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This study firstly investigated the species, concentration variation, and emission factors of mercury emitted from the burning of incenses and joss papers in an Asian temple. Both indoor and outdoor speciated mercury (GEM, GOM, and PHg) were sampled by manual samplers, while ambient GEM at an indoor site was in-situ monitored by a continuous GEM monitor. Field measurement results showed that the total atmospheric mercury (TAM) concentrations in indoor and outdoor environments were in the range of 8.03-35.72 and 6.03-31.35 ng/m 3 , respectively. The indoor and outdoor ratios (I/O) of TAM in the daytime and at nighttime were in the range of 0.64-0.90 and 1.50-2.04, respectively. The concentrations of GEM, GOM, and PHg during the holiday periods were approximately 1-4 times higher than those during the non-holiday periods. GEM was the dominant mercury species in the indoor and outdoor environments and accounted for 63-81% of TAM, while the oxidized mercury accounted for 19-37% of TAM. Burning incenses and joss papers in a combustion chamber showed that the concentration of GEM from joss paper burning ranged from 4.07 to 11.62 μg/m 3 , or about 13.97 times higher than that of incense burning, while the concentration of PHg from incense burning ranged from 95.91 to 135.07 ng/m 3 , or about 3.29 times higher than that of joss paper burning. The emission factors of incense burning were 10.39 ng/g of GEM and 1.40 ng/g of PHg, while those of joss paper burning were 12.65 ng/g of GEM and 1.27 ng/g of PHg, respectively. This study revealed that speciated mercury emitted from worship activities had significant influence on the indoor and outdoor mercury concentrations in an Asian temple. Higher intensity of worship activities during holidays resulted in a higher concentration of speciated mercury in indoor and outdoor air, which might cause health threats to worshipers, staffs, and surrounding inhabitants through long-term exposure., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This study investigates the views of contemporary Muslim jurists about withdrawing treatment of the terminally ill. Its aim is threefold. Firstly, it analyses jurists' views concerning core themes within the process of withdrawing treatment. Secondly, it provides insight into fatwas about withdrawing treatment. Thirdly, it compares these views with current medical standards in Europe and the Atlantic world on withdrawing treatment. The data consisted of six papers by Muslim jurists presented at the conference of the Islamic Fiqh Council in 2015. We conducted a directed content analysis (DCA) through a predetermined framework and compiled an overview of all previous fatwas referred to in the papers, which are also analysed. The results show that the general consensus is that if health cannot be restored, treatment may be withdrawn at the request of the patient and/or his family or on the initiative of the doctor. The accompanying fatwa emphasizes the importance of life-prolonging treatment if this does not harm the patient. It becomes apparent in the fatwa that the doctor has the monopoly in decision-making, which is inconsistent with current medical standards in Europe. Managing disclosure in view of the importance of maintaining the hope of Muslim patients may challenge the doctor's obligation to share a diagnosis with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents revised versions of papers presented at the International Milton Symposium that convened in Toronto, Ontario in July 2023 with the panel entitled "Is Paradise Lost a Christian Poem," organized by Richard Strier. Topics discussed include Milton's supposed championship of orthodox Christianity in "Paradise Lost" and how Milton's last poems correlate with Christianity and religion more broadly.

In October 2008 The American Academy of Religion published the findings of an eighteen month study (conducted with funding from the Teagle Foundation) on "The Religious Studies Major in a Post-9/11 World: New Challenges, New Opportunities." Re-published here, this AAR-Teagle White Paper provides the opportunity for four respondents to raise issues and questions about the teaching of religion in their own institutional contexts. First, Jane Webster describes how the White Paper's "five characteristics of the religion major" find expression in her biblical literature course. Then James Buckley suggests some of the general level teaching issues provoked by the study and analyzes how well the White Paper aligns with how the teaching of religion is conceived in his Catholic university context. Tim Jensen draws comparisons between the White Paper and the higher education structures and goals from his university context in Denmark, raising questions about what motivates students to major in religious studies, the "utility" of a religious studies major, and whether students' religious and spiritual concerns ought to enter the classroom. And finally Stacey Floyd-Thomas finds surprising similarities between the state of the religion major and the various crises facing contemporary North American theological education. (Contains 42 footnotes.)

This paper outlines the development of a new Indigenous research methodology: Indigenous Literature Re-view Methodology (ILRM). In the rejection of the idea that Western, dominant forms of research 'about' Indigenous peoples are most valid, ILRM was developed with aims to research in ways that give greater emphasis to Indigenous voices and knowledges, foregrounding Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing. The advantages of ILRM include identifying themes as 'relevant' as opposed to 'common'. This method is based on relatedness, which is framed by Aboriginal ontology, axiology and epistemology, or ways of being, ways of doing and ways of knowing. Describing and employing ILRM to re-view Indigenous Australian boarding school literature, it was found there is a modest but robust body of research that has emerged in the past 20 years. Sixty-six written sources (i.e. journal articles, reports, theses and books) which were published in 2000 onwards and focussed on a topic of contemporary Indigenous boarding schooling were analysed. Sources that included a chapter or section on boarding as part of a publication focussed on other topics were not included in this re-view. Seven major themes emerged, including home, student experience, transitions, access, staff, health and evaluation. This paper focusses on the development and use of ILRM as an Indigenous methodology for researchers in Indigenous fields of study.

The relation between English language teaching and religion has not been given sufficient attention. Most of the existing explorations of this relationship have tended to reify Western-biased outlooks of this phenomenon, which rightly highlight serious moral dilemmas derived from a focus on Christian evangelization, neo-imperialist dynamics attached to the spread of English, and valid questions about the quality of teaching while proselytizing (e.g. Edge, 2003; Pennycook & Coutand-Marin, 2003). This body of work, however, fails to consider other possible and multiple ways in which religious values come to bear in ELT considering, for instance, non-Western, less globalized, and less diverse contexts such as rural locales in a South American country. This paper presents an alternative outlook, drawing on a narrative study of the current state of ELT in rural Colombia. The analysis uncovers religion-informed metaphors that illuminate how the spiritual values of eight teachers intersect with their professional identities. It suggests that spirituality plays a central role in helping teachers navigate the complex sociocultural conditions of teaching English in rural areas, influencing their roles beyond language instruction.

Background: The partograph has been endorsed by World Health Organization (WHO) since 1994 which presents an algorithm for assessing maternal and foetal conditions and labor progression. Monitoring labour with a partograph can reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes such as prolonged labor, emergency C-sections, birth asphyxia and stillbirths. However, partograph use is still very low, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMICs). In Bangladesh the reported partograph user rate varies from 1.4% to 33.0%. Recently, an electronic version of the partograph, with the provision of online data entry and user aid for emergency clinical support, has been tested successfully in different settings. With this proven evidence, we conducted and operations research to test the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing an e-partograph, for the first time, in 2 public hospitals in Bangladesh Methods: We followed a prospective crossover design. Two secondary level referral hospitals, Jessore and Kushtia District Hospital (DH) were the study sites. All pregnant women who delivered in the study hospitals were the study participants. All nurse-midwives working in the labor ward of study hospitals were trained on appropriate use of both types of partograph along with standard labour management guidelines. Collected quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS 23 statistical software. Discrete variables were expressed as percentages and presented as frequency distribution and cross tabulations. Chi square tests were employed to test the association between exposure and outcome variables. Potential confounding factors were adjusted using multivariate binary logistic regression methods. Ethical approval was obtained from the institutional review board of the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). Findings: In total 2918 deliveries were conducted at Jessore DH and 2312 at Kushtia DH during one-year study period. Of them, 1012 (506 in each facility) deliveries were monitored using partograph (paper or electronic). The trends of facility based C-section rates was downwards in both the hospitals; 43% to 37% in Jessore and from 36% to 25% in Kushtia Hospital. There was a significant reduction of prolonged labour with e-partograph use. In Kushtia DH, the prolonged labour rate was 42% during phase 1 with the paper version which came down to 29% during phase-2 with the e-partograph use. The similar result was observed in Jessore DH where the prolonged labour rate reduced to 7% with paper partograph from the reported 30% prolonged labour with e-partograph. The e-partograph user rate was higher than the paper partograph during both phases (phase 1: 3.31, CI: 2.04–5.38, p < .001 and in phase 2: 15.20 CI: 6.36–36.33, p < .001) after adjusting for maternal age, parity, gestational age, religion, mother’s education, husband’s education, and fetal sex Conclusion: The partograph user rate has significantly improved with the e- partograph and was associated with an overall reduction in cesarean births. Use of the e-partograph was also associated with reduced rates of prolonged labour. This study has added to the growing body of evidence on the positive impact of e-partograph use. We recommend implementing e-partograph intervention at scale in both public and private hospitals in Bangladesh. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confronted by myriad interconnected societal challenges, this paper asks: what kind of pedagogy does justice to the experience and challenge of living in a complex world? Departing from a critical reading of a preparative-logic to education, this paper emphasises students' entangledness: more-or-less consciously, students are uniquely shaped-by and shapers-of complex societal challenges in a here-and-now sense. Utilising this premise, the paper develops a set of pedagogical perspectives that might inspire and help teachers to design their own responses to particular complex societal challenges in their unique teaching contexts. Drawing on emerging outcomes from a narrative diffractive inquiry with 12 teachers as co-researchers and engaging with complexity thinking, six perspectives are presented and discussed: entanglement-orientedness, entanglement-awareness, hopeful action, inquiry within complex societal challenges, practicing perceptiveness, and practicing integrity. Together, these perspectives offer a heuristic for embracing complexity in education.

This paper analyses public conflicts over school policies that seek to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. It focuses in particular on conflicts where Muslims, who protest LGBT-inclusive policies, become racialised as other to secular national/Western values. Growing attention has been paid to the secular arguments used by majority and minority religious groups to publicly counter LGBT-inclusive education. In this paper, I contend that neither contemporary arguments for, or against, LGBT-inclusive education are neatly secular, i.e., non-religious, in their public appearance. Introducing a Critical Secular approach, I contend multiple parties in such conflicts work with "strategic" secularisms. Strategic secularisms are prevailing discourses which privatise, and deprivatise (make public), aspects of minority religious and sexual identities on neo-colonial, secular Christian terms. I present a thematic analysis of 149 newspaper articles covering protests largely by Muslims against LGBT-inclusive education outside schools in Birmingham, England. The analysis shows that newspapers foregrounded discourses seeking to privatise (assert private authority over) or deprivatise (publicly surveil) Muslim religiosity. LGBT identities were also variously framed as "beliefs" to be kept private, or an essential part of the public self which must be confessed to be "free". Based on this analysis, I argue public discourse should certainly challenge queer/Muslim and secular/religious dichotomies. But more fundamentally, there is a need to cultivate education publics that refuse strategic secularisms based in neo-colonial, racialised discourses of secular Christian civilisation, and engage the losses created by the privatising and deprivatising of specific forms of minority religious and sexual identity.

This paper answers the call for the importance of integrating the Islamic worldview into science classes. This research provides insights into science teachers' experiences of integrating science and Islam, as well as additional surveys to reveal gains in student understanding. This research consists of two stages. Study 1 used phenomenology and focused on the voice of science teachers through focus groups. This research involved five focus groups in five Islamic high schools providing information describing their experiences. Through thematic analysis techniques, several findings were obtained as follows: (1) the concept of integration emphasises more on the balance of compliance between vertical and horizontal; (2) the integration pattern places more emphasis on learning materials; and (3) in terms of benefits, this effort is focused on increasing understanding and followed by study 2 which aims to add to the evidence base by investigating the effect of integration patterns on student understanding. The results showed that there is evidence that the support of an overarching integration pattern contributes to students' understanding of the material. As a recommendation, it is necessary to strengthen integration at all stages of science learning, allowing students to take advantage of discussions in class to develop more relevant abilities.

Secularization theory allows for transitory religious revivals under certain conditions, such as extreme societal crises or state weakness. The country of Georgia has witnessed the largest religious revival of Orthodox countries and one of the most striking religious resurgences worldwide. This paper gives both a statistical and historical description of this revival and asks whether it is a counterexample to secularization theory. We show that the main thrust of the religious revival in Georgia lasted 25 years and seized the entire society in what was mainly a period effect. The most significant cause for the revival was a major societal and economic crisis starting in 1985 combined with a very weak state, creating massive individual insecurity. In these circumstances, the Georgian Orthodox Church was able to provide identity for individuals and legitimacy for governments. Other possible causes of the revival-state funding, too rapid modernization, or emigration-can be excluded as primary drivers of the process. The Georgian case shows a situation in which secularization theory expects transitory revivals and is thus not a counterexample., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper discusses the relationship between spiritual and emotional intelligence and eternal happiness, from an Islamic perspective. In Islam, achieving spiritual intelligence first requires a close relationship with God—established, for example, through consistent purification of the soul, repentance, acts of worship, performing good deeds and avoiding evil. Through such action, the light of God—which comes with Divine guidance and the knowledge of truth—touches the hearts of believers, causing them to experience pure contentedness. This study takes a qualitative approach, using the NVivo text analysis tool to analyse texts from 43 references, comprising 31 journal articles and 12 books or chapters. The three most frequently used words were 'Islamic', 'spiritual' and 'happiness', while 'intelligence' was the fourteenth most-used. This finding highlights the fear of God due to the love of God as the highest obedience, as it is the purest and sincerest degree of worship (i.e. for God's sake completely). Spiritual intelligence trains the soul from its prone-to-evil state to become more angelic or serene, thereby increasing emotional intelligence. This will be reflected in a believer's attitude, emotion and behaviours aligning with the conduct commended in Islam, to whom God promises an afterlife of eternal happiness in Heaven. This paper draws on the Qur'an and Sunnah as well as prominent Islamic scholarship to support the Islamic concepts discussed, enriching our understanding and perspective on the Islamic concept of spiritual and emotional intelligence and its role in attaining eternal happiness in Islam. This study also highlights several key concepts pivotal to Islamic spiritual and emotional intelligence as pre-requisites for obtaining eternal happiness, therefore advancing current knowledge on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although spiritual practices such as prayer are engaged by many to support well-being and coping, little research has addressed nurses and prayer, whether for themselves or facilitating patients' use of prayer. We conducted a qualitative study to explore how prayer (as a proxy for spirituality and religion) is manifest-whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted-in healthcare, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. This paper analyzes interviews with 21 nurses in Vancouver and London as a subset of the larger study. Findings show that nurses' kindness can buffer the loneliness and exclusion of ill health and in this way support the "spirit" of those in their care. Spiritual support for patients rarely incorporated prayer, in part because of ambiguities about permission and professional boundaries. Nurses' engagement with prayer and spiritual support could become a politicized site of religious accommodation, where imposition, religious illiteracy, and racism could derail person-centered care and consequently enact social exclusion. Spiritual support (including prayer) sustained nurses themselves. We propose that nursing's equity-oriented knowledge encompass spirituality and religion as sites of exclusion and inclusion. Nurses must be supported to move past religious illiteracy to provide culturally and spiritually sensitive care with clarity about professional boundaries and collaborative models of spiritual care., (© The Authors. Nursing Inquiry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This paper examines the debates around the "miracle of Maglavit", a shepherd's vision of God that took place in 1935 in Romania and attracted much contemporary popular and intellectual interest. The debates drew in arguments from doctors and theologians, who discussed the psychology of divine revelation and tried to elaborate the implications that such an event could have for the life of the Romanian nation. The paper places these debates in the context of wider contemporary discussions about psychology and religion. I argue that what Maglavit shows is that, in Romania at least, public debates about visionary experience in the 1930s were not only debates about its psychology, but of a psychology thoroughly imbricated with political concerns., (© 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

One of Rorty's last publications is an afterword he contributed to an updated edition of the 1907 classic _Christianity and the Social Crisis_ written ny the Social Gospel giant, Walter Rauschenbusch, who was Rorty's maternal grandfather. In this reflection on my experience organizing the archive, I attempt to situate Rorty's atheism between the religious pragmatism of his students Cornel West and Jeffrey Stout, and the anti-liberal New Traditionalism of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.

Intelligent design (ID)-the latest incarnation of religious creationism-posits that complex biological features did not accrue gradually via natural evolutionary forces but, instead, were crafted ex nihilo by a cognitive agent. Yet, many complex biological traits are gratuitously complicated, function poorly, and debilitate their bearers. Furthermore, such dysfunctional traits abound not only in the phenotypes but inside the genomes of eukaryotic species. Here, I highlight several outlandish features of the human genome that defy notions of ID by a caring cognitive agent. These range from de novo mutational glitches that collectively kill or maim countless individuals (including embryos and fetuses) to pervasive architectural flaws (including pseudogenes, parasitic mobile elements, and needlessly baroque regulatory pathways) that are endogenous in every human genome. Gross imperfection at the molecular level presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces. In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID.

This paper presents a literature review of science teaching approaches that seek to support equity in science classrooms, focusing on marginalization based on (i) race/ethnicity, (ii) social class/socioeconomic background, and (iii) religion. Considered were approaches that science teachers can use in science classes in secondary schools. They were analyzed and discussed against the backdrop of critical pedagogy by Paulo Freire and the educational theory by Hannah Arendt, which constitutes a novelty in science education research. The review used meta interpretation combined with systematic searches in the ERIC database. It is, thus, limited to works published in English. A total of 930 articles (2013-2021) were identified out of which 64 were fully analyzed. The analysis shows that most approaches strive to provide more equal access to the existing science knowledge and structures of the community. This corresponds to the introduction to the "old world" in a conservative interpretation of Arendt's term. I argue that in addition, it is necessary to employ a more radical interpretation of the "old world" as fundamentally plural which is done in translanguaging and grappling with racism. Further, the transformative nature of science education needs to be strengthened in terms of Freire's critical pedagogy and Arendt's concept of natality. This means allowing students to become aware of oppressive structures to induce change. Only youth participatory science, youth participatory action research, and grappling with racism explicitly aim for this. This shows that nuanced perspectives on equity in science education are needed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical, historical, and legal account and analysis of how money, an inexorable lubricant of all economies, evolved from metallic origins to acceptance in paper form in Muslim traditions.Design/methodology/approach This paper underlines flaws, points of objections, corollaries and counter-points, and it ends with a thematic discussion on the way forward for Muslim nations with respect to various political and regulatory implications for implementations of potential paper money alternativesFindings After undergoing experimentation and customary use of various objects as money (such as sea shells, gold, silver, stones, tobacco, etc.), the world has finally settled down by embracing paper money as an official medium of exchange.Originality/value Paper money also endured many financial crises and initial oppositions to its premise. From an Islamic standpoint, paper money poses certain flaws and limitations that can make it unacceptable from legal perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion-based AI chatbots serve religious practitioners by bringing them godly wisdom through technology. These bots reply to spiritual and worldly questions by drawing insights or citing verses from the Quran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Torah, or other holy books. They answer religious and theological queries by claiming to offer historical contexts and providing guidance and counseling to their users. A criticism of these bots is that they may give inaccurate answers and proliferate bias by propagating homogenized versions of the religions they represent. These "embodied spiritual machines" may likewise bear bias against women, their gender, and their societal roles. This paper crafts a concept intended to address this GPT issue by reimagining, modifying, and implementing a feminist approach to these chatbots. It examines the concepts and designs of these bots and how they address women-related questions. Along with the challenge of bringing gender and diversity-sensitive religious wisdom closer to the people through technology, the paper proposes a re-engineered model of a fair religion-based AI chatbot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses implementing the Islamic learning approach model in Jembrana-Bali's case study in State High School (SMAN) 1 Jembrana. This paper explores the effectiveness of multicultural learning models used in Islamic religious education learning. Multicultural learning model creating harmonious interaction. Furthermore, the integration of diversity understanding between Hindu and Islamic students aims to peaceful practices in the educational environment. Data sources were obtained through unstructured observations and interviews from July to September 2019. The result showed that the learning process of Islamic religious education with a multicultural approach forms the character of students, both Hindu and Muslim, to be humanist, tolerant, and inclusive. In shaping character and fostering understanding diversity, the learning approach used is the contribution approach, additive approach, and the decision making and social action approach proposed by Allison Cumming-McCann. The interaction of students in SMAN 1 Jembrana, both Hindus and Muslims, aims to acculturation and enculturation of two different religions and traditions.

This paper employs the feminist educational leadership perspective to analyse the ecological context and its influence on the leadership experiences of school head teachers within a patriarchal cultural setting. Methodology: This paper forms part of a mixed methods study that included a quantitative random survey during the first research phase to determine the leadership styles of 350 secondary school head teachers across nine districts in the Punjab province of Pakistan using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. This paper is based on the second research phase that analyses empirical data from semi structured interviews of a purposive-stratified sample of 14 head teachers, selected from among the 264 survey respondents, comprising of seven males and seven females. Bronfenbrenner's ecological development theory is employed as an analytical framework for thematic analysis. Findings: The study reveals that females must navigate gender stereotypes in a society where they have to fight to establish authority, encounter misogynistic attitudes, rely upon familial support to begin their career, gain spiritual support from a higher power, face work-family conflicts all while practicing educational leadership with high motivation. On the other hand, males assume themselves to be natural leaders and appear to be spared from ecological challenges that impede their leadership journeys. Implications: The findings confirm the prevalence of gender stereotypes that position leadership within the masculine domain in a patriarchal context. The study proposes a complete restructuring of the socio-cultural framework to create a gender neutral society that provides equal educational and professional opportunities to all social members in order to maximize human capital development that is crucial for a country's economic progress. The findings reflect several subtle and non-subtle socio-cultural challenges faced by female leaders around the world. Originality -- This study contributes to enhancing the literature on gender and educational leadership in a patriarchal cultural context.

Introduction to the papers from the June 2017 conference “The Sick Action”