While many scholars expect people's ideological orientations to drive their beliefs regarding the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs), research has found surprisingly limited support for this common assumption. In this article we resolve this puzzle by introducing the perceived ideological profile of IOs as a critical factor shaping the relationship between ideological orientation and such beliefs. Theoretically, we argue that citizens accord IOs greater legitimacy when they perceive these organizations as ideologically more congruent with their own orientations. Empirically, we evaluate this expectation by combining observational and experimental analyses of new survey evidence from four countries: Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, and the United States. We find that citizens indeed perceive IOs as having particular ideological profiles and that those perceptions systematically moderate the relationship between people's ideological orientations and their sense of IOs’ legitimacy. These findings suggest that political ideology is a more powerful driver of legitimacy beliefs in global governance than previously understood.

Throughout the twentieth century, Azeri Turkish was intermittently banned, occasionally tolerated, but always marginalized in relation to Persian, which was perceived as the unifying, defining, essential language of the nation. Despite the substantial population of Azeri Turkish speakers in Iran—the largest linguistic minority—any attempt to teach the language publicly or to publish in Azeri Turkish has often been regarded, even to this day, as a highly political act of dissidence. Historical analysis of Azeri Turkish texts and a review of policies in language teaching, publication, and censorship within Iranian Azerbaijan reveal a symbiotic but simultaneously paradoxical interaction between this mother tongue and the official master language.

The coinage of Bar Kosiba (Bar Kokhba), the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt (132–135/6 CE), has long been acknowledged as a source of data for understanding the ideology and goals of the rebel regime he headed. In particular, the imagery and legends on Bar Kosiba’s tetradrachms have been the subject of many interpretations and controversies. This article proposes that the facade of the temple on the obverse of Bar Kosiba’s tetradrachms and the four species on its reverse side are complementary symbols, joined together to represent the future inauguration ceremony of the restored temple. Furthermore, this imagery on the tetradrachms may have been intended to respond to the coins issued to commemorate the founding of the colony of Aelia Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem.

This short paper considers and critiques the view that the named people greeted in Romans 16.3–16 are not also among the recipients of the letter to ‘all God's beloved in Rome’ (Rom 1.7). Variants of this view spring from the work of Mullins (1968): that the second-person greeting involves the greeting of ‘a third party who is not intended to be among the immediate readership of the letter’ (Mullins, 1968: 420) and are found in Thorsteinsson (2003), Stowers (2015) and Campbell (2023). A series of arguments are made against this view. In particular, the plural form of the imperative (ἀσπάσασθɛ) and the open nature of the addressees mean that Mullins' simple principle does not apply. In addition, Paul's usage elsewhere (including in Romans 16.16) contradicts Mullins' principle.

Theologians have become increasingly attentive to the role emotion and experience must play in theological reflection. Several thinkers have recently done so by appropriating and developing Jon Sobrino’s understanding of orthopathy, or “right affect.” A close examination of these efforts, however, reveals inconsistencies in the way the category is understood and deployed. This article redresses these inconsistencies by complementing orthopathy with orthoaesthesis, or “right perception.” The article opens by considering various appeals to orthopathy before suggesting how William James’s theory of emotion might provide the category with clarifying content. The second stage engages Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch as practitioners of orthoaesthesis. Special attention is given to Murdoch’s “techniques” aimed at transforming how practitioners perceive reality. With Murdoch’s guidance, the article contends that orthopathy is ineluctably bound to and not possible without orthoaesthesis. The article concludes with a constructive proposal to show how orthoaesthesis-orthopathy contributes to a Christian theological anthropology.

Over the past 30 years, scholarship has shifted from viewing the Haitian Revolution as largely an extension of the French Revolution to understanding it as a revolt from the perspective of Africa and Africans. Four related factors contribute to explanations of this change in perspective. First, historians trained in pre-colonial Africa began to study slavery in the Americas. The second factor is the emergence of Atlantic History as a field of study, the third is the Bicentennial commemorations of the start (1991) and the end (2004) of the Haitian Revolution, and the fourth is Michel-Rolph Trouillot's much celebrated, widely circulated, and extremely influential essay “Unthinkable History” (from Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; 1995), in which he critiqued the entire historiography of the Haitian Revolution and called for new perspectives. Taken collectively, the confluence of these four factors, all emerging prominently in the 1990s, contributed to the historiographical shift in Haitian scholarship that David Geggus labels “Kongomania.”

The two main points of Geggus's contribution to this issue of The Americas is to challenge this recent understanding of the Haitian Revolution as essentially an African revolt in the Caribbean led by Kongos, and to give scholars reason to focus more attention on the active role of Creoles. Collectively, the responses by John Thornton, James H. Sweet, and Christina Mobley to Geggus's article emphasize that the point of their scholarship was to offer a Kongo perspective on the Haitian Revolution from their training and expertise in African history, not produce a new orthodoxy.