Background: Physical inactivity is the fourth leading cause of death (1) and a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Patients with rheumatic diseases (RDs), especially rheumatoid arthritis (RA), report low cardiorespiratory fitness levels (2), placing them at an increased risk of premature mortality and CVD.

'Electric Cherry Blossom' was inspired by a recent visit Simon made to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. He is in essence concerned with painting as an act in and of itself, exploring the interplay between the recognisable and abstracted expression. His influences are varied; he cites Van Gogh and Japanese printmaking; Vermeer and Rembrandt; Cinematography. These influences all reference developments in our understanding and preoccupation with pictorial space, and how abstract, apparently empty spaces can carry so much more weight in a painting or an image than we might first realise.

Book: Sensual Religion demonstrates the value of paying attention to the senses and materials in lived religion and also leads the way for improved studies of religion as sensuality. Each of the five senses - vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell - will be covered by two chapters, the first historical and the second contemporary. The historical discussions focus on the sensuality of religion in ancient Greece, Samaria, Rome and Byzantium - including reflections on their value for understanding other historical and contemporary contexts. Chapters with a contemporary focus engage with Chinese, African-Brazilian, Sikh, First Nations and Metis, and Spanish Catholic religious lives and activities. Beyond the rich case studies, each chapter offers perspectives and arguments about better ways of approaching lived, material and performative religion - or sensual religion. Historical and ethnographic critical and methodological expertise is presented in ways that will inspire and enable readers to apply, refine and improve on their practice of the study of religions. In particular, our intention is to foreground the senses and sensuality as a critical issue in understanding religion and to radically improve multi- and inter-disciplinary research and teaching about the lived realities of religious people in this sensual world.

This paper signals the value of making for well-being as a reflexive research activity. It focuses on a series of short reflective diary entries created by artist and researcher Mah Rana during her daily encounters with people, spaces, places, and things. The entries are personal and incidental, involve memories and snippets of conversation but, crucially, they are all positioned from her perspective as a self-identified ‘well-maker’. Someone, that is, who is alert to the particular values, benefits, qualities, and characteristics of creative making for mental and physical health: who takes note of how these manifest in our everyday lives, often in the quietest of ways.

An investigation into the development of patchwork texts as a model for enabling students to make progressive links between theory and practice on a BA (Hons) Fine Art course and how this model of delivery might support a more holistic assessment of contextual knowledge in which learning takes place and ‘makes sense over time’ and in relation to a range of experiences.

This article re-examines Bataille’s increasingly influential notion of the sacred, with particular emphasis on the left or impure aspects of the sacred and their relationship to social structure or topology. Bataille’s understanding of the ‘sacred nucleus’ of society is examined in detail, particularly his suggestion that society endures only as the hardening of the conduits of sacred and profane around a radically heterogeneous, impure or ‘filthy’ central nucleus. For Bataille the sacred as heterogeneous is necessarily excluded from profane, homogeneous working life, and is internally divided between left and right, or pure and impure aspects. The article then examines the theme of profanation in Bataille’s writing, and the emergence of what he calls ‘post-sacred’ society. Finally, the article turns to Baudrillard’s relationship to Bataille’s work, and, beyond their common indebtedness to Mauss, the author examines the thematic relationship between Bataille’s heterological sacred and Baudrillard’s notions of symbolic exchange, evil and transparency. Baudrillard’s work presents a version of heterology more adapted to the contemporary era of rampant consumerism and virtual technologies, but, as the author argues, it actually departs rather little from Bataille’s position. However, for Baudrillard, profanation generates conditions of hyper-positivity and transparency which reintroduce evil, repulsion and disorder into the social system.