The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) occupied the city of Manbij and its countryside from 23 January 2014 until 12 August 2016. During this period, the region suffered greatly as ISIS monopolized control and brutally imposed its ideology. Fierce battles were fought for the control of oil wells, bakeries, mills, dams, and power stations, all of which were sources of revenue. Antiquities were soon recognized as another potential income source. This article demonstrates the ways in which ISIS began to administer and facilitate the looting of antiquities through the Diwan Al-Rikaz. Within this diwan, ISIS established the Qasmu Al-Athar, which was specifically responsible for looting antiquities. Based on interviews conducted in 2015 and primary documents, this article studies the specific ways in which ISIS facilitated the quarrying and looting of antiquities in Manbij and the rich archaeological sites of its countryside. Further, by examining the damage at a previously undocumented archaeological site, Meshrefet Anz, the looting of antiquities under the direct supervision of the Diwan Al-Rikaz is studied. Using documentary evidence including ISIS’s internal documentation as well as photographs collected by the author between 2014 and 2016, the article demonstrates the methods used by ISIS, reveals its financial motivations, and bears witness to the damage done at specific Syrian heritage sites.

There is still much unclear about the nature of the origins of Australia’s most respected and hallowed national day, namely Anzac Day, 25 April, and about who was primarily responsible for instituting a day of solemn commemoration for the fallen in the Great War of 1914–18. Much has been written by mostly unqualified would-be ‘authorities’ that is either patently false, uninformed or hostile to the commemoration. This is either because of resentment in some quarters of the distinctly Anglican contribution to the nature of the commemoration or pacifist misunderstanding that the celebration of Anzac Day is somehow a glorification of war. This paper based on original research into the files of the Queensland Anzac Day Commemoration Committee establishes the key role of Canon David John Garland (1864–1939) in shaping a liturgy of civic religion for the day which he hoped would become a means of reminding the population of their calling as part of the British Empire to emphasize the reign of Almighty God over all nations of the earth. That was the hidden Christian agenda in the mind of Canon Garland. Naturally he had his opponents to this objective.

Schmid and Mullins present what they call ‘the Aloneness Argument’ for the inconsistency of four theses from classical theism: the doctrine of divine simplicity, the doctrine of divine omniscience, the claim that God is free to create or not to create, and the claim that it is possible that God and nothing but God exist. We deny that they have shown an inconsistency between these theses. We maintain that, depending on how certain premises are interpreted, one or another premise is false. We also offer a positive proposal regarding a simple God's knowledge that he is alone in a world where he doesn't create anything.

Although much has been written about divine knowledge, and some on divine beliefs, virtually nothing has been written about divine credences. In this article we comparatively assess four views on divine credences: (1) God has only beliefs, not credences; (2) God has both beliefs and credences; (3) God has only credences, not beliefs; and (4) God has neither credences nor beliefs, only knowledge. We weigh the costs and benefits of these four views and draw connections to current discussions in philosophical theology.

Women’s intra-household care burden is one of the main reasons behind women’s low employment rates in Turkey. Many empirical studies have tested this relationship by focusing on the existence of dependent household members, if any. They have largely overlooked the use of care services and the time spent on caring for dependent household members to evaluate women’s care burden.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between women’s care burden and employment prospects and status in Turkey from the perspective of access to care services and the time dimension of the care burden. This relationship is analyzed through the logit model by using latest available data from the 2014–2015 Time Use Survey. The article shows that the time spent by women caring for dependent household members, and access to care services, are the most important factors influencing women’s employment probability in Turkey. Benefiting from informal childcare services increases the employment probability of women approximately twenty-seven times, while benefiting from formal childcare services increases two times and informal adult-care services 2.6 times. Ensuring the accessibility of institutional care services improves women’s employment status by enabling women’s transition from part-time to full-time jobs, and from unskilled to professional jobs.

One of the well-known conundrums of the Guide of the Perplexed, found in its last chapter, pertains to Maimonides's contradictory presentation of the hierarchy of human virtues and perfections. This article draws attention to a parallel between the paradox posed by the closing paragraphs of the Guide and the contradiction found in the concluding paragraphs of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, a parallel that has never been noted by students of Maimonides. The intention here is not to make a categorical statement about Maimonides's position on the core issues of the relationship between the intellect and the moral virtues. Rather, it is to shed new light on the unexpected structure of the last chapter, and thus also provide a significant addition to the important debate about Maimonides's position on these issues.

Given their strategic position within American society, clergy continue to remain important actors in American politics. This article examines the partisan identifications and electoral behavior of American Protestant clergy in the 2016 presidential election. Although clergy partisanship may be of interest in any election, the 2016 contest, given the milieu of political polarization and the presence of the Trump candidacy, provides an intriguing context for assessing the profession's electoral behavior, particularly among Republican clergy. Based on survey results from over 2,500 clergy drawn from ten Protestant (five mainline and five evangelical) denominations, the study finds that, during the early stages of the 2016 nomination process, only a small percentage of Republican clergy supported Trump and that, despite the high level of political polarization, a sizable segment of Republican clergy resisted partisan pressures and refused to vote for Trump in the general election. The propensity of both independent and Republican clergy to vote for the GOP nominee varied largely with the level of perceived “threats”: to the Christian heritage of the nation, from Islam, and from the process of “globalization.”

Donald Trump's campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” captivated the imagination of millions of Americans by contextualizing disparate sources of social resentment as emblematic of a broader story of American decline. Employing a “traditionalist civil religious jeremiad,” Trump called for a reassertion of American exceptionalism, and extolled a romanticized golden age predating transformative social changes (e.g., sexuality, gender roles, racial equality). As such, his rhetoric legitimized the defense of white male privilege as a vital component of this restoration. While this use of civil religious themes emboldened those who harbor prejudicial views, it alienated others who interpret such rhetoric as an assault on the soul of the nation. Relying on a unique module within the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we demonstrate that adherence to the tenets of American civil religion significantly exacerbated the effects of symbolic racism and modern sexism on support for Trump.

It has become commonplace to contrast Plotinus’s spirituality with Christian spirituality by portraying the former as solipsistic and the latter as communal. In particular, this critique has centred around Plotinus’s description of mystical ascent as a “flight of the alone to the alone” and his presentation of Plato’s Phaedrus as an exhortation to “work on your own statue.” Yet, should one understand the One as a supreme unity, it would appear that the Plotinian unio mystica renders the mystic supremely unified with the rest of being. Accordingly, this article emphasizes Plotinus’s “inclusive monotheism” in order to argue that the “flight of the alone to the alone” should be understood as a movement towards the supreme unity that underlies reality. The unificatory effects of this ascent are emphasized by the way in which Plotinus, in both his life and works, depicts teaching as a common response to henosis. This didactic turn, it is argued, is a response to glimpsing the deep unity of reality, which expands the mystic’s sphere of concern to include the “other” as another self.

The claim that article four of Thomas Aquinas’s De unione verbi incarnati is a reversal of his consistently held single esse position is challenged in this paper. The article argues that reading all five articles of the De unione as a single-structured argument discloses a single esse understanding of the Incarnate Word. The very nature of the radically hypostatic union between God and man in Christ is at stake in this dispute. According to Thomas, positing a second esse in Christ not only contradicts the tradition, especially of the Christian East, that he appropriates, but it would also compromise the reality of the hypostatic union itself.

Memory laws are often accused of enforcing an inaccurate, manipulative or populist view of history. Some are also said to violate fundamental rights, in particular the right to free speech. These accusations are not entirely unjustified. Yet, a discussion of memory legislation that concentrates on these faults might be missing its mark. The main problem with memory legislation is not necessarily with the merits of any particular law. Rather, the determination of historical facts is not the kind of matter that should be entrusted to the legislator in the first place. The role of legislation is to make social cooperation possible despite substantial disagreement, but only when such social cooperation is indeed required. Disputes about historical facts, I argue, are not a coordination problem that requires a legislative solution. Still less can they justify legal coercion.

This article explores the tension between the theoretical conceptualisations of liberal peace, transitional justice and reconciliation by focusing on power sharing as a liberal peace institution-building mechanism. Power sharing is based on the premise that identities in conflict in deeply divided societies are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The article outlines the limitations of liberal peace by demonstrating how the implementation of power-sharing arrangements creates a political reality in which conflict patterns are further entrenched, thus hindering the prospects of conflict transformation. In order to address the limitations of liberal peace, the article draws on models of transformative justice to highlight the growing need for a new conceptualisation of reconciliation as a political and transformative concept, in which both justice and reconciliation are recognised as intrinsic goals for post-conflict societies. Thus, the re-establishment of political structures and institutional reforms is envisaged not only as a tool to promote political stability, but as a means of facilitating transformation in conflict patterns in the political and social spheres.

This article presents a unique cylinder seal found at the site of Tell Abu al-Dhahab, in the Iraqi marshes. The cylinder seal, made of alabaster, is dated to the First Sealand Dynasty period and contains a scene with an introduction to a seated deity. It is accompanied by an inscription identifying the father of its owner as the overseer of the incantation priests. The aim of the article is both to discuss the cylinder seal, but also contextualize it within the temple where it was found and the period to which it is dated.

This article argues that the Wisdom of Solomon complicates Martinus C. de Boer's typology of two ‘tracks’ of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology (‘forensic apocalyptic eschatology’ and ‘cosmological apocalyptic eschatology’). Wisdom, which entails both ‘forensic’ depictions of an eschatological courtroom (5.1–14) and ‘cosmological’ depictions of cosmic war (5.15–23), offers a cosmology fundamentally incompatible with the cosmology presumed in de Boer's ‘cosmological apocalyptic eschatology’. Instead of envisioning eschatological justice as the result of a divine invasion, Wisdom envisions it as the result of divine pervasion. That is, cosmological eschatology in Wisdom entails a fully functioning, divinely pervaded cosmos operating as it was intended to operate. Wisdom innovates within Jewish apocalyptic tradition by employing the mythological idiom of apocalypticism to defend the philosophical claim that the cosmos is just and facilitates life for those who are likewise just.

This article demonstrates that Paul's use of Ps 68.10b OG in Rom 15.3 makes sense of the psalm's context, fits with the parenetic rhetoric of Paul's argument in 14.1–15.6 and necessitates Paul's justification in 15.4 of his use of Scripture. Citing Ps 68.10b because the δυνατοί (15.1) face actual reproaches for accommodating to the ἀδύνατοι's convictions, Paul grounds the call to bear these reproaches in emulating Christ's devotion to God, not his vicarious suffering. The focus on allegiance to God orients the δυνατοί towards the one who can then enable them to counter-culturally endure shame with fellow members of God's household.

In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that reveal the historical inaccuracy of an exceptionalist scholarly framework. However, as this essay explains, untethering Jewish studies scholarship completely from exceptionalism discourse may risk overlooking the prevalence of these beliefs and what they tell us about those who propagated them. Exceptionalism does not need to be historically accurate for it to warrant attention from scholars. Nor must scholars approve of exceptionalism, or deem it a positive, for it to be a worthy subject of study. Scholars may indeed view American Jewish exceptionalism as a fantasy that prevents believers from seeing the reality—in particular the problems—of their situation, but the fact that this fantasy had so many fervent espousers should make it a matter of interest. Examining the trail of American Jewish exceptionalist voices reveals the multiple ways these voices have been deployed.

This article examines the process of text-based negotiations surrounding the documents of the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. It focuses on revisions to the Operational Guidelines of the Convention and utilizes ethnographic observation and textual examination to show how alternative, and often the most controversial, proposals are silenced through the practice of consensus. It expands anthropological perspectives on the inner workings of intergovernmental institutions and adds to the literature on heritage regimes by providing examples from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) most prestigious intergovernmental committee. Ultimately, the article enhances our understanding of the political tensions and practical limitations of policymaking within intergovernmental organizations in the United Nations, including UNESCO.

The Neo-Assyrian site Šibaniba (modern Tell Billa) served as a provincial center at the very edge of what is traditionally known as the “Assyrian Heartland”. Excavations in the early 1900s under Dr. Speiser of the University of Pennsylvania uncovered architecture in the southwestern portion of the mound, but a loss of records and lack of publication have prevented any comprehensive publications or analysis of the archaeological material. The architecture from Level I in the southwest corner is the remains of a palace from the latter half of the Neo-Assyrian period – comprised of an inner, paved courtyard and surrounding rooms. The analysis of this palace complex is carried out herein, with a discussion of its positioning and importance, especially during Nineveh's tenure as imperial capital. Overall, Šibaniba, despite being located so close to the Heartland, was an important administrative center in its own right – illustrated by a restructuring of the citadel's organization in the later Neo-Assyrian period and its inclusion in Sennacherib's irrigation program.

This paper aims to clarify the scope and limitations of the ideals of Pan-Maghrib nationalism as developed by the Association of North African Muslim Students in France (AEMNAF) in the 1930s. The AEMNAF members’ inclination toward sciences and technology and their emphasis on conserving their mother culture made them consider Arabism and Islam their most important identity markers. Moreover, the AEMNAF created a sense of solidarity among Maghribi students in France and extended its social influence by cooperating with French and Mashriqi opinion leaders in Europe. However, the AEMNAF's narrow definition of Muslim-ness and its elitist nature led to the exclusion of Maghribis with French citizenship from the organization. The dualistic view of technology and culture in Maghribi nationalist thought also contributed to prioritizing Francophones over Arabophones, Muslims over non-Muslims, men over women, and students in the sciences over those in humanities.