Search Results (43)

This paper argues that English translations of the Qur’ān play a pivotal role in shaping interfaith dialogue, either fostering mutual understanding or reinforcing religious division, depending on the translator’s ideological stance. While interreligious relations have historically been marred by conflict, the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions marked a turning point toward more inclusive and dialogical engagement. In this context, translating the Qur’ān emerged as a crucial medium through which Islamic teachings could be made accessible to non-Muslim audiences. Several scholars, including Kidwai and Elmarsafy, have explored the Orientalist framing of Qur’ān translation; however, few researchers have examined how modern renderings consciously reposition the text as a site of interfaith ethics. This study critically examines whether George Sale’s influential translation of the Qur’ān—reprinted nearly 200 times—contributes to or hinders interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians. It compares Sale’s Qur’ān rendition into English with five contemporary translations. The paper analyzes the translations of five Qur’ānic verses promoting coexistence, with particular attention to key terms such as إِكْرَاهَ ikrah (compulsion), الدِّينِ ad-dīn (religion), تَّقْوَىٰ taqwā (piety), and مُسْلِمُونَ muslimūn (submitters). Guided by Munday’s theory of ideology in translation, the analysis demonstrates that Sale’s rendering adopts a distinctly polemical tone intended to assert Christian superiority. The findings indicate a clear shift from polemical to dialogical translation strategies. Sale’s Orientalist approach—evident in his footnote on Q.4:157, where he characterizes Muslim exegesis as intellectually deficient—ultimately constrains meaningful interfaith engagement. In contrast, Khattab employs an inclusive and ethically grounded approach that actively fosters interreligious dialogue. By positioning Qur’ān translation at the intersection of theology, linguistics, and interfaith relations, this paper demonstrates that translation choices hold significant power: they can either bridge divides or exacerbate tensions between religious communities. Full article

This thesis examines the theological status of artificial intelligence-generated religious imagery through Byzantine icon theory, asking whether such images can participate in the material, devotional, and communal, definitions traditionally ascribed to icons. Situating AI within an intellectual lineage beginning with iconoclasm debates and then turning to Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, this project places contemporary image generation models such as DALL·E and Midjourney in dialog with late antique and Byzantine debates on representation, likeness, and mediation. Drawing on St Theodore the Studite’s defense of icons as relational images grounded in the Incarnation, this thesis argues that AI-generated portraits cannot be understood as icons in a theological or art historical sense. Icons depend upon an embodied triad between maker, prototype, and worshiping community, sustained through liturgical practice, ascetic discipline, and intentional craft. Adding Aristotle’s account of deliberation further clarifies this distinction: algorithmic production lacks the ethical agency and purposive choice intrinsic to sacred image-making. While engaging the scholarship of Robin Cormack, Charles Barber, Bissera V. Petcheva, and many others, this study reasserts the Christological foundations of icon theory while situating AI imagery within contemporary political economies of data extraction, militarism, and environmental cost. AI may attempt to reproduce religious imagery, but it cannot generate objects of real veneration. Full article

This study explains how strategy–execution gaps become self-reinforcing during digital process transformation in layered manufacturing organizations. Drawing on an embedded qualitative process study of a large Chinese brewery’s transformation (2020–2024), we triangulate 10 semi-structured interviews across hierarchical levels with longitudinal public disclosures to reconstruct the initiative timeline and trace mechanisms across change phases. The analysis shows that platform-based process governance can scale faster than shared meaning and dialog, producing frontline sensemaking gaps and formalistic, top-down communication. These conditions thin employee voice and weaken feedback closure, which in turn erodes the legitimacy of organizational diagnosis and fragments implementation support. As interface problems are handled through local workarounds, management intensifies visibility-based monitoring, further suppressing voice and reinforcing the execution gap. We develop an organizational development process model that centers feedback closure and diagnosis legitimacy as bridging mechanisms linking soft change dynamics (meaning, trust, voice) with hard digital governance (process standards, data infrastructures, monitoring). The model offers actionable implications for leaders to build closure and legitimate diagnosis as operational capabilities throughout transformation. Full article

Open-ended, team-based problem solving demands (i) a bridge between stochastic language models and symbolic control, (ii) mechanisms for idea elaboration, (iii) feature-level concept combination, and (iv) internal representations that support understanding beyond mere association. We present a cognitive architecture (CA) that couples an LLM with an editable knowledge-graph (KG) scaffold and a controller that adaptively schedules five reasoning strategies. Elaborations are cast as graph updates validated against coverage and consistency checks; combinations produce property- and relation-level recompositions. On 30 collaborative programming dialogs (nine representative scenarios), adaptive prompting improves solution completeness by 19.1% and reduces required turns by 18.5% over a CoT baseline; explicit concept combinations increase Distinct-3 by 12.4 points with a +0.7 gain in human-rated creativity. Ablations show that Soft→Pruning scaffolds best support early elaboration, while Hard partitioning helps under ambiguity. The CA demonstrates a practical route to aligning LLMs with team intent in open-ended tasks. Full article

This study explores, through the lens of rural revitalization, how local cultural heritage can be activated and turned into an endogenous driver for rural cultural and creative industries. Focusing on Jiande City in Zhejiang Province, China, it draws on longitudinal fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2024. Methodologically, the research employed participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and focus group discussions with key stakeholders from local government bodies—such as the Organization Department and the Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports Bureau—as well as village communities, including Meicheng Town. Based on this empirical work, the study advances a theoretical framework centered on “cultural gene decoding,” structured around three core phases: cultural decoding, creative transformation, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. This process involves excavating fragmented local cultural memories and transforming them into culturally resonant narratives and creative products with contemporary appeal. Cases such as “Strawberry Town” and “Qianhe Women’s Culture” in Jiande illustrate the emergence of an integrated “culture + industry + technology + academia” ecosystem. Within this ecosystem, the international journal Agricultural & Rural Studies plays a pivotal role by translating local practices into academic discourse, thereby connecting grassroots experiences with global dialog and enhancing international visibility. Full article

Grounded in the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework, this study examines how tourists’ in-trip use of ChatGPT shapes satisfaction during leisure travel. Survey data from 502 Indonesian travellers were analysed using PLS-SEM. Information diagnosticity, task efficiency, and perceived social support significantly strengthen travellers’ confidence in on-site choices, with social support emerging as the strongest predictor. Greater confidence elevates positive destination emotion, which in turn enhances tourist satisfaction, supporting a sequential cognition–affect mechanism. The study extends SOR to the during-trip stage by conceptualising ChatGPT as a real-time, dialogic stimulus that influences experience formation. Practically, destination and tourism firms can deploy ChatGPT at key on-site touchpoints and prioritise reassuring, effort-reducing guidance, supported by reliable local information and clear escalation to human assistance for higher-stakes needs. Full article

In 2024, the conservative media outlet Daily Wire produced a documentary film entitled Am I Racist? Created by political commentator and author Matt Walsh and director Justin Folk, the film became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of the last decade. Unlike traditional documentaries, Walsh employs a rhetoric of irony against anti-racist adherents to obstruct their influence and inoculate mostly conservative viewers. His method, however, is unusual and even questionable in conservative Christian circles. The film is analyzed using a Bakhtinian analysis of dialogic opposition wherein Walsh embodies three ironic characters—Rogue, Fool, and Clown—in order to expose the monologue of anti-racism. The analysis demonstrates the dialogization of the anti-racist monologue through rhetorical enactments of anacrisis and syncrisis. Through juxtapositions of anti-racist ideologists and their everyday racist opponents, Walsh obstructs the future effectiveness of the ideology. Even more, by becoming a DEI expert himself, he performatively distorts the monologue to victimize opponents and entertain viewers through the public spectacle. Ultimately, Am I Racist? demonstrates a unique modern turn and strategy in conservative and, more importantly, Christian rhetorical strategies that needs more attention in the future. Full article

In the face of growing demand for emergency treatment in mass casualty incidents involving acute hemorrhagic shock, disaster sites often suffer from limited search and rescue manpower and inadequate medical detection capabilities. With the rapid development of robot technology, the deployment of robots provides greater flexibility and reliability in disaster emergency response and search and rescue work, which can effectively address the shortage of search and rescue forces and medical resources at disaster sites. This paper introduces a snake-like robot designed for the rapid triage of casualties with hemorrhagic shock. Through a structural design combining active wheels and orthogonal joints, the robot integrates the advantages of high-speed mobility of wheeled robots with the high flexibility of jointed robots so as to adapt to the complex environments typical of search and rescue scenarios. Meanwhile, the end of the robot is equipped with a visible light camera, an infrared camera and a voice interaction system, which realizes the rapid triage of casualties with hemorrhagic shock by collecting visible light, infrared and voice dialog data of the casualties. Through Webots software simulation and outdoor site simulation experiments, seven indicators of the designed snake-like search and rescue robot are verified, including walking speed, minimum passable hole size, climbing angle, obstacle-surmounting height, passable step size, ditch-crossing width and turning radius, as well as the effectiveness of collecting visible light images, infrared images and voice dialog data of the casualties. Full article

This study examines two proximate yet theologically and spatially disparate religious spaces in Seoul: the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine (Korean: 절두산 순교 성지; hereafter “Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine”) and the Yanghwajin Protestant Cemetery (Korean: 양화진 묘원; hereafter “Yanghwajin Cemetery”). We propose the concept of isomorphic heterotopias and discuss the logic of intersecting memories. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and cultural memory theory, the study finds that the Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine, through architectural enclosure, the exhibition of relics, and pilgrimage rituals, foregrounds the vertical redemption of martyrs’ flesh and faith, reinforcing ecclesiastical discourse and collective salvation narratives. In contrast, at Yanghwajin Cemetery, through dispersed tombstone layouts, egalitarian epitaph inscriptions, and public commemorative activities, the study finds that the site presents the dialectic of the martyr spirit within a secular spiritual space and individual testimonies. Despite their spatial heterogeneity, their geographic proximity generates a dialogical memory field: the vertical sacrality of the shrine is refracted through the cemetery’s horizontality, while the cemetery’s public spirit resonates with the shrine’s liturgical framework. This dialogical memory field, shaped by shared physical environments and common public narrative platforms—generates a long-term coexistence without convergence, producing a spatial relationship of “non-integrative entanglement” born of antagonism. At the same time, these sites are not isolated spatial fragments; rather, through urban governance, they are woven into the same memory politics network, forming an “isomorphic heterotopia.” Through politically inflected discursive narratives, both sites facilitate multidirectional flows of memory, preserving their respective “canons” while re-contextualizing each other within the same urban memory network. In doing so, they engage in an ongoing process of mutual rereading and co-construction, producing a re-contextualization of spatial memory and shaping a “composite historical sensibility” that, in turn, contributes to the city’s character. Full article

Against the backdrop of the rapid advancement of intelligent speech interaction and holographic display technologies, this paper introduces an interactive holographic display system. This paper applies 2D-to-3D technology to acquisition work and uses a Complex-valued Convolutional Neural Network Point Cloud Gridding (CCNN-PCG) algorithm to generate a computer-generated hologram (CGH) with depth information for application in point cloud data. During digital human hologram building, 2D-to-3D conversion yields high-precision point cloud data. The system uses ChatGLM for natural language processing and emotion-adaptive responses, enabling multi-turn voice dialogs and text-driven model generation. The CCNN-PCG algorithm reduces computational complexity and improves display quality. Simulations and experiments show that CCNN-PCG enhances reconstruction quality and speeds up computation by over 2.2 times. This research provides a theoretical framework and practical technology for holographic interactive systems, applicable in virtual assistants, educational displays, and other fields. Full article

Drawing on the epistemological tradition of feminist care theory and care ethics, this article analyzes Boris Groys’s contribution to the philosophy of care in order to highlight the implications of care issues in the context of art, which is an important reference point for both his and my own investigation. After an introductory overview of the problematic and conceptualization of care, I address Groys’s position. I then provide insights into feminist care ethics and the philosophy of the body, care aesthetics and care work, before turning to art care. In a concluding synthesis, I argue for a different philosophy of care in the light of a reorientation of our understanding of care work in general and in the art world in particular. Methodologically, I combine philosophical exegesis and critical theory, referring to the feminist critique of the Western philosophical tradition as expressed in Groys’s work. I remain at the discursive level of the philosophical study of care and its dialog with the broader field of feminist theory and care ethics, including in relation to care work and art care in the contemporary museum economy. Full article

This essay serves as an expansive, conceptual anchor and scholarly argument that demonstrates the modality of “reflexive extractivist” religious studies and also orients the Special Issue on Religion in Extractive Zones. We demonstrate that critical religious and theological scholarship have existing tools and methods for deepening the study of extraction in the environmental humanities and related discourses. We make two interconnected arguments: that religion has been and continues to be produced out of extractive zones in the conflicts, negotiations, and strategic alliances of contact zones and that the complex production of sacred and secular in these zones can be fruitfully analyzed as imaginaries and counter-imaginaries of extraction. We present these arguments through a dialogical and critically integrative methodology, in which arguments from theorists across several disciplines are put into conversation and from which our insights emerge. This methodology leads to a final section of the essay that sets a framework for, and invites further dialogical and integrative scholarship on, the practical ethics of non- or counter-extractive academic research, scholarship, and publishing. Offering theoretical, methodological, and practical suggestions, we call for a turn toward reflexive extractivist religious studies, articulate the specific conceptual and methodological approaches linking religion and extraction, and thus set the framework and tone for the Special Issue. Full article

This work underlines an analogy between urban and biological systems. The dialogic approach of systems biology showed us that parts constitute a whole and, in turn, the whole constitutes the parts. The development of a biological system such as an animal or a plant does not unfold by means of an autonomous internal program. Rather, it stems from the interaction of the organism’s internal response pattern and its external environment. The wide scientific literature on the genome–environment interaction confirms this. Nevertheless, the scientific community still tends to consider the environment as a mere external factor which simply modulates the organism’s program. On the contrary, the environment has a key role in development. For example, when a seed germinates after heavy rain, it does not simply react to an external signal indicating favorable conditions for germination. Rather, it interacts directly with rainwater, which becomes a developmental factor no less important than the seed coat proteins. Similar to what happens during the development of an organism, the interface between any complex system and its environment determines its structural and functional fate. We argue that large cities have blurred the interface with their natural environment and depend on delocalized global sources. They are like organisms kept alive by external devices. Hence, we propose to regenerate a vital interface between cities and their rural and natural environment as the main and promising path towards future urban civilization. Full article

Dialogic pedagogy has been explored by researchers at length in the 21st century. Focusing on the interactions between teachers and children and the underlying epistemological values that these interactions signal, a growing body of research has identified features of dialogic classrooms and conducted fine-tuned analysis of dialogic functions in classroom talk. Much of this research features classes of older primary learners. However, the foundations of dialogic pedagogy lie in early learning contexts. This article considers how teachers enact dialogic values with young learners (five- to six-year-olds) in discussions where they are invited to share their ideas in response to visual texts that provoke philosophical thinking about social responsibility and living together. The research uses linguistic ethnography to analyse the language of these interactions at macro-, meso- and micro-levels, and detailed extracts from the lessons are included to demonstrate different dialogic strategies that teachers employ. Dialogic chains of four or more turns are analysed in detail, as representative of extended interactions that move beyond simple and traditional classroom interaction structures. The findings highlight core dialogic principles of meaning-making and relating as fundamental to the success of the interactions with young children. Full article

This paper attempts to reconceptualize memory as an event from a theological perspective, drawing on the recent dialog between memory studies and Critical Event Studies. To this end, it analyzes the narrative and themes of the 2007 novel Brodeck’s Report by Philippe Claudel, classified as a third-generation Holocaust (narrative) writer in France, within the framework of event studies. The novel has been praised for successfully depicting the tragedy as a universal event transcending spatial–temporal specificity by utilizing the genre of allegory while minimizing references to the historical and geographical specificity of the Holocaust. Extending this evaluation, this paper particularly focuses from a theological perspective on how the protagonist and narrator, Brodeck, simply names the subject of his report—a past event that happened to an unidentified other (Autre) called the ‘Anderer’—as ‘Ereignis’ (event). This is noteworthy because Ereignis is not only the most famous concept representing late Heideggerian philosophy but also holds significant importance in post-Heideggerian modern philosophy as the speculative source of the ‘evental turn’, which, along with the ‘material turn’, constitutes one axis of the ‘ontological turn’ in contemporary humanities and social sciences. In this regard, this work, which narrativizes the universality of the Holocaust, provides interesting implications for the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis between memory studies in the humanities and social sciences and theological event studies. Above all, it stimulates a reconsideration of the conventional dichotomy between memory and event—namely, the commonplace premise of “events that occurred in the past” and “present memories of past events”—as revealed in the definition of memory studies as “naming pasts, transforming futures”. Thus, this paper explores the possibility of reconceptualizing the moment of memory as part of the ongoing event itself from past to present, and the event as a process of symbolic construction of meaning through memory. Full article