Childbearing women and infants in developing countries continue to experience unacceptably high rates of mortality and morbidity in spite of targeted initiatives to address the problem. The aim of this study was to identify the beliefs and rituals of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) in one indigenous Guatemalan community to better understand the cultural influences on perinatal care practice...

Sacred spaces and their attendant pilgrimage attractions seem to be some of the universal more obvious features world religions. One emerging phenomena within contemporary Ghanaian Christianity is Christians’ sacred mountains. Even though scholarship on this phenomenon gradually bourgeoning epistemic context, a thematic engagement literature Prayer Mountains (PMs) as in Christian setting seems ...

Supplementary Fig 1. Distribution of predicted proteins in ESTs of sacred lotus based on Gene Ontology classifications. (a) Cellular component; and (b) Biological process. The x-axis indicates the percentage of each category. 0 5 10 15 20 25 membrane intracellular cytoplasm nucleus plastid plasma membrane cytosol mitochondrion thylakoid endoplasmic reticulum Golgi apparatus vacuole extracellula...

‘‘Our land is sacred, and not tradable.’’ ‘‘Jerusalem is not up for discussion.’’ ‘‘As a matter of principle, I will not give that crook a dime!’’ ‘‘Human life cannot be given a dollar value.’’ Each of these statements suggests that the actor places a sacred value on some issue. But, what does sacred mean? One possible answer is that it is a constraint and that the issue is truly not open for d...

This article surveys the beliefs concerning the supernatural characteristics and powers of sacred trees in Israel; it is based on a field study as well as a survey of the literature and includes 118 interviews with Muslims and Druze. Both the Muslims and Druze in this study attribute supernatural dimensions to sacred trees which are directly related to ancient, deep-rooted pagan traditions. The...

A profound transformation of the cultural memory in the former Soviet Union has resulted in deep changes in the cultural identities of all Soviet—and ex-Soviet—ethnic and religious groups. This transformation led to a change of perceptions about sacred and profane spaces and the connections of these spaces to the urban landscape. As a result of complex historical and cultural processes, contemp...

A growing body of research is beginning to identify characteristics that influence or are related to helping professionals’ integration of clients’ religion and spirituality (RS) in mental health treatment. This article presents Namaste Theory, a new theory for understanding the role of mental health practitioners’ RS in clinical practice. Using Glaser’s (2008) formal quantitative grounded theo...

Sacred forests represent an important long-held tradition of conserving specific land areas that have cultural, and often religious, significance. India, with its diversity of cultures and traditions, has over 100 000 sacred forests. Many of these groves are forest fragments in agricultural landscapes. In most cases, community members are at least aware of these fragments, if not actively invol...

The GRAS gene family is one of the most important plant-specific gene families, which encodes transcriptional regulators and plays an essential role in plant development and physiological processes. The GRAS gene family has been well characterized in many higher plants such as Arabidopsis, rice, Chinese cabbage, tomato and tobacco. In this study, we identified 38 GRAS genes in sacred lotus (Nel...

To utilize the notion of a sacred and a profane is to suggest an explanation and ordering of the world encountered that looks back to the Judeo-Christian traditions often claimed as the foundations of Western society. The term " sacred and profane " , bound together often as a figure of speech, suggests the defining differences between a number of oppositions: good and evil, Godly and Godless o...