Disentangling religion and culture: americanizing Islam as the price of assimilation

This essay is an exploration into the social inevitabilities of culture shifts within the American Muslim community’s self-understanding of their faith. Rather than a theological explication of the reasons why and why not Islam may or can or will not assimilate in America, our approach will be strictly sociological thereby side-stepping the intricate dialectic of theological niceties in deference to the social realities of culture change. As a social psychologist, my duty is to acknowledge the inevitabilities of behavioral shifts brought about due to social and cultural pressures resulting from immigration into an alien cultural weltanschauung, i.e., worldview. Therefore in this essay, we will explicate the meaning and nature of de-ethnicization and re-enculturation as we endeavor to disentangle religion from culture, recognizing that much of what goes under the flag of religious orthodoxy is really culturally-mandated behavior and worldview. The assimilation process, however, will bear heavily upon the necessity for Muslim clergy in America to become professional by Western standards and we will in the process explore the complexities of religious secularism as a way of becoming an “American” Muslim. Finally, we will suggest liturgical and architectural “adjustments” to Western modes of public worship while indicating linguistic niceties which will prove helpful in the assimilation process which we have chosen here to call the “Islamicization of America”

US and foreign alloy cross-reference database

Marshall Space Flight Center and other NASA installations have a continuing requirement for materials data from other countries involved with the development of joint international Spacelab experiments and other hardware. This need includes collecting data for common alloys to ascertain composition, physical properties, specifications, and designations. This data is scattered throughout a large number of specification statements, standards, handbooks, and other technical literature which make a manual search both tedious and often limited in extent. In recognition of this problem, a computerized database of information on alloys was developed along with the software necessary to provide the desired functions to access this data. The intention was to produce an initial database covering aluminum alloys, along with the program to provide a user-interface to the data, and then later to extend and refine the database to include other nonferrous and ferrous alloys

AMERICANIZING ISLAM AS THE PRICE OF ASSIMILATION

This essay is an exploration into the social inevitabilities of culture shifts within the American Muslim community’s self-understanding of their faith. Rather than a theological explication of the reasons why and why not Islam may or can or will not assimilate in America, our approach will be strictly sociological thereby side stepping the intricate dialectic of theological niceties in deference to the social realities of culture change. As a social psychologist, my duty is to acknowledge the inevitabilities of behavioral shifts brought about due to social and cultural pressures resulting from immigration into an alien cultural weltanschauung, i.e., worldview. Therefore in this essay, we will explicate the meaning and nature of de-ethnicization and re-enculturation as we endeavor to disentangle religion from culture, recognizing that much of what goes under the flag of religious orthodoxy is really culturally-mandated behavior and worldview. The assimilation process, however, will bear heavily upon the necessity for Muslim clergy in America to become professional by Western standards and we will in the process explore the complexities of religious secularism as a way of becoming an “American” Muslim. Finally, we will suggest liturgical and architectural “adjustments” to Western modes of public worship while indicating linguistic niceties which will prove helpful in the assimilation process which we have chosen here to call the “Islamicization of America”

Geriatric Logotherapy: Exploring the Psychotherapeutics of Memory in Treating the Elderly

Geriatric Logotherapy is an analytical approach designed to address issues uniquely confronted in the counseling encounter with the elderly and is an adaptation of the psychotherapeutic school of thought known as Logotherapy. Logotherapy is a type of psychotherapeutic analysis and treatment which focuses on a will to meaning, founded upon the belief that striving to find meaning in one's life is the primary, most powerful motivating and driving force within the human experience. Sometimes called existential analysis, logotherapy grew out of the psychiatric research and personal experience of Viktor Frankl, M.D., based on his internment experience in Germany. Known as the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (Freud and Adler being the founders of the First and Second Schools), logotherapy as a school of thought emphasizes existential reflection rather than psychoanalytic repression, focusing upon the concept and centrality of “meaning” in one’s life rather than Freud’s “pleasure principle” and Adler’s “will to power.” This article explores, then, the application of this school of psychotherapeutic theory and practice to the psychological care and treatment of the elderly, emphasizing the “existential efficacy of the good memory” as an analytical tool for emotional nurture with emphasis upon “immediacy” rather than “longevity” of care and treatment. Language: Englis

Development of Ground-testable Phase Fresnel Lenses in Silicon

Diffractive/refractive optics, such as Phase Fresnel Lenses (PFL's), offer the potential to achieve excellent imaging performance in the x-ray and gamma-ray photon regimes. In principle, the angular resolution obtained with these devices can be diffraction limited. Furthermore, improvements in signal sensitivity can be achieved as virtually the entire flux incident on a lens can be concentrated onto a small detector area. In order to verify experimentally the imaging performance, we have fabricated PFL's in silicon using gray-scale lithography to produce the required Fresnel profile. These devices are to be evaluated in the recently constructed 600-meter x-ray interferometry testbed at NASA/GSFC. Profile measurements of the Fresnel structures in fabricated PFL's have been performed and have been used to obtain initial characterization of the expected PFL imaging efficiencies.Comment: Presented at GammaWave05: "Focusing Telescopes in Nuclear Astrophysics", Bonifacio, Corsica, September 2005, to be published in Experimental Astronomy, 8 pages, 3 figure