To what extent is religion inherently textual? What might the term 'textual' mean in relation to religious faith and practice? These are the two key questions addressed by the eleven thought-provoking essays collected in this volume. Accounts of the content and structure of sacred texts are commonplace. The rather more adventurous aim of this book is to disclose (within the context of religion) the various ways in which meaning can be read of more or less obviously sacred writing and from discourses such as the body, the built and natural environment, drama and ritual.

This book explores the genealogy of Jamaican dancehall while questioning whether dancehall has a spiritual underscoring, foregrounding dance, and cultural expression. This study identifies the performance and performative (behavioural actions) that may be considered as representing spiritual ritual practices within the reggae/dancehall dance phenomenon. It does so by juxtaposing reggae/dancehall against Jamaican African/neo-African spiritual practices such as Jonkonnu masquerade, Revivalism and Kumina, alongside Christianity and post-modern holistic spiritual approaches. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies, popular culture, music, theology, cultural studies, Jamaican/Caribbean culture, and dance specialists.

This book provides innovative tools and strategies to support reading intervention for students in grades 3–8 who do not yet read with grade-level accuracy. Uniquely comprehensive, the Interactive Strategies Approach--Extended (ISA-X) has been shown to enhance intermediate and middle grade students' reading accuracy and comprehension as well as content vocabulary knowledge. Preservice and inservice teachers learn how to conduct assessments that help to identify instructional goals; monitor progress toward these goals; promote students' strategic thinking and motivation; and implement small-group instruction using thematic text sets on science and social studies topics. Numerous lesson examples and a thematic text set are included. Purchasers get access to a companion website where they can download and print reproducible materials from the book, as well as additional Web-only lesson templates and assessments, in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size. See also Early Intervention for Reading Difficulties, Second Edition: The Interactive Strategies Approach, by Donna M. Scanlon, Kimberly L. Anderson, and Joan M. Sweeney, which focuses on supporting the literacy growth of beginning and struggling readers in grades K–2.

Reading instruction is too often grounded in a narrowly defined "science of reading" that focuses exclusively on cognitive skills and strategies. Yet cognition is just one aspect of reading development. This book guides K–8 educators to understand and address other scientifically supported factors that influence each student's literacy learning, including metacognition, motivation and engagement, social–emotional learning, self-efficacy, and more. Peter Afflerbach uses classroom vignettes to illustrate the broad-based nature of student readers’ growth, and provides concrete suggestions for instruction and assessment. The book's utility is enhanced by end-of-chapter review questions and activities and a reproducible tool, the Healthy Readers Profile, which can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" size.

Is Religion Good for Your Health? takes you deep into the heart of the ageless debate on the importance of religion and faith to physical and mental health. On the one hand, you will learn about important research findings from cross-sectional, longitudinal, and intervention studies that have demonstrated positive effects of religious belief on both mental and physical health. On the other hand, you will learn how the vast clinical experiences of leading health experts suggest that religion can have negative effects on health. Integral to the book’s exploration of the relationship between health and religion are the trends that have occurred in society over the last century. You will learn about significant demographic changes, changes in health and health care, and shifts in values, attitudes, and religious conviction, all of which have direct implications for health care providers, the clergy, the “baby boomers,” and older adults. From Author Harold Koenig, a leading expert on religion and health who has frequently been interviewed by major broadcasting networks such as ABC, National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corporation, NBC, CBS, and “Ivanhoe Broadcast News,” you will also learn about: pathological uses of religion the need for cooperation and collaboration between health and religious professionals studies on the relationship of religious beliefs and practice to physical conditions such as blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and cancer links between religious behavior and depression, anxiety, and drug use the waning of religion’s influence in America first-hand accounts from patients who have faced painful and/or life-threatening illness As Is Religion Good for Your Health? analyzes the pathological aspects of religion, you will begin to understand how religious beliefs have the capacity to strongly influence people’s lives and their health, whether positively or negatively. Health care providers, public policy experts, religious professionals, medical researchers, and medical students will find the book’s overview of the issues at stake, particularly the implications for our public health care system, crucial to the advancement of health care practice into the next century.

This book covers the topic of discourse and argumentation in archaeology with an aim to serve the archaeology community. The book presents discourse and argument analysis approaches and techniques in an affordable manner and applied to archaeological situations. It focuses on techniques and approaches that can be applicable to multiple situations, periods and cultures. The book begins with an introduction to discourse and argumentation analysis as a general field and also as an auxiliary technique to archaeology. The work includes conceptual applications, ranging from causality, ontological connections, vagueness, social production of discourse and public debates. The work also devotes a section to computational approaches and describes the specifics of some well-known families of algorithms such as lexical processing, information extraction or sentiment analysis. The conclusion comments on the future and which reflects on the previous chapters and discusses how the presented techniques and approaches should be adapted or improved for easier and more powerful application to archaeology. Contributing authors bring perspectives from archaeology, linguistics, and computer science.

The Journal of International Students (JIS), an academic, interdisciplinary, and peer-reviewed publication (Print ISSN 2162-3104 & Online ISSN 2166-3750), publishes scholarly peer reviewed articles on international students in tertiary education, secondary education, and other educational settings that make significant contributions to research, policy, and practice in the internationalization of higher education.

This book brings together new approaches to the study of Sikh religion, culture and ethnicity being pursued in the diaspora by Sikh academics in western universities in Britain and North America. An important aspect of the volume is the diversity of topics that are engaged - including film and gender theory, theology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics and race theory - and brought to bear on the individual contributors' specialism within Sikh studies, thereby helping to explode previously static dichotomies such as insider vs. outsider or history vs. tradition. The volume should have strong appeal both to an academic market including students of politics, religious studies and South Asian studies, and to a more general English-speaking Sikh readership.

Evil in Scripture denotes both suffering and behavior that causes it. Anger often follows suffering. Anger at people is condemned, but anger at God is accepted because biblical faith portrays God as inflicting evil. This faith calls for an understanding of language about God acting and a biblical theodicy revealing God's goodness; both are provided. Portrayals of God as inflicting evil do not deny that, factually, humans inflict it, so the witness about human sin is included. Final chapters offer biblical deliverances from evil.