Search results

AN Englishman sees at once, with the New England landscapes about him, that he could easily make his home there—in the exhilaration of the moment he clean forgets the quota and the fact that he isn't wanted, and Al Capone, prohibition, and the slump. New England is as far from Hollywood as Old England is. Its hills are of granite and the harsher rocks. Its woods, with trees reminiscent of home, yet certainly foreign, are still savage, and the Indian place‐names remind you that the frame‐houses are recent invaders. See it under snow and the sun, when the temperature is dropping to zero though the sky is blue, and you begin to understand why so much New England poetry and thought is as delicate and austere as a flower on stoney ground. These people, for generations, have had to keep resolutely watchful and on their guard, knowing they could survive only if they could get corn enough to husband. They have some residue from the memories of their forefathers of the stockaded settlement, when the Indians were lurking in the dark swamps without. Their hope has been bleak enough in their fight against granite and snow, and the seas of the North. Enduring through long and relentless winters, when nature was arctic, they made more of any sign of spring in the heart, or in the fields, than we should. Mysticism, a sense of relationship with a purpose behind the harsh and unforgiving show of things, is natural and consolatory to lonely folk who, as Thoreau somewhere remarks, have to get through hard times, like bears, by sucking their own paws. There is nothing else. With all against them, they kept watch at the stockade, waiting for morning. What is heard in the silence of the mind, while enduring in loneliness, can be expressed only in austere images. Says Emerson: “What generous beliefs console. The brave whom Fate denies the goal! If others reach it, is content; To Heaven's high will his will is bent.” Emerson was not ironic; those words occur in a tribute to his dead brother.

THIS number of THE LIBRARY WORLD closes one of the most distinguished years in the history of libraries. The opening of the National Central Library by the King on November 7th was undoubtedly the most important public happening in this country, not only of that particular day, but for a very long period. For the first time the highest personage in the land gave his countenance and approval to the work of the public library through the National Central Library which is its natural crown. In describing the Library as “a university which all may join and which none may ever leave,” His Majesty added a memorable phrase to library literature, and gave a new impulse to library activity.

This chapter examines the pitfalls of overdependence on quantitative research in tourism and the depersonalization of those being researched in the post-COVID-19 world of tourism. Although not claiming that an overt dependence on numerical research can lead to fascism, this chapter demonstrates that fascist governments use numbers to reduce the human experience into a quantifiable commodity that is outside of the mainstream of liberal democratic ideals. The chapter connects the ideas of tourism research to the humanistic side of tourism and explores the historical roots of tourism research starting from Biblical narratives. Taking a theoretical approach, the chapter notes that in a world filled with science there also exists a parallel universe of mysticism and the reality that tourism research must find a way to reunite not only the quantitative with the qualitative but also the mystical side of reality with the scientific.

In this commentary, the authors introduce certain paradoxes of religious experience, ways the sacred is both attractive and repulsive, how there are urges to merge with the divine and to meaningfully change the world, how sacred power is both ineffable and accessible, how the divine can best be understood as a coincidence of opposites, how there is both good and evil in the world, and how religions sometimes proclaim peace yet instigate wars. The authors link these paradoxes with the contributions of the chapters in this volume on religion and philosophy. On the basis of both our and the chapters’ contributions the authors demonstrate several domains where religious paradox adds important insights to organizational approaches to paradox.

The study applied the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) framework to investigate the influence of flow elements (e.g. perceived control, concentration and cognitive enjoyment) on artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled e-tail services in evoking awe experience in online fashion apparel context.

Data of 739 active users of online fashion retail shoppers were collected using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Partial least square-structural equation modeling was used for analysis.

This study suggested the relevance of AI-enabled services in evoking flow and stimulating the customers' awe experience in online fashion shopping.

The use of AI could help online fashion retailers to improve the experiential elements by using stimuli that evoke feelings of vastness, novelty and mysticism.

The study offers insights about the relevance and applicability of AI in enhancing the flow elements and awe experience on online fashion apparel shopping in an emerging economy.

It is a common observation that new technology introduced into Third World countries frequently fails to yield the expected results. Despite the availability of adequate finance, willing donor and recipient organisations and a congenial political climate, the imported equipment is often under‐utilised, used less productively and, at the end of its useful life, the users may look forward to a fresh induction, indicating thereby that the technology provided has not been absorbed.

The purpose of this paper is to explore one broad question: what do information, information processes, information services, as well as information systems and technology have to do with the spiritual?

The task is accomplished by conducting a literature review of 31 refereed texts in information studies. The paper proceeds by inspecting the manifestation of spirituality in information sources, generic information processes, as well as specific information processes: conceptualizing, seeking, processing, using, storing, describing and providing information.

A total of 11 relationships between information phenomena and the spiritual are discovered. Based on these, a definition of spiritual information is put forth. There are also some descriptive statistics on the corpus as a whole.

The results are susceptible to limitations imposed by the reviewed studies themselves. Errors of interpretation were a possibility. The article suggests many directions for further research in the context of the spiritual, and discusses how to view spirituality in information science.

Practical implications are only mentioned here and there, because research implications are of primary concern in the investigation.

This paper is the first to synthesize information research in the spiritual domain. Beyond the subject area, the article demonstrates how to classify information processes, and conduct a context‐centric literature review in the field of information studies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the success of the US economy at the end of the second millennium do not necessarily mean the end of socialism. In fact both capitalism and socialism are beneficial for a unitary human development, which consists of both material and spiritual development. Capitalism, with its emphasis on self‐interest and individual freedom, has been crucial to material development. But socialism, with its preference for other‐interest and collective necessity, is conducive to spiritual development. Thus, what is needed for further development of the human race is a unitary economics that synergizes capitalism and scoialism.

Introduced by John H. Clark, the Map of Mental States is a geometrical model of a human mental life. In spite of its simplicity, it takes into account the most essential variables characterizing the mind. Deals with three important types of mental life which can be represented on the Map: mystical states, mental illnesses and drug states. The exact numerical positions of the states have been established on the Map, for the most known mystical path, for some mental illnesses and for two typical drugs. Rectilinear and curvilinear distances between corresponding states have been calculated and perspectives of such a study have been shown.