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Overview: Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has emerged as a severely debilitating psychiatric disorder associated with critical illness. Little progress has been made in the treatment of post-intensive care unit (ICU) PTSD. Aim: To synthesize neurobiological evidence on the pathophysiology of PTSD and the brain areas involved, and to highlight the potential of music to treat post-ICU PTSD. Methods: Critical narrative review to elucidate an evidence-based neurobiological framework to inform the study of music interventions for PTSD post-ICU. Literature searches were performed in PubMed and CINAHL. The Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles (SANRA) guided reporting. Results: A dysfunctional HPA axis feedback loop, an increased amygdalic response, hippocampal atrophy, and a hypoactive prefrontal cortex contribute to PTSD symptoms. Playing or listening to music can stimulate neurogenesis and neuroplasticity, enhance brain recovery, and normalize stress response. Additionally, evidence supports effectiveness of music to improve coping and emotional regulation, decrease dissociation symptoms, reduce depression and anxiety levels, and overall reduce severity of PTSD symptoms. Conclusions: Despite the lack of music interventions for ICU survivors, music has the potential to help people suffering from PTSD by decreasing amygdala activity, improving hippocampal and prefrontal brain function, and balancing the HPA-axis.

This special issue of Religious Studies and Theology centers on spiritual kinship and globalization. Such a topic may appear unlikely for such a journal. What is the meaning of "spiritual kinship", and how does it compare to ordinary kinship? What does spiritual kinship have to do with "globalization"? And why is the conjunction of these terms important for religious studies and theology? Ordinary conceptions of kinship To begin with "ordinary" kinship: For more than a century, this concept has been pursued most assiduously, and most theoretically, by social and cultural anthropologists, under two main headings: consanguine relations, by blood (descent theory), and affine relations, by marriage (alliance theory). Beginning as comparative cultural analysis by 19 th century pioneers (such as Morgan 1871), kinship theory became a constant for anthropological analysis across functionalist, structuralist, symbolic, cognitive, Marxist, and other paradigms (Radcliffe-Brown 1941; Evans-Pritchard 1951; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Pitt-Rivers 1973). Meanwhile (whether as cause or result of its ubiquity) kinship theory developed a sophisticated analytic formalism replete with standardized neologistic terminology, forbiddingly complex diagrams, and algebraic manipulations-the "hard science" of social anthropology, holding promise for rigorous, empirical, comparative social study, and the discernment of nomothetic propositions (e.g. Murdock 1949). By 1967 Fox could righdy declare that "kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy" (Fox 1967:10), i.e. rigorous, central, essential. Naively, kinship seems to entail the study of biological relationships. But early on anthropologists realized that what they were studying was not biological per se, but rather a social construction whose relation (if any) to biology could not be ascertained a priori. A distinction was drawn, for instance, between pater/mater (social parents) and genitor/genetrix (biological parents); later, the latter pair was also recognized as a social construction (of biological parentage), and the pair of pairs theoretically augmented with a third (the actual genetic parents) (Barnes 1961:29T). 1 Though biology might be viewed locally as defining "natural" (pre-social) relations, the task of the socio-cultural anthropologist is to show how the "natural" is always a social construction; for human

It is often assumed that as ‘orthodox’ Islam rejects music, Qur’anic recitation (tilawa) and the Call to Prayer (adhan) are its only acceptable melodic practices. By the same logic, the special music of Sufism is bracketed under the labels ‘heterodox,’ or else ‘popular,’ Islam. Both ‘orthodox’ and ‘Sufi’ practices are then categorically distinguished from the ‘secular’ world and its music. This erroneous ‘tripolar’ view of music and religion in Egypt can be ameliorated by considering the rich range of Islamic melodic practices performed there.