As sustainability becomes a strategic priority amid global economic, environmental, and social challenges, family firms are uniquely positioned to lead due to their long-term orientation, legacy focus, and community ties. This article introduces the Special Issue “Sustainability in Family Firms: Leading the Path Forward”, highlighting how family businesses extend the traditional Triple Bottom Line by adding a fourth dimension—perpetuity—rooted in socioemotional wealth and legacy concerns. Despite growing interest, research on sustainability in family firms remains fragmented and lacks cross-contextual depth. This (...) Special Issue advances the field with six contributions exploring internal and external drivers of sustainable behavior, from governance structures and founder influence to stakeholder dynamics and next-generation leadership. Together, these articles offer fresh insights into how family firms navigate and shape sustainability agendas across contexts and generations. (shrink)

The article sets the tone for the rest of this journal by raising some fundamental question of the relevance of the margins for theology of the local church. It explores a possible theology for the local church in the margins of our society. Purusing the theme of Jubilee as ‘presence’ rather than as activism, the author explores five themes for constructing a missiology for the local church’s in the margins. The article defines the local church in the margins of our (...) society as a disruptive prophetic presence. (shrink)

Introduction -- Evolution: how life and we came about -- Medicine: our health, illnesses and healing -- Order, disorder and chaos: complex phenomena around us -- Motion, space and time: where and when we are -- Cosmology: how did our universe come about -- Religion, science and scientists -- Science for life.

It is a foundational principle of medical humanities that the appreciation of literature and other humanities enrich and expand medical training. But what are the mechanisms by which this happens? As a faculty member and former medical student, who met during an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional 5-session poetry seminar, we reflect on how poetry enriches our own experiences working with patients, as well as how we care for patients. Reading poetry in medicine has the potential to enhance observational skills, model an (...) appreciation of uncertainties, and generate joy. Similar to our seminar, other institutions may also consider incorporating poetry into curricula. (shrink)

This book brings together a series of short essays by Chaturvedi Badrinath on diverse topics related to Indian philosophy and thought. Drawing mainly from the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, and the Yoga-vasishtha, Badrinath explores the concept of dharma, central to any understanding of the Indian civilization. The book engages the ordinary reader, who is perhaps unacquainted with formal philosophy, but is in search of meaning in the midst of the pressures of modern life. The moral dilemmas faced by human beings today (...) are not new. In a world increasingly filled with fear, violence, and terrorism, ordinary people seek ways in which to order their lives. An understanding of the foundations of human liberty, happiness, self and the other, self-interest, the basis of fear, and a movement towards freedom or moksha are essential to that quest. Badrinath had an entirely original approach to the six darsanas or world views. In the essays, he has rendered the most sophisticated ideas in language that is simple and accessible. His thoughts were crystallized over a life spent in deep reflection and engagement with Eastern and Western philosophies. In his writing, the most ancient philosophy is shown to have immediate relevance to modern times. (shrink)

Articles on ethics by a Jaina religious leader.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents unprecedented opportunities to transform healthcare worldwide, from improving diagnostic accuracy to expanding access in underserved regions. Despite this potential and growing investment, a significant gap persists between AI’s theoretical promise and its realised benefits in healthcare settings. This article examines the complex barriers impeding AI benefits realization in global health contexts, including ethical uncertainties, data infrastructure limitations, evidence quality concerns, and regulatory ambiguities. We analyze current initiatives addressing these challenges and highlight how technological solutions alone cannot (...) resolve fundamental healthcare inequities. Drawing on the interdisciplinary perspectives and insights presented at the Global Health in the Age of AI Symposium hosted by the Cini Foundation and Yale Digital Ethics Center, we propose five core infrastructure requirements necessary for ethical AI implementation: robust data exchange; epistemic certainty with staff autonomy; actively protected healthcare values; validated outcomes with meaningful accountability; and environmental sustainability. These requirements form the foundation for a systems approach that balances technological advancement with ethical imperatives, contextual adaptability, and global equity considerations. We conclude that the successful integration of AI into healthcare demands coordinated action across sectors and borders, with careful attention to avoiding technological colonialism and ensuring AI serves as a force for health equity rather than widening existing disparities. (shrink)

As a neo-liberal economy, India has become one of the new health tourism destinations, with commercial gestational surrogacy as an expanding market. Yet the Indian Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill has been pending for five years, and the guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research are somewhat vague and contradictory, resulting in self-regulated practices of fertility clinics. This paper broadly looks at clinical ethics in reproduction in the practice of surrogacy and decision-making in various procedures. Through empirical research in (...) New Delhi, the capital of India, from December 2011 to November 2012, issues of decision-making on embryo transfer, fetal reduction, and mode of delivery were identified. Interviews were carried out with doctors in eighteen ART clinics, agents from four agencies, and fourteen surrogates. In aiming to fulfil the commissioning parents’ demands, doctors were willing to go to the greatest extent possible in their medical practice. Autonomy and decision-making regarding choice of the number of embryos to transfer and the mode of delivery lay neither with commissioning parents nor surrogate mothers but mostly with doctors. In order to ensure higher success rates, surrogates faced the risk of multiple pregnancy and fetal reduction with little information regarding the risks involved. In the globalized market of commercial surrogacy in India, and with clinics compromising on ethics, there is an urgent need for formulation of regulative law for the clinical practice and maintenance of principles of reproductive ethics in order to ensure that the interests of surrogate mothers are safeguarded. (shrink)

This book is the first to bring together an interdisciplinary collection of essays on surrogacy and egg donation from three socially, legally and culturally distinct countries - India, Israel and Germany. It presents contributions from experts in the field of social and cultural sciences, bioethics, law as well as psychology and provides critical-reflective comparative analysis of the socio-ethical factors shaping surrogacy and egg donation practices across these three countries. This book highlights the importance of a comparative perspective to ‘make sense’ (...) of controversies and transitions in this highly contested area of artificial reproductive technologies. It demonstrates how local developments cannot be isolated from global events and vice versa. Therefore, this volume can be used as a standard reference for anyone seeking to understand surrogacy and egg donation from a macro-perspective in the next decade. (shrink)

This chapter gives a brief overview of the composition of the volume and explains why it is important to undertake a detailed scholarly analysis and comparison of the following ethico-legal regimes of surrogacy and egg donation: the permissive-unregulated but transitory regime of India; the permissive regime of Israel, although highly regulated by professional, medical and religious norms, and the extremely restrictive regime of Germany, being legally permeable for particular forms of cross-border reproductive practice despite the non-permissive national law. It uses (...) an interdisciplinary lens to examine how the ethical, social, legal and cultural issues are interwoven in each regime. Moreover, we highlight the importance of a comparative analysis to understand how local developments cannot be isolated from each other, but deeply influence each other through transnational markets, modern media and the transfer of knowledge, people and body parts. (shrink)

In this work we present the TULSI system (so named after Turin University Legal Semantic Interpreter), a system to produce automatic annotations of normative documents through the extraction of modificatory provisions. TULSI relies on a deep syntactic analysis and a shallow semantic interpreter that are illustrated in detail. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of the system and discuss them, also suggesting future directions for further improvement.

Literary histories are narratives, just like the literatures they describe. They construct not only a temporal framework but also a spatial arena for literary events, movements and authors—frequently following extra-literary agendas. Using the example of Hindi, the official language of the Republic of India, the article analyzes the conceptualisation of space within literary history by comparatively mapping the space of a sixteenth-century Hindi poet, Tulsi Das, as presented in three histories of Hindi literature (by two Western and one Indian (...) historiographer) from the periods of high colonialism, the struggle for independence andthe post-colonial era. The highly divergent spaces that emerge show that space can never be an objective ‘given’ and also testify to the significance of visualising verbally produced spaces cartographically, so that underlying socio-political dimensions can be perceived. (shrink)

One of the most striking features of contemporary political scenario is widespread popularity of democracy so much so that many people think that there can be no other desirable alternative. They may argue that there is end of history/ideology and with democracy saturation point has reached in political thought. They may assume democracy to be the best form of government that can be conceived by human mind and think that no alternative to democracy is conceivable. There is an end to (...) human rational capacity, and there can be no advancement beyond. ‘Thus far and no further’ position seems to be the point of culmination of thought to them. To a rational and creative human mind, it is irrational to think and talk of end of history or saturation in thinking. To ask reason not to think further is to ask it to commit suicide. Innovative thinking, transformative thinking and radical thinking should be regarded as natural to human mind. Therefore, with regard to political thinking also there must be rethinking about democracy leading to search for an alternative. To safeguard freedom and justice, we shall have to re-examine tenets of modern political thinking, premises upon which it is built and policies upon which it acts. The alternative may or may not be radically different, but it must surely be essentially different in the sense that it should transcend all the limitations, deformities, drawbacks and demerits of democracy, particularly the ones of the manifold forms of democracy practised in modern times. It is not a plea to distrust or reject but to re-examine it, to transform it, to cleanse it and if needed to go beyond it and look for an alternative. It is too well known to argue that all is not well with democracy. The search for an alternative requires newer intuitions, fresh insights and innovative thinking. If necessary, it may call for paradigm shift in end, means and modalities, and consequent structuring of new vocabulary and phraseology. Acharya Tulsi and Acharya Mahapragya have given thoughts to this issue and have provided helpful suggestions. (shrink)