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The paper attempts to assess the state of Christianity as a power mechanism. There are certain speculations which seem to argue that historically Christianity has served as a mechanism to aggregate power for the political and religious establishment of the time through the means of emerging with the Roman Empire, Crusades, and Colonialism. Although at particular times, Christianity has been used to aggregate power from the people, this paper argues that Christianity supports a different view of power. We argue theologically and historically that a distribution philosophy of power is intrinsic to Christianity, and Christianity itself (pre and post Reformation) has served as a mechanism to empower the people.
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This short study outlines and illustrates the importance of the person of Abraham as fundamental to Jesus’ teaching, esp. in view of his own Jewishness in addressing his fellow citizens. In the four gospels, the name of Abraham, and particularly the phrase “son of Abraham”, served as a technical term for genuine Jewishness and religious identification. Frequently, in the context of disputes between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders of the time, Jesus persistently returned to the person of Abraham as a paradigm of faith rather than primarily a reference to the father of the nation. In the Old Testament, Abraham is constantly referred to as the friend of God, a believer par excellence. This attribute seemed to have been lost in the days of Jesus and the New Testament times. Jesus thus wishes to re-establish this role of Abraham, especially for the Jews.
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Years of miscalculations by Minsk have created unprecedented online freedom in Belarus. A sweeping new law aims to change that.
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A somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of the campaign promises made by four leading Slovak parties ahead of the 12 June elections. Slovak journalist Rado Bato decided to deconstruct the electoral platforms of the four leading parties going into the 12 June parliamentary elections. Here is a brief rundown of the main players: • Smer-SD (Direction - Social Democracy): Leftist, populist party headed by Robert Fico, prime minister since 2006. Sme, the paper in which this commentary appeared, has been a target of Fico’s frequent assaults on the Slovak media. • SDKU (Slovak Democratic and Christian Union): Lead party in the centrist government headed by Mikulas Dzurinda between 1998 and 2006. • KDH (Christian Democratic Movement): An original member of the governing coalition under Dzurinda; left the coalition several months before the 2006 elections. • SaS (Freedom and Solidarity): Liberal party founded in 2009 by economist Richard Sulik.
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TOL slide show: Two elderly Azeri women reflect on coming to - and staying in - Nagorno-Karabakh
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Amid a cartoonish election campaign starved of substance, a new collection of writings on Slovak identity is food for thought.
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Women are climbing the ladder to influence in post-communist parliaments. But far too slowly.
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Instead of dealing with brutality in the army, some lawmakers aim to establish a fee for those who want to opt out.
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A one-man encyclopedist devotes his life to repopulating a fading Serbian town one Austro-Hungarian at a time.
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The conditionality of academic performance, seen as one of the main pillars of the stratification structure of contemporary society, which includes the relationship between natural, descent-based and socio-cultural factors has been the subject of long debate. Sociological thought has consistently accentuated the role of social and cultural factors in one’s educational, occupational and other attainments. A number of non-sociological authors have questioned the perception of such societal determinism. This paper tested the impact of various factors, including one used as an indicator of what is usually called ‘mental ability’ (or intelligence), on children’s academic achievement on a sample of 1,156 Slovenian secondary school pupils. The results did not warrant a definite conclusion about the predominance of either cognitive or environmental influences, but indicated that the score one achieved in the mental ability test was a significant explanatory variable. Other significant factors included the education of one’s mother (which was more influential than the father’s) and gender.
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The results of the study presented in this paper confirm other empirical results obtained via sociological research on the activities of research groups (e.g., Hemlin, Allwood and Martin 2004) that creativity or research productivity is strongly influenced by intra-social factors: autonomy, flexibility, co-operation etc. The analysis presented in the paper confirms that for science at the micro level the relationships among researchers play an important role in scientific performance. This is especially true in the phase of the socialisation and professionalisation of young scientists.
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The article explores the representation of domestic violence in quality daily newspapers and on a news and current affairs programme on Slovenian television. Its emphasis is on the formal issues of the media’s representation of violence, particularly on the generic aspects of chronicles in the daily press and on the episodic news story on television news. The authors argue that the journalistic representation of domestic violence uses ‘factism’ as a key strategic ritual of reporting which results in the decontextualisation, psychologisation and individualisation of the problem of violence. Police and the judiciary act as standard bureaucratic sources which serve to authenticate and verify the journalistic discourse. The main feature of the news on domestic violence on television is the episodic account of events in the news programme, the standard framing of the problem within the framework of conflict between political parties and the melodramatic representation of violence in the current affairs programme. The melodramatisation of violence in turn results in the decontextualiaation and individualisation of the problem of domestic violence that is conventionally interpreted as being outside of the structural sources of violence, such as class differentiation and the performance of hegemonic masculinity.
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According to common belief it is the economic elite which has an influence on the political elite. The alternation of political authority in Slovenia and consequential changes in the network of the economic elite shows that in specific historic circumstances the political elite may dominate over the economic elite. If we use some of the tools provided by social network analysis and compare the most cohesive parts of the network which existed in 2004 with the one which existed in 2006, we find that the changes in the network run very deep. Since the alternation of the political elite, the ‘inner circle’ (Useem) of the economic elite has disintegrated and a new ‘inner circle’ of the economic elite has been appearing.
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Following from a historical review and analysis of selected cases, the article aims to determine the historical origins of stereotypical perceptions of Italians among the Slovenian nation. The author reflects on the form of these stereotypes, their temporal continuity and the impact of the specific socio-cultural and political context on their formation. Despite the numerical smallness and political weakness of Slovenians from 1848 onwards, stereotypes of the Italian nation in the Slovenian consciousness have often been explicitly underestimating, mocking and degrading. These characteristics can be ascribed to the expansionist ideology and aggressive politics expressed towards the Slovenian nation and its territory in the past. Nevertheless, they became extremely intolerant and even hostile in the independent Republic of Slovenia, which is based on democratic principle of the freedom of speech and declaratively settled relations with the Republic of Italy, whose national minority forms a constitutionally recognised part of the Slovenian state.
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