No Church is monolithic—this is the preliminary premise of this volume on the public place of religion in a representative number of post-communist countries. The studies confirm that within any religious organization we can expect to find fissures, factions, theological or ideological quarrels, and perhaps even competing interest groups, such as missionary workers, regular clergy versus secu…
In August 1969, a group of local Japanese martial arts masters in New York invited Ronald Duncan, a burgeoning Black1 American practitioner of the Japanese martial art of ninjutsu, commonly translated as the “art of stealth,” to exhibit his techniques as part of the second International Convention of Martial Arts hosted by Black Belt mag…
Sound economic policy presupposes availability of timely, comprehensive, credible, and multi-purpose data that many African countries have lacked for a long period. It is not long ago when major policy reforms were implemented based on findings drawn from faulty data. A recent project B. Ndemo Kenya’s Ambassador, Belgium and the EU Mission, Brussels, Belgiume-mail: bndemo@bitang…
The coastal areas of Louisiana have been subject to extreme weather ever since the Mississippi River began to create the Delta land 7000+ years ago (Roberts 1997). The extreme weather first impacted the indigenous population that has lived here for millennia and, over the last 300+ years, multi-ethnic immigrants, refugees and enslaved peoples who settled among them (Owens 2015). Whil…
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Wa…
In the United States, many political leaders throughout history have come from powerful families. For Barack Obama, this is far from the truth. His upbringing was in humble circumstances, and, while he doesn’t fit any typical political mold, he is already considered by many to be one of the most dynamic figures in U.S. politics. His oratory skills, direct style, and ability to communicate are…
In his 1980 book Language: The Loaded Weapon, Dwight Bolinger decries the number of ‘shamans,’ as he calls them, who comment without authority (and usually without recourse to evidence) on the use of language. The problem, he says, is that ‘they are almost the only people who make the news when language begins to cause trouble, and someone must answer the …