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Showing posts from June, 2009

The Role of Culture in Education

The spiritual life has been described as the “interiorization of the outward” ( khalwa )and the “exteriorization of the inward” ( jalwa )’.Education is an aspect of the latter process; the very etymology of the word (e-ducare, of lead out”) is an indication of this. As a “leading-out”, education is a rendering explicit of the immanent Intellect ( Intellectus or Nous ),the seat of which, symbolically speaking, is the heart. As Frithjof Schuon has said more than once: “The Intellect can know everything that is knowable”. This is because “heart-knowledge” (gnosis) is innate, and thus already fully present within us, in a state of virtuality. This virtuality2 has to be realized, and this realization is education. This corresponds to the Platonic doctrine of “recollection” ( anamnesis ),which in the last analysis is the “remembrance of God” ( memoria Dei ).“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Man is constituted by the ternary: Spirit, soul and body ( Spiritus, anima, corpus)

On the Way of Poetry and Nature

Within a traditional culture everything is potentially a religious discipline, and in few places has this been made clearer than in Japan prior to modernity, for there the way of the sword, the way of tea, the way of flower arranging, all were, and to a most limited degree now are still, modes of religious expression, and indeed are in general well known outside Japan even today. To be a tea master for instance is, still, a matter of great prestige, but more than this, is a manifestation of religious discipline–it is a demonstration of active samadhi, of total absorption in the moment, in one’s activity, and this it is which infills the ceremony with so much dignity and power. [1] Time seems suspended; everything is condensed into a single fluid movement. This dignity and power is common to all the initiatory disciplines– for that is what these all are, and indeed what all the traditional arts are– but there is one discipline which is traditionally not limited to one or another class,

Gender as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis

This essay is very significant in the field of women’s history, and it has been cited widely outside the discipline of history as well. It is a synthesizing text that offers tools and appraisals of them. Scott is focused on the utility of gender analysis — what comes to light when you focus on gender (not just on women but how gender systems and symbolic orders produce men and women, and masculinity and femininity, not only in the home and family but in the labor market, politics, schools, nations, etc.). Gender — the term usually (and most appropriately) is a grammatical term whereby in certain languages, formal rules apply for making designations of masculine or feminine. In grammar, gender is a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agree upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits. [See our previous discussion of the terms realism, essentialism, nominalism, and social constructionism.] In recent history, feminists have appropriated the term

GENDER IN RURAL TRANSPORT For Agricultural livelihoods

Rural transport contributes to rural livelihoods by increasing the mobility of people and goods and facilitating access to resources that serve basic needs as well as labor and commodity markets, services (health, education, and financial), and information. Rural transport infrastructure often opens the way for the development of water, energy, and other infrastructure. Rural transport includes motorized and nonmotorized rural transport services for passengers and freight (such as public and private trucks, buses, trains, and boats as well as bicycles, animals, and other intermediate means of transport) and rural transport infrastructure (rural roads, bridges, tracks, trails, paths, and waterways). The rapid growth of urban centers and periurban sprawl in developing countries has blurred the boundaries of rural and urban and increased nonfarm income opportunities for rural men and women. The globalization of food production, distribution, and retailing based on integrated global valu