The article describes attitudes towards death and funeral rites in contemporary Czech society. It begins by revealing the attitudes to death held by the majority of the Czech population - non-believers. The customary secular funeral ceremony, held in a crematorium, is not entirely well suited to meeting the needs of the bereaved, and this is borne out by the fact that about one-third of all cremations are held without a funeral ceremony. The author argues that the current situation is not solely the result of the economic situation of individuals but also stems from the deeply rooted attitudes and values and the approach to religion of the Czech population. The second part of the article is devoted to the attitudes towards death and the funeral rite preferences of believers, based on a survey conducted with members of three religious groups: Roman Catholics, Protestants (Church of the Czech Brethren), and Jehovah's Witnesses. Finally, the author compares the attitudes of the secular majority and believers, and also outlines the connections between conditions today and under the former communist regime regarding the general approach to death and funeral rites.
We will deal with a new geometrical interpretation of the classical Legendre and Jacobi conditions: they are represented by the rate and the magnitude of rotation of certain linear subspaces of the tangent space around the tangents to the extremals. (The linear subspaces can be replaced by conical subsets of the tangent space.) This interpretation can be carried over to nondegenerate Lagrange problems but applies also to the degenerate variational integrals mentioned in the preceding Part II.
We study Toeplitz operators between the pluriharmonic Bergman spaces for positive symbols on the ball. We give characterizations of bounded and compact Toeplitz operators taking a pluriharmonic Bergman space $b^p$ into another $b^q$ for $1 < p, q < \infty $ in terms of certain Carleson and vanishing Carleson measures.