The increased visibility of the Muslim population suggests the need for health care professionals to gain a better understanding of how the Islamic faith influences health-related perceptions and health care-seeking behaviors. From an Islamic perspective, health is viewed as one of the greatest blessings that God (Allah) has bestowed on humankind. In Islam, illness has three possible meanings: a natural occurrence, punishment of sin, or a test of the believer’s patience and gratitude. Muslims believe that cure comes solely from Allah, even if this is practically in the form of a health professional. Ill health is part of the trials and tribulations of Muslims and a test from Allah. Understanding Muslim patients’ beliefs and health practices, customs, and religious beliefs would be prime factors in the delivery of sensitive and culturally appropriate care to enhance positive health outcomes.

This chapter presents case studies from ten countries: Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, and Spain. These cases show that many world leaders believe that nuclear latency provides greater international influence.

Today, bitch is one of the handiest words in the English language. It’s used to express a multitude of emotions – anger, horror, fear, frustration, despair, envy, resentment, shock, surprise, pain, and pity. But on the other hand, it can also express happiness, excitement, and endearment. Bitch is invoked to offend people, but also to compliment them, to complain, or to show camaraderie. Bitch is complicated. It can mean so many things at once, and yet, it has still retained its original humble meaning. It’s been quite a journey for “bitch.” But one thing’s for sure – bitch is still on its journey.

This chapter revisits the Expert Transition Cycle presented in Chapter 3 from the perspective of how identity changes. Five stages of the Expert Transition Cycle operate during transition. Intention orients and clarifies choices and provides drive. Inquiry holds open the transition process with criteria for choice and discrimination based upon intention. Exploration actively investigates the familiar and the new elements of identity, roles, social situations, work opportunities, beliefs, and performance. Commitment narrows and targets the choices made regarding those elements. Integration modifies and adapts the identity to include new elements, knowledge, experience, and beliefs. Each stage of the Expert Transition Cycle is reviewed in light of the operation of the transition experiences, such as cognitive flexibility and purpose. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

The feeling of shame (aischunē) is a dramatic key of the Gorgias, notably revealed by Callicles, who accuses both the master of rhetoric Gorgias and Polus of surrendering to Socrates’ refutation out of shame, before yielding himself to the feeling he declared himself immune to. But shame is not only a literary pattern in the dialogue: its function is closely connected to the kind of refutation of each interlocutor. It can be minimally said that shame is a natural effect of refutation, and optimally that it is an essential lever for Socrates to make his interlocutors acknowledge their deep moral commitments. This chapter aims at distinguishing several levels, rather than kinds, of shame among the interlocutors of the Gorgias: shame as sensitivity to others’ opinion, shame as an indication of the beliefs and values we are committed to, and shame as a potential step towards a better understanding of the real good. Though these levels sometimes overlap in the narrative, such distinctions may aid in understanding the role of shame for each interlocutor. Shame remains, for Plato, an ambiguous emotion, which must be used in a certain way to perform purification of wrong opinions.

This chapter analyzes the effects of two important foreign policy traditions, isolationism and moral principle, as policy guides since the beginning of the Republic, and their continuing influence today.

This chapter outlines the degree of change and continuity that the Obama administration brought to foreign policy and compares it to the Trump administration and its America First foreign policy.

With its large distributional range across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and an ability to co-exist as a commensal with many human habitations, not surprisingly, the Little Owl has figured prominently in many cultural beliefs, and in a variety of ways. The common names given to this species across the countries are linked to its activity, to its voice, to its morphology, to its food, to beliefs, to its habitat, and to mythology. In Greek mythology, Athena was the daughter of Zeus and originally a Mycenaean palace goddess, guardian of cities, war goddess, patroness of arts and crafts, and promoter of wisdom. A particularly interesting example of the cultural use of Little Owls comes from Crespina, Italy, which was a center for the rearing of owls in captivity to be used for hunting small passerines. They were sold at the Little Owl market while tied up on a roost. The nobility (upper-class people) commonly hunted in the countryside using the Little Owls as bait. The history and traditions of the Little Owl are truly long, rich and varied, and grow with additional recoveries of artefacts from archaeological sites, as well as evolving cultural views. In closing this chapter, we urge reviewers of owl myths, traditions and lore to closely scrutinize the information they assemble, to determine whether the ideas and symbolism described in text and artefacts still apply in contemporary societies, or whether they are part of the colorful but quaint past.

The present chapter set out to complement the quantitative analyses in Chapter 3 with more qualitative analyses of L2 learners’ beliefs and assessment of advancedness. We analyzed the different metalinguistic descriptors they produced to describe their beliefs and other speakers’ actual use of language, its content, manner, and the L2 speaker’s identity. We found that our L2 learners were only partially explicitly aware of the language, the content, and the manner exhibited by our L2 speakers, but that they were implicitly sensitive to categorically different levels of intercultural competence among different L2 speakers. We concluded that our L2 listeners could only partially imagine L2 advancedness, and we hypothesized that the lack of a full understanding of advancedness, operationalized as a lack of language awareness, could inhibit their ability to develop an L2 identity. Consequently, we call for future research to examine how institutional intervention, through curricular design or student advising, may help to make students more explicitly aware of the multifaceted nature of advancedness, as well its empowering effect on their identity and agency as an L2 speaker.

The present chapter provides qualitative analyses of ideologies and practices toward the assessment of advanced L2 Spanish based on descriptors produced by L2 professionals. As a supplement to the quantitative findings in Chapter 6, we generated more nuanced descriptions of beliefs and practices. We found that advancedness goes beyond the scope of mainstream conceptualizations. In addition, different foci of assessment were not merely limited to constructs of functional communication, linguistic structure, and sophistication, but also extended to L2 speaker identity. We concluded that institutionalized methods of assessing advanced language use should evolve, and that professionals’ values should be free of biases toward specific learner identities. Among such values are the emphasis on language proficiency, on sophisticated language use, and on the L2 speaker’s identity as an autonomous L2 learner developing agency in socio- and intercultural interaction, rather than one that strives to be “nativelike.” We suggest that future research consider the construct of L2 identity as an essential component of advancedness, and that language departments emphasize L2 identity construction.