bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Managed Care and Child Welfare Practitioner Training Needs
Authors: Jackson Vivian , McCullough Charlotte , McCarthy Jan
Published: November 2023

The term “managed care” describes a wide variety of financing and service delivery operations. What all managed care operations have in common is the effort to balance cost, quality, and access. Because multiple human service systems have turned to managed care, child welfare practitioners may find themselves confronted with several different managed care operations for the children within their responsibility. For example, primary health care may be offered through a network of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) that offer limited mental health benefits for acute care. A separate behavioral health carve-out plan may provide both acute care and some extended services for children and families. And finally, the child welfare system itself may use managed care technology to provide some of its services.

This chapter will focus on the knowledge and skill requirements for child welfare in a managed care environment. This includes managed care under an auspice apart from child welfare, such as medical and behavioral health services. It also includes changes within child welfare that use managed care technology. This discussion will address both the knowledge and skill requirements of those practitioners at the direct practice level and at the management/executive level. We will consider both pre-service and inservice training needs.
Facilitating the Enrollment of Elderly and Disabled Persons into Medicaid Managed Care
Authors: Chandler Susan M
Published: November 2023

This chapter discusses the challenges faced and lessons learned when a state agency began planning for the enrollment of elderly and disabled people into a managed health care environment. The particular case study describes a state Medicaid agency ‘s attempt to plan for the smooth transition of elderly and disabled people from their traditional fee-for-service medical sys tem into privately managed care health plans under Medicaid contracts. The state agency had been anticipating this change since its inception of its Medicaid Managed Care Program. Phase I began in 1994 with the enrollment of the Aid to Dependent Children population and Phase II was expected to be gin in 1997 with the aged, blind, and disabled populations. The agency wanted to ensure that:

1. There was sufficient information among the consumers about their choices so they could make well informed plan selections

2. There was sufficient inclusion of the target population in the planning efforts to ensure their active participation both in the program design and in the policy design

3. There was sufficient time to ensure that the medical provider networks were able to serve this population with continuous, high-quality medical care
Sacred Musics: Traditional Ojibwe Music and Protestant Hymnody
Authors: Mcnally Michael D
Published: November 2023

The tradition of Ojibwe hymn singing emerged in the middle third of the nineteenth century from the conjunction of evangelical hymns, Anishinaabe attitudes toward music, and the social circumstances that set the terms of symbolic exchange. To understand how hymns came into the musical life of Ojibwe communities, it is important to first illustrate the place of music generally in early-nineteenth-century Ojibwe culture and then to compare that with the place of hymnody in the evangelical culture that missionaries brought to the field. Neither Ojibwe nor evangelical culture came to this encounter as static wholes; both had been changing against the historical backdrop in their own right long before the missionary encounter. Notwithstanding the cultural and spiritual continuities that thread through the last four hundred years, the Ojibwe nation itself had been a product and process of post contact history. What had been a loose federation of linguistically related but highly mobile and localized bands emerged through the fur trade into a more coherent social network and set of political alliances. Ethnohistorians have reconsidered fur trade society in terms of culturally diverse, polyglot native villages to which the fur trading companies attached their posts.
Music As Memory: Contemporary Hymn Singing and the Politics of Death in Native America
Authors: Mcnally Michael D
Published: November 2023

While hymns today are performed in a variety of contexts, the primary work of the Ojibwe singers takes place at the funeral wakes of the community. On these occasions, the political circumstances of life at White Earth are seen in their bitterest clarity. Because so many die young and die violently, each successive wake resonates with the dispossession of history and urges collective reflection on both social and existential matters. Gatherings around death have become crossroads where the community takes stock of history and where it musters the spiritual resources to continue to act in and on that history. A wake creates an unstable space, one that puts on heightened display the contradictions of contemporary native experience. That space calls into question the possibility of meaning on one level and the very possibility of Anishinaabe survival on the other. The music of the Ojibwe singers, however, can carry the possibility of transforming this space. Through the distinctive operations of music and language, Ojibwe hymn singing can create a shared experience of Anishinaabe time and can structure a process of collective remembering. This memory is socially integrative, though not unequivocally so.
Connective Leadership
Authors: Lipman-Blumen Jean
Published: November 2023

Business today is framed by two global tensions. On the one hand, the age of the Internet has ushered in an unprecedented interdependence. People from far-flung reaches of the globe now find themselves in close contact, and collaboration is the order of the day. On the other hand, we still live in an autonomous world of diverse nations and unique individuals, and the businesses and organizations that we have created to represent us are equally unique. In this conflicting environment, a special approach to leadership is called for, one that tames these two forces and integrates them in a political but ethical way. The Connective Leadership model defines that approach, emphasizing various modes of working with and through other people instead of bowing to authoritarianism. This includes creating short-term coalitions instead of long-term alliances and forming ennobling enterprises to which people want to commit themselves. Based on extensive research analysing the leadership styles of more than 5,000 leaders and managers world-wide, Lipman-Blumen has developed an innovative nine-part strategy for flourishing despite the demands of inter- and intraorganizational relationships. Connective Leadership begins by examining the origins and evolution of the human need for leadership. It then presents a detailed explanation of the Connective Leadership Model, showing leaders how to move beyond competition towards an ethical instrumentalism that employs the talents of others to achieve strategic goals. And in a final section, it explores the empirical organizational results and the philosophical implications of that model. Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, this book provides the skills and information needed to move organizations, nations, and people into the emerging era with stellar results.
The Relational Path to Leadership:The Collaborative, Contributory, and Vicarious Styles
Authors: Lipman-Blumen Jean
Published: November 2023

The second set of achieving styles, the relational set, is paramount in many societies, among them Argentina, Singapore, and Egypt. In Stage 3, these are the strategies that leaders need to link them selves to other peoples’ goals and visions. In contrast to the direct strategies that focus on one’s own objectives, relational strategies emphasize participating in group goals and helping other people with their tasks.
Ritual Rights
Authors: McGee Mary
Published: November 2023

Power and authority in Vedic times were very much connected with the ritual of sacrifice. The performance of a sacrifice conveyed power and prestige to the sacrificer, and great authority was attributed to the priests who knew about the proper performance of ritual. Access to power in every culture and at all times in history seems to be closely guarded, so it is not surprising that the mimamsa school of India philosophy, which focused on the power and efficacy of Vedic rites, considered quite seriously the question of who was entitled to perform a sacrifice.
Mantras and Miscarriage
Authors: Patton Laurie L
Published: November 2023

A young woman is pregnant for the first time in fourth-century b.c.e. India. She is living in a brahmin family, of the Aśvalayana lineage, who is faithful to all of the prescriptions outlined for them in the domestic family book, the Aśvalayana Grhya Sùtra, Her husband has recently returned from his final period of Vedic studentship and has started householder life. She and her husband keep the family fires according to prescription. He not only knows the domestic rites but also occasionally participates in the public, or śrauta rites from the Aśvalayana tradition of their lineage, according to his priestly role. Her husband is one of the caretakers of the tradition, an intelligent and able student who may be able to, in the course of further Vedic study, continue the illustrious line from which both of their families descend.
Giver or Given?
Authors: Jamison Stephanie W
Published: November 2023

Questions about women and questions about property intersect in a number of significant ways in ancient India and raise a number of vexed questions. We can, too simply, divide the questions into two types: (1) to what extent can a woman be “owned” as property; in particular is the wife the property of her husband in the same way a cow or a pot is? Such is in part the issue in the aftermath of the dicing match in the Sabha Parvanof the Mahābhārata (MBh): did Draupadl remain the ̔̔property̔̔of her husband after he had lost himself? I will not pursue this matter further here, instead concentrating on some aspects of the second question: (2) what can a woman herself ̔̔own̔̔ as property. I will approach this question through a single facet of the issue: the giving of gifts.
Hindu Nationalist Women
Authors: Bacchetta Paola
Published: November 2023

In most scholarship on rightwing women, there is an underlying assumption that rightwing women adhere rather directly to the ideology of their male counterparts. However, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (hereafter Samiti), the women’s wing of India’s most extensive all-male Hindu nationalist organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), provides a striking oppositional example, for it has produced its own ideology. The Samiti was established in a gender separatist, homosocial setting, and it has developed in a somewhat autonomous manner from the RSS. While both organizations strive to establish in (otherwise secular) India a specifically Hindu nation, there are vast zones of differences, sometimes incompatible, between the Samiti and the RSS. One of the starkest points of disagreement is on the models each organization puts forth for the gendered identities of the Hindu nation’s ideal citizens.
Counterpoint Authority in Women’s Ritual Expressions
Authors: Gold Ann Grodzins
Published: November 2023

A Rajasthani woman, Shobhag Kanvar, taught me much about women’s religion. In an earlier work, I described her as someone who, although totally illiterate, “possesses more knowledge about rituals and traditional lore than most women in her large multicase village, giving her a certain status there as a religious expert.” I noted further that her repertoire included stories, songs, healing spells, and massage.
Buddhist Saints in India
Authors: Ray Reginald A
Published: November 2023

The issue of ideal types, or saints, in Buddhism is a difficult and complicated problem in Buddhology. In this magisterial work, Reginald Ray offers the first comprehensive examination of the figure of the Buddhist saint in a wide range of Indian Buddhist sources.
The Buddhist Saints and the Two-Tiered Modelof Buddhism
Authors: Ray Reginald A
Published: November 2023

The relative lack of scholarly attention given to the Buddhist saints cannot be explained by an absence of data, for these figures are many and are documented throughout Indian Buddhist history. The primary reason for this neglect, it seems, has to do with a prevailing interpretation given to these figures and, more fundamentally, of Buddhism itself, an interpretation referred to in this study as the ‘ ‘two-tiered model of Buddhism. ‘ ‘ Any discussion of the Buddhist saints must be preceded by the identification of this model and an assessment of its impact on any attempt to understand the saints.
Sophocles Oedipus at Colon us
Authors: Grennan Eamon , Kitzinger Rachel
Published: November 2023

The latest title to join the acclaimed Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus tells the story of the last day in the life of Oedipus. It was written at the end of the fifth century BCE in Athens, in the final years of the “Golden Age” of Athenian culture, and in the last year of Sophocles’ own life. At the center of the play is the mysterious transformation of Oedipus from an old and blind beggar, totally dependent on his daughters, to the man who rises from his seat and, without help, leads everyone to the place where he is destined to die. In the background of this transformation stands the grove of the Furies, the sacred place of the implacable goddesses who pursue the violators of blood relationships. Although Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, is an obvious target of the Furies’ vengeance, he enters their grove at the beginning of the play, sure that it is the resting place Apollo has predicted for him. The reversals and paradoxes in the play speak to the struggle that Oedipus’ life and the action of the play bring vividly before us: how do we as humans, subject to constant change, find stable ground on which to stand and define our moral lives? Sophocles offers his play as a witness to the remarkable human capacity to persevere in this struggle.
On The Translation
Authors: Grennan Eamon , Kitzinger Rachel
Published: November 2023

Translators should probably say nothing about their work, since whatever they say will most likely sound defensive or, at best, like special pleading. Ideally, the translation should speak for itself, embodying the translator’s particular “theories” (too specific a word for what are so often ad hoc determinations, choices of a moment and determined by many factors, including personal taste and linguistic capacity), rather than making them explicit. For if they are explicit they open themselves distractingly to opposition and/or dismissal as either betraying the orig¬inal in unforgivable ways or as simply inadequate.
The First Gospels? Q and Thomas
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: November 2023

These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. … Jesus said, Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.
Identity, Narrative, and Group Memory
Authors: Gottschalk Peter
Published: November 2023

Just as no one map can adequately demonstrate all the geographic features of a particular terrain, so no one description can hope to depict completely the full spectrum of identities that comprise an individual’s sense of himself or herself. The previous chapter provided a broad overview of the geographic, social, economic, religious, and historical context of the Arampur area and the associated range of identities of its residents. This chapter develops the heuristic tool by which we will disclose and analyze various group identities in the final two chapters. First, this chapter considers the village as a focus of study. Second, it evaluates Paul Ricoeur’s notion of group self-definition according to shared interests, the past as one of those shared interests, and the essential role of narrative in defining an identity based on those interests. Third, in an effort to create a single field of study that brackets historiographic notions of veracity in favor of local truth claims, the chapter presents the concept of group memory as a single, descriptive term for these diverse narratives. Fourth, it demonstrates the utility of this term and the range of narrative styles through an analysis of four versions of a commonly told local story.
Institutions of Integration and Disintegration
Authors: Gottschalk Peter
Published: November 2023

Typical of the iconoclastic songs of the Middle Period devotional poet Kabir, these lines mock certain Hindu and Islamic traditions and those who unreflectively follow them. Kabir rhetorically questions Brahmans who keep their fasts and facetiously derides Muslims who practice namaz, the basic daily prayer, for only bumping their heads on the ground. He eschews mortal gurus and Sufi pirs (spiritual teachers) for the one, authentic spiritual guide. True faith, Kabir argues, cannot be found in external places, practices, or teachers but only within the devout heart. Yet, Kabir’s portrayal of his belief in “Allah Rām” (and, obviously, that name itself) derives from and is expressed in language that comes from Hindu and Islamic traditions.
American Women Choosing Islam
Authors: Anway Carol
Published: November 2023

A small but growing number of American-born women are choosing to become Muslim, helping the process of making Islam the fastest growing religion in the United States. This growth can be attributed not only to immition and increase in births, but to the success of daʿwa (witnessing by Muslims to the non-Muslims) in America.1 A growing number of families are finding themselves with daughters or sons who have chosen to leave the Christian tradition to become a follower of Islam.
Understanding the Multi-Ethnic Dilemma of African-American Muslims
Authors: Dannin Robert
Published: November 2023

The adoption of another people’s god always entails the adoption of their space and system of measurement.

Henri Lefebvre1

In the autumn of 1990 the Rabita al-Alam al-lslami (Muslim World League and World Supreme Council of Masajid [mosques]) embarked upon a program to create worldwide consensus in favor of the Saudi-American military coalition against Iraq. In the United States this took the form of a concerted effort to mobilize support among both immigrant and African-American and other indigenous Muslims, since the Rabita sought to avoid the possibility that demonstrators would initiate an anti-war movement that would jeopardize political support for U.S. military action in Kuwait. By September 1990 activists had already organized marches and rallies against Operation Desert Shield. With the support of the Saudi kingdom and Washington, Rabita set about mollifying the Islamic community. A delegation of American Muslims led by Imam Warith Deen Muhammad (fig. 10.1) went to Mecca on September 10 to attend a special conference to discuss the events in the Persian Gulf. The assembly received assurances from Saudi religious officials that the Qurʾan fully supported its decision to invite foreign infidel troops to defend the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina against Iraqi military aggression.2 Steps were also taken to initiate a broad public relations campaign. When the delegation returned, Rabita invited African-American and immigrant Muslim imams throughout the United States and Canada to Chicago to participate in another conference. To ensure a good turnout, it paid for their airline tickets and booked a block of hotel rooms in downtown Chicago.3
Muslims and the American Press
Authors: Noakes Greg
Published: November 2023

Islam and Muslims have become American media mainstays in the decade and a half since the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hardly a week goes by without news of some breaking event in the Muslim world, and with it reams of explanations of Islam and Muslims for Americans. In spite of the air time and column-inches devoted to Islam and Islamic themes, however, the performance of the mainstream American press in the coverage of Islam, Muslims, and events in the Muslim world has been little short of dismal.1
Attention for Sale The Hidden Privileges of Class[This chapter was co-authored with Dr. Yale Magrass.
Authors: Derber Charles
Published: November 2023

Suddenly, a sharp, dry cough was heard, and they all looked around. It came from a tall supercilious-looking Rocket, who was tied to the end of a long stick. He always coughed before he made any observation, so as to attract attention. “Ahem, Ahem,” he said, and everybody listened As soon as there was perfect silence, the Rocket coughed a third time and began. He spoke with a very slow distinct voice, as if he was dictating his memoirs, and always looked over the shoulder of the person to whom he was talking. In fact, he had a most distinguished manner. “I am a very remarkable Rocket, and come of remarkable parents. My mother was the most celebrated Catherine Wheel of her day, and was renowned for her graceful dancing. When she made her public appearance she spun around nineteen times before she went out and each time that she did so she threw into the air seven pink starts.
On One’s Own: The Overburdened Self and the Need For Attention
Authors: Derber Charles
Published: November 2023

I have described dehumanizing patterns of interaction and attention behavior. To consider how change in these patterns might occur, several essential questions must be asked. To what degree can the allocation of attention be cooperative and mutually supportive rather than competitive? To what extent can a psychology oriented toward giving attention be realized? Can in­equalities in the distribution of attention be altered and definitions of social worth changed so that no group is regarded as unworthy of attention? For such changes in everyday behavior to occur, the larger society itself must be transformed.
Introduction
Authors: Haines-Eitzen Kim
Published: November 2023

Around the year 170 C.E., a resident of Oxyrhynchus in upper Egypt sent a friend a request for copies of several literary works: Make and send me copies of books 6 and 7 of Hypsicrates’ Characters in Comedy. For Harpocration says that they are among Polion’s books. But it is likely that others, too, have them. He also has prose epitomes of Thersagoras’ work on the myths of tragedy.
“I Copied Everything Letter By Letter” Locating the Copyists of Early Christian Literature
Authors: Haines-Eitzen Kim
Published: November 2023

Who copied Christian texts during the second and third centuries? A seemingly simple question occupies us for the duration of this chapter and the next. Since we have little direct literary evidence from Christian texts with which to answer this question, in this chapter we will begin with a broader question: Who copied texts in the Graeco-Roman world? As we shall see, the complex interplay of literacy, class, and status in the Graeco-Rornan world alerts us to the possibility that even this question itself requires nuance; indeed we will have to consider both who was able to copy texts and who did copy texts. According to the first-century B.C.E. anonymous author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, the task of copying was not an honorable one; this suggests that those who were able to copy texts did not necessarily do so. In fact, we will see throughout this chapter the resources-namely, a wide range of slave and freed scribes - that permitted elites to avoid writing, and in particular copying. At the same time, the story of Hennas indicates that we cannot assume that only professional scribes copied texts. Hennas, in the only passage that depicts copying in second-century Christian literature, attaches no stigma to copying these sacred texts; to be sure, Hennas identifies himself as a slave at the opening of The Shepherd, but he does not indicate that he is a scribe. The juxtaposition of these two passages suggests that locating early Christian scribes may be more complex than it appears.
“Girls trained for beautiful writing, Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity
Authors: Haines-Eitzen Kim
Published: November 2023

The complex portrait of Graeco-Roman scribes offered in the previous chapter conspicuously, and deliberately, failed to address an important dimension in the social history of scribes: the question of gender. All of the scribes we have explored thus far have indeed been male. Our investigations may well have seemed complete, for scholars have largely overlooked the presence of female scribes in the inscriptionary and literary evidence from the Graeco-Roman world. In omitting female scribes from the discussions of the transmission of ancient literature, scholars, on one level, simply replicate their disinterest in scribes more generally; if scribes are “mere copyists” they hardly deserve extensive treatment. As we shall see, however, there is an additional facet to the scholarly neglect of female scribes; the lack of an awareness of the extent to which there is evidence for female scribes has resulted in misunderstandings of the ancient literary references to female scribes.
“Make and send me copies” Private Scribal Networks and the Transmission of Early Christian Literature
Authors: Haines-Eitzen Kim
Published: November 2023

That early Christian texts were composed, reproduced, and disseminated during the second and third centuries cannot be disputed. Furthermore, the fact that soon after The Shepherd of Hermas was written, apparently in Rome, we find papyrus copies of the text in upper Egypt, quotations in Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus of Lyon, and some forty years later a mention in the Muratorian Canon testifies to the widespread circulation of at least some early Christian texts. Early Christian texts indeed betray an active exchange of literature - letters, Gospels, accounts of martyrdoms, and so forth - between churches and between individuals, and we do not need to look far to find out precisely how these texts made their way from one church to another: Christian letters are replete with references to friends or associates who served as couriers (Rom 16:1; 1 Cor 16:10; Eph 6:21; Col 4:7; 1 Pet 5:12; 1 Clem 65.1; Ign, Phil 11.2 and Smyr 12.1). It appears that such exchanges of texts began with a simple request: “make and send us copies of the letters of Ignatius” the church at Philippi must have requested of Polycarp. Similarly, the fourth-century writer who asks for “the Ezra” offers us a glimpse into the processes of text circulation.3 Such requests were the impetus behind the copying of classical literature more generally, as the requests of our anonymous letter writers in upper Egypt and Cicero illumine. Classical and Christian literature alike appear to have circulated by the agency of social networks.
Humanism and Islamic Ethics
Authors: Goodman Lenn E
Published: November 2023

Normative Islam develops in three phases: the Qur’anic or scriptural phase; its elaboration in the f:iadfth, that vast literature of sayings and doings ascribed to the Prophet; and the comprehensive system of law (jiqh), which adds new tributaries to the stream, drawing anew on the ancient floodplain of ethical and juridical culture that had from the outset fed the wellsprings of Islamic norms. The first section of this chapter aims to consider the shape that Islamic practical ethics takes under the impress of scripture, tradition, legal theory and practice, and theological theories of action. Having done that, I’d like to focus on two key thinkers. The first is the humanist ethical philosopher, his­ torian, and courtier AI:imad ibn MuI:iammad Miskawayh (ca. 932-rn30), a learned and articulate exponent offalsafa and adab, the Islamic traditions of philosophy and literary culture. The second is the Sufi-inspired theologian, jurist, and philosophic critic of falsafa, al-GhazalI (rn58-rm), who spoke up as a friend of music in chapter 1. GhazalI’ s ethics builds systematically on Miskawayh’ s work, but with telling revisions for the fate of Islamic humanism.
Creating Space for Peace
Authors: Chupp Mark
Published: November 2023

The Escuipulas II Peace Accord, signed in August 1987 by all of Central America’s presidents, provided the impetus for major shifts throughout Central America, especially in the Nicaraguan conflict. The ac-cord included a cease-fire covering all armed conflicts in the region, steps toward free elections and pluralistic democracy in each country, amnesty for all irregular forces fighting against their own governments in the region, the end of all types of government aid to such forces, and an agreement that these forces could not use a base in one country to attack the government of another Central American country. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) actively engaged in a number of peacemaking efforts that gave flesh to the accords.

Central America drifted through uncharted waters. The persistent winds of the Cold War were waning. Years of armed conflict were coming to an end. What would peace look like? How would those who had turned into hardened enemies somehow live together again in the same country?
Justice as a Christian Virtue
Authors: Gilman James E
Published: November 2023

ONCE A CLUSTER OF CHILDREN approached the Hodja requesting that, in his wisdom, he settle a dispute that had arisen between them. One child said, “The four of us have gathered all the walnuts from under a tree; we have all shared equally in gathering them and would like to divide them equally among us. But when we do so, three walnuts still remain. It seems that one of us will be deprived of a walnut, but we do not know who it should be. How should we decide?” After some thought, the Hodja asked, “Do you wish God’s justice in this matter, or man’s?” The child replied, “I have seen man’s justice, how vengeful and uncaring it can be; I vote for God’s justice.”
Educating the Heart for Compassion
Authors: Gilman James E
Published: November 2023

As JESUS WALKS BY the Sea of Galilee he sees the fishermen brothers Simon and Andrew and says to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they drop their nets and follow. Further on he sees two other brothers and calls them to follow, and immediately they leave what they are doing and follow. What does “following” Jesus entail? Among other things and most immediately it involves practical, on-site training for his disciples, a kind of apprenticeship. They travel with Jesus throughout the region of Galilee, observing, serving, and emulating him as he carries out his ministry of compassion (Matthew 4:18-25).
C
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

Cancer is the fourth sign of the zodiac and the hardest to see in the night sky. In ancient Greece, the sun passed through this constellation on the summer solstice, the day the sun shone the longest. This event gave the crab a connection with the sun. The Egyptians saw in this star group their scarab beetle, a common symbol of solar birth. But other peoples saw a crab, and they found another solar connection. At the summer solstice, the sun appeared to hesitate, then to move backward across the ecliptic, its path across the sky. The crab exhibited a similar peculiarity of movement. It too appeared to hesitate, then walk backward across the earth like the sun walked backward across the sky.
N
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

In the myths of India and southeast Asia, Nagas were serpents who inhabited rivers and pools and the waters believed to exist beneath the earth. The Nagas of Indian myth appeared either as cobras or as half cobra and half man, and they had the ability to change forms at will. Some of the Nagas, like Shesha, the king, drank a few _sips of Soma, gained immortality, and were worshipped as gods. But most of them were demons, powerful and dangerous and known to cause droughts and disturbances of wind and tide.
0
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

The nature myths of Oceania include those told by the inhabitants of Australia, New Guinea, and the numerous islands that dot the Pacific Ocean. A large part of this area was sea and the other part land masses surrounded by sea on all sides, places where tribal people depended on the ocean for survival. Oceania had its gods of the earth and the sky and of the sun, the stars, the clouds, the winds, the fog, the rain, and the mist. It had its gods of volcanoes and its gods of fire. But the sea gods were perhaps the most numerous. The nature myths relied heavily on water symbolism, and the sea gods personified the natural forces that affected the ocean realm.
V
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

Varuna was a complex deity in the Hindu pantheon, at first the supreme sky god and later the god of the oceans. In his original position as sky god, he was thought to possess infinite knowledge and acted not only as creator but also as divine judge, controlling the destiny of humanity and upholding the laws of the universe. Varuna kept his high position for only a short time, however. By the end of the Vedic period, he had surrendered his powers to Indra and become lord of the seas and rivers. As sea god, he watched over demons in the darkness beneath the waves, and he ruled from the western ocean from whence the rains blew to India.
Y
Authors: Andrews Tamra
Published: November 2023

Yggdrasil of Norse mythology was an enormous evergreen ash and a classic illustration of the world tree, a concept common to many European and Asian cosmologies. Yggdrasil marked the center of the world and it overshadowed everything in existence. Its roots delved into the Underworld and its branches spread over the sky. Its leaves became the clouds, its fruits the stars, and its trunk the support of the nine worlds that made up the earth, the sky, and the Underworld.
Introduction to Master Sheng-yen
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

Chan master Sheng-yen (Shengyan, according to Pinyin romanization) is an expatriate monk from mainland China who has been teaching in Taiwan and the United States for over two decades now. To Buddhists of the Chinese diaspora he needs no introduction. He is author of numerous academic and popular works that are read widely by Chinese Buddhists; his Dharma Drum Mountain is one of the three largest Buddhist organizations in Taiwan; and he is a regular guest of communities in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong-and, more recently, mainland China-who are bent on seeking his guidance as a Chan master and Buddhist scholar. In Western countries he is less well known, partly for his lack of exposure but more likely for the misguided assumption in American and European circles that Zen (or “Chan” as it is properly known to Chinese) disappeared from China ages ago.
Meditation and the Principles for Training Body and Mind
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

Meditation-above all, seated meditation-:-has always been one of the foundational practices of Buddhism. Sakyamuni Buddha realized supreme enlightenment while seated in meditation beneath the bodhi tree. When he set out to establish the teachings and convey this enlightenment to others, he organized the Buddhist path according to the three basic disciplines of purity in the observance of the precepts, or moral restraints (S. sila); meditative con­ centration, or samii.dhi; and wisdom, or prajfia.
The Five Methods for Stilling the Mind
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

Buddhist literature contains many different techniques for developing samadhi and wisdom. The Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana teachings all have their respective systemizations. One of the most classic formulations of the meditative path is the scheme of the Five Methods for Stilling the Mind and the Four Stations of Mindfulness. When called upon to summarize Indian Mahayana and Hinayana teachings on meditation, Chinese Buddhist masters have often used these two formulations to provide an overview of the Buddhist meditative path. Together, they provide a good introduction to the basic principles that inform Buddhist meditation in all its different forms.
The Use of Gong’an and Huatou
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

In the Recorded Sayings of Linji-a text alleged to contain the teachings of Linji Yixuan (d. 866), the Chan master from whom the Linji (J. Rinzai) line takes its name-we find several basic stratagems used by Linji and descendants in his lineage for the training of disciples.
Prerequisites for Chan Practice
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

The Chinese term for practicing Chan is canchan, which means to investigate, engage, or dig into (can) the heart or living enlightenment of the Chan/Zen tradition (chan). It is often said in Chan that the door to Chan is “no door;’ the method of Chan is “no method;’ and the practice of Chan is “no practice.” There is a famous story about master Nanyue Huairang (677-744) and his student, Mazu Daoyi.
The Ten Oxherding Pictures
Authors: Sheng-yen Master , Stevenson Dan
Published: November 2023

People who have never undergone Buddhist training or have never had a taste of “entering the gate” of Chan often like to speculate about enlightenment. But lacking a clear sense of what the dharma actually entails, they tend to delight in the exotic and cook up all kinds of strange fantasies.
Introductory: Pilgrimage to Makka
Authors: Ruthven Malise
Published: November 2023

Every year during the season of pilgrimage or ‘Hajj’, about two million people converge on the holy places of Makka, Mina, Muzdalifa and ‘Arafat to participate in rites whose origins have been lost in the mists of antiquity. About one million of them come from overseas - 50 per cent from the Arab world, 35 per cent from Asia, 10 per cent from sub-Saharan Africa and 5 per cent from Europe and the Americas. The rest are from Saudi Arabia, most of them foreign workers.
Sects and Solidarity
Authors: Ruthven Malise
Published: November 2023

The divisions of Islam, in contrast to those of Christianity, have their origins in politics rather than dogma. This is not to say that dogmatic and theological questions do not form part of these divisions. However, the questions over which they first crystallized were political to the extent that they were primarily concerned with leadership of the community. Having a religious ideology built on the social foundations of tribalism, the Muslims expressed their aspirations first in the terms of group loyalty, and only afterwards in terms of the doctrinal and theological accretions surrounding these loyalties.
Spiritual Renewal
Authors: Ruthven Malise
Published: November 2023

If one could sum up in a phrase the essential difference between the two great western monotheisms, one might say that whereas Christianity is primarily the religion of love, Islam is above all the religion of justice. This does not, of course, mean that Christians are necessarily better at loving than Muslims, or that Muslim society lends itself more successfully to the realization of justice. A pessimistic view of religion would suggest exactly the opposite. The Christian imperative, ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself’, is far too universal to be given practical application, except at a purely individual level. The admonition to ‘love one’s enemy’ takes little account of the social and political circumstances in which the majority of people find themselves. A very few Christians have found it possible to follow the conclusion of Christ’s teaching to the point where they become pacifists. The cruellest and most destructive wars in human history have been waged against each other by nominally Christian states.
Challenge from the West
Authors: Ruthven Malise
Published: November 2023

The casual visitor to modern Cairo will at first sight see little to distinguish it from other cities which have succumbed to the utilitarian banalities of the twentieth century. Apart from the river Nile, whose gleaming surface cuts a shimmering swathe through the geometrical patterning of blocks and tenements, it is a noisy, dirty, smelly place, a cacophanous confusion of pedestrians and automobiles, where the sensible tourist usually remains in the cool of a hotel lobby, only venturing out in an air-conditioned bus to visit the dozen or so sights recommended by the tour operators. One of the places on the tourist agenda is the bazaar area known as the Khan al-Khalili: a covered suq or traditional Arab market, where enterprising shopkeepers offer hand-crafted souvenirs for several times the price they fetch a few streets away. The customary bargaining rituals, according to which buyers and sellers arrive at an agreed and fair price, depend, of course, on a common knowledge of the market- something the tourist cannot hope to acquire in three days. The foreigner who wants to pick up a good bargain must take along an Egyptian companion.
Afterword (2005)
Authors: Ruthven Malise
Published: November 2023

Since the previous edition of this book went to press in 1999, the world has seen momentous eruptions in the relations between the Islamic and western worlds, as well as within the Islamic world. On Septem ber 11, 2.001 a group of Arab terrorists hijacked three airliners on do mestic flights in the United States and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building near Washing ton, D.C., killing just under three thousand people. A fourth plane thought to have been intended for the White House or Capitol crashed on empty ground in Pennsylvania after a group of passengers, alerted by cell-phones, overcame the hijackers and forced the plane down, killing everyone on board. Spurred into action by the first external attack on the US mainland since the British burned the White House in the war of 1812., the US government, with widespread international support, declared war on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban were the known protectors of al-Qaeda, the ‘Foundation’ or ‘Base’ - an international terrorist network overseen and funded by Osama bin Laden, a member of a wealthy and influential Saudi Yemeni family. Prior to 9/11, al-Qaeda had mounted several attacks on US targets in Arabia and East Africa, including the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden harbour in October 2.000, and the devas tating attacks on the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, causing hundreds of deaths, most of them Kenyans and Tanzanians. Although bin Laden avoided claiming responsibility for these attacks, he praised the hijackers in interviews in the Muslim press and on videos delivered to the independent al-Jazeera channel in Qatar, seeing 9/11 as divine retribution for American atrocities against Muslims.’
Reconstruction, 1865–1876
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

Wars, even decisive ones such as the American Civil War, often raise as many questions as they settle. In the spring of 1865, victory by the United States made it clear that states could not successfully claim a constitutional right to secede from the Union. None have tried in the century and a half since. Also, the defeat of the Confederacy sealed the fate of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln had fought the war primarily to save the Union rather than to destroy slavery, but in the fall of 1862, seeing the importance of linking his cause and freedom for the enslaved, he had announced his intention of freeing all bonds- men behind Confederate lines as of January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation freed virtually no slaves on the day that Lincoln issued it, but as Union troops advanced so did freedom. Winning the war and freeing the slaves, however, raised two new issues. First, how and on whose terms would the defeated states be returned to full membership in the Union? Second, what would be the place of former slaves, now freedmen, in southern society? Did freedom bring full citizenship, including the right to vote and hold office? Would the former slaves be given any economic assistance in establishing themselves as freedmen? These questions—restoration to the Union and the status of freedmen—dominated the years of Reconstruction from 1865 to 1876 and left an indelible stamp on Texas to this day.
World War II and the Rise of Modern Texas, 1941–1971
Authors: Campbell Randolph
Published: November 2023

World War II brought economic recovery to the United States and left the nation in 1945 a productive giant possessing military power on an unprecedented scale. Obviously, the war unsettled virtually every aspect of life across the United States, but nowhere was its effect more dramatic than in Texas. The state’s economy recovered and never looked back as diversification increasingly became the rule. Population growth, slowed notably by the Great Depression, resumed, and a gain of more than 1.2 million residents during the war decade brought the total to 7,711,194 by 1950. This increase came in spite of the fact that a good many black Texans left the state for work in California and northern cities during the 1940s. By 1950 the state’s 977,458 African Americans represented only 13 percent of all Texans. Departing blacks were replaced, however, by a rising Mexican American population that reached ap- proximately one million in 1950. More and more Texans moved into towns and cities, and the urban population rose from 45 to 60 percent, the largest increase during any decade in the state’s history. Essentially, then, Texas entered World War II a largely impoverished, rural, agricultural state and emerged from the war decade thriving and far more urbanized and alized than ever before. The foundation for these changes was in place prior to 1941, of course, but the war provided the impetus for spectacular growth.
Rebels and Saints: The Middle Class and Church Reform
Authors: Hasan S S
Published: November 2023

Into the secular public spaces that had begun to emerge in the urban centers in the 1930s, mostly in Cairo and Alexandria, had come an influx of young Copts attracted by the prospects of a modern education. These middle-class Copts of recent rural origin, principally from Upper Egypt, the home of 70 percent of Egypt’s Christians, vacillated between two competing modalities of solidarity: the religious one offered by the clergy, with the church as the communal meeting place, and the secular one offered by the Coptic upper class, with a political party (the Wafd) as the nexus connecting Coptic youth to each other. These young men from Egypt’s villages and small towns were profoundly religious. They were shocked by the contempt of the upper class Wafdist leaders for the clergy whom they venerated. But, at the same time, they were fascinated by their western lifestyle and by the western-style reforms they advocated. Little by little, they allowed themselves to become seduced by the prospect of equality dangled before them by the Wafd Party, which featured such a visible upper-class Coptic presence among its leadership.
“The Glorious and the Sacred”: Bishop Moses and the Socialization of the Young
Authors: Hasan S S
Published: November 2023

The growing presence of militant Islamic groups within the universities and the growing friction between them and the Christian students caused the latter to turn increasingly to the church for support. Previously, the Coptic university groupings known as Usar jami’ryah Qibt[yyah (Coptic university families) had led a fairly autonomous existence. They were created in the fifties by the Sunday School generation. Their founder, Dr. Shafik Abdal-Malik, had grounded them in Cairo’s faculty of medicine. He had encouraged the organization of Christian students there, for the purposes of excursions and collective prayers, but also for mutual aid in saving front seats in the crowded university lecture halls, assembling study groups for review before exams, and for photocopying and distributing learning materials. This kind of solidarity and this model of organization had then been transplanted to the other faculties and university towns, thanks to the efforts of the Sunday School generation.