bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Regulation of hepatic lipid metabolism by intestine epithelium-derived exosomes
Authors: Feng Tiange , Liang Yuan , Sun Lijun , Feng Lu , Min Jiajie , Mulholland Michael W , Yin Yue , Zhang Weizhen
Published: November 2023

The “gut-liver axis” is critical for the control of hepatic lipid homeostasis, where the intestine affects the liver through multiple pathways, such as nutrient uptake, gastrointestinal hormone release, and gut microbiota homeostasis. Whether intestine-originated exosomes mediate the gut’s influence on liver steatosis remains unknown. Here, we aimed to determine whether intestinal epithelium-derived exosomes (intExos) contribute to the regulation of hepatic lipid metabolism. We found that mouse intExos could be taken up by hepatic cells. Mice fed high-fat diet (HFD) received intExos showed strong resistance to liver steatosis. MicroRNA sequencing of intExos indicated the correlation between miR-21a-5p/miR-145a-5p and hepatic lipid metabolism. Both liver overexpression of miR-21a-5p and intExos containing miR-21a-5p alleviated hepatic steatosis in mice fed with HFD. Mechanistically, miR-21a-5p suppressed the expression of Ccl1 (C-C motif chemokine ligand 1) in macrophages, as well as lipid transport genes Cd36 (cluster of differentiation 36) and Fabp7 (fatty acid binding protein 7) in hepatocytes. Liver-specific inhibition of miR-145a-5p significantly reduced hepatic lipid accumulation in mice fed with HFD through negatively regulating the expression of Btg1 (BTG anti-proliferation factor 1), leading to an increase of stearoyl-CoA desaturase-1 and lipogenesis. Our study demonstrates that intExos regulate hepatic lipid metabolism and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) progression via miR-21a-5p and miR-145a-5p pathways, providing novel mediators for the gut-liver crosstalk and potential targets for regulating hepatic lipid metabolism.
Gemini near-infrared spectroscopy of high-redshift Fermi blazars: jetted black holes in the early universe were overly massive
Authors: Burke Colin J , Liu Xin , Shen Yue
Published: November 2023

Jetted active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are the principal extragalactic γ-ray sources. Fermi-detected high-redshift (z > 3) blazars are jetted AGNs thought to be powered by massive, rapidly spinning supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early universe (<2 Gyr). They provide a laboratory to study early black hole (BH) growth and super-Eddington accretion – possibly responsible for the more rapid formation of jetted BHs. However, previous virial BH masses of z > 3 blazars were based on C iv λ1549 in the observed optical, but C iv λ1549 is known to be biased by strong outflows. We present new Gemini/GNIRS near-infrared spectroscopy for a sample of nine z > 3 Fermi γ-ray blazars with available multiwavelength observations that maximally sample the spectral energy distributions (SEDs). We estimate virial BH masses based on the better calibrated broad H β and/or Mg ii λ2800. We compare the new virial BH masses against independent mass estimates from SED modelling. Our work represents the first step in campaigning for more robust virial BH masses and Eddington ratios for high-redshift Fermi blazars. Our new results confirm that high-redshift Fermi blazars indeed host overly massive SMBHs as suggested by previous work, which may pose a theoretical challenge for models of the rapid early growth of jetted SMBHs.
Momentum-space spin texture induced by strain gradient in nominally centrosymmetric SrIrO3 films
Authors: Gu Minghui , Sheng Haohao , Wu Xiaofeng , Wu Mei , Liu Xiaoran , Yang Fang , Zhang Zhongshan , Gao Peng , Wang Zhijun , Meng Meng , Guo Jiandong
Published: November 2023

Spin texture in k-space is a consequence of spin splitting due to strong spin–orbit coupling and inversion symmetry breaking. It underlies fertile spin transport phenomena and is of crucial importance for spintronics. Here, we observe the spin texture in k-space of nominally centrosymmetric SrIrO3 grown on NdGaO3 (110) substrates, using non-linear magnetotransport measurements. We demonstrate that the spin texture is not only induced by the interface, which inherently breaks the inversion symmetry in strong spin–orbit coupled SrIrO3 films, but also originates from the film bulk. Structural analysis reveals that thicker SrIrO3 films exhibit a strain gradient, which could be considered as a continuous change in the lattice constant across different layers and breaks the inversion symmetry throughout the entire SrIrO3 films, giving rise to the spin texture in k-space. First-principles calculations reveal that the strain gradient creates large spin-splitting bands, inducing the spin texture with anisotropy, which is consistent with our experimental observations. Our results offer an efficient method for inducing the spin textures in k-space.
Brahman Lineages beyond the Mughal Court
Authors: O’Hanlon Rosalind
Published: November 2023

In early modern India, the essential setting for the intellectual achievements of many Sanskrit scholars lay in the learned household. For lineages of Sanskrit scholars, many of them based in Banaras, the household was often a form of corporate enterprise. It was the site of their social reproduction, of the gendered division of labor that made their work possible, of the concentration and transmission between generations both of cultural capital, and of the tools of scholarship in family manuscript libraries. Household and lineage relationships were also on display in the sabhas, or deliberative assemblies, that formed such an important part of the intellectual life of the period. The Brahman scholar ascetic orders were in important ways a part of this social formation. The three daṇḍī branches of the Dasnāmī order of sanyasis, in particular, provided important forms of social and moral support to Brahman scholar households, in addition to the intellectual resources that they brought to key debates of the period, particularly among Advaitin intellectuals. These overlapping forms of lineage not only concentrated scholarly energies, but also provided many of the connections that carried scholars, ideas, and resources across the subcontinent.
Global Intergenerational Justice
Authors: Caney Simon
Published: November 2023

Many serious problems of intergenerational justice are global in nature. An obvious example is climate change, but there are numerous others. A theory of global intergenerational justice is concerned with what principles of justice apply to all persons across the world (the global component), including both those alive at one time and those who will live in the future (the intergenerational component). This chapter introduces a particular cosmopolitan account of justice, one grounded in a liberal egalitarian account of justice, and examines how one might apply such an approach over time. A theory of global intergenerational justice must address two key questions. First, What principles of distributive justice should apply between generations? Second, since distributive justice concerns the just distribution of burdens and benefits we need to know what makes something a ‘burden’ and what makes something a ‘benefit’. The chapter begins by considering the first question and exploring six principles of global intergenerational distributive justice. It then turns to the second question. While many policymakers focus on economic criteria like the level of gross domestic product, this chapter explores three challenges to this and considers an alternative.
Translators, Translation, and Literature in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century South Africa
Authors: Mokoena Hlonipha
Published: November 2023

The earliest encounters between Europeans and the people of what is now South Africa resulted in the first attempts to translate texts and contexts among the different languages and cultures of the region. The process of translation among indigenous laborers, colonial administrators, and other groups helped to develop a literary tradition that encompassed poetry, novels, and essays. However, the fraught colonial context also contributed to the idea that the modern Black writer is not so much a translator at the level of linguistics, grammar, and phonetics but is instead more of a transmitter and assessor of custom and tradition. That tension continues to be a major part of the South African literary tradition, with its inherited orality, its connection to European traditions, and its history of resistance and defiance during the apartheid era.
Digital Landscapes of Early Childhood Music Learning and Development
Authors: Lunde Ingeborg
Published: November 2023

This chapter investigates the role of historical children’s music media in the contemporary construction of children’s music cultures. The chapter argues that parents’ (re)appropriation of their childhood music involves negotiations of personal experiences with the music and negotiations of beliefs about what constitutes a valuable childhood. It also shows that musical parenting in terms of supporting children’s contemporary co-construction of this music’s meaning is a challenging but rewarding road for parents to embark on. The empirical base for the chapter consists of two sets of data. The first set is from an ethnographically oriented study of how one- to five-year-old children use music media (recorded music) in their everyday lives, and how these uses are described and legitimized. The second set is from an ongoing study of the social dynamics of the musical upbringing of children in the Norwegian welfare state (DYNAMUS), involving media history.
A Toddler’s Musical Interactions at Home on the Kibbutz
Authors: Gluschankof Claudia
Published: November 2023

This article investigates the ways a toddler, Tommy, constructs his learning through home musical interactions with his family. Tommy’s mother shared the data with the researcher via WhatsApp videos and messaging. Four theoretical frameworks were used to interpret the interactions and learning construction: entrainment (Clayton, Sager, & Will, 2004), communicative musicality (Trevarthen & Malloch, 2012), flow experience (Custodero, 2002), and mediated learning experiences (Feuerstein & Feuerstein, 1991). Entrainment is a natural characteristic of making music together at all ages. Communicative musicality is present in adult-baby and principal caregiver-toddler interactions, and even in Tommy’s interactions with his baby brother. Parents intuitively support their child’s flow experiences, also intuitively fostering learning experiences by mediating them. Combining those theoretical lenses contributes to appreciating and recognizing the value of musical interactions of toddlers in the home. The study hints at a style of musical parenting that recognizes the value of children’s unstructured musical experiences.
Section Introduction
Authors: Marsh Kathryn , Flynn Libby
Published: November 2023

This chapter introduces the rationale for this section and the commonalities that bind the constituent studies together. Drawing on the fields of music education, music therapy, ethnomusicology, music psychology, and early childhood studies, this section outlines ways in which music may play a fundamental role in the lives of young children in ameliorating the psychosocial effects of familial or situational transition, abuse, violence and war, social marginalization and displacement, and maternal imprisonment. In examining these issues, the chapter summarizes the studies in this section, which have been conducted in diverse settings, including Australia, Northern and Southern Europe, Ireland, the United Kingdom, South Asia, and Central America, with some locating sites of originating trauma in the Middle East and the Balkans. In these contexts, the socio-musical lives of young children are explored in relation to emotional regulation, attachment, self-expression, self-esteem and identity formation, social integration and the feelings of connection that this entails, nostalgia, and alleviation of anxiety and trauma. Implications are drawn for caregivers, music facilitators, and researchers working with young children.
Child Music Development
Authors: Benetti Lucia , Costa-Giomi Eugenia
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines core issues in music development research and different approaches to the study of developmental change in early childhood. It surveys common theoretical and methodological frameworks found in the field as well as more recent directions based on naturalistic data that attempt to explain learning and processes of change in the first years of life. References and examples drawn from the literature on infant vocalizations and singing development are used to illustrate the ideas presented. The chapter ends by proposing that the study of children’s music experiences and their spontaneous behaviors in everyday music environments is critical for understanding trajectories of change in early childhood music development. The value of research that focuses on variation and cultural differences is also discussed.
War and Conflict in Resettlement Contexts
Authors: Dieckmann Samantha Sebastian , Marsh Kathryn
Published: November 2023

This chapter discusses children’s musical responses to war-related conflict as they have experienced it within their lives, through direct exposure to war; forced migration and displacement as a result of war; or through intergenerationally memorialized experiences of conflict and displacement. Utilizing examples from a study of refugee children and immigrant children in the resettlement context of Sydney, Australia, the chapter explores how the music children learn early in life can provide ways for them to express the ongoing disorientation and alienation resulting from, or connections with homeland disrupted by, conflict-related displacement. Featuring the everyday musical lives of those whose families have migrated from former Yugoslavia, South Sudan, and Iraq, it maintains that music and memory, musical adaptation, and musical recollection provide avenues for ongoing psychosocial resettlement and identity formation of children from a very young age. Thus music and conflict have a direct relationship in the lives of these children.
Connection through Music for Mothers and Young Children in Prison
Authors: Lamela Inês , Anderson Kirstin
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines a particular sector of music practice that is seemingly underrepresented in the literature: music-making between mothers and their children residing together in custody. A scoping review of literature on music and attachment, music in prisons, and women’s experiences of custody was undertaken to explore how music is—or could be—used between mothers and their children to form positive attachment bonds in custody. At the time of this research, only one study was found that specifically examines music-making with mothers and their young children living in custody together (Rodrigues et al., 2010). Through their experience as practitioners teaching music in criminal justice settings, the authors know that wider practice exists, but this review suggests that it is not reflected in the academic literature. Given the importance of music-making for child development, this suggests a significant gap and presents a powerful case for future research.
Live Music in a Children’s Hospital
Authors: Shoemark Helen , Preti Costanza
Published: November 2023

The chapter discusses practical and theoretical aspects that are key to the success of implementing live music programs in pediatric hospitals. Over a period of ten months the authors had regular discussions following a duoethnography process. Thematic analysis was performed on the transcript of the discussions and is presented in a dynamic narrative informed by the literature. The final themes included aspects of identity, intention, issues of harm, underpinning theory, intrinsic and extrinsic role of music, professional place of the music provider, and the need for research. These themes promote clarity in the discourse about live music programs in hospitals as well as highlighting potential areas for collaboration between an established discipline (music therapy) and an emerging one (music in hospitals).
Unfurling the Musicality of Children with Autism
Authors: Jayashri Ramnath Bombay
Published: November 2023

The paper discusses the experience of the author—an Indian Classical music performer and teacher—and her students under the aegis of Hitham Trust, which is located in the Tamil Nadu region of India. The chapter reveals aspects of her journey in discovering and nurturing the musicality of children on the autism spectrum, primarily in the age group eight to seventeen years. In addition, there is evidence of the positive impact that regular musical instruction and engagement has had on the children’s evolving identity and personality. As well as general observations on the development and work of the Trust, three case studies of individual children with autism are reported, each with a history of advanced musical engagement from a very young age.
‘Everyone Has a Story’
Authors: Strausz Erzsébet
Published: November 2023

The Strangers Project in New York City invites ‘strangers’ to stop by and handwrite their story. Over 65,000 anonymous stories that capture a fragment of someone’s life have been collected and displayed on site and online in the past fourteen years. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s notion of the ‘narratable self’, Walter Benjamin’s figure of the ‘storyteller’, and other philosophical inspirations, this chapter engages various aspects of this ongoing experiential and experimental project with regards to how relationships to selfhood, otherness, and one’s own life story may be negotiated in writing and reading, as well as by navigating an expanding archive of autobiographical memory. Following Cavarero, the transformational potential of storytelling lies in offering the other a narration that speaks to what they may see and experience as fundamentally incomplete in their own quest for identity as ‘unity’. In dialogue with the founder of the project, I aim to uncover some of the complex ethical and aesthetic processes that lie within what it might mean to domesticate strange(r)ness and estrangement both within and outside oneself through the performative practices of writing, reading, and communal sharing. In this effort I pay special attention to the pictorial aspects of handwritten life stories—that is, the ‘second story’ that emerges from the marks and traces left on the page—as gateways to sensing and making sense beyond our habitual (academic) modalities.
Aesthetics for Everyday Quality
Authors: Cribb Alan , Pullin Graham
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we seek to illuminate the importance of aesthetics for health-care quality and encourage more explicit discussion of aesthetics in health-care improvement scholarship and practice. Drawing on the ‘everyday aesthetics’ literature, we hope to contribute to and help develop the hinterland between arts-based initiatives in health care and the ‘normal business’ of health-care quality improvement. Our broad contention is: (i) that aesthetic considerations should be seen as of universal relevance across quality debates; (ii) that they should never be assumed to have a marginal or even secondary status; and (iii) that taking aesthetic considerations seriously calls for explicit discussion of associated uncertainties and dilemmas and a readiness to welcome aesthetics expertise into health-care improvement debates.
Adamot—Art Music—Israel
Authors: Shelleg Assaf
Published: November 2023

This chapter discusses the histories of art music in British Palestine and Israel reframing them through a study of the key variables of Hebrew culture (or Hebrewism) and the meanings they have accrued and lost between the 1930s and the early 2000s. Mapping the simultaneities and interdependencies of these variables—territorialism, biblocentrism, diaspora-negating rhetoric, Westernness, language, and historiography—this chapter is concerned less with surface phenomena like exoticism or identitarian qualities, and more with the transitions from musics conditioned by territorial nationalism to growing autonomous aesthetics manifested in deflations of neo-biblicism, dialectical returns to diasporic Jewish cultures, and the outgrowing of the theological from the national receptacles that attempted to tame it. The impact of these non-linear developments saw the introduction of other adamot (lands) whose histories, cultures, and ethnographic imports have steadily decentered Zionist territorialism, as much as it interfered with its management of Jewish history and socio-ethnic hierarchies. The music of Paul Ben-Haim, Abel Ehrlich, Josef Tal, Betty Olivero, and Chaya Czernowin serves as a springboard to illuminate the separation of culture from the national territory.
The YIVO Sound Archive as a Living Space
Authors: Biezunski Eléonore
Published: November 2023

This chapter seeks to uncover the links between the establishment of the Max and Frieda Weinstein Archive of YIVO Sound Recordings in New York and the phenomenon of klezmer music’s revitalization by focusing on distinct moments in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Sound Archive was created. It approaches the Sound Archive not only as a repository of documents and sources, but as a social and musical phenomenon and as a living space. As such, the YIVO Sound Archive emerges as a product of dynamics generated by a group of individuals whose creativity is entangled in a web of social and cultural, intellectual and scientific, as well as institutional and artistic contexts. The small group of activists created the YIVO Sound Archive to gain access to the music—for the most part Yiddish song and klezmer—and to simultaneously revitalize it. This process reveals the archive as a space where objects and people circulate, and as a living space in which practices and usages evolve.
Early Modern Yiddish Wedding Songs
Authors: Matut Diana
Published: November 2023

Several Yiddish and bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish wedding songs are known from the early modern period. Although it is safe to assume that their greater part has been lost, the existing material allows defining both, recurrent themes and changes in topics sung about. As this chapter uncovers, wedding songs promoted and also mirrored trends in the development of muser, mineg, and hanhoge (ethics, custom, and conduct) in Ashkenaz. Functionally, they served not only as entertainment, but first and foremost as vehicles for the conveyance of social, religious, and ethical norms of premodern Ashkenazic society. Especially in light of the new status of the couple within the community they were authoritative tools of societal “normativization” and part of the greater attempt of “streamlining” Ashkenazim and especially women into conformity within new sets of social norms and regulations, including a shift in singing practices. While the singing of women for bride (and groom) was common during the early modern period, it slowly disappeared, finally to be substituted in most functions by the performance of professional male wedding singers.
Jewish Music Sound-Recording Collections in the United States
Authors: Pinnolis Judith S.
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines several significant Jewish music sound-recording collections in the United States, most of which originated as private collections but are now housed at academic institutions. Their origins provide insight into individual agency tied to different understandings of Jewish music. A discussion of their complexities from a library-science perspective focuses on conservation and preservation as well as bibliographic control and other issues in which the complexities of Jewish music unfold more clearly. Authenticity, comprehensiveness, and other constructions demonstrate how sound-recording collections reflect the overall difficulties of defining and delimiting Jewish music. Subsequent discussions and observations on access and audiences inside and outside the academy ultimately reveal the fine line of individuality and collectivity that Jewish music sound-recording collections navigate.
“I Say She Is a Muṭriba”
Authors: Wenz Clara
Published: November 2023

Focusing on the Syrian city of Aleppo, this chapter discusses the ethno-historical memory of the Khūjahs, local women musicians who performed songs in Arabic and whose primary performance context was Muslim women wedding celebrations. Though many of Aleppo’s Khūjahs were Jewish throughout the past century, their history is largely missing from official records. Examining the different reasons for this absence—from a history of national conflict, approaches within existing scholarship, to moral concerns over women’s public music making—reveals how the memory of Aleppo’s Jewish Khūjahs nevertheless endures in the personal accounts of their descendants and constituencies. By associating the Khūjahs with a musical community known in Arabic as the ahl al-ṭarab, these memories expose forms of musical belonging that challenge the often-drawn distinction between “male” and “female,” “Arab” or “Muslim” and “Jewish,” as well as “folkloric” and “classical” musical practices.
Singing at the Sabbath Table
Authors: Cohn Zentner Naomi
Published: November 2023

This chapter focuses on the different modalities of collective musical experience in the Jewish home, through the prism of zemiroth repertoires practiced in Ashkenazi families in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It does so in the context of mapping the sources of zemiroth and their transmission. Examining the zemiroth repertoire of one individual belonging to the religious Zionist community reveals that life story and social affiliations interlink with collectives of different kinds; indeed, the zemiroth repertoire sung at home can serve as a weekly connection to various social webs of geographic, familial, religious, and even political nature in the course of a single meal. And yet while certain melodies in a family’s zemiroth repertoire signify their belonging to ethnic and regional collectives, others show their affiliation to innovative religious, social, or national movements (specific Hasidic courts, yeshivas, and national religious youth movements).
The Concept of Harmony in Pre- and Early Modern Jewish Literature
Authors: Cerveux Alexandre
Published: November 2023

The idea that the world resounds with a song of praise to the divine is present in the Torah, in which all the work of creation, all beings, give thanks to God. In late antiquity, this idea was imbued with the Pythagorean theory, known as Harmony of the Spheres. Subsequently, Jewish thinkers adopted it for the discussions of biblical ideals. This chapter unravels the recurring themes of early mystic texts that relate to music, such as the perpetual praise in heaven, celestial liturgy, and praise in the lower part of the cosmos. It analyzes the conceptualizations of harmony in major texts written by renowned thinkers, such as Philo, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and Yohanan Alemanno. This corpus, conceived between late antiquity and the early Renaissance, uncovers the role music played in the general economy of Jewish knowledge, not simply as a discipline or an art, but more concretely as an activator of metaphorical thinking. The treatment of the concept of harmony in premodern Jewish literature also reveals that in Jewish circles thinking about the subject of music is part of the process of developing the philosophical mind and enables analogical reasoning. As such, music, and especially harmony, ties into the people of Israel, understood as a collective body in itself and part of a greater collectivity האנשים)), and its connections with the shekhinah.
Sonic Transformations
Authors: Pierce J. Mackenzie
Published: November 2023

This chapter considers how ghettoization transformed the musical culture of Warsaw Jews. Focusing on the period between the creation of the ghetto and the mass deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942, it situates ghetto music-making within the urban space of the city, as well as within longer lineages of Warsaw’s musical culture. Its analysis is based on rarely considered sources from the clandestine archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, or Oyneg Shabes (also known as the Ringelblum Archive). These sources highlight the emergence of public and semi-public performance spaces, such as courtyards and cafés, within the ghetto, as well as a discourse that deployed music to comment on ghetto society more broadly. While traces of prewar Warsaw’s musical life remained in the ghetto, the listening and interpretative practices of commentators also evolved in response to the noise, misery, and poverty that defined the ghetto’s public spaces.
Introduction
Authors: Frühauf Tina
Published: November 2023

A critical reflection on historical developments and current realities related to Jewish music studies as an emerging field that revisits the much-debated term “Jewish music” and its ideologies and contexts, asserting that Jewish music studies does not need embrace a given definition, thereby circumventing the limits of any one claim. It departs from definition of Jewish music through (surrogate) theories and proposes to understand Jewish music studies in a different way, as a complex field that takes account of all the many factors that form the context of and are indissolubly bound together in the experience of Jewish music. The chapter then continues to discuss issues of theory and methodology of Jewish music studies in the broader context of music studies and Jewish studies, including major trends. It problematizes the related issue of institutionalization. A model for Jewish music studies is then proposed that draws on the concepts of spatiality, temporality, and collectivity (rather than identity) as pillars and with the aim to veer away from previously established binaries (Jewish/non-Jewish, Sephardi/Ashkenazi, and so on). Taking space as a primary lens, it explains a prototype approach to the proposed model by way of eight spatial domains: land, city, ghetto, collection, and sacred and ritual spaces, as well as phenomenological spaces such as destruction and remembrances, as well as the shekhinah.
Homa in Jain Traditions
Authors: Gough Ellen
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the narratives, histories, and rituals associated with the performance of two different modern Jain fire offerings (homa, havana, āhuti, yajña): one Śvetāmbara worship of the protector deity Māṇibhadra and another Digambara propitiation of the yāgamaṇḍala, a ritual diagram made of synthetic colored powder into which the enlightened founders of Jainism, the jinas or tīrthaṅkaras, have been invited. Both fire ceremonies resemble non-Jain “tantric” homas that are performed alongside, or to conclude, offerings made to ritual diagrams (maṇḍala, yantra). Śvetāmbaras developed the fire rites for Māṇibhadra in the early modern period as a reaction to the tantric propitiation of powerful non-Jain deities like Bhairava, and Digambaras developed their yāgamaṇḍala rites in the medieval period by drawing upon non-Jain tantric image consecration practices and instructions in the ninth-century Jain history of the universe, the Ādipurāṇa. Despite early Jain scriptures’ admonitions against the ritual use of fire, Jains of both image-worshiping sects—Digambara and Śvetāmbara—have used fire in ritual for hundreds of years, developing various strategies to continue to reject the Vedic fire sacrifice while integrating homas into the Jain path to liberation.
Cosmic Process, Philosophy, and Soteriology in the Works of Abhinavagupta
Authors: Timalsina Sthaneshwar
Published: November 2023

An early eleventh-century polymath from Kashmir, Abhinavagupta developed groundbreaking work on metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. However, he is perhaps best known as a mystic, writing on tantrism and Trika Śaiva philosophy. This chapter contextualizes the cosmology, epistemology, and soteriology of Abhinavagupta in light of particular contemporary scholarship. Explaining the world as an expression of the freedom (svātantrya) of the absolute, Śiva, who actualizes the manifold, Abhinava proposed a model of nondualism that recognizes the reality of the world, confirming it as an articulation of the absolute. Through both independent and commentarial works, he developed philosophy from tantric visualization and ritual practices, yogic and mystical experiences, and aesthetic experience, synthesizing these within the framework of Trika philosophy. This expresses the transcendence of the absolute from its creation, while remaining embodied and immanent. Materiality in this light is not expunged of the luminosity of consciousness or the exuberance of bliss. For Abhinava, embodiment and materiality were not the intrinsic nature (svabhāva) of the absolute.
Ednah Dow Cheney: Philosopher of Human Progress
Authors: Dykeman Therese
Published: November 2023

This chapter contends that the philosophy of Ednah Dow Cheney (1824–1904) is foundational to her theoretical works on aesthetics, feminism, religion, and nature and to her practical life as teacher, reformer, innovator, and member of the human family. This philosophy provided her with an understanding of the universe and all that exists as one and many, matter and spirit, an understanding of the Divine as male and female and as a force within all living things, and an understanding of all humanity as being of value and equal in race and sex. Hers was a philosophy of reason, freedom, evolution, and relationality, influenced by Plato, the transcendentalism of both Emerson and Fuller, Enlightenment thinkers, the romanticism of Coleridge and Goethe, and nineteenth-century science. This chapter also demonstrates Cheney’s character and her contributions to education in New England and the South, to women’s advancement, to the discipline of art, and most importantly to how to live life.
Jane Addams, the Settlement Women of Hull House, and the Feminist Pragmatist Orientation
Authors: Lowe Barbara J. , Kiefer Fenton Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Jane Addams and the settlement women of Hull House lived and acted as public intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century but were written out of many of the professions and fields of study they shaped. With special attention to the work and writings of Jane Addams, this chapter offers an overview of the feminist pragmatist orientation that defined these women’s public intellectualism, delineating five themes that frame this orientation and the kind of community engagement and public intellectualism that Jane Addams and the settlement women of Hull House exemplified. These five themes are the relationally interconnected self, democracy as a way of life, place-based and empathetic inquiry through cooperative action, narrative-informed social scientific method, and lateral progress toward cosmopolitan humanitarianism. The chapter closes with a discussion of the value of recovering a feminist pragmatist orientation for contemporary public-facing scholarship.
Fanny Jackson Coppin and Oberlin College
Authors: Perkins Linda M.
Published: November 2023

Fanny Jackson Coppin was a prominent educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born a slave in Washington, DC, in 1837, her freedom was purchased by a devoted aunt when she was thirteen. She moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where she worked as a servant in the mansion of the Calverts, descendants of Lord Baltimore and Mary Queen of Scots. From 1860 to 1865, Coppin attended Oberlin College in Ohio. When she graduated in 1865, she was the second known Black woman college graduate in the country. Upon graduating, she became a teacher and later principal of the Quaker-founded private classical high school in Philadelphia, the Institute for Colored Youth, working there for thirty-seven years. Under Coppin’s leadership, the school became renowned for its high academic offerings and outstanding students. This chapter discusses her philosophy of education and race.
Transcendentalism
Authors: Moyar Dean
Published: November 2023

The chapter focuses on three women who played central roles in American transcendentalism. Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863) inaugurated transcendentalism’s characteristic themes, and she was the dominant educational influence on a central figure in the movement, her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), known today mainly as an educational reformer, was also a significant theologian and philosopher in her own right. The most prominent woman in the movement is Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), who edited The Dial and authored Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The dominant concern for all three writers is the development of the mind. They thematized the innocence of childhood and perfectibility of humans through education, the dialectic of mind and nature in the service of spiritual growth, and the idea that we achieve the millennium in reforming our social institutions.
American and British Women Peace Activists
Authors: Chmielewski Wendy E.
Published: November 2023

American and British women peace activists in the nineteenth century were members of organized peace groups from 1815 onward. They worked with male activists but were rarely allowed leadership positions. Some men blamed the female sex for the continuation of war as an institution. As a result, some women formed women-only groups to work against war. They networked with other women peace and social reform activists to achieve their goals. To make their ideas public many published short stories, poems, hymns, essays, and pamphlets through women’s magazines and the reform press. These writers often emphasized how war and militarization of society negatively affected women, children, and families. Women often connected this to other social issues, such as economic deprivation, mental illness, sexual violence, and slavery and racial violence. Some peace women connected their own lack of a voice in public affairs to the continuation of war.
Lydia Maria Child on Truth, Beauty, and Reform
Authors: Moland Lydia
Published: November 2023

The American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) philosophized throughout her life about the relationship of truth and beauty and how that relationship could help eradicate the evils of our world. In her 1836 novel Philothea, set in ancient Greece, she weaves together themes from Plato and Emanuel Swedenborg, suggesting that beauty, as a symbol of the divine, can lead us to truth and then to justice. Her correspondence as well as other publications, including Letters from New York, confirm this philosophical belief as a guiding principle that supported Child’s lifelong activism. This chapter presents background from Child’s life, gives an explication of Philothea and its philosophical influences, and links Philothea to themes in Child’s philosophical life and to her struggles within the antislavery movement.
The Church of England and Protestant Established Churches in Europe (1648–1800)
Authors: Gunn T. Jeremy
Published: November 2023

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost all European states and many of their colonies maintained established churches. Such established churches were financed by the state and received both legal and social privileges. The established churches in turn provided religious support and legitimacy for the states. With the rise of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran and Calvinist establishments emerged in Europe. Although no established Protestant Church was a model or representative of others, the Church of England illustrates the wide range of conflicts and issues that arose in Protestant establishments during the period. Conflicts emerged not only between the established church and dissenting religious groups but within established churches over questions of doctrine, ritual, and hierarchy, as well as of influence over political leaders of the state. It is often observed that both political and religious leaders used their comparative positions to enhance their power and influence over others.
Christianity and Law in the Post-Soviet Space and Eurasia Today
Authors: Brüning Alfons
Published: November 2023

Christianity and law in what in geographical terms is now “Eurasia” reflects political developments of the twentieth century, from the end of the Russian Empire via the Soviet Union to the current Commonwealth of Independent States. Although the space of Eurasia has always been home to a multitude of religions and various Christian denominations, Russian Orthodoxy was always dominant, including in relation to the state. The atheist Soviet Union was no exception to this rule, and the Soviet experience, in various ways, has influenced developments since the 1990s and up to the present day. The main conceptual opposition, already inherited from tsarist Russia, had been the one between “freedom” and “morality,” i.e. between law as the codification of moral norms and “public morality” on the one hand and law as rights and freedoms of citizens on the other hand. More recent developments display an increasing prevalence of the “moral” approach and of new concepts of “traditional values”—to the detriment of freedoms and of adaptations of human rights inside the countries and adaptations of international law to the outside.
Christianity and Law in Southeast Asia Today
Authors: Goh Daniel P. S. , Neo Jaclyn L.
Published: November 2023

Christianity is a minority religion in Southeast Asia as a whole, albeit a significant and influential one. It is professed by a majority of the population only in the Philippines and Timor Leste. Historically, the spread of Christianity and Christian values is closely linked with European colonialism in the region. Christian morality and ideas of law were introduced via legal transplants by the European colonials. The most evident example is the criminal codes that the British enacted in their colonies, which are still being administered today in Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, and, to some extent, Brunei. Within colonial Indochina, French civil, penal, and commercial codes interacted with local legal systems and customs. This chapter examines the influence of Christianity on laws in Southeast Asia through three lenses. The first is the Christian foundations of the legal categories of the individual and the family, highlighting tensions between local customs and modernizing developments but also intrinsic tensions between individual rights and familial traditions. The second discusses Christian influences on the law through the ongoing shaping of public morality by Christian institutions and actors, especially in the modern arena of abortion rights, reproductive health, and homosexuality but also in the traditional fields of family reforms. The third analyzes how Christianity has influenced the very conception of religion, privileging Catholicism through canon law concepts in the Philippines but also posing specific problems for arguably the most secularist state in the region, Vietnam.
Christianity and Procedural Law
Authors: Schmoeckel Mathias , Witte John
Published: November 2023

Legal procedure helps determine what is just in a case. This is true for both civil cases that resolve disputes between private parties and criminal cases that determine whether a party is guilty of a crime. Both civil and criminal procedural laws are of ancient vintage in the Western tradition. Early Christians were subject to both Roman and biblical procedural laws, as the trials of Jesus, Saint Paul, and other New Testament figures attest. Already in the first centuries, however, the church developed its own internal procedural laws, too, for the application of its canon law. In the second millennium, these canonical procedural laws were combined with Roman law precedents to form a sophisticated “Roman-canonical” law of procedure as well as an inquisitorial form of procedure that dominated Western law until the reforms of the Enlightenment and the modern legal codification movements. While civil and criminal procedural laws are now set out in detail in modern state procedural codes, these state laws still have vestiges of earlier Christian procedural teachings. Moreover, modern Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant church laws still maintain a good deal of traditional Roman-canonical procedure for the governance of the church and its members. This chapter sketches briefly these Christian forms of procedural law in different eras of the Western tradition and the vestiges of that influence still today.
Christianity and the Law of Taxation
Authors: Calhoun Allen
Published: November 2023

Christian thinking about taxation generally falls into two camps, one reading Christ’s admonition to “render unto Caesar” as a principle of separation between the rule of Christ and that of civil authorities, the other reasoning that taxation is good or bad depending on its use. Christian thinkers in the late Roman world reacted against the burden and regressivity of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century taxes. Bishops in the western part of the Empire also succeeded in subverting society’s understanding of poverty and poor relief. Ascetics like Jerome renounced wealth so that their lives could be identified with Christ’s absolute poverty. Ambrose and Augustine insisted that property wrongly used was property wrongfully possessed, and property wrongfully possessed belonged to the poor. After the disappearance (around 700) and then reappearance of tax (around 1000) in Rome’s successor states in the West, theologians fashioned theological doctrines that limited the purpose of taxation to things necessary for the common good but at the same time justified taxation as necessary to achieve that purpose. Thomas Aquinas developed these doctrines systematically. William of Ockham’s tax theories, however, resembled those of the earlier eastern ascetics. Martin Luther advocated for redistributive taxation for poor relief, managed by the civil authorities, in place of almsgiving. John Calvin saw taxes as part of the overall circulation of goods necessary to bind society together. Modern Christian perspectives on taxation show the influence of the prevailing utilitarian assumption that tax policies should balance efficiency (minimal distortion of market dynamics) and equity (fair allocation of the tax burden).
Christianity and Labor Law
Authors: Kohler Thomas C.
Published: November 2023

The ties between religion and labor law generally go unknown and unappreciated. However, current labor law would not exist without the religious impulse. One cannot understand how and why labor law developed, both within and beyond Europe, and the full scope of its significance without an understanding of the role of religion. Religion is that for the sake of which one does everything else, and as Jürgen Habermas notes, religion “is primordially a worldview” that gives structure to a way of life as a whole. Given the centrality of work to humans, it would be astounding if religion took no notice of work. This chapter discusses the anthropological understandings and significance of work that Judaism and various branches of Christianity take, and it explains how religion shaped understandings of work, motivated actors, and shaped European and American labor and employment law.