St. Symeon the New Theologian and Western Dissident Movements

The trial at Orleans in 1022 of a group of aristocratic clergy, who included the confessor of Queen Constance of France, and their followers on the charge of heresy is the most fully reported among the group of heresy trials which were conducted in the Western Church during the first half of the eleventh century. Although the alleged heretics of Orleans are usually considered a part of a wider pattern of Western religious dissent, the charges brought against them differ considerably from those levelled against the other groups brought to trial in that period. The heterodox beliefs with which the canons of Orleans were charged bear a strong resemblance to the teachings of the Byzantine abbot, St. Symeon the New Theologian, who died in 1022. St. Symeon taught that it was possible for a Christian to experience the vision of God in this life if he or she received ascetic guidance from a spiritual director, who need not be a priest. In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries a significant number of Orthodox monks visited northern Europe, including Orleans, and some of them settled there. It is therefore possible that the Canons of Orleans who were put on trial had been trained in the tradition of St. Symeon by one of those Orthodox monks who were familiar with it. St. Symeon was part of the Hesychast tradition in the Byzantine Church. Even so, his emphasis on the supremacy of personal religious experience at the expense of the corporate worship of the institutional Church was strongly criticised by some of his contemporaries. A study of his writings shows that he was, in fact, completely Orthodox in faith and practice and that these criticisms were ill-judged. Nevertheless, if, as we have suggested, the Canons of Orleans had tried to live in accordance with his teachings, the hostile reactions of the Western hierarchy would be comprehensible. For there was no tradition of Hesychasm in the spirituality of the Western Church, and the fact that the dissidents at Orleans saw little value in observing the rituals of the established Church would have alarmed conventional churchmen

Monotone Volume Formulas for Geometric Flows

We consider a closed manifold M with a Riemannian metric g(t) evolving in direction -2S(t) where S(t) is a symmetric two-tensor on (M,g(t)). We prove that if S satisfies a certain tensor inequality, then one can construct a forwards and a backwards reduced volume quantity, the former being non-increasing, the latter being non-decreasing along the flow. In the case where S=Ric is the Ricci curvature of M, the result corresponds to Perelman's well-known reduced volume monotonicity for the Ricci flow. Some other examples are given in the second section of this article, the main examples and motivation for this work being List's extended Ricci flow system, the Ricci flow coupled with harmonic map heat flow and the mean curvature flow in Lorentzian manifolds with nonnegative sectional curvatures. With our approach, we find new monotonicity formulas for these flows.Comment: v2: final version (as published

Agile thinking in motion graphics practice and its potential for design education

Motion Graphics is relatively new subject and its methodologies are still being developed. There are useful lessons to be learnt from the practice in early cinema from the 1890's to the 1930's where Agile thinking was used by a number of practitioners including Fritz Lang. Recent studies in MA Motion Graphics have accessed some of this thinking incorporating them in a series of Motion Graphic tests and experiments culminating in a two minute animation “1896 Olympic Marathon”. This paper demonstrates how the project and its design methodology can contribute new knowledge for the practice and teaching of this relatively new and expanding area of Motion Graphic Design. This would be not only invaluable to the International community of Motion Graphic practitioners, Educators and Researchers in their development of this maturing field. But also to the broader Multidisciplinary disciplines within Design Education. These methodologies have been arrived at by accessing the work of creative and reflective practice as defined by Carol Grey and Julian Marlin in Visualizing Research (2004) and reflective practice as defined by Donald Schon (1983). Central to the investigation has been the approach of Agile thinking from the methodology of "Bricolage" by Levi Strauss "The Savage Mind" (1966)

The Effects of Poverty: Children and Education

At the Boys and Girls Club of Nacogdoches, it is obvious that poverty is well known to the children, as this program aims to help low-income families. The concept addressed in the following presentation is the affect poverty has on a child and their education. Through academic literature and personal experience, the author was able to explain how poverty can affect a child’s development, academic performance, and behavior. Lastly, recommendations will be made on how the Boys and Girls Club can improve parent and school involvement, as well as improve the volunteer experience

Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’s Stone Worlds

This article explores the spatial, architectural and conceptual relationships between landscape places, stone quarrying, and stone moving and building during Rapa Nui’s statue-building period. These are central themes of the ‘Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction Project’ and are discussed using aspects of the findings of our recent fieldwork. The different scales of expression, from the detail of the domestic sphere to the monumental working of quarries, are considered. It is suggested that the impressiveness of Rapa Nui’s stone architecture is its conceptual coherence at the small scale as much as at the large scale