Identity serves as a vehicle for World Religions (WRs), and WRs are indispensable in the study of identity—Identology. The concept “identity” itself has become an overly used deflationary term that has lost some of its connotation, authenticity, or effectiveness. The claim for a persistent identity is slowly becoming scarce or often illusory. This paper explores the meanings and manifestations of the terms “identity” and “identification,” and then reintroduces “sense of identity” as a more evocative construct for the 21^st century, especially in the context of WRs. Sense of Identity is then operationalized into three primary components: 1) personal beliefs, 2) communal attributes, and 3) sociopolitical attitudes, or for the sake of brevity, beliefs, attributes, and attitudes. These three key components furnish a concentric model with beliefs at the core, attributes surrounding that core, and attitudes at the periphery. But this theoretical model is incomplete without a second pivotal structure of concentric circles drawn from different perceptions of Sense of History, with the personal view of history at the core, the communal view of history surrounding that core, and the dominant historiography inhabiting the periphery. These two structures may differ in their configuration from one person or community to another, and from one time to another, but they interact with, shape, and are shaped by, each other. Eventually, the two structures merge into one coherent, sensible, and emancipatory model for any discourse on WRs.

The modern trend of increasing the number of pigs at production sites led to a noticeable surplus of manure. Separation of manure solids provides an avenue of their utility via thermochemical conversion techniques. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to assess the physical and thermal properties of solid separated swine manure obtained from two different farms, i.e., farrowing, and growing-finishing, and to determine their pyrolysis kinetic parameters. Swine manure solids were dried and milled prior to assessing their properties. Differential and integral isoconversional methods (Friedman, and Flynn-Wall-Ozawa) were used to determine the apparent activation energy as a function of the conversion ratio. Significant differences were observed in the proximate, ultimate composition between both manure types. The higher heating value (HHV) for the manure solids from farrowing, and growing-finishing farms reached 16.6 MJ/kg and 19.4 MJ/kg, respectively. The apparent activation energy computed using Friedman and FWO methods increased with the increase in the degree of conversion. Between 10% and 40% degrees of conversion, the average activation energies, using Friedman method, were103 and 116 kJ/mol for the farrowing and growing-finishing manure solids, respectively. On the other hand, the same activation energies, calculated from FWO method, were 98 and 104 kJ/mol, for solid manure obtained from farrowing and growing-finishing farms, respectively. The findings in this study will assist in the effort to optimize thermochemical conversion processes to accommodate swine waste. This could, in turn, minimize swine production impacts on the surrounding ecologies and provide sustainable energy and biochar streams.