Religious Belonging in the East Asian Context: An Exploration of Rhizomatic Belonging

Dichotomy of Believing and Belonging – An Irish Context

Religion, in both the sense of the institution and religious practices, is embedded in society the social forms of religious life are fully integrated into the structures of society. Secularization is a source of great debate, and is a prominent feature in the sociology of religion literature. The need to examine the extent to which Catholicism in Ireland has been affected by the secular moveme...

Transnational Identities and Religious Traditions: A Case of Religious Double Belonging in India

‘Belonging’ in the cosmopolitan imaginary

In the 1990s, much discourse both in and about global civil society was beset by a false opposition. On the one side was the utopia of cosmopolitan liberalism. On the other was the specter of reactionary nationalism or fundamentalism. And, of course, in a variety of settings, some national and some diasporically transnational, the value loading was reversed: fundamentalist or national utopia, t...

An Exploration of Softmax Alternatives Belonging to the Spherical Loss Family

In a multi-class classification problem, it is standard to model the output of a neural network as a categorical distribution conditioned on the inputs. The output must therefore be positive and sum to one, which is traditionally enforced by a softmax. This probabilistic mapping allows to use the maximum likelihood principle, which leads to the well-known log-softmax loss. However the choice of...

Archaeology and cultural belonging in contemporary Syria: the value of archaeology to religious minorities

This paper has evolved out of a series of community projects that I have initiated in Syria since 1997. My hypothesis is that a knowledge of the archaeological remains and religious traditions of a region bring local people more in touch with their cultural roots and encourage a sense of belonging. This is particularly the case when a religious minority feels disenfranchised by the majority gro...