The theory of the kingdom: A unified model of human agency

Andrew Root

This original monograph presents a comprehensive theory regarding the economy of the kingdom of God. The theory and associated model will help individuals make better choices. The research integrates fundamentals of the temporal real economy, and the permanent economy of the kingdom of God, to present a unified model of human agency. According to the model, effective agents are salt and light in the real economy, arresting corruption and revealing the truth. Effective agency produces life, peace, and growth. Individual and organizational practices that arrest corruption and reveal truth can resolve longstanding economic grievances. The list of spiritual credence goods is extensive and includes commonly known virtues such as humility, patience, and hope. Spiritual goods are allocated based on the owner-agent relationship. The quantity of goods the owner supplies is in proportion to an individual’s sacrificial offering of time and money. Spiritual goods are stored as heart capital. In a process analogous to the real economy, heart labor applied to heart capital produces desirable outputs. The owner relates to his agents through a heart-inscribed behavioral contract. The owner generally intervenes in the real economy by communicating with agents rather than by restricting choice. Prior studies across economics, finance, and sociology prove the efficiency of behavioral contracts and communication over restricted choice. Herein researchers will find new testable propositions, and practitioners will find new ideas and practices to live better, more consequential lives. Examples of practical applications include methods of resolving group-level bias and understanding the purpose of life’s difficulties.

The Labyrinth of Multitude and Other Reality Checks on Being Latino/x

Julio Marzán

Seventies “Hispanics,” identifying with Latin American emergence and increasing immigration to the U.S., adopted the epithet 'latino', soon written as Latino. Media fast-tracked, English Latino would eventually tilt presidential elections, advocate national programs, and protest policies, with native and immigrant subgroups presumed homogenous. Enunciated identically as 'latino' and presumed to be 'latino' or its exact translation, “Latino” proved to be a transliteration that since its coining started diverging from 'latino'. Latino became the political mask of unity over discrete subgroups; its primary agenda identity politics as a racialized, brown consciousness divested of its Hispanic cultural history. In contrast, 'latino' retains its Spanish transracial semantics, invoking an 'hispano' cultural history. Nationally Latino represents the entire Hispanic demographic while internecinely not all subgroups identify as Latinos. Latino is defined by immediate sociopolitical issues yet when needed invokes the 'latino' cultural history it presumably disowns. Intellectual inconsistency and semantic amorphousness make Latino a confusing epithet that subverts both speech and scholarship. Collective critical thinking on its semantic dysfunction, deferring to solidarity, is displaced with politically correct but circumventing tweaks, creating Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx. On the other hand, Latino exists because its time had come, expressing an aspiration for a more participatory identity in a multicultural America. Julio Marzán, author of 'The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams', suspends solidarity to articulate the intellectual challenges of his Latino identity. Writing to academic standards in a style accessible to the general reader, Marzán argues that from 'latino' roots Latino evolved into an American identity as a demographic summation implying a culture that actually origin cultures provide, ambiguously an ethnicity and a nostalgic assimilation. “Latino” are American-germane sociopolitical extrapolations of 'latino' experiential details, the often-conflicted distinction illustrated in Marzán’s equally engaging essays that revisit iconic personages and personal events with more nuance than seen as Latino.

Laws and policies to contrast and prevent Gender-Based Violence Against Women

A comparative analysis between Spain and Italy (1993-2015)

Stellamarina Donato, LUMSA University of Rome, Italy

What stage of development are women’s rights as human rights? By specifically regarding the prevention and elimination of all forms of Violence Against Women, the book focuses on two European Mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. The book first considers the chronological description and analysis of the main international documents, those belonging to the United Nations apparatus, followed by the analysis of the sources on Gender-Based Violence Against Women (GBVAW) of the Council of Europe and the European Union. The analysis of international documents guarantees an initial overview of the debate on GBVAW, following a top-down approach, from the UN to the national level. Successively, the focus is on both national sources as well as the level of government responsiveness in terms of policies on GBVAW in Italy and Spain, while also comparing the cases. The book adopts multimethod research based on qualitative text analysis; an examination of the level of national Government Responsiveness to GBVAW, and a series of in-depth interviews with targeted individuals. The final aim of this book is to understand how international (UN) and regional (CoE, EU) documents on GBVAW, along with the categories and expressions used within the documents, have contributed to different policies in countering GBVAW in Italy and Spain, while also highlighting the reasons why the two countries responded differently. Within a comprehensive international scenario, this book intends to create space for debate on possible future EU policies aimed at contrasting GBVAW.

Sensory Environmental Relationships: Between Memories of the Past and Imaginings of the Future

Edited by Blaž Bajič, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and Ana Svetel, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sensory environmental relationships – understood as dynamic, embodied, and emplaced affective sensory perceptions in (and of) the environment – invite us to remember the past, infuse our experiences of the present, and entice us to imagine the future. Ethnographically specific, socially and culturally nuanced approaches to environmental relationships require considerable conceptual and practical flexibility and inventiveness. Reflecting this commitment, 'Sensory Environmental Relationships' aims to offer a new anthropological understanding of how, in our individual and collective lives, senses, places, and temporalities intersect. While anthropologists have been studying the sensory environmental relationships in connection to people’s pasts and presents, futures remain conspicuously absent. By bringing different timeframes into the foreground of the analysis, this volume contributes to filling in the gap in our understanding of the human experience. The volume’s ethnographically based contributions address the questions of how embodied and emplaced practices of sensing, while moving or staying in place in diverse environments, engender, inform, and affect the processes of remembering (and forgetting) the past, experiencing the present, and imagining the future. Drawing on the fields of environmental anthropology, sensory studies, studies of movement and mobility, memory studies, and other related (sub)disciplines, as well as diverse, epistemologically and methodologically experimental approaches, the volume explores the ways in which sensory environmental relationships “touch” upon our pasts, presents, and futures.

Unwrapping Racism: Dealing with Differences

Chuck Grose

“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu “Unwrapping Racism: Dealing with Differences” will connect the reader with recent social movements such as gun safety, Black Lives Matter, and college reform movements. The Early social movements would portray racial discrimination within the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Eugenics/Sterilization Movement. The Civil Right Movement of 1950s/1960s highlights Rosa Parks, Dr. M. L. King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis. This book will present key issues, such as cultural privilege and its prevalence. The reader will be lifted up from xenophobia, colonialism and slavery while creatively facing individual responses to those issues today. All those approaches move into our societal goals of assimilation, cultural pluralism and the “melting pot” concept. This volume will make the perfect complement to Dr. Grose previous book "Dealing with differences". Every reader can do something, sometime, somewhere to effectively deal with differences. As the book confronts race, it challenges the reader to grapple with action-oriented exercises, questions, and projects relevant to key paragraphs on every page. At the end of the book, the readers will be empowered to tell their own stories about their experiences with race within each chapter.