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By exploring the works of both Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Søren Kierkegaard, Lydia B. Amir finds a rich tapestry of ideas about the comic, the tragic, humor, and related concepts such as irony, ridicule, and wit. Amir focuses chiefly on these two thinkers, but she also includes Johann Georg Hamann, an influence of Kierkegaard's who was himself influenced by Shaftesbury. All three thinkers were devout Christians but were intensely critical of the organized Christianity of their milieux, and humor played an important role in their responses. The author examines the epistemological, ethical, and religious roles of humor in their philosophies and proposes a secular philosophy of humor in which humor helps attain the philosophic ideals of self-knowledge, truth, rationality, virtue, and wisdom.

The notion of \"self\" and \"other\" and its representation in artwork and literature is an important theme in current cultural sciences as well as in our everyday life in contemporary Western societies. Moreover, the concept of \"self\" and \"other\" and its imaginary dichotomy is gaining more and more political impact in a world of resurfacing ideology-ridden conflicts. The essays deal with Jewish reality in contemporary Germany and its reflection in movies from the special point of view of cultural sciences, political sciences, and religious studies. This anthology presents challengingly new insights into topics rarely covered, such as youth culture or humor, and finally discusses the images of Jewish life as realities still to be constructed.

The Bible has inspired Western art and literature for centuries, so it is no surprise that Christian iconography, characters, and stories have also appeared in many comic books. Yet the sheer stylistic range of these comics is stunning. They include books from Christian publishers, as well as underground comix with religious themes and a vast array of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse titles, from Hellboy to Preacher.     Christianity and Comics presents an 80-year history of the various ways that the comics industry has drawn from biblical source material. It explores how some publishers specifically targeted Christian audiences with titles like Catholic Comics, books featuring heroic versions of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, and special religious-themed editions of Archie. But it also considers how popular mainstream comics like Daredevil, The Sandman, Ghost Rider, and Batman are infused with Christian themes and imagery.    Comics scholar Blair Davis pays special attention to how the medium's unique use of panels, word balloons, captions, and serialized storytelling have provided vehicles for telling familiar biblical tales in new ways. Spanning the Golden Age of comics to the present day, this book charts how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans' changing attitudes towards religion.

This essay argues that Keith Secola’s music evidences survivance through its comedic discussion of what it means to be Indigenous within the modern US. Examining two of Secola’s most popular songs, “NDN Kars” (1992) and “Fry Bread” (1996), and through an author’s interview with Secola, this essay investigates how humour demonstrates survivance through the versatility of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

Another columnist, who is also an emergency physician of Paris SAMU, was still at a meeting with firefighters and emergency medical services leaders to discuss how to improve hospital admission services about 600 meters away when his mobile phone rang. Growing evidence from the military experience points out the meaning of both early external hemostasis and surgical intervention among severely injured patients with exsanguinating hemorrhage, meaning in prehospital setting rapid transport to operating room of trauma center after in-the-field management of immediately life-threatening injuries.

Exploring the range of circumstances in which medieval Christians laughed with, against, at, and through religious topics, this article investigates four objects: an ivory cross, an ampulla of a saint's blood, a preaching codex, and a pilgrim's badge. While these objects are taken to illustrate a diversity of attitudes to religious humor, they are also, in light of recent work citing the productive power of medieval matter, scrutinized as agents in their own right. The article suggests two significant patterns. On the one hand, the objects point to laughter's use as a unique mode of spiritual practice. Through amusing miracles, through the provocative work of comic sermons, and through the playful humor of pilgrimage badges, Christians from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries were able to use humor to relate to their faith in sophisticated and often counterintuitive ways. Yet as the four objects and their use also attest, these modes of comic relation were also subjected to clerical reduction and regulation. Harnessing the pedagogical potential of laughter especially, preachers, hagiographers, and clerics all worked to redirect more anarchic forms of religious humor toward functional ends. While tracing how laughter with Christian topics was increasingly encouraged, the article suggests that the price of this encouragement was that laughter was often brought into a more policed domain of orthodox Christian practice.

BBC Internet survey participants (119,733 men and 98,462 women) chose from a list of 23 traits those they considered first, second, and third most important in a relationship partner. Across all participants, the traits ranked most important were: intelligence, humor, honesty, kindness, overall good looks, face attractiveness, values, communication skills, and dependability. On average, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness more important than women did (d = 0.55 and 0.36, respectively), whereas women ranked honesty, humor, kindness, and dependability more important than men did (ds = 0.23, 0.22, 0.18, and 0.15). Sexual orientation differences were smaller than sex differences in trait rankings, but some were meaningful; for example, heterosexual more than homosexual participants assigned importance to religion, fondness for children, and parenting abilities. Multidimensional scaling analyses showed that trait preference profiles clustered by participant sex, not by sexual orientation, and by sex more than by nationality. Sex-by-nation ANOVAs of individuals' trait rankings showed that sex differences in rankings of attractiveness, but not of character traits, were extremely consistent across 53 nations and that nation main effects and sex-by-nation interactions were stronger for character traits than for physical attractiveness. United Nations indices of gender equality correlated, across nations, with men's and women's rankings of character traits but not with their rankings of physical attractiveness. These results suggest that cultural factors had a relatively greater impact on men's and women's rankings of character traits, whereas biological factors had a relatively greater impact on men's and women's rankings of physical attractiveness.