scholarly journals PLANT BIOLOGY, A RESOURCE FOR PROSPERITY

Author(s):  
Martin M. Kater

Worldwide agriculture is facing many challenges. A fast growing world population, a changing climate and an increasing need for sustainability call for immediate solutions to guarantee environmental, social and economic stability. An important contribution will have to come from innovative plant research. However, despite that there is more and more scientific and political attention for problems related to agriculture, there is still little investment in this field of research. It will be important that this will change and that we start to realize that investing in plant research is an investment in the future of our society.

Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Levy

After John Cage’s 1958 Darmstadt lectures, many European composers developed an interest in absurdity and artistic provocation. Although Ligeti’s fascination with Cage and his association with the Fluxus group was brief, the impact it had on his composition was palpable and lasting. A set of conceptual works, The Future of Music, Trois Bagatelles, and Poème symphonique for one hundred metronomes, fall clearly into the Fluxus model, even as the last has taken on a second life as a serious work. This spirit, however, can also be seen in the self-satire of Fragment and the drama and irony of Volumina, Aventures, and Nouvelles Aventures. The sketches for Aventures not only show the composer channeling this humor into a major work but also prove to be a fascinating repository of ideas that Ligeti would reuse in the years to come.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Rachel Wagner

Here I build upon Robert Orsi’s work by arguing that we can see presence—and the longing for it—at work beyond the obvious spaces of religious practice. Presence, I propose, is alive and well in mediated apocalypticism, in the intense imagination of the future that preoccupies those who consume its narratives in film, games, and role plays. Presence is a way of bringing worlds beyond into tangible form, of touching them and letting them touch you. It is, in this sense, that Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward observe the “re-emergence” of religion with a “new visibility” that is much more than “simple re-emergence of something that has been in decline in the past but is now manifesting itself once more.” I propose that the “new awareness of religion” they posit includes the mediated worlds that enchant and empower us via deeply immersive fandoms. Whereas religious institutions today may be suspicious of presence, it lives on in the thick of media fandoms and their material manifestations, especially those forms that make ultimate promises about the world to come.


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Perlmutter

This article focuses on the apparent disjunction between the Italian reluctance to allow Albanians to come as refugees and Italy's enthusiastic leadership of the United Nations military-humanitarian mission. It explains the Italian response both in terms of Italian popular opinion regarding Albanians and Italy's concern for the impression on Europe that its politics would make. Italy's leadership of the mission represents the first time a medium-sized power has assisted a neighboring country with whom it has had deep historical connections. The conclusion argues that such proximate interventions are likely to increase in the future, and spells out the implications of the Italian case.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Hilary M. Carey

Time, according to medieval theologians and philosophers, was experienced in radically different ways by God and by his creation. Indeed, the obligation to dwell in time, and therefore to have no sure knowledge of what was to come, was seen as one of the primary qualities which marked the post-lapsarian state. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of delights, they entered a world afflicted with the changing of the seasons, in which they were obliged to work and consume themselves with the needs of the present day and the still unknown dangers of the next. Medieval concerns about the use and abuse of time were not merely confined to anxiety about the present, or awareness of seized or missed opportunities in the past. The future was equally worrying, in particular the extent to which this part of time was set aside for God alone, or whether it was permissible to seek to know the future, either through revelation and prophecy, or through science. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scientific claims of astrology to provide a means to explain the outcome of past and future events, circumventing God’s distant authority, became more and more insistent. This paper begins by examining one skirmish in this larger battle over the control of the future.


2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerrit Van Tonder ◽  
Roger Tucker

One of the challenges for Practical Theology in Africa is to engage with the continent’s concerns and challenges in such a way that the kingdom of God is realised in society and is seen to be relevant to these issues by people who are outside of academia. In our article, which was first presented at the Practical Theology congress in Pretoria in January 2014, the authors seek to demonstrate how this may be accomplished by applying insights to one concern, namely ‘fracking’. The objective is to mobilise the influential Christian faith community in South Africa to begin to exercise prophetic discernment concerning fracking in the Karoo. The fracking debate is a product of the tension between the environmental degradation that its waste products may cause, on the one hand, and, on the other, the greater energy demands of a rapidly increasing world population along with its expectations of an ever-increasing standard of living. Shale gas fracking in the Karoo region of South Africa promises to make vast reserves of oil and gas available to help meet a significant percentage of the country’s energy needs for many years to come, and so thus aid development and contribute to raising the standard of living of many people. Yet the management of the waste products associated with the process is an area of serious environmental concern. The article aims to apprise the South African Christian faith community of the technology and risks involved. Theological guidelines are presented by which fracking’s benefits and dangers can be interrogated so that the community may come to an informed decision as to whether or not to support fracking.


1958 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Carl-Erik Quensel

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-245
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko

AbstractInternational constitutionalism relates to processes of limiting traditionally unrestricted powers of states as ultimate subjects, law-makers and law-enforcers of international law. Human rights occupy a central, but very confusing and confused role in the theorisation of international constitutionalism. If feminist scholars have criticised the inadequacies, shortcomings and gaps of international law of human rights at least since 1991, the doctrine of international law theorising constitutionalisation of international law until now has remained blind to these critiques idealising human rights and often using them as the ultimate legitimating factor. Thus, legitimacy and legality become confused and the distinction between them blurred in the doctrine of international constitutionalism. This in turn creates a danger of failure of the constitutionalists project itself, as it will serve to reinforce existing inadequacies and gaps in human rights protection. To illustrate this argument, I discuss some examples related to the protection of women's and migrants' rights. In order to avoid this dangerous development, I argue that international lawyers theorising international constitutionalism shall adopt an adequate, inclusive notion of legitimacy. In order to develop this adequate understanding of legitimacy, they should first take seriously feminist and other critiques of international human rights law and international law more generally. In the final parts of this article I develop my own more detailed proposals on the future of legitimacy and international constitutionalism. In doing so, I draw on the 'self-correcting learning process' developed in the writings of Jürgen Habermas, 'democracy to come' and more general views on the nature of sovereignty and human rights expressed by Jacques Derrida, as well as Levinasian 'responsibility-to-and-for-the-Other'.


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