This book delves into one of the most profound and timeless pursuits of humankind: happiness, exploring its meaning, origins, and pathways across cultures, disciplines, and traditions. Drawing from psychology, philosophy, biology, and workplace dynamics, it offers a nuanced understanding of well-being, revealing the intricate forces that shape human flourishing. Moving beyond scientific frameworks, this volume brings together insights from the world's major religious traditions to explore how faith, virtue, and spiritual practices foster a fulfilling life. It examines the intersection of happiness with morality, purpose, and transcendence, offering a holistic perspective on what it truly means to live well. This book is about exploring and attaining of happiness which really comes out of sacred Religious Scriptures representing to the World practicing religions. One thing that is interesting in Scripture is that 'Love of God' is often used to attain happiness. Doing religious practices mean more about faithfulness, trust and obedience to God.

Seamlessly integrating empirical research with timeless wisdom, this book serves as an essential resource for students, scholars, and educators in Psychology, Positive Psychology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Liberal Arts. Equally invaluable for mental health professionals, counsellors, leaders, and individuals dedicated to personal growth, it offers practical insights drawn from both scientific inquiry and spiritual traditions, guiding readers toward deeper well-being and fulfilment.

This inspiring book provides readers with information which will help them to understand why they feel overwhelmed or anxious when under pressure, what they can do about it, and how to make the necessary mindset and lifestyle changes to become more resilient so they can cope well with the challenges they face.

Showcasing the innovative and easy- to- remember 'FUEL Your Resilience' model, which stands for Flexibility, Use of resources, Energising, and Locus of control, the book offers a structured, practical approach which utilises the power of psychology to enable people to build resilience skills in focused, proven, and practical ways. The book provides practical strategies that can be implemented immediately to help individuals, team members, and employees remain productive in stressful situations by understanding, developing and applying their resilience skills. Readers will feel liberated and empowered to move forward and cope well with pressure, challenges, and changes, with more energy, enthusiasm, and confidence.

It is valuable reading for all professionals, particularly those in high pressure environments such as health, mental health, education, business, finance and law.

Child Development: Theories and Critical Perspectives provides a perceptive and engaging overview of theories in child and adolescent psychology, uniquely combining traditional scientific perspectives with critical (postmodern) approaches. This new edition has been extensively revised to incorporate recent advances in the field, featuring a new chapter, 'Theorizing about children's digital worlds', that explores contemporary issues including social media, artificial intelligence, internet addiction and the banning of mobile phones in schools.

The authors skilfully place developmental theories within philosophical and cultural contexts, tracing historical developments across different schools of thought while exploring their interconnections and practical implications. Early chapters cover mainstream theorists such as Piaget, Skinner, Freud and Vygotsky. Other influential theorists include Maccoby and Thelen, and contemporary thinkers such as Overton and Stetsenko. Significant figures less well-known today, like Dewey and Rubinstein, are also introduced. The text also addresses broader frameworks including lifespan perspectives, systems theory, evolutionary theory, epigenetics, feminist approaches, children's voices and Indigenous theories. Current controversies such as 'decolonizing' developmental psychology and the role of universities in knowledge production are also discussed.

Written with students in mind, the book includes valuable pedagogical features such as recommended readings, discussion questions, activities and relevant websites. Essential reading for postgraduate students in developmental psychology, education, social work and social policy, its lucid style makes complex theoretical concepts accessible to readers at all levels, including those with limited background in psychology.

This book examines the educational needs of school-aged children with autism in China. It addresses the gap between the available resources and the growing demand for specialized education.

The author presents a comprehensive assessment system based on well-established models, such as the iceberg theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The framework prioritizes three levels of need: physiological, developmental, and advanced developmental. This ensures that interventions are tailored to each child's unique requirements. The book emphasizes the importance of comprehensive treatment models focusing on long-term, individualized education strategies rather than short-term interventions. It provides teachers with practical guidance on assessment methods, teaching strategies, and interventions across eight domains. These approaches aim to address the core challenges in social communication, behavior, and cognition commonly experienced by children with autism. In addition to meeting the diverse needs of students with autism, the proposed system serves as a roadmap for creating a more responsive educational environment.

By connecting theoretical frameworks with practical solutions, the book offers valuable insights for special education professionals, policymakers, educators, researchers, and students interested in special education, autism spectrum disorders, and educational psychology.

The book comprehensively explores the metaverse's application in China's vocational education, particularly focusing on its impact on digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.

Through 59 case studies, the book systematically examines the metaverse's conceptual framework, functional positioning, technological architecture, and pedagogical system in vocational education. Based on this foundation, the book conducts empirical investigations into students' cognition, attitudes, and acceptance of metaverse technologies and their impact on learning outcomes and technological adaptability. Four representative cases from Chinese vocational institutions are featured in the book, vividly illustrating innovative practices in metaverse applications such as reconstructing teaching scenarios, optimizing training processes, strengthening industry-education integration, and expanding employment services. The authors propose systematic strategies to advance the digital transformation of vocational education and offer solutions to practical challenges, such as technological costs, data privacy, and platform standardization. This work provides essential theoretical grounding and practical insights into leveraging metaverse technologies to promote high-quality, competency-based talent cultivation in the new digital era.

The book will appeal to policymakers, educators, and researchers working in vocational education and metaverse in education.

Arguing for a holistic approach to student support, this book explores how to better serve students in African settings through the services and programmes offered at universities, providing empirical studies, case studies and theoretical explorations from four Southern African countries.

Acknowledging the ultimate role of student support services in improving and enhancing the overall student experience, the book includes voices and perspectives of lecturers, students and support staff to gain an on-the-ground understanding of challenges faced. Chapters cover a wealth of themes related to student support and services, such as accommodation and student life, sexual and gender-based violence support services and ICT services, and explore educational settings in Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa and Eswatini. The book explores areas for growth and the need for multi-level engagement and responsibility in higher education, where the obligation of curating an inclusive and conducive learning environment is shared amongst all key stakeholders. By shining a spotlight on African approaches and innovations, the book contributes underrepresented viewpoints to the established field of global higher education discourse.

The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, student affairs practice and higher education administration, as well as African studies. The book will provide useful insights more broadly for international scholars in the global south interested in student support and services in resource-constrained settings.

In this book, evidence from a long-run history of epidemic-society interaction in the Low Countries shows that most recurring outbreaks were accommodated by communities, and most reactions, responses, and changes seen were the product of frequent and incremental adaptations, sometimes in periods outside of epidemics.

Epidemics blur the distinction between the normal and the sub-normal. Accordingly, although histories tend to emphasise epidemics' capacity to create sharp changes, deviations, or transitions within societies and economies, this book develops an alternative argument that the most relevant questions are not "how and why change", but given the substantial pressures of raised mortality, why was change often so modest? It brings together around five centuries' worth of existing and new evidence on epidemics and societal resistance, wealth redistribution, and women's experiences to support this interpretation.

Challenging conventional narratives about epidemics as agents of dramatic change, this book will be of interest to researchers examining historiographical debates about crisis and continuity in European history.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Open Science and the Future of Education emphasizes the crucial role of collaboration in generating new solutions for education through open science.

A manifesto for future global collaboration, the contributors to this volume set out a path forward for education innovation across four essential categories: open scientific knowledge; open science infrastructures; scientific communication; and open participation of social agents and open dialogue. Each category represents a key element of the Open Movement, with chapters highlighting timely topics including AI literacy, migrant education, and disability studies.

Featuring contributions from a diverse range of thought leaders in the open science movement, this timely volume is essential reading for anyone interested in global partnerships, open science, and interdisciplinary studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Henry Eustace McCulloch provides the first comprehensive account of a pivotal nineteenth-century military leader and politician from Texas. In his military career, Henry McCulloch served with his brother Ben in one of the first Texas Ranger companies after the Texas Revolution of 1836, defended settlers during the Great Comanche Raid of 1840, and helped to defeat Mexican forces that reoccupied San Antonio in 1842. He also served as a captain in the United States Army during the Mexican-American War.

In the 1850s, voters in Texas elected McCulloch to the state legislature, where he advocated for creating additional Ranger units to defend settlers on the frontier. He was an enslaver who supported secession and commanded a regiment of Rangers that became the first unit sworn in by the Confederacy. McCullough later served as the temporary commander of the Department of Texas, directed regiments defending territory around San Antonio, briefly led the Texas Division, and participated in the attack at Milliken's Bend, Louisiana.

After the Civil War, McCulloch remained active in politics, leading a group supporting Richard Coke during the Coke-Davis imbroglio in 1873 and running as the Populist Party's candidate for governor in 1892. David Paul Smith's biography reveals McCulloch's involvement in events that shaped nearly all of nineteenth-century Texas history, restoring his legacy as one of the state's most important military leaders and politicians.

Obsessions and compulsions have plagued humanity for millennia, and yet no major psychological theory has considered their content to be meaningful-until the work of Carl Jung. This book presents Jung's symbolic approach to the understanding and treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

The strength-based Jungian perspective restores dignity and efficacy to what can be an experience of frustration and, for the sufferer, humiliation. In this book, Morgan Stebbins employs his 30 years of practice as a clinician, professor and teacher to outline a step-by-step process: we see how obsessional ideas and compulsive actions can be understood from a symbolic standpoint, and how that both changes the personality and heals the suffering from unwanted ideas and urges.

Featuring clinical material throughout, this will be a valuable guide for Jungian analysts, clinicians of all kinds, as well as individuals in advanced study and clinical training who want to learn about the Jungian approach to the spectrum of obsessive and compulsive struggles.

The devastation of Hungary and Poland by the Mongols in 1241-2 prompted Pope Innocent IV to dispatch embassies to the invaders, remonstrating with them and urging them to accept Christianity. The papal envoys were Friars - members of the two recently founded Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who were beginning frequently to serve as instruments of papal policy. Their reports represent the first detailed and largely accurate testimony produced by European Christians about a people, hitherto virtually unknown in the West, who had become masters of much of Asia.

Early Missions to the Mongols (1245-1248) thus focuses on a watershed period in the relations of the Christian West with this new and formidable pagan power. It comprises translations of Pope Innocent's letters, together with the limited information available to the papacy prior to 1245; the menacing replies brought back by the Friars; and their reports, which include narratives of their journeys and accounts of the Mongols and their vast empire. The translations are accompanied by introductory material setting the documents in their historical context and by a full commentary.

The volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on the history of the Mongol empire, but also to those concerned with the early development of the Mendicant Orders, papal policy towards the non-Christian world, the relations between sedentary and nomadic societies in the Middle Ages, and the discovery by the Christian West of distant and extensive regions previously shrouded in myth and fantasy.

A comprehensive study of D. T. Suzuki's Zen philosophy and philosophical psychology in relation to his Buddhist understanding of the "cosmic Unconscious."

This book explores how the Japanese philosopher D. T. Suzuki (1870-1966) developed an integral synthesis of Eastern and Western sources to establish a modern philosophical psychology of the "cosmic Unconscious," which he in turn used as the basis to interpret every aspect of Zen art, meditation, and enlightenment. Beyond Freud's personal unconscious and Jung's collective unconscious, according to Suzuki, is the cosmic Unconscious of Zen, which as absolute nothingness is the fountain of inexhaustible creative potentialities and the source of all Zen-inspired arts. The book demonstrates that, like the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy, Suzuki's Zen endeavors to overcome the existential problem of nihilism or relative nothingness by shifting to the openness of absolute nothingness wherein emptiness is fullness and all things are disclosed in the evanescent beauty of their suchness. Suzuki, however, formulates his scheme in terms of a depth psychology where the cosmic Unconscious is the encompassing locus of absolute nothingness. Ultimately, the book argues that, by integrating both Eastern and Western views of the unconscious psyche, including the different schools of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, as well as American, French, and German theories of the unconscious, Suzuki's Zen concept of the cosmic Unconscious constitutes a significant original contribution to philosophical psychology.

Millions of Muslims across the Indian Ocean littoral have historically followed a matrilineal system, where women had better economic and social stability and an upper hand in their personal choices. The system raised serious questions as the Islamic legal tradition evolved in the Middle East, especially when some inheritance customs gave men little to no share in the property. Bringing diverse matrilineal Muslim communities together for the first time, this volume studies their engagements against the patriarchal interpretations of Sharia in comparative and connected perspectives. The comparisons and connections go beyond the Indian Ocean and Islamic world, to the Mediterranean, Sub-Saharan and North African contexts as well as to the Christian, Jewish and Hindu traditions. The contributors explore how and why the followers of the matrilineal praxis defended the system within the legal epistemologies of their religion.

A striking new perspective on women, religious spaces, and literary culture during the Ming and Qing erasFrom the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, Neo-Confucian ideology sought to reinforce the seclusion of women within the domestic sphere, while flourishing lay Buddhism increasingly fueled their passion for visiting temples and going on distant pilgrimages. Xu Ma explores this cultural tension to reveal how religious spaces-physical, imagined, and embodied-emerged as a "third social space" that both sustained and subverted the Confucian binaries of inside and outside, public and private.

Drawing on an impressive range of sources, from popular fiction and drama to biographical accounts and archaeological evidence, Ma shows how women's religious engagement was simultaneously celebrated and condemned in literary and cultural imagination. Outdoor temples were sites of controversy, where women were portrayed as both vulnerable to corruption yet also capable of transcendent manipulation. Through domestic altars and household shrines, women redefined marital and gendered dynamics on their own terms. Eventually, even the female body itself became a sacred site of meaning.

This richly interdisciplinary study redefines the place of women in Chinese religious and cultural history. By blending gender studies, spatial theory, and literary analysis, Boundaries and Bodhisattvas demonstrates how women's bodies and hearts reconfigured both Confucian gender paradigms and the broader religious landscape of late imperial China. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the intersections of gender, religion, and cultural narratives.

This book explores the history of foreign astral science in China from the unique viewpoint of the knowledge introduced to the Middle Kingdom by monks, travellers, and merchants from different parts of Eurasia throughout the first millennium CE.

By comparing the extant works in Chinese with parallel materials in their original languages, including texts in Sanskrit and Pali for the Buddhist materials, and in other languages for works by the Nestorians, Zoroastrians, and Manicheans, this book fills a lacuna in the understanding of the role foreign scientific ideas played in Chinese and East Asian societies.

Including full English translations of a number of Chinese texts of foreign origin for the first time, together with commentaries and the critically edited original Chinese texts, this book will appeal to students and scholars of the history of science and Chinese history.

In the early eastern theater of the American Civil War, the Northern and Southern armies saw little of combat and little of each other, with most of their military intelligence more akin to propaganda than objective fact. However, by 1862 both sides knew through bloody experience how the other could fight, though gaps in knowledge of the other's tactics and political strategies remained. Perhaps most important, Northern soldiers had by then spent significant time in the South, and as they witnessed firsthand the effects of slavery, their attitudes hardened toward the South.

Covering all aspects of the war in Virginia in the first six months of 1862, Forward to Richmond treats the military actions in the Shenandoah Valley, the Piedmont, and the Peninsula as part of a theatre-wide campaign. Brian K. Burton goes beyond military events to also examine the political, social, and diplomatic interactions with military events, including the meetings of Union soldiers with Southern civilians and African Americans, ultimately leading to a turn away from conciliation and a beginning of a move toward support of emancipation.