The birth of a child is an event that is also the subject of ethnological research. The human being, when he is born is is already the focus of attention of the family and the community, because for both groups it represents a significant change in their previous way of life. Ethnological studies confirm that, with the birth of a child, the a number of ritual ceremonies, magical acts and superstitions have been associated with childbirth since time immemorial. The aim of this contribution is to provide an overview of the magical acts that were associated with the arrival of a new member to the family. In our study, we will use the method of interpretive analysis, the purpose of which is to to capture the magical practices present at the various stages in the birth of a child such as pregnancy, childbirth, six months, the neonatal period and baptism

Paul’s call, which explicates that he is a chosen instrument of God, and the success of his pastoral ministry dovetail with his Damascus road experience. Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians experienced a conversion on the road to Damascus and became an apostle to the Gentiles. Existing studies on this remarkable experience have focused more on controversies surrounding the unusual nature of the event and its veracity than on its contribution to the success of Paul’s ministry. This study, therefore, investigates Acts 9:15 with a view to establishing the nexus of Paul’s Damascus road experience to his call and pastoral ministry. Using Ralph Martin’s grammatico-historical approach to biblical exegesis, the paper reveals that the divine grace that characterised Paul’s call to the ministry, the nature and results of his preaching, and the recognition and support that he had received from the church and its leadership enabled Paul to have an effective pastoral ministry. It recommends that the promotion of the gospel and zeal for Christian message must correspond to the proclamation of the crucified Christ.

From the Middle Ages until the beginning of the Enlightenment, culture and cultural activity were understood as a service to God’s cause. Societies that emerged from Christianity, however, are currently described by the model of secular and lay culture. Today's man demands autonomy from God for himself and for the society that surrounds him. Man has taken on the role of his own savior, and yet he realizes that being alone is not enough for him as the "center of his own being". On the contrary, he always strives anew to "connect with others around him" (Scruton, 2002, p. 94 – 101). The question of relationality, i.e., the degree of depth of interpersonal relationships opens up even in the Internet environment, in which each of us already "exists". So, if we recognize that our online existence is an existence in its essence, exploring its character must be crucial for us. The paper deals with selected theoretical starting points that characterize the concept of pastoring an individual on the Internet. The subject of the study is the presentation of current pastoral challenges in the context of the individual's online relationships with others.

The research is aimed at uncovering the distinctiveness of the culture types (or communities) identified by Mary Douglas, and at determining the extent of inner willingness for intercultural communication of the representatives of those culture types. The authors are motivated by the inadequacy of the prevailing in modern intellectual discourse division of societies into "open" and “closed" ones. In particular, they emphasize that the global tendency of societies towards openness should have led to an emergence of Kant's citizen of the world, but instead it led to an increase of cultural intolerance and an exacerbation of intercultural conflicts. In view of this, the typology of societies conceptualized in Karl Popper's works needs significant reexamination, expansion, and clarification; the intellectual work of Mary Douglas accomplishes this goal in its own way. Mary Douglas's scientific work, in particular her concept of “grid/group" can become a theoretical foundation for the study of problems and contradictions of intercultural communication. The "cultural map”, proposed by the researcher, makes it possible to determine the level of openness of the representatives of a certain cultural environment to intercultural communication, and to predict its effectiveness and its consequences. In addition, the concept of “grid/group”, developed by the researcher, can become a useful theoretical basis for the study of "cultural intelligence”. Evaluation of social structuring and categorization from the standpoint of Durkheim's approach enabled Mary Douglas to demonstrate the particulars of formation and maintenance of cultural boundaries by means of ritual and to form an original "cultural map", identifying four extreme types of social communities with a clear internal structure. The latter organizes the social and cultural experience of each member of the community, determining the characteristics of his or her behavior, including the willingness for intercultural interaction. In the works of Mary Douglas, it manifests itself not only and not so much as an individual’s personal mood, but as a specific and predetermined social program of interaction with representatives of other cultural environments, that is, a kind of mental directive. It determines the characteristics of individual behavior of each person; meaning, it becomes a schematic marker of a person's cultural affiliation, thus facilitating the understanding of cultural differences and motivation of a person in a group.

The article proposes to adapt the experience of rhetorical understanding of the text to the aesthetic issues of trope in the fine arts. Differentiating the rhetoric of figures and the rhetoric of the text as a whole, author proves the determination of the rhetorical (poetic) function in the fine arts as a means of self-detection of work’s artistic language involved in creation of meaning and as a set of operations leading to the semantic changes and to the integration of text semantics. Significance of metalogism as a type of rhetorical transformation in the fine arts has been revealed. A thesis that the category of visual metalogisms includes operations associated with the deviations from visual perceptual and logical codes present in a work, which is the specificity of the fine art systems of the modern art, has been put forward. Regarding the analysis of metalogisms, author concludes that the refusal from the principles of mimesis, the reduction of the optical illusion and the beginning of scene, which were typical for the art of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are the ways to realize poetic (rhetorical) function of language in the fine arts. The article reveals the functional heterogeneity of the various types of intertextual relations, suggested by the rhetoric of text. It has been accented that one of the sources, that generate indirect meanings in art, is a communicative situation, given by the presence of the centers of semantic uncertainty in a work and leading to activation of autocommunication acts. Taking into account the distinguishing between linguistic and extralinguistic symbolism, the proposed model can become a methodological basis for the differentiation of historical types of symbolism in art, including non-classic specific for art.

The article examines some aspects of the mental space, the psychic one, and the internal space of thinking. The psychic space is not considered a “psychic reflection of the sensory stimuli” insofar as the first psychic movements that presuppose psychic space are not related to the sensory (for example, the prenatal states). The psychic space arises at the same time as the very psychic phenomenon. Some forms of changes in the mental space, and in the internal space of thinking, as well as the emergence of self-intentional states are also considered

Ludwik Fleck is a philosopher, biologist and physician who had a decisive influence on Thomas Kuhn. The research is dedicated to a publication of the Ukrainian translation of the Fleck’smain work “Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact” by Stefania Ptashnyk. The article deals with the scientific formation of Fleck, describes what happened to his philosophical achievements after his death and the outbreak of his popularity. The article presents the content of all Fleck’s works on philosophy, which are divided into three periods: preparatory, major and post-war. The main emphasis is on the formation of the key concepts of Fleck’s philosophy: “thought style” and “thought collective”.

The article analyzes the scientific and philosophical heritage of Ibn Sina, one of the most prominent representatives of the Middle East philosophy. Ibn Sina, an outstanding scientist and physician of the Eastern Renaissance, is among the first-class scholars in world culture, science, philosophy and medicine. The problem of man takes a central place in the creative work of a scientist. The creative work of Ibn Sina, especially his anthropological teaching, promotes finding answers to questions arising in the process of knowing some aspects of nature and the very essence of man, and partly on the global challenges of the modern world. It is precisely in his work that the eternal questions of human existence are addressed and resolved. Ideas of Ibn Sina were and remain genius, he considered a man in terms of a holistic approach, laid the foundations for modern medical ethics, defined a system of fundamental ethical concepts that have specific medical, biological and clinical content. He regarded man as the inseparable unity of spirit, soul and body. The scientific and philosophical heritage of Ibn Sina is a very important link of the only cultural tradition of mankind. The scientist introduced new ideas in many fields of scientific activity

The article is focused on human nature from view of ethical and Christian consequences resulting from bioethical research in the field of transhumanism. The aim is to examine impact of these researches on human nature within Christian dogmatics which may be threatened by transhumanism. Knowledge, which such researches bring to us, is unambiguously enriching and contributive. However, the value of knowledge should not be a justification of devaluation of religious and ethical values. After all, the getting to know is only one of many ways of man development.

The article addresses the problem of etymological and theoretical uncertainty of the “postmarxism” concept, which is traced in both domestic and specialized Western studies. The basis for the formation of mental constructs, in the direction of clarifying the specifics of postmarxism, is its setting on “overcoming metaphysics”, which is expressed in an actual refusal to decode social phenomena / processes through the reference to their basic values. The study identifies the main theoretical and methodological contradictions in the understanding of postmarxism, and at the same time, in order to confirm the subject of the work, attention is paid to the avoidance of contradictions and oppositions by postmarxism itself. Because any opposition in postmarxism is questionable, it is a prerequisite for superstructure, which is meaningless itself. Also, a theoretical-comparative and semantic analysis of the "postmarxism” concept is conducted, the historical-political context of the evolution of the concept as a theoretical category and as self-identification is analyzed in order to define its position by some philosophers. The background to its formation is fundamental to explain the denial of universal ontology in postmarxism. Namely, they are decentralization, “breaking up” of structure, derriadian critique of the transcendental meaning, which in postmarxism is expressed as an artificial fixation of meaning and “ideological arrangement”.