The resources and economy of Scotland re‐viewed

The increasing demand for sand and gravel in Scotland is examined and it is shown that most reserves occur in areas of fluvioglacial deposition. Against this background, existing methods of evaluation are compared and it is argued that these techniques are either too costly and time‐consuming, or else not of general applicability to all regions containing aggregate supplies. A new methodology is suggested which overcomes these drawbacks and provides a means by which a trained geomorphologist can produce a reasonably accurate inventory of reserves in a given region. An example of the application of this new procedure to North East Scotland is considered.     

Intra‐European Racism in Nineteenth‐Century Anthropology

Nowadays the term “racism” is usually applied in the context of relationships between Europeans and non‐European “others”. During the nineteenth century scientific ideas about innate human differences were also applied extensively to various European populations. This was partly due to a category confusion whereby nations came to be regarded as biologically distinct. The origins of “scientific” racism were connected with the use of race as an explanation of history, and with the rise of physiognomy and phrenology. The development of “craniology” was paralleled and reinforced by ideological writings about “Nordic” racial superiority. In times of conflict such as the Franco‐Prussian war, absurd racial theories emerged and social Darwinist anthropologists connected race and class. Such ideas persisted well into the twentieth century and reached their apogee in Nazism.     

Colonialism,corporeality and character: Methodist missions and the refashioning of bodies in the pacific

Today, dramatic improvements in transportation and social communications are forging dense transnational networks. People, cultures and societies that were previously isolated from one another are now coming into regular contact. This abolition of temporal and spatial constraints affects both the social and cultural spheres: globalization provides a common context that attenuates differences among ways of life. After reviewing the major social theories on cultural globalization, this article focuses on religions within cultural globalization and describes the similarities between Islam and other major religious traditions, as they interplay with globalization.     

Wisse die Wege! Hildegard von Bingen zum 900. Geburtstag

Hildegard is regarded as one of the most important women of the Middle Ages. Her contemporaries from all over the world wrote letters to her searching for help and prayer. Universally working she wrote works about medicine, natural history, compositions of chants for the honour of God and his creation and more than three hundred letters to people all over the world including the popes and the emperor. Hildegard's work and the way she understood herself were strongly marked by vision and prophecy. Her works were of divine origin by vision and audition. Her aim was the religious interpretation of the whole universe and a Christian life in the sense of the bible. Heaven and earth, faith and natural science, medicine and religion, the human existence in all its facts and potentials, everything was a mirror of divine love to her. In her first work Scivias ("Know the Ways") she is considering on the history of creation and salvation, from the origin of the world and of man over Christ's salvation to the fulfillment at the end of times. In the centre is standing the human being as microcosm reflecting the whole world in all conditions and laws. Man is the main work of god, reflecting in his doing and thinking God's love. Man has to know the ways that means to live the life of love in all consequences including reproduction by creating a new human being for the praise of God.     

“Religious Violence as Modern Myth”

Abstract

In this essay the author summarizes the argument of his book entitled The Myth of Religious Violence, whose main contention is that there is no reason to suppose that people are more likely to kill for a god than for a whole other host of “secular” ideologies and practices that behave in the way that “religions” do. The author then goes on to respond to various critiques that have been made of the book since its appearance in 2009.     

西藏佛教文化旅游资源开发与研究

西藏是我国西部地区藏传佛教的发源地,具有丰富的佛教文化旅游资源。本文在概述西藏丰富而独特的佛教旅游资源并对其进行评价的基础上,针对西藏发展佛教文化旅游的优劣势,提出了进一步开发西藏佛教文化旅游的策略。     

江南文化的区域界定及诗性精神的维度

当前学界对江南文化在区域、界定上过分强调地理学的意义,忽视人的主体性中“内在尺度”的作用,造成江南元叙事中的人文精神的流失和区域范围的狭隘。江南文化体现了中国民族独特的诗性精神,其维度有二:一是自由审美的维度,既不同于北国政治伦理之美,也有别于江南其他区域文化的浪漫之美;二是宗教的维度,其生产于本土巫风和外来佛教的双重基因。     

God,not Caesar: Revisiting National Socialism as ‘political religion’

This article argues that use of the concept of ‘political religion’ to describe the radicalized political movements of the twentieth century has again gained currency in recent years as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the global upsurge of religiously inspired violence and that research with respect to religion proper – what religion is, its role in public life, its evolving reception by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – can advance the discussion. The article subsequently offers the author's own research as evidence of the concept's applicability to the case of National Socialism. Analysis focuses, specifically, on a movement in nineteenth century Germany to develop a secular system of ethics, a project that eventually led, ironically and tragically, to the emergence of a new faith in a absolutized ‘collective will’ as the transcendent source of all moral values. The National Socialist movement subsequently co-opted this article of faith, the article argues, by transforming Hitler into a holy medium for the salvific dictates of what became, by the early 1930s, an unimpeachable ‘Volkswille.’