings also dominated Sephardic chief rabbinate of Jerusalem for much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sharʾabi's immediate heirs assumed the initial leadership of the circle and also produced a substantial number of books. Among the Beit El kabbalists, the sages of Aleppo have great authority and credibility and are considered to have preserved the most authentic version of Sharʾabi's kavvanot. One of these, Hayyim Shaul Dweck, moved to Jerusalem and precipitated a split in the community, moving part of the community in the Bukharian quarter of Jerusalem's New City. Dweck also began to publish Sharʾabi's kavvanot. The third center of Beit El activity was Baghdad, which was dominated by the personality of R. Yosef Hayyim, the Ben Ish Hai. The Beit El school included many European kabbalists, as well, so that it may be seen as an early cross‐over institution.
The Kavvanot in Ḥasidism
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

Beit El is cited in the earliest records of the Hasidic movement, although the kabbalists were culturally and geographically disparate. The founder of Hasidism, the Baʾal Shem Shem Tov, moved among groups of pietists that the earliest manuscript prayer books, which in turn formed the basis of the “Nusakh AR“I,” the order of prayers in the Lurianic style. Of these, the edition by Avraham Shimshon Rashkov was most influential. Menachem Kallus as demonstrated that the Baʾal Shem Tov was an avid practitioner of kavvanot. Nonetheless, in subsequent generations the leaders of Hasidism moved to ban the practice. Nonetheless, they devised an order of prayers that they called “Lurianic,” which has become normative today.
Conclusions: Mysticism, Metaphysics, and the Limitations of Beit El Kabbalah
Authors: Giller Pinchas
Published: May 2008

This book is a combination of a historical survey of a kabbalistic school and a study of a “lived tradition” that is, a living community of Kabbalists. Beit El has maintained a direct historical link to earlier schools going back to the Safed revival. It is assumed that Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism and that, as “mysticism,” it shares common properties with other mystical traditions in the religions of the world. There seems to be little of the mystical experience in Beit El Kabbalah. The metaphysical object of the practice is clear, however. Beit El kabbalah is obviously an authentic form of Jewish esotericism. Boaz Huss of Ben Gurion University has addressed these reasons with a bracing clarity in recent years. The terms of the “study of mysticism” originated in Christology and have often retained an appropriationist dimension. These anxieties have blinded scholars to certain new developments in the history of Kabbalah. Beit El kabbalah may serves as a wedge to distinguish Kabbalah from “mysticism.”
Fighting over Words
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

Everybody fights about something or other and language is usually at the very center of the conflict. We use language as we fight our battles, but when the dispute is over what is said or how it was worded, language becomes the very cause of the battle. Although there are many arenas in which language disputes can be observed, civil law cases offer the most fertile examples of this warfare over words. What did the business contract actually say or mean? Was there evidence of deceptive language practice in its promotional materials? Can the warning label become part of a product liability charge? Did the company evidence age discrimination or race discrimination against its employees or customers? Was one company's trademark too similar to another's? Did the company engage in copyright infringement? Was it guilty of procurement fraud in its business proposal? This book is about the way linguistic analysis describes, exposes, and helps corporations analyze disputed meanings and practices in various types of civil cases where the central issues revolve around the way language was used in commerce. It also provides all of the language data that was practical to include so that others can do their own analyses.
Interpreting State Code
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

Free shuttle buses that are often used to transport clients or customers from one designated location to another are usually not permitted to compete with common carrier transportation. One such company was accused of violating the state code for picking up nonauthorized customers as it transported people between hotels and casinos. The defendant argued that the wording of the state code was ambiguous and unclear. Semantic analysis of the words “effectively,” “limits,” “customer,” and “trip” framed the linguistic contribution to this case.
Certificates of Deposit Advertisements
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: May 2008

The case of a bank's advertisements about the rate of return for its certificates of deposit centered on the use of the lexical items in the bank's advertisements and other materials, specifically “interest,” “simple interest,” and “compound interest.” A plaintiff bought CDs in 1983, before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation began to require banks to specify the difference between simple and compound interest in their advertisements. Principles of lexical semantics and marking were used to indicate the taxonomic hierarchy of relationships between interest (the unmarked highest node), simple interest, and compound interest (the marked lower nodes), because the latter two can be differentiated from each other and are more morphologically complex while maintaining their relationship with the higher node. Principles of language change also were relevant to this case. Historical records of the use of these terms supported the defense that when the plaintiff purchased the CDs, there was no usage or legal reason for the bank to have indicated what type of interest would be paid. Because “simple interest” was the unmarked form at the time of purchase, synonymous with “interest,” the bank did not engage in deceptive trade practice.
Conclusion
Authors: Ownby David
Published: May 2008

The conclusion uses the case of Falun Gong to probe deeper issues in the history and historiography of modern China, arguing that the metanarratives of politics and revolution have obscured the important roles that religion in general and redemptive societies in particular have played in China's modern experience. The popularity of Falun Gong and qigong in the Chinese diaspora suggests that redemptive societies are not simply a product of the post‐Mao era and that they are likely to reappear in one form or another as China becomes a more open, less controlled society.
Spies in Arabia
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This book offers a cultural history of British intelligence–gathering in the Middle East in the era of World War One and its consequences in British literary and political culture and military and state practice. Culture mattered especially in this intelligence endeavor because of British agents' orientalist preconceptions of “Arabia” as an inscrutable, romantic space offering adventure and spiritualism. They developed an intelligence epistemology grounded in intuition, elevating as “experts” those claiming an innate “genius” for understanding the region, regardless of empirical knowledge. This intelligence culture assured the agents an unusual influence in the running of the Great War campaigns and postwar mandatory administrations in the region, notably in the British state's conspiracy fears and consequent design of a brutal air control regime for Iraq. The book argues that violence and culture were more closely allied in imperial rule than has been recognized, ironically, especially at a moment of popular anti–imperialism and increasing mass democracy. As the British public demanded control over foreign policy in the Middle East, the imperial state developed new means of keeping its affairs secret, developing a style of colonial rule that Priya Satia calls “covert empire,” in which airpower, intelligence agents, and propaganda were critical. As democratic oversight vanished, colonial violence reached a new pitch, with lasting consequences in the Middle East, British attitudes towards the state, and, and military tactics. The book offers a new understanding of the legacies of the Great War and of the British empire in the 20th century.
The Cultural World of the Edwardian Agent
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.
Cunning in War
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This chapter describes the wartime application of the intuitive intelligence mode in new domains, including policing, colonial administration, and military tactics. The intelligence strategy morphed from a means of gathering knowledge to a means of acquiring political control. As agents strove to fulfill their dreams of adventure in Arabia, they strayed into the realm of warfare, applying their expertise on Arab affairs to the use and theorization of irregular warfare, deception tactics, and airpower, all of which set the Middle East campaigns apart from the war of attrition in Europe. The official construction of Arabia as a “spy-space” where the expert agent knew how to meet cunning with cunning was central in the articulation of these tactics and underwrote the adoption of an avowedly conscienceless approach to involvement in the Middle East.
Official Conspiracy Theories and the Wagers of Genius
Authors: Satia Priya
Published: May 2008

This chapter describes the emergence of a conspiracy-thinking culture in the postwar British imperial state. As intelligence agents from the Middle East slipped into administrative roles in the postwar Middle Eastern empire, they applied their intuitive mode and conception of Middle Eastern space to the official task of understanding the postwar series of periods of anticolonial unrest. The theories were notable for their vagueness and ineffability. The conspiracy mode was intensified by the competing claims to expertise of the old guard of amateur agents and an emerging group of professionals. The British state became captive to a paranoid mode of understanding political events in the Middle East. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ramifications of this mode, namely the excuse it provided for continued British presence in the region.