The use of different blood sample preparations in the development of biomarkers for the environmental monitoring of domestic farm animals

The application of biological effect monitoring for the detection of environmental chemical exposure in domestic animals is still in its infancy. This study investigated blood sample preparations in vitro for their use in biological effect monitoring. When peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), isolated following the collection of multiple blood samples from sheep in the field, were cryopreserved and subsequently cultured for 24 hours a reduction in cell viability (<80%) was attributed to delays in the processing following collection. Alternative blood sample preparations using rat and sheep blood demonstrated that 3 to 5 hour incubations can be undertaken without significant alterations in the viability of the lymphocytes; however, a substantial reduction in viability was observed after 24 hours in frozen blood. Detectable levels of early and late apoptosis as well as increased levels of ROS were detectable in frozen sheep blood samples. The addition of ascorbic acid partly reversed this effect and reduced the loss in cell viability. The response of the rat and sheep blood sample preparations to genotoxic compounds ex vivo showed that EMS caused comparable dose-dependent genotoxic effects in all sample preparations (fresh and frozen) as detected by the Comet assay. In contrast, the effects of CdCl2 were dependent on the duration of exposure as well as the sample preparation. The analysis of leukocyte subsets in frozen sheep blood showed no alterations in the percentages of T and B lymphocytes but led to a major decrease in the percentage of granulocytes compared to those in the fresh samples. The percentages of IFN-γ and IL-4 but not IL-6 positive cells were comparable between fresh and frozen sheep blood after 4 hour stimulation with phorbol 12-myrisate 13-acetate and ionomycin (PMA+I). These results show that frozen blood gives comparable responses to fresh blood samples in the toxicological and immune assays used.

Religion, the study of religion and other products of transnational and colonial imaginings

The category of ‘religion’ as contemporary scholarship has demonstrated is a fairly recent innovation, dating back only a few hundred years in Western thought, and ‘world religions’ as we think of it and as we teach it is an even more recent category, emerging out of European colonialism. Thus the academic study of religion is both the product and, at times, the agent of colonial modes of knowledge. And yet, it is perhaps because ‘religion’ continues to be invented and reinvented through connections across cultures that investigating the work of religious ideas and practices offers such fruitful possibilities for understanding the work of culture and power. This article investigates religion and the study of religion as a mode of anti-colonial practice, seeking to understand how each have the potential to cross boundaries, build bridges and produce critical insights into assumptions and worldviews too often taken for granted.

A nation preferring visions: moving statues, apparitions and vernacular religion in contemporary Ireland

This thesis examines important issues of Irish vernacular Catholicism, Irish religious and cultural identities, the impacts of modernity plus socio-religious and economic change on traditional religiosity, sacred landscape and topophilia, religious material culture, folk and individual creativity, gender roles and expectations, and devotional subcultures through the vehicle of Marian apparitions and their aftermath in the Republic of Ireland in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This thesis examines in detail five Irish Marian shrines as case studies; Knock shrine (Co. Mayo), Ballinspittle and Mitchelstown grottoes (Co. Cork), Mount Melleray grotto (Co. Waterford) and the Marian shrines of Inchigeela in West Cork and the attached houses of prayer. Key themes include; vernacular religious theory; the nature of Irish indigenous Catholicism; local, global and transnational trends in contemporary Irish devotional life; areas of individual creativity, fluidity and agency in Marian devotion; and the vital role and influence of material culture in and on local and individual religiosity.

Religious memory as a conveyor of authoritative tradition: The necessary and essential component in a definition of religion

In a landmark book published in 2000, the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger defined religion as a chain of memory, by which she meant that within religious communities remembered traditions are transmitted with an overpowering authority from generation to generation. After analysing Hervieu-Léger’s sociological approach as overcoming the dichotomy between substantive and functional definitions, this article compares a ritual honouring the ancestors in which a medium becomes possessed by the senior elder’s ancestor spirit among the Shona of Zimbabwe with a cleansing ritual performed by a Celtic shaman in New Hampshire, USA. In both instances, despite different social and historical contexts, appeals are made to an authoritative tradition to legitimize the rituals performed. This lends support to the claim that the authoritative transmission of a remembered tradition, by exercising an overwhelming power over communities, even if the memory of such a tradition is merely postulated, identifies the necessary and essential component for any activity to be labelled “religious”.