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Chapter 5 of the book "Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West" is presented. It explores the anti-colonial struggles as an alternate site of democratic theory in the West. It highlights the democratic visioning of Mahatma Gandhi, the totality and alternative universalism and the diversity in democratic unity.

The article presents Chapter Nine of the book "Explorations in Contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion," edited by Deane-Peter Baker and Patrick Maxwell. It explores the book "The Great Divorce," by C. S. Lewis, which tackles problems of universalism and the justice of hell, heaven, and purgatory. It also discusses the idea of spatial whole, the problem of evil that serves as biggest psychological and intellectual barriers to theistic belief, and the eternal relation of love with God.

This article discusses the universalism of human rights. As long as social contexts vary, representations of fundamental rights will vary. The idea of studying human rights as organizing principles of individual positioning anchored in multiple social and symbolic relations should not make us forget the idea of shared knowledge. In interactions between people, between individuals and groups, existing symbolic landmarks orientate the thinking of persons involved. Social representations of human rights are based on shared references held by members of different national and cultural groups. to our research on social representations, findings show that respondents manifest consistent attitudes when they are confronted with general principles or articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such strong coherence disappears when they react to contextualized presentations of human rights issues. In such cases institutional and normative representations of rights do not seem to be applied directly in different realms of social reality. One of the founding ideas of human rights is the necessity of establishing mutually satisfying relationships between different groups and cultures. In such relationships social comparison processes play an important role, people establish relationships on symbolic levels, comparing their own fate to the fate of others and many cultural groups are now narrowly intertwined through direct and indirect symbolic relationships.

The chapter describes universal and selective approaches to welfare and also describes the importance of citizenship for empowerment. A selective welfare state gives no social rights to welfare; access to welfare is conditional upon the level of a person's resources, the adequacy of which is assessed by the state. Supporters of selectivity argue that this is advantageous, because it requires those above a set level of resources to make their own arrangements for welfare. This chapter has placed empowerment within a wider societal context. It has discussed two competing conceptions of empowerment within the Personal Social Services (PSS), which are contested notions of citizenship. It has analyzed the difficulties in empowering the users of the PSS and discussed how both the exit and voice models have their own unique problems. Finally, it has assessed the effectiveness of empowerment and the increasingly politicized nature of this concept for the PSS and the users of service. Both universalism and selectivism have been criticized as inadequate for the development of citizenship.

This article focuses on the political globalization of the world with assessing the way in which the disciplines of political science and international relations have sought to theorize the impact of socio-economic and other changes. The world is argued to be globalizing at the level of economics and culture but states remain the primary location for sovereignty and decision making. The article examines a radical counter-proposal, the argument that the state too is becoming subordinated to globalization processes and that political activity increasingly focuses on cross-societal issues. According to economist George Robertson, this process of globalization is not new, that it pre-dates modernity and the rise of capitalism. European civilization is the central focus for and origin of the development. He maps the path of globalization as a series of five phases. The first phase is the "germinal phase" in which colonialism was a dominant process. The second phase is the "incipient phase" which refers to the formal diplomacy between states, international exhibitions and communications agreements, and ideas of internationalism and universalism. Rest other phases are: the take-off phase; the struggle-for-hegemony phase, and the uncertainty phase. In the last phase, the global environmental problems has been recognized and international relations has become more complex and fluid.

This chapter discusses the concept of the book Heroines of Sport: The Politics of Difference and Identity, by Jennifer Hargreaves. The concept of the heroic is examined through analysis of the struggles and achievements of specific groups of women whose stories have been excluded from previous accounts of women's sports and female heroism. It focuses on five specific groups of women from different places in the world: South African women; Muslim women from the Middle East; Aboriginal women from Australia and Canada; and lesbian and disabled women from different countries worldwide. The women selected for investigation are from historically marginalized groups who have had to struggle against particularly harsh forms of discrimination to take part in sport and have constructed their own sporting identities in changing and difficult conditions. Their struggles in sport are social as well as personal, linked to specific cultural, economic, political and religious contexts and to global processes. In summary, through its attention to difference and identity the book raises important questions about inclusion and exclusion, about power and privilege, and about local-global connections. It opposes the concept of universalism and recognizes the distinctive differences and characteristics of women who have been outsiders in mainstream sport. Most importantly, it is about the affirmation of identity in sport through struggle, negotiation and achievement. It is about everyday heroines of sport.

This essay looks at the problems raised by the persecution of Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses. When Imam Khomeini called for the defenders of true faith to execute Rushdie by whatever means, informed observers thought that the imam found himself in a difficult situation vis-à-vis his Sunni opponents and seized an occasion to trump their intransigent attitude and to affirm his own authority over Islam. By this event alone, it has had the virtue of bringing out a maleficent pole of religious universalism and of reawakening somewhat those who are nodding off into the cult of relativism.

The article focuses on a processual model for understanding how nature is used to ground cultural meanings and practice. This processual model emphasizes the movements enabling ideas of the natural to signify with the notable fluidity, contradictoriness and power that is their distinctive feature. The ways in which culture must be recognised as changing lead us to theorise culture as a set of techniques and processes, through which forms of distinction, classification, differentiation and comparison are enabled or precluded. nature has established a model for context in terms of temporality and scale, securing the way-finding device of the horizon, or the genealogical orientation of descent, which inform the natural order of history, and the relationality of life itself. This leads us to consider for example, new kinds of universalism through which the global can be said to refigure what a context means and does. If the uses of nature as models for context are indeed shifting, and if this is in part what the term globalization signifies, then it seems likely that the kinds of life which are brought into being through this changing relationship will themselves be transformed

The article presents information on the universalism-particularism issue. The overall circumstance of identity representation in conditions of great global density and complexity poses large analytical problems, to which there have been a number of responses. There has been a marked tendency in many discussions of the world-system, world society or whatever, to ignore individuals--more precisely, the contemporary construction of individualism-- for the apparent reason that globalization of alleged necessity refers to very large-scale matters, in contrast to the `small-scale' status of individuals. The globewide encouragement of individualism in association with increasing polyethnicity and multiculturality themselves encouraged by large migrations and `diasporations'--has been crucial in the move towards the circumstance of `foreignness.' The celebration of subjective identity relative to involvement in `rationalized social organization' has played a major part in the virtually globewide establishment of various `minority' forms of personal and collective identification--among which gender has been of particular significance.

Section V, Part Four of the book "Nuggets of Wisdom From Great Jewish Thinkers," William Gerber is presented. It explores the basic attributes of Judaism to provide a spiritual sustenance from the Jewish wisdom. It also discusses the views from several modern Jewish thinkers that expound the relation between Christianity and Judaism, the celebration of Jewish holiday and the issue of universalism in the context of Judaism.

This article talks about the link between science and the democratic social structure. The word science refers various topics related to knowledge. The ethos of science are divided into four categories: universalism, communism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism. The characteristics of communism as a scientific ethos are based on a social structure of limited ownership. A career in science different from other professions with regards to client relations. The article concludes by talking about the effects of organized skepticism on the ethos of science.

The article presents a definition of the term FYRTIOTALISTERNA ("The Poets of the Forties"). A group of Swedish modernist poets of the 1940s whose work is characterized by anxiety, pessimism, and stylistic complexity. During its most cohesive phase--between 1944 and 1947, when the journal 40-tal (The Forties) was published--the movement was quite broad, with a remarkable number of talented young poets. Their literary orientation, combining universalism with social commitment, developed in response to World War II, Sweden's wartime neutrality, and the moral nihilism of influential philosopher Axel Hägerström.