The Service of the Romanian Orthodox Church to Migrants

Through the concrete steps taken by its members (clergy, believers, and monks), from 1998 until now, the Romanian Orthodox Church has carried out extensive actions to monitor and solve the migration crisis. Thanks to this approach, initiated and improved by its current Primate, His Beatitude, Patriarch Daniel, both in the country and in the diaspora of our Church, the phenomenon of migration was not only be monitored, but also solved both in accordance with Church rules and with State laws, as well as those of the Law of the European Union, that is, of the EU Member States. From our article, the informed reader will be also able to see that, in its actions for monitoring and solving the migration problem, our Church has taken into account both the guidelines issued by the bodies of the Ecumenical Council of Churches and the guiding principles stated by the leaders of the two Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, namely, His Holiness, Pope Francis, and His Beatitude, the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I, in their joint Declarations on the issue of migration, hence the ecumenical nature of the approach to the issue of migration.

On gazers’ encounters with visual art: ekphrasis, readers, ‘iconotexts’1

This chapter defines ekphrasis concisely as ‘the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium’. It rejects narrower definitions that exclude texts on non-representational visual configurations, including architecture, or restrict the discourse to literary texts representing works of art. But with its emphasis on the text the concise definition unduly reinforces the consideration of ekphrasis as a form of ‘intermedial transposition’ in contemporary discourse on intermedial relations. An ekphrastic text should be primarily approached as the record of a viewer’s interpretive encounter with a non-kinetic visual configuration, which may not actually contain anything that has been ‘transposed’ from the image. This viewer may be the persona of a poem, a figure in a prose narrative, or an art critic. It is the reader’s task to construct these viewers in the interpretation of any ekphrastic text. But the role of the reader has not received much attention. This includes the question of the immediate mental reception of ekphrastic texts. The critical construct of ‘iconotexts’, suggesting that such verbal texts spontaneously trigger a mental visual image for the informed reader, is problematic, and even in a more general sense the term may be of limited critical use.

The readability of integrated reports

Purpose This is an exploratory study to investigate the readability of integrated reports. The aim of this paper is to assess whether integrated reports are accessible to their readership and add value to stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach Readability analyses are performed on the integrated reports of all companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for 2015 and 2016. Readability results are compared by means of a correlation analysis to the results of the Ernst & Young Excellence in Integrated Reporting Awards for 2015. Findings The results show that the complex nature of the language used in integrated reports of listed companies impairs readability and, as an implication, affects the value stakeholders can derive from the information. The results from the correlation with the Ernst & Young Excellence in Integrated Reporting Awards indicate that an integrated report is considered of higher quality if it is written using complex language. Research limitations/implications The main limitation of the study lies in its exclusively South African setting, which is the only country where integrated reports are recommended as part of stock exchange listings requirements. Another limitation is the fact that integrated reports are mainly aimed at informed users and is thus compiled with the informed reader in mind, which impacts on general readability. Practical implications The results present new findings regarding integrated reporting practice, which is of interest to firms, investors, regulators, amongst others. The findings show how the value-added by integrated reports could be improved. Originality/value This study is the first to investigate the readability of integrated reports in a South African context. The results indicate that integrated reports are difficult to read and are only useful to a portion of the total intended population.

A STUDY OF RUSKIN BOND’S “TENACITY OF MOUNTAIN WATER”

“I am not a religious person but if I were to say I have a religion then I would say I am a nature worshipper.” Ruskin Bond Ruskin Bond, a prolific writer, is known for his short stories, novellas and poems and is widely popular especially in Children’s Literature Circles. His stories can be likened to an ecological narrativedesigned to spread awareness about the bitter consequences of human actions that damage the planet’s basic life support system. He has received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India for ‘Our Trees Still grow in Dehra’ in 1992. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. Ruskin Bond’s stories breathe his great love and sincere concern for nature which is all encompassing and all pervasive.The prismatic portrayal of nature in Bond’s stories enraptures the soul. He draws our sense towards the natural brilliance manifest all around us by presenting a painstakingly drawn out record of the the natural life around him. The amazingly captured landscapes with its myriad forms of life inked by Bond’s imagination and his inimitable style come with a strong lesson on the need to protect and preserve nature. My paper proposes to study Bond’s short story entitled “Tenacity of Mountain Water” that exploresthe interlinked web of life through a simple narrative. Weaving the threads of eco consciousness through the narrative, he marvels at how a tiny rivulet of water becomes a beautiful roaring cascade nourishing and beautifying the entire landscape. The story offers the informed reader a chance to investigate the underlying ecological values and also revisit the human perception of natural resources.

Introduction and Background

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on a class of general models, quantal response equilibrium (QRE) models, and its applications to economics, political science, and pure game theory. It aims to lay out for an informed reader the broad array of theoretical and experimental results based on QRE. It contains some genuinely new material, offering new directions and open issues that have not been explored in depth yet, as well as delving into a range of peripheral issues, tangencies, and more detailed data analysis than the typical journal-article format allows for. There is also a “how-to” aspect to the book, as it provides details and sample programs to show readers how to compute QRE and how to take it to the data.

An Urgent Suggestion to Pour Old Wine into New Bottles: Comment on “A New Jurisprudential Framework for Jurisdiction”

Dan Svantesson is quickly establishing himself as a leading voice in the field or jurisdiction. Coming to this field from Internet and data protection law, he is surely well placed to criticize the current legal framework of international jurisdiction in light of technological evolution, which has made territoriality lose its salience as the cornerstone of jurisdiction. I myself have recently been characterized as one of the border guards of territoriality, on the basis of my earlier monograph on Jurisdiction in International Law. Accordingly, the informed reader might believe that I will severely criticize as iconoclastic such a proposal as Svantesson’s namely, doing away with territoriality as the very linchpin of jurisdiction. As it happens, however, I largely concur with Svantesson’s ideas, at least to the extent they apply to cross-border transactions via the Internet. In this contribution, I argue that the reality of a de-territorialized Internet necessitates jurisdictional rethinking, but that this rethinking in fact heavily relies on previous scholarship, predating the Internet era. The advent of the current era, however, has lent particular urgency to those earlier proposals.

Response

Herbert Davidson's critique of my thesis regarding the relation between Averroes' Middle and Long commentaries on De anima contrasts my reading and translation of Middle Commentary passages with his own. I leave it to the informed reader to judge whether one translation is more “neutral” than the other, excluding the specific denotation which I give to sharh, which is the point at issue.

Women in the Qur'an, Traditions and Interpretation

It takes a book like Barbara Freyer Stowasser's Women in theQur'an, Traditions and Interpretation to help extricate the compleximages of Muslim women from the gross overgeneralization characteristicof popular western media. Truly understanding that complexityrequires a look at all of the components that make up the Islamic worldview,from its primary sources ideologically to its cultural history as ithas affected the lives of Muslims. Such a look has been offered inStowasser's book.I was very excited by the cross-referential methodology proposed bythe author in her introduction and her actual use of it throughout the text.She moves among Qur'anic passages, earlier tafasir, hadith traditions, aswell as among contenders in modem Islamic discourse: modernists, traditionalists,and fundamentalists (pp. 5-7). As a result, the reader viewsdifferent responses to ideas about specific women from the Qur'anic textwhile knowing precisely the source of certain ideas.This is not the usual diatribe that confuses indiscriminately fact withmythology, intellectual tradition with popular culture, and results in misinformingthe already ill-informed reader. Moreover, Stowasser avoidsthe other popular extreme: diminishing everything to a single factor, suchas gross misogyny, for example. Although she distinguishes between thevarious strains that make up a complex picture, she does not merelyregurgitate the historical legacy but rather offers critical analysis anddemonstrates her capability in deciphering the various components in theinternal Islamic debates as well.Perhaps the complexity of the cross-referential methodology limits thebreadth of the subject matter. We can understand how complex notions ofthe place of Muslim women in society have resulted from these variousreferences, even though we get no hint at what that place is from this work.The characters analyzed are limited to the specific female characters givenindividual attention in the Qur'anic text and to the wives of the Prophet.These models of virtue and .struggle, failure and frustration, can and have ...