Preliminary Research on the Social Attitudes toward AI’s Involvement in Christian Education in Vietnam: Promoting AI Technology for Religious Education

Artificial intelligence innovations, such as chatbots and specialized education suggestion tools, provide potential interactive and on-demand pedagogical engagement between non-Christians and Christians with Christianity. However, there is little empirical research on the readiness, acceptance, and adoption of religious education involvement of AI in a secular state such as Vietnam. This research addresses the literature gap by providing an entrepreneurial analysis and customer perspectives on the ideas of AI involvement in religious education. Specifically, the study explores whether the Vietnamese across different ages accept and have enough skills to adopt AI in Christian education innovation. The interview sample is 32 participants, selected based on their religious orientation (Christians and non-Christians) and age (Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z). Most respondents are open to AI application in religious education except for Church personnel. However, only Generation Z are fully prepared to adopt this innovation. Theoretically, the research customizes the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model into religious innovation context. Practically, this research acts as market research on the demand for AI’s religious innovation in Vietnam, an insight for future religious tech entrepreneurs.

The problem of higher education in Russia in the second half of the XVII century

This article reviews the known facts on the work and concepts of Russian higher educational institutions of the 1650s-1700s. The author analyzes the polemics that unfolded in the XVII century and continues until today around higher education in Russia from Fyodor Rtishchev's School to Zaikonospassky Greek Schools created by Likhud brothers. It is noted that the idea of autonomous estate-inclusive university in Moscow, which was conceived by the Tsar Feodor III Alexeyevich and received privileges in the Grant Letter of 1682, was never brought to life. The author reveals the motives of resistance to introduction of regular education and recognition of rules of the rational science. It is demonstrated that breaking with the Russian traditional church rituals by Patriarch Nikon on the basis of false Greek scholarship caused doubts of the society on the utility of foreign regular science; and the desire of the devotees of Greek scholarship to prove that Latin education, unlike Greek, is harmful for the faith, nullified the attempt of Tsar Feodor III Alexeyevich to create a Moscow university for preparing secular and church personnel. Such struggle for the Academy resulted in the clash between rationalism of the enlighteners and authority of the church, which destroyed and suppressed the enlighteners, and discredited the church. In the XVII century, no Higher educational institutions were established in Russia; moreover, the Moscow academic staff was annihilated. In the context of the reforms of Peter the Great, the humanities education in Russia of the XVIII century was implemented Little Russian scholars, while natural scientific education – by Western scholars.

Personnel and Collaboration

This chapter considers the bishop’s role as leader of an organization whose primary resources are people. Using data from the survey and interviews, the chapter explores bishops’ relationships and collaborations with Church personnel, including priests, deacons, religious, and lay persons. It also explores relationships with other bishops and collaborations through state and national bishops’ conferences. The first section explores the bishops’ perspectives and experiences with different types of Church personnel. The second section discusses how bishops rely on different individuals and groups to assist in their decision making. The final section looks beyond the diocese to relationships with fellow bishops, both individually and as part of national and state bishop conferences.

Exceptional Sexual Harms

Questioning of Catholic Church leaders in the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed a distinct sense of immunity and lack of responsibility for the crimes of church personnel, which has resulted in stymied justice for complainants in sexual abuse lawsuits. In this article, I explore this immunity by examining it in the context of treatments of sexual harms in other areas of private law, particularly religious exceptions to discrimination law, by which religious organizations are granted immunity from the modern rationale of the harms of discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation. In situating child sexual abuse claims in the broader sphere of private law, I aim to reveal law’s incoherent logic of sexual harms, and its implications for justice. The example of religious exceptions illustrates an incoherent problematization of sexual harm and responsibility in contemporary legal and political systems that aim to uphold modern values of equality and dignity while sustaining incompatible doctrines of religious autonomy.

Partnership and Race in Mission Encounters in Tanzania

I examine racial and ethnic dynamics in encounters between Tanzanian church personnel, and visiting American partners or short-term missionaries. Contemporary mission work in Tanzania is situated within a historical context that includes, but is not ultimately determined by, race or ethnicity. Several kinds of engagements and partnerships exist between American religious organisations and the Tanzanian church, which I describe ethnographically, and discuss how encounters between Tanzanian Christians and American visitors become ethnically inflected. Two cases—encounters with Maasai and Chagga people respectively—provide a comparative illustration. Finally, I address the role played by new types of partnership between Tanzanian and American religious organisations, and how themes of hospitality and identities as guests and hosts contribute to encounters between American and Tanzanian Christians. In these encounters, multiple areas of shifting meanings of race come together, resulting in disjunctures of understanding. I suggest that these disjunctures, coupled with the guest-host dynamic and the lack of in-depth knowledge characteristic of short-term mission in general, reveal patterns of social inequality and tensions inherent in the changing context of Christian mission.

Better Disaster Statistics: The Lisbon Earthquake

Inaccurate published statistics are often due to faulty information about a disaster, to the different accounting methods used by organizations, and to the lack of consensus among researchers and agencies about how to define key terms. Until recently, damage estimates for the 1755 Lisbon earthquake steadily increased due to the influence of ideological and emotional factors, as well as to the geographical/temporal distance from the event. New calculations, based in part on the death rate of Catholic Church personnel in Lisbon, suggests that falling debris killed between 5,000 to 8,700 people, a range that is close to initial claims. Roughly the same number of people died as a result of the subsequent tsunamis, fires, and civil unrest.

Between Empires and Emporia: The Economics of Christianization in Early Modern Southeast Asia

Studies of church connections to commercial interests in pre-nineteenth-century Southeast Asia have focused on the Catholic venture in the Spanish Philippines. This article uses a broader and more ecumenical framework to incorporate eastern Indonesia into this discussion by comparing the economic involvement of Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch missionaries and church personnel. It contextualizes differences in church resources, secular oversight, and motivation, but also argues that clerical involvement with European economic ambitions helped to mark out a path toward the domestication of local Christianity. The perception of foreign priests and ministers as conduits for exploitation encouraged many Southeast Asian Christians to differentiate between the teachings of the religion they had adopted and the ways these teachings had been distorted in support of European control.La recherche de l’Asie du Sud-Est pré-moderne touchant au rapprochement des relations de l’Église d’avec les intérêts commerciaux porte habituellement sur l’entreprise catholiques des Philippines espagnoles. Cette contribution par contre, a un cadre spatial plus vaste et au point de vue religion plus oecuménique. L’étude y inclut l’Indonésie orientale et elle compare la participation économique des missionaires et du clergé, tant espagnols, tant portuguais, tant hollandais. D‘un part les différences des ressources ecclésiales, la supervision des laïques et la motivation cléricale sont étudiées d’après leur contexte, d’autre part la participation du clergé imbu d’ambitions économiques européennes est aussi explorée parce qu‘elle a favorisé les modes locales du christianisme. C’est que l’image des prêtres et des pasteurs rapaces auprès les populations de l’Asie du Sud-Est stimulaient ces peuples à distinguer entre la religion adoptés par eux et la déformation de l’ínstruction religieuse du clergé qui visait à faciliter le contrôle européen.

Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda

Christian churches were deeply implicated in the 1994 genocide of ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda. Churches were a major site for massacres, and many Christians participated in the slaughter, including church personnel and lay leaders. Church involvement in the genocide can be explained in part because of the historic link between church and state and the acceptance of ethnic discrimination among church officials. In addition, just as political officials chose genocide as a means of reasserting their authority in the face of challenges from a democracy movement and civil war, struggles over power within Rwanda's Christian churches led some church leaders to accept the genocide as a means of eliminating challenges to their own authority within the churches.