Conversion in late antiquity: Christianity, Islam, and beyond

The papers in this volume were presented at a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar held at the University of Oxford in 2009-2010, which sought to investigate side by side the two important movements of conversion that frame late antiquity: to Christianity at its start, and to Islam at the other end. Challenging the opposition between the two stereotypes of Islamic conversion as an intrinsically violent process, and Christian conversion as a fundamentally spiritual one, the papers seek to isolate the behaviours and circumstances that made conversion both such a common and such a contested phenomenon. The spread of Buddhism in Asia in broadly the same period serves as an external comparator that was not caught in the net of the Abrahamic religions. The volume is organised around several themes, reflecting the concerns of the initial project with the articulation between norm and practice, the role of authorities and institutions, and the social and individual fluidity on the ground. Debates, discussions, and the expression of norms and principles about conversion conversion are not rare in societies experiencing religious change, and the first section of the book examines some of the main issues brought up by surviving sources. This is followed by three sections examining different aspects of how those principles were - or were not - put into practice: how conversion was handled by the state, how it was continuously redefined by individual ambivalence and cultural fluidity, and how it was enshrined through different forms of institutionalization. Finally, a topographical coda examines the effects of religious change on the iconic holy city of Jerusalem.

Effects of a multi-session Cognitive Bias Modification program on interpretative biases and social anxiety symptoms in a sample of Iranian socially-anxious students

This study examines the effects of a multi-session Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) program on interpretative biases and social anxiety in an Iranian sample. Thirty-six volunteers with a high score on social anxiety measures were recruited from a student population and randomly allocated into the experimental and control groups. In the experimental group, participants received 4 sessions of positive CBM for interpretative biases (CBM-I) over 2 weeks in the laboratory. Participants in the control condition completed a neutral task matched the active CBM-I intervention in format and duration but did not encourage positive disambiguation of socially ambiguous scenarios. The results indicated that after training the positive CBM-I group exhibited more positive (and less negative) interpretations of ambiguous scenarios and less social anxiety symptoms relative to the control condition at both 1 week post-test and 7 weeks follow-up. It is suggested that clinical trials are required to establish the clinical efficacy of this intervention for social anxiety.

Biodiversity and green open space

Biodiversity has been defined as the totality of genes, species, and ecosystems that inhabit the earth with the field contributing to many aspects of our lives and livelihoods by providing us with food, drink, medicines and shelter, as well as contributing to improving our surrounding environment. Benefits include providing life services through improved horticultural production, improving the business and service of horticulture as well as our environment, as well as improving our health and wellbeing, and our social and cultural relationships. Threats to biodiversity can include fragmentation, degradation and deforestation of habitat, introduction of invasive and exotic species, climate change and extreme weather events, over-exploitation of our natural resources, hybridisation, genetic pollution/erosion and food security issues and human overpopulation. This chapter examines a series of examples that provide the dual aims of biodiversity conservation and horticultural production and service; namely organic horticultural cropping, turf management, and nature-based tourism, and ways of valuing biological biodiversity such as the payment of environmental services and bio-prospecting. Horticulture plays a major role in the preserving of biodiversity.