The European Rivers Network (ERN) calls for the ‘reconciliation of citizens with their rivers and lakes’, as a necessary step for freshwater protection and restoration of rivers. It co-ordinates annual river-bathing days with collective river jumps; upstream and downstream, across Europe, citizens simultaneously jump into rivers and lakes. But what is ‘reconciliation with the river'? This paper analyses that concept as the acknowledging and restoring of distorted, marginalised or blocked capabilities, and, based on this (...) analysis, critically discusses the practical contribution which the ERN makes to ‘reconciliation with the river’. (shrink)

The European policies acknowledge greenways and “Green Infrastructure” as strategically planned and delivered networks comprising the broadest range of green spaces and other environmental features. The Aniene River, linking the eastern suburbs of Rome to the City of Tivoli, has been envisaged in a multi-level approach as a Green-Blue Infrastructure able to hinder land use fragmentation and provide new continuity to remainders of open space. In turn, landscape is taken into account as a biodiversity reservoir, the scenery of outstanding (...) cultural heritage and the relevant backdrop of ordinary life. (shrink)

The balance between births and deaths in an age-structured population is strongly influenced by the spatial distribution of sub-populations. Our aim was to describe the demographic process of a fish population in an hierarchical dendritic river network, by taking into account the possible movements of individuals. We tried also to quantify the effect of river network changes (damming or channelling) on the global fish population dynamics. The Salmo trutta life pattern was taken as an example for.We proposed a (...) model which includes the demographic and the migration processes, considering migration fast compared to demography. The population was divided into three age-classes and subdivided into fifteen spatial patches, thus having 45 state variables. Both processes were described by means of constant transfer coefficients, so we were dealing with a linear system of difference equations. The discrete case of the variable aggregation method allowed the study of the system through the dominant elements of a much simpler linear system with only three global variables: the total number of individuals in each age-class. (shrink)

River segmentation of remote sensing images is of important research significance and application value for environmental monitoring, disaster warning, and agricultural planning in an area. In this study, we propose a river segmentation model in remote sensing images based on composite attention network to solve the problems of abundant river details in images and the interference of non-river information including bridges, shadows, and roads. To improve the segmentation efficiency, a composite attention mechanism is firstly introduced in the central region (...) of the network to obtain the global feature dependence of river information. Next, in this study, we dynamically combine binary cross-entropy loss that is designed for pixel-wise segmentation and the Dice coefficient loss that measures the similarity of two segmentation objects into a weighted one to optimize the training process of the proposed segmentation network. The experimental results show that compared with other semantic segmentation networks, the evaluation indexes of the proposed method are higher than those of others, and the river segmentation effect of CoANet model is significantly improved. This method can segment rivers in remote sensing images more accurately and coherently, which can meet the needs of subsequent research. (shrink)

The new business opportunities and prospects emerging in Europe within the Common Market and other Western and European countries also raise important ethical challenges. This work comprises a collection of ethical insights to enhance the conduct of business in an evolving Europe.

Modern cities form city networks through complex social ties. City network research is widely applied to guide regional planning, infrastructure construction, and resource allocation. China put forward the Yellow River Basin Development Strategy in 2019, but no research has been conducted on regional social connections among cities. Based on the gravity model modified by two-way “time distance” between cities, this is the first study to empirically examine the intensity and structure of the entire city network in the Yellow (...) River basin using the social network analysis method and ArcGIS software. The connection rules of the cross-city transfer of city officials in the basin are also investigated to illustrate the official ties between cities. The results suggest that the intensity of two-way connections between cities is generally low in the Yellow River basin and there is a positive correlation between city network development level and regional economic development level. The development gap between cities on the north and south banks is larger than that between the east and west regions, and some cities in the middle and upper reaches of the river are marginalized in the network. The status of the central cities in the Yellow River basin is distinct, but their connecting and leading abilities are not strong, showing an inverted T-shaped spatial distribution. The subgroups of city networks have strong internal connections, while the connection among subgroups is weak and the development shows a partitioned and fragmented pattern, making it difficult to form linkages among the upper, middle, and lower reaches. The “beaded chain” spatial development strategy can be adopted in the river basin planning, giving priority to strengthening the links within subgroups of cities and among adjacent subgroups, building central city chains, and reinforcing the overall basin management. (shrink)

During the precolonial period Zulu identity was based on a set of cultural markers defined by the royal family. But European linguists extended the borders of Zulu, as a written language, to include the peoples living to the south of the Tugela river in the colony of Natal. Folklorists, anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists, as well as European employers, adopted this view of the Zulu as a people or Volk. Following the defeat of the Zulu kingdom in (...) 1879, and the decline of the royal family, migrant workers increasingly returned home with this new notion of what it meant to be Zulu. This essentially European interpretation of the word was embraced and spread by Christian converts who, in the twentieth century, sought to mobilize an ethnic political following.Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi has continued with this tradition. In his speeches he represents the Zulu in primordial terms as a bounded group that historically has occupied both Natal and the old precolonial kingdom. The bantustan of KwaZulu, delineated and defined by the policy of apartheid, is presented as the natural heir to the Zulu kingdom and the Inkatha Freedom Party is portrayed as the guardian of the essence of Zuluness. An attractive historical self-imagery encourages people to define themselves in an exclusive manner as Zulu. Firm values and standards provide an ontological security and a network of assistance for sons abroad. Through a martial imagery, Buthelezi has represented the seven million Zulu as historically the most powerful obstacle to white supremacy. But since the resurgence of nationalist politics in the mid-1980s, and especially since the democratization started in 1990, Inkatha has attempted to attract the Zulu as a people in opposition to the ANC and their allies. This has most visibly resulted in a violent struggle for power; but it has also led to a virulent struggle over what it means to be Zulu. (shrink)

In the first millennium CE trade and kinship networks linked Western Europe and Central Asia via Scandinavia and the Russian rivers. These networks broke down when the early states began to emerge in Scandinavia during the 11th and 12th centuries, concurrent with the Christianization of the far North. Two cultural fault-lines mark Nordic history – between Western and Eastern Christendom and between feudal and non-feudal societies – and make this region distinct from Russia and Germany. The Swedish state, with (...) Finland as an integral part of the realm until the 19th century, was neither a composite monarchy, nor a feudal or despotic state. Sweden was one of the largest but also least populated countries in Europe. Its relative lack of resources led to unusual but efficient techniques of state-making demonstrated in two periods when Sweden was prominent in an all-European perspective: first as a Great Power (1620–1720) when it developed characteristics that did not appear elsewhere in Europe until the 20th century, and then during the rapid modernization that began around 1870. In this latter period there were five key junctures in the transition from the constitutional limbo and social democratic breakthroughs of the interwar period to the antinomies of present-day Sweden. (shrink)

Water quality prediction is the basis of water environmental planning, evaluation, and management. In this work, a novel intelligent prediction model based on the fuzzy wavelet neural network including the neural network, the fuzzy logic, the wavelet transform, and the genetic algorithm was proposed to simulate the nonlinearity of water quality parameters and water quality predictions. A self-adapted fuzzy c-means clustering was used to determine the number of fuzzy rules. A hybrid learning algorithm based on a genetic algorithm (...) and gradient descent algorithm was employed to optimize the network parameters. Comparisons were made between the proposed FWNN model and the fuzzy neural network, the wavelet neural network, and the neural network. The results indicate that the FWNN made effective use of the self-adaptability of NN, the uncertainty capacity of FL, and the partial analysis ability of WT, so it could handle the fluctuation and the nonseasonal time series data of water quality, while exhibiting higher estimation accuracy and better robustness and achieving better performances for predicting water quality with high determination coefficients R2 over 0.90. The FWNN is feasible and reliable for simulating and predicting water quality in river. (shrink)

The influence of William James on Ludwig Wittgenstein has been widely studied, as well as the criticism that the latter addresses to the former, but one aspect that has only rarely been focused on is the two philosophers’ use of the image of the flux, stream, or river. The analysis of some notes belonging to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass support the possibility of a comparison between James’ stream of thought, as outlined in the Principles of Psychology, and Wittgenstein’s river-bed of thoughts, presented (...) in On Certainty. (shrink)

This essay looks at the image of the ship in Péter Forgács’s documentary The Danube Exodus (1999) as a site that enables the viewer to meditate the encounter of the historical Self and the Other. Forgács, who works with the found footage material of an amateur filmmaker, teases out the paradoxical double movement of the historical event, in which both Jewish and German refugees use the river Danube as an escape route in the early phase of World War II, traveling (...) on the same paddle steamer in opposite directions. The documentary about two river-stories directed by an Eastern European filmmaker becomes a contemplation on interconnectedness, national cross-pollination and the inscription of the viewer in these processes. I argue that the film offers its audiences a way to visually and conceptually consider the unfeasibility of historiographic authority. (shrink)

With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low-carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This paper presents the construction of the CO2 emission network of an urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis, based on the gravity model. Combined with social network analysis, a multilevel analysis framework is proposed to (...) deal with the complexity, spatiality, and visualization of the CO2 emission network with reference to the network features, structural equivalence, and the rich-club phenomenon. The following results emerged: firstly, the spatial structure of the CO2 emissions was characterized by low robustness and compactness, indicating disunity among the studied cities. Secondly, there was found to be a strong correlation between regionalism and intercity connections, with geographically close cities playing a similar role in the network. Thirdly, the “rich-club” cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, Xiaogan, and Zhuzhou, dominated the connections, covering more than 87.1% of the network in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis. (shrink)

This paper aims to detect the methods of earnings management in Pearl River Delta region of China. The data were selected based on the list companies of Pearl River Delta region from 2008 to 2019 and the balanced panel analysis was adopted to pursue the results. After the random effect analysis, this study reaches the conclusion that downward earnings is through total assets, the difference between sales and receivables, fixed assets, and sales and upward earnings is mainly through the changes (...) of sales by the companies in Pearl River Delta region of China. (shrink)

The influence of William James on Ludwig Wittgenstein has been widely studied, as well as the criticism that the latter addresses to the former, but one aspect that has only rarely been focused on is the two philosophers’ use of the image of the flux, stream, or river. The analysis of some notes belonging to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass support the possibility of a comparison between James’ stream of thought, as outlined in the Principles of Psychology, and Wittgenstein’s river-bed of thoughts, presented (...) in On Certainty. After an introduction which offers a general frame for the following work, the first section of the paper examines all the Nachlass entries that directly mention James’ stream. Section 2 focuses on two remarks in which Wittgenstein explicitly criticizes James’ concept and implicitly anticipates his own way of dealing with this matter. These remarks, belonging to Manuscripts 165 and 129, both dating 1944, have not been published in any of Wittgenstein’s edited books, nor is it possible to find the same argument elsewhere. Wittgenstein’s critique concerns James’ lack of distinction between what is grammatical, or a priori, and what is empirical, or a posteriori, a distinction which the image of the stream should have suggested: a stream flows in a stream-bed and within banks. This is exactly the meaning that Wittgenstein’s own metaphor of the river-bed of thoughts is intended to convey. Section 3 analyses James’ concept of the stream and its corollaries, in order to clarify whether Wittgenstein’s critique is justified or not. James in effect draws a separation between a priori and a posteriori, but this separation is conceived from within the framework of empirical science. This analysis leads to the theme of the relations among science, philosophy and metaphysics, which is the subject of section 4. The conclusion is that Wittgenstein did appreciate James for his intuitions and for the power of his imagination: in a sense he even developed them; but he could not agree on the explicit formulation of his ideas. (shrink)

Domestic violence is endemic across Latin America. It is legitimated by patriarchal Christian theologies and widespread gender inequality. Drawing on the work of women theologians and activists working in Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere, this article explores women's networks of resistance against violence. These include public and legal acknowledgement of domestic violence; the transmission of life-affirming values; pastoral support in the denouncement of violence; and the development of open and fluid household structures.

In 1972, George Seddon wrote Sense of Place, documenting his experience and research into the Swan Coastal Plain, which has since become a landmark Australian environmental publication. Among its claims to influence is having given modern currency to the term sense of place. Although Seddon did not coin the phrase, it was this book that introduced the phrase into the fields of landscape and environmental design. The book includes information on landforms, climate, geology, soils, flora, the Swan River, the coast, (...) offshore islands, wetlands, and urban areas. Mr. Warner in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but at him 'generally'. But we cannot aim 'generally' at the universe, or if we do, we will miss our game. So said William James, the philosopher, and it is good advice on how to take aim at environmental problems. Sense of Place is a topographic essay, not on the universe, but the environs of Perth, Western Australia. It is in three parts: The Land - The Plants - Man. The landforms, climate, drainage geology and plant-cover are discussed in detail, to construct a picture of the region before European settlement. The last third deals with the land use by Aboriginal and European, and the major environmental resources of the region. (shrink)

It has been fashionable in the generalist literature to argue that the Ottomans lacked knowledge in European geography and politics. This chapter first offers some comments regarding Istanbul's understanding of geography and environment in the context of Ottoman strategy and frontier warfare. The, it presents a short overview of the importance of rivers, marshlands and mountains with regard to the formation of the opposing Hapsburg and Ottoman defence systems in Hungary. The last part of the chapter deals with (...) the relationship between landscape, climate and fortifications and offers some preliminary results and tentative observations regarding deforestation and marshlands. The discussion also argues, although in somewhat different ways, that the Ottomans and their Hapsburg rivals both had a keen interest in geography and mapped their empires and resources, and possessed adequate information as to the terrain and river systems of their lands and frontiers. (shrink)

Over the course of the 19th century, several campaigns in African territories led by white European or North-American scientists, explorers, entrepreneurs, or military officials have been transposed into travelogues where different stages of imperialism and colonialist presences are portrayed. While most of the approaches to these writings tend to favor a post-colonial framework for the interpretation of the interactions depicted there, it is also possible to employ a critical apparatus modeled after the recent developments in the field of the (...) environmental humanities. In this essay, I discuss how Slavoj Žižek’s contributions to the debates around the ideas of nature, ecology, and global capitalism have the potential to deepen our understanding of colonial regimes of oppression, serving as a powerful tool to explore processes of world-making involved in the imperial projects developing over the course of the 19th century. To do so, I propose a close reading of several instances of the travel book Angola and the River Congo, by Joachim John Monteiro, focusing on the entanglements between the human and non-human agencies, vegetable landscapes and extractive transnational economies, and the articulation of racism and scientific projects in the Angolan territory. (shrink)

Enhancing urban development vitality and optimizing the allocation of regional industrial factors require a comprehensive analysis of listed companies, such as the overall distribution network, agglomeration evolution trend, industrialization layout, and driving mechanism. Using 1,624 A-share listed companies in China's Yangtze River Economic Belt as research area, this study integrated trend surface analysis, exploratory spatial data analysis, standard deviation ellipse, and spatial regression model methods. The main results are as follows: The overall quantity scale of the listed companies in (...) the Yangtze River Economic Belt has achieved significant growth, but the spatial difference of location selection persists. The spatial configuration formed a hierarchical urban distribution pattern with the Yangtze River Delta region as the agglomeration core and the provincial capitals as the fulcrum. Listed companies accelerate the expansion of the Yangtze River Delta region. Chengdu, Wuhan, Changsha, and other central-western provincial capitals gradually increased the region’s attractiveness. High-high and low-low agglomerations remain the main forms of agglomeration. There are significant differences in the location selection of listed companies with varying specialization levels, forming a relatively different alienated high-value distribution structure among various industry types. The levels of knowledge spillover, city scale, and policy support level are major factors affecting the location selection process of listed companies in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. For low-level city network with few listed companies, city scale and knowledge spillover levels are significant determinants for the development of headquarters’ economy. For high-level city network, along with the level of knowledge spillovers and policy support, globalization level has an important contribution to the shaping of the location advantages of attracting the layout of listed companies. (shrink)

The description of named entities in terminological knowledge bases has never been addressed in any depth in terminology. Firm preconceptions, rooted in philosophy, about the only referential function of proper names have presumably led to disparage their inclusion in terminology resources, despite the relevance of named entities having been highlighted by prominent figures in the discipline of terminology. Scholars from different branches of linguistics depart from the conservative stance on proper names and have foregrounded the need for a novel approach, (...) more linguistic than philosophical, to describing proper names. Therefore, this paper proposed a linguistic and terminological approach to the study of named entities when used in scientific discourse, with the purpose of representing them in EcoLexicon, an environmental knowledge base designed according to the premises of Frame-based Terminology. We focused more specifically on named rivers mentioned in a coastal engineering corpus. Inclusion of named entities in terminological knowledge bases requires analyzing the context that surrounds them in specialized texts because these contexts convey specialized knowledge about named entities. For the semantic representation of context, this paper thus analyzed the local syntactic and semantic contexts that surrounded potamonyms in coastal engineering texts and described the semantic annotation of the predicate-argument structure of sentences where a potamonym was mentioned. The semantic variables annotated were the following: semantic category of the arguments; semantic role of the arguments; semantic relation between the arguments; and lexical domain of the verbs. This method yielded valuable insight into the different semantic roles that named rivers played, the entities and processes that participated in the events educed by potamonyms through verbs, and how they all interacted. Furthermore, since arguments are specialized terms and verbs are relational constructs, the analysis of argument structure led to the construction of semantic networks that depicted specialized knowledge about named rivers. These conceptual networks were then used to craft the thematic description of potamonyms. Accordingly, the semantic network and the thematic description not only constituted the representation of a potamonym in EcoLexicon, but also allowed the geographic contextualization of specialized concepts in the terminological resource. (shrink)

Industrial agriculture has extensive environmental and social costs, and efforts to create alternative farming systems are widespread if not yet widely successful. This study explored how a set of grain farmers and rotational graziers in Iowa transitioned to agroecological management practices. Our focus on the resources and strategies that farmers mobilized to develop opportunities for, and overcome barriers to, transitioning to alternative practices allows us to go beyond the existing literature focused on why farmers transition. We attend to both the (...) ecological and socioeconomic context of innovation by comparing processes of technical change in two contrasting regions of Iowa. Farmers cultivated farm-level biodiversity and enterprise diversity, developed new cognitive and psychological competencies, and overcame barriers to innovation by developing external network linkages with peers, knowledge organizations, and federal policies. Our research provides insights into how biophysical, cognitive, structural and market considerations can be integrated into research efforts that aim to make sense of innovation toward sustainable agriculture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:European Network of Buddhist-Christian StudiesJohn D'Arcy MayThe European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies met at Samye Ling, Scotland, 16-19 May 2003. The theme of the meeting was "Buddhists, Christians, and the Doctrine of Creation."Samye Ling, founded in 1967 by Dr. Akong Tulku Rinpoche and now under the guidance of his brother, the Venerable Lama Yeshe Losal, is one of the oldest and largest Buddhist monasteries in (...) Europe. Ven. Yeshe, in welcoming conference participants, told how the monastery has both materially and spiritually reinvigorated what had become a depressed area around the town of Lockerbie in southwest Scotland. Despite the inclement weather, it was thus an appropriate venue for the fifth conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies on the topic of creation. As Perry Schmidt-Leukel (Glasgow), who organized the conference, pointed out in his opening remarks, creation in view of ultimate redemption is the quintessentially Christian doctrine. Yet Buddhism certainly did not see samsara as the ultimate reality, and even if the origin of the world was ultimately an unanswerable question, Buddhism too was confronted by the problem of evil.Ernst Steinkellner (Vienna) opened the conference proper with an account of Buddhist critiques of Hindu doctrines of creation. The absolute Brahman was not a creator, but in the course of doctrinal evolution (the masculine Brahman becoming the post-Vedic Brahma) the world came to be seen as the work of a kind of demi-urge, leaving open the question of why. Buddhism, restricting itself to the realm of the finite, mocked Brahmin ideas of the cause of the world, but still had to account for the existence and nature of the world. By the time the Madhyamaka had developed theories of momentary creation, these had become part of the common logic of Buddhists and Hindus.This was followed by a presentation on contemporary Buddhist critiques of creation and creator doctrines by José Cabezón (Santa Barbara), who pointed out certain affinities between modern theories of many universes without beginning or end and traditional Buddhist ideas. Buddhism, he maintained, has an aversion to cosmological uniqueness, whether spatial, temporal, causal, or personal, but it does [End Page 237] regard the causal law of karman as ineluctable. Despite the critiques of Buddhist thinkers such as Gunapala Dharmasiri of Sri Lanka, who are under the misapprehension that Buddhism is on a par with science whereas Christianity is merely religion, this lays the basis for a metaphysics. The site of both suffering and liberation is the cocreativity of all beings. Buddhism is concerned not with being, but with consciousness.Eva Neumaier (Calgary) suggested that in fact Buddhism does have conceptions of creation, but in narrative form, represented in the cosmological structure of the world as the product of the Buddha's meditation rather than as a cosmogony. Creation is not ex nihilo, because nature predates any act of creation, yet the "emptiness" of shūnyatā is also the "swollenness" of fulfilled potential. The Buddha has been represented as the all-creating sovereign, and pure mind has been interpreted as the gender-neutral mother-father of all Buddhas, the "primordial basis." The "original enlightenment" objected to by Critical Buddhism enabled Buddhists to adapt pre-Buddhist ideas such as the Tao, even to the extent of tolerating animistic polytheism.If this presentation surprised some participants, it provided the perfect counterpart to the paper on Christian ideas of creation by John Keenan (Middlebury College). The Jewish and Christian conceptions of creation arise out of events in history, the exodus from Egypt being the originating metaphor. For Christians, liberation from the bondage of sin was the legacy of Israel's tribal warrior God. The Genesis accounts of creation are essentially liturgical, not cosmogonic. Creation is simply assumed as the evidence of divine transcendence; God is not a benevolent parent. The pagan critics who mocked the Jewish and Christian creation stories were just as misguided as the Buddhists who ridiculed the Vedic myths. God was eventually conceived as ipsum esse, the "to be" of things, a nonsubstantialist account that does not purport to answer the question "why." According to the logic of Buddhism, the complete enlightenment of all would mean the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:European Network of Buddhist-Christian StudiesSalzburg, Austria, June 8–11, 2007John D’Arcy MayIs it a problem for Buddhists that what is generally regarded as religion can be profoundly different from tradition to tradition? Is it appropriate or even desirable to speak of a Buddhist “theology of religions”? Does Buddhism have its own ways, however subtle, of affirming its superiority over all else that claims the name “religion”?The European (...) Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies set out to find answers to these questions at its seventh conference, held at the splendid Catholic conference center of St. Virgil on the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria.Given the demographic realities in Europe, the network has inevitably tended to be a group of Christians discussing Buddhism, as far as possible with the participation of Buddhist guests but without really providing a platform for a thoroughgoing Buddhist discussion of religious plurality. This time, more Buddhists than ever before, including significant scholars from America and Asia as well as Europe, participated in the conference. We were thus treated to a discussion of Buddhist attitudes to the religions that broke new ground and presented a vivid picture of Buddhism’s own internal diversity.In his introductory address the president of the network, Prof. John May, paid tribute to the University of Salzburg’s newly established Centre for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions, whose director, Prof. Gregor Maria Hoff, welcomed participants on behalf of the university. Dr. Ulrich Winkler contributed substantially to the organization of the conference.Dr. Kristin Kiblinger (Winthrop University), author of the first systematic treatment of Buddhist “inclusivism,” opened the conference proper by distinguishing between “open” and “closed” forms of inclusivism. She suggested a parallel with George Lindbeck’s “experiential-expressive” paradigm of religious doctrine in order to make clear that Buddhists, like Christians, have ways of privileging their own positions, though these generally remain unacknowledged.“One vehicle” (ekayāna) theories of Buddhism have something in common with “common core” theories of Christian pluralism in that they presuppose a “single end” [End Page 149] inclusivism. Whether the “positionless position” derived from Buddhist “emptiness” (śūnyatā) is a better guarantee of genuine pluralism than the Christian notion of “self-emptying” (kenōsis), as suggested by Masao Abe, remains an open question. The Buddhist doctrine of “two truths,” one expressed in the “higher” language (paramārthasatya) accessible only to Buddhist practitioners and the other in the “lower” language (samvrtisatya) of discourse with others, does not hold out much promise of true mutual respect between traditions.Prof. John Makransky (Boston College), an ordained lama and meditation teacher as well as a renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, took up the challenge of developing a Buddhist “theology” that avoids the claim to superiority. What matters to the Buddhist practitioner is to cut through all subconscious clinging, even to approved teachings and spiritual results. “Ultimate truth” can be known, directly but nonconceptually, yielding a “nonconceptual compassion” comparable to what Christians call “totally undivided oneness with God.” Lacking historical consciousness, however, teachers have tended to project their understanding of skillful means back on to Śākyamuni Buddha, each school assuming that other schools are merely preparations for itself. The same pattern is evident in the integration into Buddhism of indigenous religions such as Shintō, which enriched Buddhism but also assimilated it to themselves. Prompted by his contacts with Christian colleagues to venture beyond practice into Buddhist self-reflection, Makransky is now prepared to see in conceptions such as the Dharmakāya (“Dharma body” of the Buddha or ultimate reality) an equivalent of what Christians understand by God. The Body of Christ, with its implications for ecclesiology, could open up a further avenue for comparison.Existing under the conditions of late or post-modernity, Buddhism is forced to come to terms with pluralism and ecumenism. Prof. Kenneth Tanaka (Musashino University, Tokyo), an ordained Jōdo Shinshū priest, sees himself as incapable of saying to a non-Buddhist, “You’re not saved,” because the practice of prajñā and karunā (wisdom and compassion) is not restricted to Buddhists. Even within traditions, however, levels of spiritual attainment are not equivalent, nor are all religions equally valid. “Prophets can’t be pluralists,” but like... (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the process of standardization of Higher education initiated by the Bologna Process bringing to the forefront the temporal politics of the standardization o...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Report on the Ninth European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies Conference:"Hope: A Form of Delusion? Buddhist and Christian Perspectives"Elizabeth J. Harris, President of the NetworkCan we hope in a world that is shot through with suffering? Should hope be shunned as a form of attachment? Should we affirm our hope or let go of it? And, if we embrace hope, what should we hope for and what can (...) inspire us? Between sixty and seventy people, from sixteen countries, came together to address questions such as these at the ninth conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies, held in glorious weather at Liverpool Hope University in England, between 30 June and 4 July 2011.At the heart of the conference were ten keynote presentations on five crucial aspects of the theme of hope: "Hope and the Critique of Hope," "Hope in Pastoral Situations," "Embodiments of Hope," "Hope in Situations of Hopelessness: Engaged Buddhism and Liberation Theology," and "Eschatologies of Hope." Dr. Sybille Fritsch-Oppermann (Church of Southern Hesse) gave the introductory lecture, which suggested that hope can be seen both as a utopian ideal within and beyond living religions, and a working hypothesis, through which humans can strive toward truth and transcendence.Each theme was addressed from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective, followed by a plenary to enable dialogue between the speakers, and between speakers and participants. Addressing the first theme, "Hope and the Critique of Hope," from a Buddhist perspective, Richard Gombrich (Balliol College, Oxford) robustly argued that hope was not a category relevant to Theravada Buddhism, distinguishing between hope and confidence, and hope and expectation. Werner Jeanrond (Glasgow University), taking the Christian perspective, suggested that a critical theology of hope—an inter-hope dialogue—is necessary, within a critique of other key concepts such as salvation, faith, and love. [End Page 135]Within the session titled "Hope in Pastoral Situations," Dr. Hiroshi Munehiro Niwano (Rissho Kosei-kai, Japan) focused on Rissho Kosei-kai's pastoral work, most movingly its response to the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Notto Thelle (Oslo University), speaking from a Christian viewpoint, sensitively explored pastoral situations caused by life experiences that seem to question and make a mockery of hope, drawing on decades of Buddhist-Christian encounter. Peggy Morgan (Mansfield College, Oxford), addressing the third theme, "Embodiments of Hope," concretized her brief by focusing on a contemporary embodiment of hope capable of emboldening Christians: Rosemary Radford Ruether and her listening dialogue with Buddhism. Mitsuya Dake (Ryukoku University, Japan), on the other hand, chose Amida Buddha as his empowering embodiment of the wisdom, compassion, and non-dualism that lies at the heart of Buddhism, focusing on Shinran's understanding.The theme "Hope in Situations of Hopelessness" was opened to the public in an evening session. Sallie King (James Madison University, USA), using examples such as the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka and the Dalai Lama's peace work, argued that Buddhism is "loaded" with hope, from an Engaged Buddhist perspective. Buddhist hope, at one level, is an amalgam of acceptance, lawful change, and effort. At another level, it is the conviction that everyone has the potential to change and that truth has power. Sathianathan Clarke (Wesley Theological College, Washington, D.C.) movingly examined Dalit liberation theology, suggesting that hope within this context could be seen as a proxy topos that extends faith into life, an alter-wisdom where love can enrich life, and an energy, a verb, leading to transformative action.Addressing the last theme, "Eschatologies of Hope," Anthony Kelly (Australian Catholic University) recognized a contemporary crisis of hope and, distinguishing between hope as an emotion and hope as a virtue, explored a paradox: that Christian hope is rooted in the resurrection of the crucified Jesus but that this event is described in a varied rhetoric of negations. Justin Ritzinger (Oberlin College, USA), noting that endings are hard to find in Buddhist literature, examined the coming of Maitreya, the future Buddha, as a possible candidate for a Buddhist eschaton. He concluded that the similarities to Christian eschatology are superficial, with the exception of a contemporary reinvention of the Maitreyan tradition in China.In addition to invited keynote speakers, a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eighth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian StudiesSt. Ottilien, Germany, 11–15 June 2009John D’Arcy MayWith a higher proportion of Buddhist participants from Europe, Asia, and the United States than ever before, the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies at its 2009 conference in the Benedictine Archabbey of St. Ottilien near Munich addressed the question of authority, both spiritual and temporal, in the two traditions. There (...) seems to have been little comparative study of this topic, and there were many surprises as the speakers were confronted with aspects they had not been aware of in their own traditions and in those of others.The conference began with intercultural music that drew on Christian and Buddhist themes. After this, Brother Josef Götz spoke about the Benedictine Archabbey of St. Ottilien, stressing its longstanding and enriching participation in intermonastic dialogue. Elizabeth Harris, the incoming president of the network, then introduced the theme. She pointed to contemporary literature in English that represented the crisis in authority in the West and stressed that this was compounded by the awareness that some of those with power to enforce authority in the world did not possess legitimacy. She then raised a series of questions connected with the different forms of authority to be discussed at the conference—from the balance between external and internal authority to the struggle with institutional authority for equality between men and women. She hoped for three outcomes from the conference: that participants would be able to explore what their own tradition said about authority; that they would give wisdom to each other on the theme, Buddhist to Christian and Christian to Buddhist; and that all would reflect on how they represented themselves to the wider society, both to those searching for religious authority and those rejecting all authority.Following up this theme of a contemporary crisis of authority, Rita Gross said that Buddhists, in the spirit of the teaching on impermanence (P. anicca), need to take seriously the historicity of their different traditions in order to develop a nonsectarian history of Buddhism that acknowledges the authenticity of the foundational Buddhism [End Page 189] of the first four hundred years. The Kālāmasutta (AN.I.188 –193), one of the discourses in the Pāli canon, which was cited again and again in the course of the discussion, urges the Buddhist to assess the trustworthiness of teachers and their teaching, but criteria such as “what the wise would accept” or whether a text is accepted by the saṅgha (community) raise the problem of determining what constitutes wisdom and the authenticity of a text, as noted by Shenpen Hookham and Zhiru Shi. Rita Gross remarked on the irony that many Western Buddhists, despite their rationalistic education, abandon critical discernment and prefer myths to history. This is regrettable, as Western Buddhists have their own contributions to make to the further development of Buddhism.Kajsa Ahlstrand, referring to the World Values Survey, pointed to changing attitudes toward obedience, disobedience, and rebellion. Disobedience is now seen as praiseworthy, whereas obedience could be harmful to one’s mental health. Obedience in this “new key” emphasizes rights over duties. One can thus identify varieties of Christianity that are “hard” or “soft,” “strong” or “mild,” in various combinations, which she illustrated using different cheeses (thereby causing some puzzlement among the Asian participants!). We were left with the question whether there is an unchanging essence of eternal truth in either tradition, which is beyond historical change and sociological conditioning, and the realization that both obedience and disobedience can go terribly wrong. As Rita Gross concluded, it is our attachment that is the problem, not the things we are attached to.Spiritual authority is central to both Buddhism and Christianity, but it can take very different forms. Shenpen Hookham maintained that for Buddhists spiritual authority resides in enlightened people, whether monastic or lay, and is the result of realization rather than learning. The visible monastic saṅgha merely “represents” the ariyasaṅgha (noble community) of the truly enlightened (though this was later contested). The authority to teach derives directly from the teacher’s spiritual attainments or his or her status as the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 195-197 [Access article in PDF] Fourth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies John D'Arcy May Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin Hosted by the Department of Theology at the University of Lund, May 4-7, 2001, this conference reversed the perspective of the previous one, which studied Buddhist perceptions of Jesus. In the event, a strong Buddhist presence from Europe, Thailand, (...) and Japan ensured that distinctive, even conflicting Buddhist views of Christianity were represented at the Lund conference. But there were also some impressive attempts by Christians to come to terms with the history of the relationship and its implications for theology.A feature of the conference was personal testimonies to lives transformed by awareness of other traditions. Eshin Nishimura described his "Zen way—with Christians," starting with his contacts with Quakers in postwar Japan and America. In an extremely interesting and controversial session, Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand and Reimyo Tierelinckx, a Belgian living the life of a Zen nun in Dortmund, Germany, disagreed about those aspects of Christianity that are actually relevant to Buddhism: social action or contemplation? In his Christian response, Jacques Scheuer emphasized the "always already, always now" character of grace and the eschatological perspective of "Christ ahead of us" as a fundamental contrast, while Asa Egner pointed out the difference between salvation without self-interest and the "god" of capitalism.There were also examples of how Buddhism is understood by Christians in specific contexts. Sulak Sivaraksa recalled the intolerance of the missionaries in Thailand, who assumed they had a monopoly on truth and morality and were "not comfortable with differences." On the other hand, they stimulated renewal in the Theravada sangha and forced Buddhists to confront structural violence. Kosuke Koyama, who was one of those missionaries, said he became more relaxed about living in space-time as the coordinates of divine-human encounter, but questioned whether dependent coorigination and the Buddhist emphasis on psychology leave enough room for a sense of history. Yet Buddhism too requires that we make an effort to "put out the fire," which in today's context should lead to a hermeneutic of ethical action. Eshin Nishimura told how Buddhism, even before it reached Japan, had begun to conceive of the Buddha as an absolute being transcending time and space who was to be worshipped as a savior. He startled participants by speaking of "the secret reason why [End Page 195] Japanese Buddhism is so degenerate," which he later clarified to some extent by illustrating how practice can have priority over charity.Though there was plenty of opportunity to practice at the conference, the personal side was complemented by a number of first-rate scholarly studies of both history and theology/buddhology. Elizabeth Harris drew on her firsthand knowledge of Sri Lanka to analyze the different phases the Christian understanding of Buddhism passed through there. In the period 1800-1830 there was puzzlement among the British as to whether the Buddha was a god or a man who proposed a "system of undisguised atheism." Between 1830 and 1870, though the realization was dawning that Buddhism represented a high degree of ethics and even holiness, the missionaries did everything in their power to undermine it and demonstrate its inferiority and inauthenticity. From 1870 to 1900 this trend continued, despite a growing sympathy for the Buddha and Buddhism on the part of humanists and scholars. The outcome was a "demythologizing" of the Buddha to a status below that of Jesus as the prelude to the growth of conservative evangelical Christianity in Sri Lanka.Hakan Eilert gave a reassessment of Karl Reichelt, the Norwegian Lutheran missionary to China, where he arrived in 1893 after having a healing experience of nature mysticism. This made him more open to Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism than might have been expected of a Lutheran from such a conservative background. Though his motto was "the light of the Buddha shines everywhere," in fact he seems to have read Christian ideas into Buddhism. Constrained by incipient Barthianism and a watchful home church, Reichelt... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Report on the Tenth European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies Conference:History as a Challenge to Buddhism and ChristianityJohn O’Grady, Elizabeth J. Harris, and Jonathan A. SeitzThe Tenth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies (ENBCS) brought together between sixty and seventy people at the Oude Abdij, Drongen, Belgium, between 27 June and 1 July 2013, to examine the theme “History as a Challenge to Buddhism (...) and Christianity.” It was a collaborative effort between the ENBCS and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The 2011 ENBCS conference had focused on whether hope was a relevant concept for Buddhists and Christians. The choice of history as a theme complemented this. It also resonated with a research concern of both KU Leuven and the Network.Five key themes were chosen for examination: the traditional Christian and Buddhist conceptions of history; Jesus and the Buddha: fact and fiction; Buddhist and Christian historiography; dangerous memory in Christianity and Buddhism; and permitting historical consciousness in Buddhism and Christianity. Each was approached from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective. An opening lecture addressed the theme “Modern Historical Consciousness and the Challenge to Religion.” In addition, eighteen research papers on Buddhist-Christian relations were given in parallel sessions on Friday evening and Saturday morning. These covered topics as various as the writings of Edmund Pezet (Pierre Gillet), Paul Knitter’s understanding of Buddhist-Christian double belonging (Achim Riggert), Keiji Nishitani and the death of God (Jonatan Navarro Estrada), the encounter of Zen Buddhism and Christianity in the works of D. T. Suzuki (Mariusz Rucki), Buddhist-Christian encounters by Han Yong Woon (Seung Chul Kim), and “Liberating the Conflict from ‘History’ in Sri Lanka” (Jude Lal Fernando).Perry Schmidt-Leukel (Münster, Germany), in the opening lecture, discussed [End Page 189] seven challenges that modern historical consciousness was posing to religion: the challenge of falsification (when historical evidence, for example, showed some doctrines cherished by believers were not taught by the founder), the challenge of uncertainty or methodological doubt, the challenge of methodological naturalism (should a natural explanation be considered more probable than a supernatural one?), the challenge of the distance between past and present, the challenge of change (religions are not static), the challenge of demystification, and the challenge of relativity (the writing of history is perspectival, conditioned by context). He stressed that it would be a blessing to religion if these challenges were faced and, throughout the conference, encouraged other speakers to face them.The first theme was tackled by Mark Blum (Berkeley, USA) from a Buddhist perspective and Jan-Olav Henriksen (Norwegian School of Theology) from a Christian perspective. In a magisterial historical and geographical survey of the Buddhist tradition, Blum first noted that no one had unearthed a traditional notion of Buddhist history in the early texts. The theme of decline and reformation had been taken from Indian cosmology, but with a Buddhist twist and the conviction that it was pointless to talk about beginnings. And in the growth of the Mahāyāna tradition, a dehistoricization of the Buddha had occurred in the belief that the Buddha’s dharma-body was his only “real” body.Henriksen argued that Christian salvation history had its origin in the narrative of the Fall, an event for which there was no historical evidence, and developed into a history of God’s call (election) to all people that they should be brought together in community. It was a history that was linked with the divine logos, a force that Christian theology has seen as deeply interwoven into creation from the beginning of time and that was made human in Jesus.Terrence Merrigan (KU Leuven, Belgium), giving a Christian perspective on the second theme, distinguished three quests or attempts to reach the historical Jesus. The first, from 1774 to 1906, sought to uncover the Jesus that had been obscured by dogma. It imploded with the realization that separating “core” from “myth” was impossible, and conditioned a reactive “no-quest” in the first half of the twentieth century. A “new quest” arose in the 1950s, initiated by Käsemann’s reaction to the theologies of Barth and Bultmann. A further quest that appealed to archaeology and the... (shrink)

Single-country approaches to the study of Buddhism miss the crucial significance of international networks in the making of modern Buddhism, in a period when the material basis for such networks had been transformed. Southeast Asia in particular acted as a dynamic crossroads in this period enabling the emergence of a ?global Buddhism? not controlled by any single sect, while India and Japan both played unexpectedly significant roles in this crossroads. A key element of this process was the encounter between Asian (...) Buddhist networks and western would-be Buddhists. Those involved, however, were often marginal - ?creative failures? in many cases - whose stories enable us to think this history in a more diverse way than is often done. In other cases as isolated figures they could pave the way for the ?mainstreaming? of new forms of Buddhism by established actors in later decades. This article introduces the special issue of Contemporary Buddhism entitled ?A Buddhist crossroads: pioneer European Buddhists and globalizing Asian networks 1860?1960?. The research described in this issue often raises other methodological questions of representativity and significance, while posing important challenges around collaborative research and the use of new technologies. (shrink)

This paper investigates the diversity of mediated parent networks from the perspective of communicative figurations, by focussing on what kinds of networks can be identified (RQ1) and what expectations parents hold towards these networks (RQ2). It draws upon a qualitative, exploratory study conducted in Austria, Denmark, Portugal and the UK, with interviews conducted with parents across 16 families in 2021. Different kinds of parent networks are described in terms of size, perceived publicness, frames of relevance, actors involved, communicative practices, and (...) media ensembles. Our analysis of parents’ expectations shows that disappointment seems to be closely connected to practical sense, social barriers and exclusion. (shrink)

Research on urban agglomerations from the perspective of network spatial structure is important to promote their sustainable development. Based on online and traditional data, this paper first improves three aspects of the traditional spatial gravity model—city quality, the gravitation coefficient, and city distance—considering urban center functional intensity and population mobility tendencies. The resulting improved directional gravity model is applied to analyze the structure of the city network for two urban agglomerations in China, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration and the (...) Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. The results of the study are as follows: the existing urban connections have obvious hierarchies and imbalances, with the YRDUA urban hierarchical connections being of larger scale. Cities are closely connected, but city networks are unbalanced, though the YRDUA has more balanced urban development. Each node city has a clear radiation range limit, and spatial distance remains an important constraint on urban connections. The backbone network of the BTHUA has a triangular shape and trends toward a “sparse north and dense south,” while the YRDUA is characterized by multiple axes and an overall distribution that trends toward a “dense north and sparse south.” Cities with poor comprehensive strength are more likely to be captured, forming an attract and be attracted relationship. The BTHUA and the YRDUA each form three communities. (shrink)

The University of Vienna saw witness to the Opening Conference of the ESF-Research Networking Programme “The Philosophy of Science in a European perspective” (PSE) which was organised by the Vienna Circle Institute and took place on the 18-20 December at the Campus of the University of Vienna, 2008. Its overarching aim was to set the background for a collaborative project organising, systematising, and ultimately forging an identity for, European philosophy of science by creating research structures and developing research (...) networks across Europe to promote its development. As such under the general rubric of ‘the present situation in the philosophy of science’, the emphasis was on as a first step identifying traditions and research structures already present, and the directions in which this research was leading. (shrink)

Recreational Drugs European Network (ReDNet) project aims to use the Psychonaut Web Mapping Project database (Psychonaut Web Mapping Group, 2009) containing novel psychoactive compounds usually not mentioned in the scientific literature and thus unknown to clinicians as a unique source of information. The database will be used to develop an integrated ICT prevention approach targeted at vulnerable individuals and focused on novel synthetic and herbal compounds and combinations. Particular care will be taken in keeping the health professionals working (...) directly with young people showing problematic behaviors regularly updated in terms of novel compounds and combinations as well. A user-friendly project website will be developed aimed primarily at delivering the information/prevention approaches, but will also be a way of communicating with project partners and relevant stakeholders (e.g. thematic forum facilities, instant messages, blogs, video chat, wikiblog, newsletters distributed via mailing list). The website will support various ICT prevention tools, including an SMS alert service. Different areas and sections will be aimed specifically at the different target groups. -/- . (shrink)

Knowledge networking in the cross-cultural setting here focuses on promoting a culture of shared communication, values and knowledge, seeking cooperation through valorisation of diversity. The process is seen here in terms of creating new alliances of creators, users, mediators and facilitators of knowledge. At the global level, knowledge networking is seen as a symbiotic relationship between local and global knowledge resources. This focus is informed by the human-centred vision of the information society, which seeks a symbiotic relationship between technology and (...) society. It explores the nature of the knowledge in transition, raising issues of technology and knowledge transfer in the local–global context. The notions of human–machine symbiosis and of diversity and coherence provide a handle to explore the role of technology for sustainable development. The centrality of knowledge in stimulating knowledge networking for cross-cultural collaboration is illustrated through an exemplar of an EU–India Cross-Cultural Innovation Network project, a collaboration between European and Indian universities and institutes. (shrink)

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, (...) were structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. (shrink)