Turner’s communitas and non-Buddhists who visit Buddhist temples

Increasing numbers of people are participating in reflexive forms of spiritual travel. Rites of passage and intensification are becoming voluntary, and so is religion. Arguably, individuals travel to achieve mental and social escape. Their quests to religious sites are self-motivated, not obligated. Because of their mobility, Americans constantly explore new outlets for their spiritual growth, including different metaphysical movements and philosophies. This study focuses on what motivates Americans to visit Buddhist temples, including their desire to explore new ideas or life directions. The results of a survey study (N = 179) conducted in Los Angeles, California indicate that non-Buddhists visit Buddhist temples for stimulus-avoidance and intellectual purposes; to mentally relax and broaden themselves in the holy site. Furthermore, they may pursue a sense of communitas ‒ defined by social relations that are no longer normative, hierarchical and distant, but close and egalitarian. American Buddhist temple visitors are not necessarily Buddhists. As religious options grow and obligations decrease, religion has become secularized. As a consequence, non-religious temple-goers may be seeking Turner’s communitas ‒ a transition away from mundane structures toward a looser commonality of feeling with fellow visitors. They may also seek healing and renewal as well as a higher level of freedom. These individuals may desire to re-structure or re-orient their life-direction through contemplating at Buddhist temples. By examining these new phenomena, this study contributes to the field of religious tourism research; it reveals what motivates Americans to visit Buddhist temples and provides an anthropological explanation for these motivations

The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits

What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, “Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems” — Christopher Roman, “Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul” — Jennie Friedrich, “Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde” — Robert Stanton, “Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe” — Carolynn Van Dyke, “Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor” — Sarah Breckenridge Wright, “Building Bridges to Canterbury” — Thomas R. Schneider, “Chaucer’s Physics: Motion in The House of Fame

Common variants in 22 loci are associated with QRS duration and cardiac ventricular conduction

The QRS interval, from the beginning of the Q wave to the end of the S wave on an electrocardiogram, reflects ventricular depolarization and conduction time and is a risk factor for mortality, sudden death and heart failure. We performed a genomewide association meta-analysis in 40,407 individuals of European descent from 14 studies, with further genotyping in 7,170 additional Europeans, and we identified 22 loci associated with QRS duration ( P < 5 x 10(-8)). These loci map in or near genes in pathways with established roles in ventricular conduction such as sodium channels, transcription factors and calcium-handling proteins, but also point to previously unidentified biologic processes, such as kinase inhibitors and genes related to tumorigenesis. We demonstrate that SCN10A, a candidate gene at the most significantly associated locus in this study, is expressed in the mouse ventricular conduction system, and treatment with a selective SCN10A blocker prolongs QRS duration. These findings extend our current knowledge of ventricular depolarization and conduction