There is no scholarly consensus on whether Paul’s mandates on head coverings were directed solely to married women or to all women in the Corinthian community. I suggest the discussion can be tentatively advanced by considering two factors that have not received the attention they warrant in conjunction with this passage: first, the presence of slaves in the community, and second, that the Genesis material which Paul alludes to in these verses was understood in some ancient thought as addressing the institution of marriage rather than creation. I propose that, in view of these considerations, it is more likely that Paul directed his exhortations towards free(d) married women.

This article argues that the current approach of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to evaluating scientific evidence is lacking and hampers its ability to properly handle cases involving questions of science, and particularly environmental cases which are replete with them. It identifies three problem areas in relation to the ECtHR's adjudication of such cases: the evaluation of evidence proving the causation of harm; the extent of the Court's deference to the determinations made by national authorities; and the Court's evaluation of evidence adduced by the respondent State in justifying its conduct as being in line with the standard of due diligence. Several cases that illustrate the recurring problem of the lack of science-based reasoning in the Court's judgments are then identified, highlighting the shortcomings of its approach. Such issues have an impact upon the legitimacy of the ECtHR, and it is therefore imperative that it engages more robustly with scientific evidence. The article suggests the best way to do this would be for the ECtHR to make more use of its power to seek assistance from independent scientific experts in environmental cases.

How do opinion diversity and belief polarisation affect epistemic group decision-making, particularly if decisions must be made without delay and on the basis of permissive evidence? In an agent-based model, we track the consistency of group opinions aggregated through sentence-wise majority voting. Simulations on the model reveal that high opinion diversity, but not polarisation, incurs a significant inconsistency risk. These results indicate that epistemic group decisions based on permissive evidence can be particularly difficult for diverse groups. The results also improve our understanding of what can reasonably be expected of expert groups, and where expert advice might have limits.

Are the existence of God and evil logically compatible? Philosophers have been dwelling on this question since the era of Ancient Greek philosophy. Most responses to this philosophical problem have come from a Western viewpoint. This article aims to answer this question by considering an African cosmological and ethical groundwork. Working conceptually within this cosmology and ethic, we argue that if the evil in the world is understood as a lesser evil, then a good God can plausibly allow evil to happen. This is the case because God preventing evil will lead to a worse state of affairs which will result in a worse world. Allowing a lesser evil is the best possible outcome. We assert that this view offers a better theory than the theodicy defended by some mainstream Western philosophers according to which a greater good is achieved through evil.

The number of clinical studies assessing the effects of time-restricted eating (TRE) has increased in recent years(1). The results of the studies conducted on humans demonstrate some health benefits, however, there is still a need to design larger and longer randomized clinical trials to prove the effectiveness and long-term benefits of these types of interventions(2). However, to ensure these health benefits, individuals need to be able to integrate its principles into their daily routines. This work aimed to associate daily habits with the potential adherence to different TRE protocols and to determine the factors that predict adherence to these protocols.

A cross-sectional study was conducted using an online questionnaire based on a previous study(3), to assess the dietary and sleeping habits, daily routines and willingness to adhere to different windows of time-restricted eating in a sample of Portuguese adults. To analyze the associations between variables, the Spearman correlation coefficient and the Chi-Square test were calculated, and multiple linear regression was performed to identify the predictive factors. Statistical analysis was conducted on IBM SPSS Statistics version 29.0.

130 responses were obtained (26% men, 74% women) with a mean age of 37.9±13.59 years old. On workdays, 60.0% of participants reported a daily eating window (the period between the first and last caloric intake) of 12h-14h, while on free days the highest percentage (41.5%) was between 10h12h. An inverse correlation was observed between age and willingness to adhere to a TRE protocol if there were health benefits (r=-0.356, p<0.001). Moderate correlations were also found between the availability to follow a TRE protocol on work days (r=0.538) and free days (r=0.598) and the potential health benefits of this type of intervention (p<0.001)). Associations were found between sex and potential adherence to the TRE protocol (χ2=10.644, df=2, p=0.005), with a tendency for more men not to adhere to a TRE protocol. There was also an association between body weight management and reducing the eating window by 1h-2h (χ² =24.883, df=12, p=0.015) and 2h-3h (χ²=22.367, df=12, p=0.034). The living situation, motivation for change, income, weight management, cooking knowledge, and working schedule were among the main factors predicting the willingness to adhere to TRE protocols (p<0.05).

People’s willingness and motivation to adhere to TRE protocols outside the controlled environment of a clinical study depends on several factors. The results presented herein provide information that may be central when considering the translation of study results into nutritional practice and counselling.

World War I was the period during which decolonization dynamics fully played out in the Muslim world, and the postwar international settlement marked a milestone in nation–state formation in the Middle East. Despite the predominant role played by colonial empires, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 witnessed many previously unrecognized and disempowered nations advancing their goals of independence, resulting in the creation of a radically new international order based on ideas of national sovereignty, self-determination, and global stability. Philip Grobien's Iran at the Paris Peace Conference is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on post–World War I international diplomacy that reassesses the Iranian diplomatic agency in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, reminding us of the importance of non-Western actors in the shaping of the contemporary Middle East.

In this article, I touch on some lexical and morphological aspects of Prasun historical linguistics. I propose six new etymologies for Prasun words that have not been etymologized at all (üžóg “resin”, ćəwā́ “rhubarb”, wulóg “footprint”, žíma “tent, camp”) or differently (wuzógrog, zógrog “knee”, wuẓnúg, wuẓéŋ “salt”), and add further remarks to three words (üzǖ́ etc. “ice; cold”, lümī́, lümǖ́ “tail”, wəs “day”) with whose traditional etymologizations I basically agree. Furthermore, it is argued that the common epenthetic wu- ~ ü- and the final (usually) -u ~ -ü have the same origin and largely go back to the acc.sg.m/n, nom.sg.n *-am of the Indo-Iranian a-stems. Additionally, while the *-ka-suffix is present in all Nuristani languages in various functions, there is a noticeable split between Prasun, where *-ka- is added to many nouns of the inherited basic vocabulary while it is absent in the cognates in the other Nuristani languages.

Insight in psychosis is associated with reduced psychotic symptom severity, less coercive treatment and better functioning. Controversially, it has been suggested that insight may lead to depression, higher suicide risk and worse self-perceived quality of life. Future clinical trials are warranted to address this ‘insight paradox’, particularly the direction of causality.

Angelology is in a renaissance. Yet the angels of new religious movements in general, and the Bahá’í Faith in particular, remain less examined. In response, I offer a typology of Bahá’í angels as avatars of the Holy Spirit, distinct celestial beings, spiritually evolved people, manifestations of God, and carriers and personifications of divine virtue. These five types respectively function to emphasize the authority of divinity, accentuate the mystery of spiritual reality, reconcile spirituality and materialism through the duality of human nature, position prophets as “manifestations” of God in the context of “progressive revelation,” and attempt to make the unknowable God knowable through the transformation of axiology to ontology. Collectively, Bahá’í angels illumine an understanding of religion as a dialogic relationship. Religion is reconceived as an interactional balance of divine will and human agential choice.

This paper argues that commodification of housing plays a key role in the reproduction of social and economic relations and contributes to debates by, firstly, recognising modern slavery as a fundamental intersection of economic and social vulnerability intimately connected to experiences of housing. Secondly, rather than understanding modern slavery in terms of exclusion, it should be understood as a form of adverse incorporation in the labour market and housing. Awareness, therefore, of critical realism as an analytical framework usefully takes debates beyond exploring relations between housing supply and housing experience to also include political economy and ideology. From this broader ontology of housing, it is possible to emphasise housing within reproduction of social and economic relations and consider ways in which this relates to modern slavery.

Three late medieval inventories of the chapel surrounding the shrine of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, London, record the presence of a number of books and pamphlets among the relics and liturgical paraphernalia. This article discusses these books, their significance and the reason for their maintenance at the shrine, and offers possible identifications with several surviving manuscripts.

In 1983 and 1984, archaeologists excavated at the ruins of Khara-khoto, Inner Mongolia, about 3,000 fragments of handwritten and printed texts from the Yuan period (1271–1368). The texts were chiefly written in Chinese and Tangut but also included a handful of other languages. Among a small group of texts in Mongolian were fragments of a woodblock-printed book with illustrations, using the Uyghur script. The content of the text, as well as the presence of a few interlinear Chinese characters, made it clear that this was a translation of a Chinese work, probably of Daoist content. Because the folios were incomplete, the narrative framework of the text could only be reconstructed partially, which is also why the source text has not been identified so far. This article locates Chinese versions of the story and identifies one of them as the closest to that used by the translator. This, in turn, helps to improve our interpretation of the Mongolian fragments and provide background information for understanding the context of the text's circulation in the Khara-khoto region. My primary aim here is to engage with the original Chinese story, rather than the translation and its place in Mongolian literature.

A new daily ritual, commonly called the Salve Mass or Lady Mass, rapidly grew throughout the British Isles in the High Middle Ages inspiring new festive chants. John Harper's introduction to Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary establishes the sources of the Lady Mass in its fully developed form in the late Use of Salisbury and earlier related sources. Yet the Marian Mass collections in insular graduals, missals and non-liturgical sources identified in this article exhibit significant local adaptations not assigned in Salisbury Ordinals. I argue that extant Marian Kyries, alleluias and offertories contained in thirteenth-century insular liturgical sources of the Mass of the Virgin Mary are evidence of the daily Lady Mass. A study of chant variants and sources demonstrates the insular circulation of some of these chants outside of sources replicating the Lady Mass at Salisbury. The insular repertory of Marian Mass music, examined here for the first time with concordances in fragmentary and non-liturgical collections, reveals a lively exchange of repertory and compositional techniques between insular monastic and secular churches. This regionally developed, decentralised ritual had an important impact on music composition and transmission in the British Isles in the thirteenth century.