Focusing on consumer trust in science, this dissertation explores the societal and ecological factors that can influence consumer’s science denial tendency, and also explores how to leverage consumers’ input with crowdsourcing to rate scientific article veracity and hence create a trustworthy media environment. In the first chapter, I find that lower religious diversity in a region, or an individual’s experience, predicts lower religious tolerance and greater science denial. The belief that my religion trumps other religions precipitates the attitude that it trumps science too. I find supporting evidence from seven studies using U.S. mobile location data, census data, worldwide archival data, national surveys conducted in different countries with participants from different religious groups, and experiments. In the second chapter, I propose a novel crowdsourcing method to leverage the input of general consumers into the fact-checking efforts. I validate the use of similarity judgments to facilitate unbiased consumer responses and prove that asking lay consumers to rate the similarity between scientist-rated and unrated articles provide an unbiased and efficient way to scale up veracity ratings of scientific articles. In order to increase consumer trust in science, I argue that policy makers should emphasize religious integration and heterogeneity in communities. In order to build a better news environment with more trustworthy scientific information, I argue that news companies, news platforms, and third-party fact-checkers can engage general consumers’ input by asking the right questions to get unbiased and reliable responses.

Magister Theologiae - MTh / This study begins by recognising the religiously plural context in which the Christian churches currently exist. It discusses the various forces that impel the churches towards recognition of and dialogue with those of other faiths, as well as factors that hinder this process. It mentions a variety of ways in which theology - in particular, the theological understanding of the relationship between the Christian churches and other faith communities - is influenced by its context. In an attempt to identify a model within the Judaeo-Christian tradition that will provide a basis for inter-faith dialogue, the study proposes an exploration of the relationship between Yahweh and the gods of the nations as reflected in the the prophetic writings known as Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah, writings that almost certainly emerged from two particular periods in the history of the people of lsrael: the Babylonian exile and the early post-exilic period in Palestine. The study outlines historical developments within these two periods. It explores the various religious beliefs - Babylonian, Palestinian and Persian - that together formed the multi-faith context for Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah.

abstract: This work examines the spectrum of Christian attitudes toward yoga as demonstrative of contemporary religious imagination in recent United States history. With the booming commodification of yoga as exercise, the physical and mental elements of yoga practice are made safely secular by disassociation from their ostensible religious roots. Commonly deployed phrases, "Yoga is not a religion," or even, "Yoga is a science," open a broad invitation. But the very need for this clarification illustrates yoga's place in the United States as a borderline signifier for spirituality. Vocal concern by both Christians and Hindus demonstrates the tension between perceptions of yoga as a secular commodity and yoga as religiously beget. Alternatively embracing and rejecting yoga's religious history, Christian yoga practitioners reframe and rejoin yoga postures and breathing into their lives of faith. Some proponents name their practice Christian Yoga. Christian Yoga flourishes as part of contemporary religious and spiritual discourse and practice in books, instructional DVDs, websites and studios throughout the United States. Christian Yoga proponents, professional and lay theologians alike, highlight the diversity of American attitudes toward and understanding of yoga and the heterogeneity of Christianity. For religious studies scholars, Christian Yoga advocates and detractors provide an opportune focal point for inquiry into the evolution of spiritual practice, the dynamics of tradition, experience and authority, and the dialectic nature of evolving cultural attitudes in a religiously plural and complex secular environment. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Religious Studies 2014

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1982. / Bibliography: leaves 891-1267. / by Donald George Morrison. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1982.

This work provides a detailed account of the historical role of the distinction between the potential and actual infinite in a variety of debates within natural philosophy and mathematics. It then connects these historical positions to modern debates over the possibility of pluralism within philosophy of logic and mathematics. In particular, it defends a view under which theories of the infinite and logic are justified abductively, and it argues that this abductive methodology provides space for an interesting pluralism about both the infinite and logical consequence. This argument relies on a detailed and thorough historical investigation into ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern views of the infinite, revealing a range of background metaphysical and epistemological commitments that motivate different abductive criteria for sophisticated philosophical positions on the infinite. It then suggests that charitable interpretations of the historical positions on the infinite should lead one to endorse a logical pluralism.

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This dissertation develops a constructive theological interpretation of the Body of Christ metaphor in order to provide a distinct understanding of Christian identity to assist Christians in responding to religious diversity. Presently, two academic approaches guide contemporary Christian theological responses to religious pluralism: theology of religions and comparative theology. They offer resources and insights into Christian responses, but questions remain regarding the relationship of Christian identity to contexts of religious diversity. Revitalizing the Body of Christ metaphor through engagement with contemporary theologians, this dissertation interprets their insights about alterity and embodiment regarding religious difference. Focusing on concepts of embodiment, relationality, diversity and praxis, the Christian identity that emerges is neither exclusive nor contained, but open and interdependent. This provides a framing of Christian identity that assists Christians in relating to religious diversity with openness. Chapter one surveys contemporary approaches that have guided the Christian theological response to religious diversity. Turning to the Body of Christ metaphor in the New Testament writings of Paul, chapter two demonstrates the original power of the metaphor to shape the values and worldview of early Jesus-followers. Chapters three and four explore womanist, feminist, queer, and crip theologies for critiques and contributions to the theological significance of bodies. Offering warnings about the failure to attend to the realities of difference, they offer essential theological insights into conceptions of bodies, hierarchy, and difference. The content they provide for the Body of Christ metaphor shapes Christian self-understanding in a manner that opens the Christian community as it engages other religious bodies. The final chapter provides a constructive interpretation of the Body of Christ and points to distinctive practices that guide the Christian community into a new embodiment of this metaphor. The identity provided by the metaphor shapes Christian relationships with each other and the world through practices of discernment, re-membering, and partnership. It challenges Christians to value fluidity and porousness, putting them in tension with dominant conceptions of Western society, and, through relationality and appreciation for the other, it calls Christians to engage religious diversity with actions of social justice.

In recent years, the sport of women's ice hockey is growing fast worldwide. Upon winning the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, women's ice hockey in China started to develop rapidly. However, the development of women's ice hockey in China has encountered numerous challenges. These challenges include addressing traditional Chinese culture, gender norms, and the process of sport reform. This study used a qualitative case study methodology to examine the perspectives of Chinese women ice hockey players, coaches, club administrators, government administrators, and the parents of youth hockey players to understand how women's ice hockey navigated itself within the institutional complexity to gain legitimacy, and how the different institutional logics impacted the identities of organizations within women's ice hockey in China. An abductive grounded theory approach was used to analyze the transcriptions and archived documents. Findings indicated that there were challenges for the development of women's ice hockey in China at macro level, meso level, and micro level. Actors such as hockey administrations, professional clubs, and ice hockey coaches and players at different levels adopted multiple forms of institutional work to find out ways to incorporate institutional structures that mitigated the fact that there were multiple logics. In addition, influenced by competing logics, the organizations created collective identities to balance those logics. This study provides insights into how the actors within sport organizations create a more satisfactory environment to gain legitimacy.

Isaiah Berlin’s doctrine of objective pluralism has been criticised as amounting in fact to ethical and political relativism. Berlin has relied on two arguments in attempting to refute this charge, those from common intelligibility and from shared values. I propose that the former argument alone is sufficient to refute relativism, whilst the latter argument leads not to pluralism but to a broad or narrow monism, depending on the number of shared values, since it fatally undermines the strong sense of incommensurability which is the defining characteristic of pluralism as a distinct and radical doctrine. Alongside his view that values are commonly intelligible, Berlin retains a minimal ethical universalism, framed in terms of his concept of ‘negative liberty’, or freedom from unwarranted interference. Some have argued that this inviolable ‘core’ of human freedom constitutes a form of liberal universalism. Whilst I concede that Berlin’s objective pluralism does exhibit a decidedly Western character, I argue that his ‘core’ is in fact a rational and pragmatic assertion of the minimal conditions for any meaningful and sustainable human life, whatever its diverse forms, rather than an endorsement of any universalist claims of liberalism, even minimal ones. I further argue that the common intelligibility of values on which Berlin’s refutation of relativism can be thought convincingly to rest is possible only because there is an essence and continuity in human ideas of a kind which is denied by Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School, and which enable the historical understanding we clearly can achieve.