Fasting is a form of Islamic worship to approach God.  There is a direct relationship between fasting, abstaining from eating and drinking, and an individual’s health as well as his ill-health. Therefore, it is of utmost importance in the Islamic perspective to weigh the spiritual benefits achieved through fasting against its probable harmfulness to an individual’s health. Regarding fasting, th...

Drosophila performs elaborate well-defined rituals of courtship, which involve several types of sensory inputs. Here, we report that Or47b-neurons promote male-mating success. Males with Or47b-neurons silenced/ablated exhibit reduced copulation frequency and increased copulation latency. Copulation latency of Or47b-manipulated flies increased proportionately with size of the assay arena, wherea...

The core beliefs, type of emotional energy and action tendencies of “hope groups” that engae in the policy process to advance their shared goals and “hate groups” that seek to expose the conspiratorial tendencies of a policy elite are compared and contrasted. The patterns of rhetoric and interaction rituals that charcterize interaction within these groups are then considered. The contribution t...

The idea that rituals are crucial to human behavior is consistent with the arguments of different social scientists who have used this concept to analyze and examine society such as Durkheim, Goffman, Collins, Douglas, Rappaport, Kertzer, Myerhoff, Alexander, Warner, and Bellah. However, despite the work of scholars such as these the concept of ritual has been underutilized, if not often ignore...

GROWTH OF THE METROPOLITAN AREA (MAP) E N T R I E S M Multicentered Chicago Next Chicagoans like to think of their home as “multiethnic,” or as “the city of neighborhoods.” Indeed, the celebration of neighborhood is one of the binding rituals of Chicago culture. The shelves of local bookstores are crammed with neighborhood guides of various sorts, and in the 1990s Mayor Richard M. Daley harness...

The symbolism of rituals creates a shared understanding of events among group members. In the context of romantic relationships, a shared understanding of relationship status transitions may be associated with greater commitment and higher quality relationships. We argue that couples with differing retrospective accounts of their premarital courtship may not have had clear discussions or ritual...