From Rejection to Embracement:The Catholic Perception of Spiritism in Brazil

The history of the relationship between Spiritism and Catholicism in Brazil can be traced through pivotal moments in the trajectory of the First Republic and the religious field since the 19th century,reflecting Brazil’s evolution into a modern,urban,and industrial society.Introduced to Brazil in the 1880s,Spiritism initially faced severe opposition from the Catholic Church,being dismissed as superstition and demon worship due to its engagement with death and spirits.Unlike Christianity,Spiritism denies the divinity of Jesus,the resurrection,and the sanctity of Church sacraments,viewing demons and angels merely as disembodied souls at different spiritual stages.Early perceptions were further complicated by the mixing of Spiritism with African and indigenous rites,which led critics to associate it with madness and mental health threats.However,the relationship between Catholicism and Spiritism in Brazil has evolved positively,particularly following the popularization of Spiritism by figures like Chico Xavier.Modern Brazilian society,characterized by increased education and religious syncretism,has grown more tolerant of diverse practices and beliefs,diminishing historical prejudices against Spiritists.This qualitative study,drawing on scholarly research and first-hand interviews,reveals that Spiritism's acceptance among Brazilian Catholics is due to its convergence with contemporary social values and the evolving profile of the average Catholic.Despite possessing a religion-like character,Spiritism is seen less as a distinct religion and more as a complementary set of practices and beliefs that enhance Catholic faith.This phenomenon mirrors the integration of Agama Hindu practices,reinforcing rather than undermining traditional religious identities.

Multifunctional Morphemes ja-and -min Ezha：An Ethio-Semitic Language

This paper is meant to indicate the different functional tasks covered by the two multifunctional bound morphemes: j9- and in Ezha. The former is found to mark accusative, genitive and dative cases. The latter, on the other hand, renders the functions of contrastive focus marking, converb marking, declarative clause marking in the affirmative perfective, and coordination. After a thorough description of their functions, it is attempted to propose as to whether the various roles rendered by the two forms relate to distinctive homophonous morphemes or to a single morpheme. The required data for this study were collected from native speakers primarily through elicitation, and this method was supplemented by recording free narratives.

The Spread and Integration of Religious Culture Along the Eastern Silk Road

The eastern Silk Road is a product of the mutual exchange of material culture and spiritual culture among ancient China and other countries,regions,and nations.It is the result of the contact and collision between eastern and western civilizations.It is also a strong proof that the Chinese nation implements the policy of opening to the outside world.Historically,the Silk Road served as a bridge of economic and cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries,closely linking ancient Chinese culture with the cultures of central Asia,west Asia,Persia,and even ancient Greek and Roman cultures.In various regions along the eastern silk road,there were many religions,but not only did they rarely fight with each other,but they were able to live in harmony and develop together.On the Silk Road,various religions developed in parallel,their doctrines absorbed and integrated,and different religions borrowed terms from each other and adopted the forms of other religions,making the silk road a cultural stage for the exchange and integration of religions,which constituted a unique phenomenon in the history of the development of world religions.

A syncretic representation for image classification and face recognition

For representation based image classification methods, it is very important to well represent the target image. As pixels at same positions of training samples and test samples of an object usually have different intensities, it brings difficulty in correctly classifying the object. In this paper, we proposed a novel method to reduce the effects of this issue for image classification. Our method first produces a new representation （i.e. virtual image） of original image, which can enhance the importance of moderate pixel intensities and reduce the effects of larger or smaller pixel intensities. Then virtual images and corresponding original images are respectively used to represent a test sample and obtain two rep- resentation results. Finally, this method fuses these two results to classify the test sample. The integration of original image and its virtual image is able to improve the accuracy of image classification. The experiments of image classification show that the proposed method can obtain a higher accuracy than the conventional classification methods.

Task Coordination Organization Model and the Task Allocation Algorithm for Resource Contention of the Syncretic System

At present, robot embedded systems have some common problems such as closure and poor dynamic evolution. Aiming at resolving this situation, our paper focuses on improvements to the robot embedded system and sets up a new robot system architecture, and we propose a syncretic mechanism of a robot and SoftMan （SM）. In the syncretic system, the structural organization of the SoftMan group and its modes are particularly important in establishing the task coordination mechanism. This paper, therefore, proposes a coordination organization model based on the SoftMan group, and studies in detail the process of task allocation for resource contention, which facilitates a rational allocation of system resources. During our research, we introduced Resource Requirement Length Algorithm （RRLA） to calculate the resource requirements of the task and a resource conformity degree allocation algorithm of Resource Conformity Degree Algorithm （RCDA） for resource contention. Finally, a comparative evaluation of RCDA with five other frequently used task allocation algorithms shows that RCDA has higher success and accuracy rates with good stability and reliability.

Hybrid Hierophanies:Where Rastafari Meets Religious Ecology in Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Ecocriticism is a comparatively new and vital discipline that responds to the literatures of an increasingly urgent environmental crisis.Yet,while its remit within materialist and secular thought is diversifying to include postcolonial,cultural,and queer theories,alongside geography and other earth sciences,there is less conversation with complementary and syncretic disciplines such as ecotheology and religious ecology.This paper seeks to diversify the secular as a singular epistemological paradigm.It suggests the“sacred hybrid”as a transdisciplinary framework through which to read,critique,and write contemporary ecological poetry that connects to emotional and spiritual procedures and content as well as intellectually-driven aesthetics.Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion demonstrates the critical amplifications that the sacred hybrid can elicit.It suggests a sacred yet asymmetric“center,”with the capacity to incorporate diverse notions of Otherness.These expressions include spiritual modalities constructed via strategies of juxtaposition,shamanic chant,and interbiotic utterance that correspond to pre-Christian and syncretic indigenous religiosity.This reading uncovers how the poems resituate the terms and conditions under which cultural epistemologies are formed.In this instance,Rastafarian“reasoning”as a literary tactic maps onto third and fourth wave ecocriticism in its reconstitution of national,gender-based,and social identities.Viewed through a decolonized lens,and by extension a conduit for spiritual and political merger and coherence,poetry’s potential as an agent of societal healing and knowledge production may be revealed.