Search Results (93)

As carriers of traditional culture, Chinese idiom allusions contain rich semantic and emotional content. High-quality illustrations of these idioms hold significant potential for applications in cultural communication and education. Although generative artificial intelligence has achieved substantial progress in general image synthesis, it remains challenging to produce idiom illustrations in culture-intensive scenarios that simultaneously preserve cultural symbols, maintain affective ontology, and exhibit high visual aesthetic quality. To address this gap, we propose a three-dimensional evaluation framework—Zhen-Shan-Mei (Truth-Goodness-Beauty)—for idiom illustrations. The ‘Truth’ module uses Chinese vision–language models to quantify cultural symbols; the ‘Goodness’ module applies cross-modal affective analysis to assess affective ontology; and the ‘Beauty’ module computes quantitative aesthetic metrics (composition balance, color harmony, and line expressiveness). Based on this system, an AI-idiom prototype system is constructed to realize closed-loop iteration of generation-evaluation-regeneration and threshold screening. Experiments show that the proportion of illustrations selected by subjects after the “Truth-Goodness-Beauty” screening reaches 78.1%. The results suggest that the proposed method is effective in maintaining cultural symbols, strengthening affective ontology, and improving visual aesthetics and offers a potentially interpretable and reproducible evaluation and optimization framework for culture-intensive image generation tasks. Full article

Honesty is essential for both individual development and the functioning of society. Although prior research has identified various factors that shape honest behavior, relatively little is known about whether adolescents’ honesty can be influenced by subtle morality-related cues, particularly among adolescents. The present study investigated whether exposure to verbal and visual morality-related cues would increase honest behavior in middle school students. Two behavioral experiments were conducted, each with 120 middle school students (aged 13–18) as participants. In Experiment 1, participants completed a Chinese idiom -unscrambling task with either the ethics-related or neutral characters. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visual cuing task involving either moral exemplar images or neutral images. In both experiments, honest behaviors were assessed via self-reported outcomes in a computerized coin-tossing task. Across both experiments, participants primed with morality-related words (Experiment 1) or moral exemplars (Experiment 2) demonstrated significantly more honest behavior in the coin toss task than those in the control group. These findings suggest that subtle verbal and visual morality-related cues can increase honest behavior in adolescents. The present study provides behavioral evidence that morality-related cues may shape honesty-related responding in adolescence and offers practical implications for promoting moral development through subtle contextual influences. Full article

This article re-examines Gen 28:10–22 through a diachronic analysis informed by its close literary and thematic parallels with Gen 35:9–15. In light of recent developments in Pentateuchal scholarship that question the traditional dating of supposedly pre-Priestly texts, the study adopts a method grounded in detailed textual, linguistic, and literary observation rather than reliance on fixed source-critical models. The analysis argues that Gen 28:10–22 is not a unified narrative but a composite text consisting of an early narrative core overlaid by a post-Priestly addition. Particular attention is given to the ritual acts of pillar erection, anointing with oil, and Jacob’s vow, which exhibit strong affinities with Priestly and Deuteronomistic idioms. A comparison with the Priestly account in Gen 35 suggests that the post-Priestly expansion in Gen 28 responds polemically to a Priestly tendency to neutralize Bethel’s sanctity. The article situates this literary development within the religious landscape of Persian-period Yehud. Full article

The stream pipeline idiom provides a fluent and composable way to express computations over collections. It gained widespread popularity after its introduction in .NET in 2005, later influencing many platforms, including Java in 2014 with the introduction of Java Streams, and continues to be adopted in contemporary languages such as Kotlin. However, the set of operations available in standard libraries is limited, and developers often need to introduce operations that are not provided out of the box. Two options typically arise: implementing custom operations using the standard API or adopting a third-party collections library that offers a richer suite of operations. In this article, we show that both approaches may incur performance overhead, and that the former can also suffer from verbosity and reduced readability. We propose an alternative approach that remains faithful to the stream-pipeline pattern: developers implement the unit operations of the pipeline from scratch using a functional yield-based traversal pattern. We demonstrate that this approach requires low programming effort, eliminates the performance overheads of existing alternatives, and preserves the key qualities of a stream pipeline. Our experimental results show up to a 3× speedup over the use of native yield in custom extensions. Full article

This paper examines Christian icons in Panjab, in northern India, and their relationship to the larger discourse on race, iconoclasm, and decentering Whiteness in the United States. I analyze the appropriation of Panjabi idioms woven into Christian icons to interrogate the alleged case of forced conversions of lower caste, Mazhabi Sikhs, and the atmospheres of violence. Focusing on the beheading of Christ and Mary’s pieta statue in a church in Tarn Taran, Panjab in 2022, I investigate the iconic materiality and vexed histories of the religious symbol through a visual studies lens. How do Christian images signal liminal material presences that oscillate between their identity of sacred icons and of hegemonic monuments of white supremacy? Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic and decolonial framework, I argue that entangled in the politics of memory, Christian icons are an impregnated space of intersecting colonial histories of oppression and conversion entrenched in hierarchies of race, class, and caste. This study contributes to understanding the growing impact of Christianity in northern India, the war of narratives being enacted upon its icons, and its relationship to anti-colonial and anti-racial expressions of transnational iconoclasm to posit a bigger question: Is there a way to navigate through the dense matrix of colonialism, race, religion, caste, and violence to reclaim agency through Mignolo’s call for a “praxis of decolonial healing”? Full article

The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨), a Qing dynasty spirit-writing (fuji扶乩) text, is widely known through the Wilhelm–Jung translation lineage, where jinhua 金華 is rendered as “Golden Flower” and read as mandala-like symbolism. Based on a close reading of the Daozang Jiyao 道藏輯要version, this article argues that in the Chinese text jinhua is not primarily a floral image but a technical and experiential term for luminosity in Daoist inner-alchemical cultivation. Hua 華 is resemanticized from botanical “flower/flourishing” into “radiance,” and the work explicitly defines the key term as “jinhua is light”. The text further organizes cultivation into a three-stage trajectory—“sudden emergence”, “circulation”, and “great condensation”, through which qi 氣 is refined into light and luminosity stabilizes as spirit (shen 神). Finally, the analysis situates this luminous grammar within the work’s explicit Three Teachings (sanjiao 三教) framing: Confucian “illuminating virtue” (mingde 明德) and Buddhist idioms of luminous mind-nature (xin-xing guangming 心性光明) and dharma-body language function as a shared vocabulary for describing non-grasping awareness and embodied realization. On this basis, jinhua is best understood not as a decorative metaphor or a purely psychological symbol but as a practice-oriented mechanism of ontological luminosity, clarifying both the inner-alchemical logic of The Secret and the stakes of its modern reception. Full article

Huysmans’s novel À rebours can be seen as an epitome of the dialectic implied by the term peccata lectionis: reading can only come into its own through certain ‘sins’ inherent to it while possibly compromising it. Such ‘sins’ are involved in the decision of the novel’s single protagonist and anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to withdraw into the solitude of his country house to live a life dedicated to aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. While celebrating his own eccentric fancies and artificiality of taste, the protagonist’s days of decadence, in their very antagonism towards both society and nature, are spent pursuing what can be called ‘reading of culture’. As ‘the reading of culture’ and its dialectics in the novel extend to and draw upon a wealth of references to the Catholic cultural tradition, the latter leads to a textual logic and a particular kind of lectio. It is in keeping with the novel being widely regarded as a harbinger of the ‘Catholic turn’ in its author’s career, Des Esseintes, at one point of the narrative, comes to explore the so-called ‘Catholic idiom’. Whereas his critique is aimed at 19th century Catholic writers in France and their indebtedness to the definitive rhetoric of the French Grand Siècle, the ‘Catholic idiom’, its particular textuality and the ‘reading of culture’ that is manifest in it may lie elsewhere in Huysmans’s novel itself. These likely reside in the textual logic of catalogues or ‘compendia’, that is, the listing of names within a category, which evokes mediaeval textual practices. The catalogue or ‘compendium’ as a genre within Huysmans’s novel fulfils the artificiality and vigour of the protagonist’s ‘reading of culture’—and the whole dialectic of the peccata lectionis. Full article

Illustrated digital picture books are widely used for second-language reading and vocabulary growth. We ask how close current generative AI (GenAI) tools are to producing such books on demand for specific learners. Using the ChatGPT-based Learning And Reading (C-LARA) platform with GPT-5 for text/annotation and GPT-Image-1 for illustration, we ran three pilot studies. Study 1 used six AI-generated English books glossed into Chinese, French, and Ukrainian and evaluated them using page-level and whole-book Likert questionnaires completed by teachers and students. Study 2 created six English books targeted at low-intermediate East-Asian adults who had recently arrived in Adelaide and gathered student and teacher ratings. Study 3 piloted an individually tailored German mini-course for one anglophone learner, with judgements from the learner and two germanophone teachers. Images and Chinese glossing were consistently strong; French glossing was good but showed issues with gender agreement, register, and naturalness of phrasing; and Ukrainian glossing underperformed, with morphosyntax and idiom errors. Students rated tailored English texts positively, while teachers requested tighter briefs and curricular alignment. The German pilot was engaging and largely usable, with minor image-consistency and cultural-detail issues. We conclude that for well-supported language pairs (in particular, English–Chinese), the workflow is close to classroom/self-study usability, while other language pairs need improved multi-word expression handling and glossing. All resources are reproducible on the open-source platform. We adopt an interdisciplinary stance which combines aspects taken from computer science, linguistics, and language education. Full article

Figurative language (metaphor, idiom, irony/sarcasm) is central to pragmatic communication but is frequently challenging for children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A scoping review was conducted to map pedagogical and clinical interventions that target figurative-language skills in school-age learners with ASD and to summarize reported outcomes. Following a PCC (Population–Concept–Context) framework and PRISMA-ScR reporting, systematic searches were performed in ERIC and Google Scholar (2010–2025). Eligibility required an ASD sample (ages 5–18), an intervention explicitly addressing figurative-language comprehension, and empirical outcome data from educational or related practice settings. Seven studies met inclusion criteria: five targeting metaphors, one targeting idioms, and one targeting sarcasm/irony. Interventions were predominantly delivered one-to-one or in small groups and emphasized structured, explicit instruction with visual scaffolds and stepwise prompting. Across studies, participants demonstrated clear gains on trained items. Generalization beyond trained material was most often observed for metaphor and sarcasm interventions, particularly when instruction highlighted underlying semantic relations or cue-based pragmatic signals; by contrast, the idiom program yielded item-specific learning with minimal near-term transfer. Limited follow-up data suggested short-term maintenance where assessed. Reported variability across individuals was substantial, underscoring the influence of underlying structural-language skills and social-pragmatic demands. Overall, the evidence indicates that figurative-language skills in ASD are amenable to targeted intervention; effective programs tend to combine explicit teaching, visual supports, multiple exemplars, and planned generalization opportunities. Given small samples and methodological heterogeneity, further classroom-based trials with longer follow-up and detailed learner profiles are needed. The findings support integrating figurative-language goals within individualized education and speech-language therapy plans, while aligning instructional complexity with each learner’s linguistic and pragmatic profile. Full article

Ilkhanid architecture occupies a distinctive position in the history of Islamic art through the development of highly elaborate stucco decoration. Despite their technical and artistic significance, these works have seldom been examined with respect to execution methods and design principles. That gap is addressed here through a field identification and classification of the techniques and stylistic patterns characteristic of Ilkhanid stucco in Iran. The analysis reveals that Ilkhanid craftsmen introduced several innovative methods in hand-carved stucco, such as Seh-gacha (very high relief) and Moshabbak (reticulated forms), as well as a specialized molding technique (Patta), frequently enriched with gilding—the earliest documented use of gilding in Iranian architectural stucco. These findings challenge the prevailing view of Ilkhanid stucco as merely a continuation of earlier traditions, instead demonstrating its role as a medium of experimentation and innovation. Key stylistic features include multilayered arabesques combined with inscriptions of varying scales (exemplified by the Mādar-o Farzand style), gypsum-plastered surfaces adorned with knotted Kufic and Bannāī inscriptions, complex geometric frameworks, and the earliest known trefoil arch mihrabs and muqarnas-like stucco mihrabs. Together, these results highlight the Ilkhanid contribution to the technical and aesthetic evolution of Islamic architectural ornament during the 13th–14th centuries. Full article

This study examines the figure of the baksı as a living reflection of ancient Turkic belief systems in contemporary Kazakh culture. The baksı, whose earliest attestations in Old Uyghur Turkic derive from the Chinese po-shih (“scholar, teacher”), historically denoted a wide range of roles, including religious guide, scholar, scribe, healer, bard, and shaman. Employing an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates philological, lexicographic, folkloric, and ethnographic perspectives, the research traces the semantic development of the term across Turkic and Mongolic traditions, its uses in historical texts, and its representations in Kazakh oral literature such as proverbs, idioms, epics, and fairy tales. The findings show that while the baksı has been idealised as a healer, sage, and spiritual mediator, it has also been depicted with suspicion as a deceiver or figure associated with jinn, particularly in the post-Islamic period. Ethnographic insights further reveal that becoming a baksı involves a sacred calling, initiation rituals, and distinctive clothing and performance practices, situating the figure at the intersection of religion, medicine, and art. The study concludes that the baksı is not only a historical heritage but also a dynamic cultural institution, mediating between past and present, nature and society, and continuing to shape Kazakh identity today. Full article

What does one learn about religion through a study of Syrian Christian family cultures? How do religion and family—both as historically shaped ideological frames and social classifiers—inflect each other in Syrian Christian articulations about their past and present? What do these inflections tell us about being Christian in Kerala and beyond? Does it offer a critique of religion and family as sui generis categories? Based on select examples of Syrian Christian articulations from digital family displays produced by family associations (or kudumbayogam), I will argue that the religion–family node (or more appropriately nexus) hovers over the muddle of social relations. On one hand, the triumph of religion as a state-cushioned, universal category separated from the realm of the social and the historical (or religion with a capital ‘R’) has meant a neat tucking away of Syrian Christian households under the rubric of a reified Christianity. Similarly, the invocation of the patrilineal, patriarchal family as a universal category bereft of specificities works in tandem with this ironed-out Christianity in Syrian Christian family cultures. On the other hand, beyond their function as easy explainers, the religion–family nexus includes particular details which complicate the universality of the categories. These details recover family and religion in their heterogeneous elements expressed in place-sensitive caste idioms. I argue that the ‘universal’ in family and religion is sustained by the ‘particular’. A dialectical process of differentiation and homogenisation is critical to the Syrian Christian embrace of the religion–family nexus. Full article

Based on the imago Dei theory, this essay attempts to establish a correspondence between the union of natures in Christ and the relationship between man and creation, focusing attention on the communication of idioms and reciprocal indwelling. It compares the dominion that man is called to exercise over nature by divine vocation as an image of the hypostatic union, with the despotic dominion, so widespread in modern times, that reflects the fall and is characterized by conflict and not by harmony. Finally, it is maintained that the form of dominion inspired by the application of the Christological doctrine inserts man in necessity and the cosmic rhythms, favoring the development of a human community aligned with the liturgical cycle and founded on peace. Full article

One of the more well-known of Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the nature of religious beliefs is that we go wrong if we try to vindicate or refute religious beliefs in the same way as we do in the sciences. This may make it seem as if Wittgenstein held a view where the world can be divided into two separate spheres, one hard, objective, world of facts where beliefs are held because we have proof for them, and another subjective, softer, vaguer, where our beliefs cannot be proven and are held for completely different reasons. Religious beliefs would thus fall into the second category. In this text, I will argue (1) that even though it is true that Wittgenstein did not think that religious beliefs were on a par with scientific beliefs (held for similar reasons, vindicated in similar ways), he nevertheless did not divide the world into two (in the above mentioned way); and (2) that Wittgenstein’s reflections on the nature of religious beliefs tells us something important about what it means to hold a belief (in general) that challenges several predominant theoretical views about beliefs. I will, with some help from C.S. Lewis, try to show that thinking about the differences in beliefs according to the predominant model—where the “beliefs” are fundamentally different in a scientific and a religious idioms, which leads us to think that one of them has to be endorsing the right, true, belief; or that they are incommensurable—is a model that misrepresents the “conflict.” The matter may not be as intellectual as one may be prone to think—given that the concept of “belief” is at the center—but may rather be best understood (and, hence, the difficulties most efficiently overcome) if we learn to exercise other features of our experience. In particular, we need to learn how to listen and look at things that sound and look strange. A self-critical training of one’s ears is what is needed. (And for these reasons, the article starts in a different register than one might expect.) Full article

The dialects discussed in this article were considered Belarusian in the early 20th century, and later, as a result of the transfer of the administrative (state) border, they became part of the Russian territory and were considered Russian. The changes occurring in these dialects as a result of the influence of the standard Russian language are interesting from various perspectives. Firstly, the linguistic self-identification of dialect speakers changes and the perception of their dialect as less prestigious compared to the standard language is formed. Secondly, linguistic features that dialectologists previously defined as characteristic of the Belarusian language are being replaced by standard Russian ones. By analyzing the linguistic data obtained from the dialect speakers of different generations, we can trace the emergence of variation and then its loss. Observing which linguistic features are subject to change first, and which remain more stable, allows us to examine linguistic changes through the lens of the “hierarchy of borrowings” theory. Additionally, given the linguistic inequality between the dialect and the standard language, we can observe the gradual transformation of the dialect under the influence of the prestigious standard idiom. Therefore, the loss of Belarusian–Russian variation can be viewed as a process of dedialectization, bringing the dialect closer to the standard language. Full article