The story of Mary and Martha is a “text of terror” for women and the mentally disabled, elevating Martha as emblematic of the spiritual failure of the anxious woman. While scholarship has focused upon the precise nature of Martha’s work, this article argues that whether Martha was in the kitchen or doing ministry, she was doing servile labor and incurring the “slavish” worry associated with such work. Attention to the socio-economic context of Martha’s worry recenters the labor dispute that is at the heart of this short passage. Rather than naturalizing ancient norms about worry or continuing to use the disabled body as something to “think with,” this article contextualizes Martha’s “worry and distraction,” demonstrating the ties between the female body, worry, anxiety, and enslaved labor in antiquity. Martha’s worry is a disability that is manufactured by unjust labor structures that purposefully assign worry to some bodies and not others.

The proviso to Canon 113 of 1603 was not a substantive enactment of the seal of confession, but rather was intended to ensure that the canon did not conflict with a continuing canonical duty not to disclose sins revealed in confession. The 1947 Canon Law report proposed two draft canons, one regulating which priests could hear confessions, and one enacting the seal substantively. In response to criticism of these drafts, Archbishop Fisher proposed what became paragraphs 1–3 of Canon B 29. Attempts to restrict hearing of confessions to certain categories of priests were eventually abandoned in favour of what became paragraph 4. The draft canon embodying the seal was replaced by a draft Clause based on the proviso, but Government lawyers indicated that it would not receive royal assent. Instead, the proviso was left in place. An act of Convocation based on it was also passed to signal the Church’s continued espousal of the seal as a doctrinal principle. The Convocations eventually agreed to delete the proposed new Clause, while a canon explicitly retaining the proviso when the rest of the 1603 code was repealed received royal assent. That no priest would in practice break the seal, even if instructed to do so by a judge, was almost universally accepted.

Why would an omnipotent and benevolent God create a world with so much evil? Some theologians suggest that God permits evil for the sake of moral goodness. Because an act cannot be good unless it is freely performed, God could not create a world with moral goodness without giving us the freedom to perform both good and evil acts. But is this a wise trade-off for God to make? Or is evil too steep a price to pay for moral significance?

Social power establishes and legitimizes actions for individuals within a society who accept the structures that create that power. Differences in power can develop without strict hierarchies, however. Here, we explore the power differences among groups living in the Mimbres Mogollon region of southwestern New Mexico using bioarchaeological data and a case study from the Harris site, a Late Pithouse period village occupied circa AD 550–1000. Aspects of mortuary practices and supporting archaeological data offer nuanced interpretations of individuals with situational power linked to social practices that both solidified and maintained power by particular households. The power differences documented here are not based on coercion; instead, they are tied to cooperation and engagement with the community. For small-scale communities such as Harris, situational power is interpreted for individuals with access to prime agricultural land and/or ritual, or by association with certain land-holding lineages. This system is consistent with a heterarchical structure that embraced flexibility in the use of power.

The duty to render assistance to persons in distress is well established in the international law of the sea, but none of the instruments which codify the duty contains human rights obligations. However, serious human rights violations may occur during search and rescue (SAR) operations or because of the lack thereof. This article examines the duty of States to render assistance to persons in distress through the lens of international human rights law and advocates for a human rights-oriented approach to SAR. It discusses the due diligence nature of the duty, the scope of jurisdiction in maritime SAR and how States should act to adhere to their human rights obligations from the moment they receive a distress call through to the moment they disembark rescued persons on land.

The semantic web promises interlinks of cultural heritage objects, both original and digital, of which the Smithsonian Institution (SI) holds plenty in artifacts, books, audio/video, etc. At the core, structured data in RDF is likely the one member of data infrastructure that carries the major lifting for interlinking. Parsing millions of bibliographic data mainly locked in MARC21 into the BIBFRAME/RDF syntax is not an insignificant endeavour for the library community. The Smithsonian Libraries & Archives, a network of specialized libraries (including art and design), is not an exception. It became part of the Share Family to utilize its technology so as to increase user resource discovery and the library staff’s ability to resource curations. Working collaboratively with scores of research, academic and national libraries, and the Share Family team, the Smithsonian Libraries & Archives experimented with BIBFRAME, a Library of Congress RDF-based ontology, which has benefited greatly from the Share-VDE semantic technology and its system design. From such efforts, the Smithsonian Libraries & Archives looks to move away from the web of documents into a web of data. Fulfilling SI’s strategic vision of availing collections through digital solutions for the increase and diffusion of human knowledge.

It has been over 40 years since the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) was concluded and opened for signature, and 30 years since its entry into force. This has sparked renewed attention to the question of how the LOSC can continue to regulate new uses of, and threats to, our oceans. Some have sought to answer this question by framing the LOSC as a ‘constitution’ for the oceans, as a reassertion of its continued influence. This article shows that this provides a false sense of security. While the LOSC is one of the most impressive and significant treaties, it should not be regarded as a constitution. This article examines how the LOSC can remain an effective and enduring framework for the law of the sea, arguing that regarding it as a constitution does not necessarily contribute to that goal. Instead, it proposes a new approach to the treatment of the LOSC which attempts to explain how best it can serve as a ‘living treaty’ and as a framework that is truly capable of guiding legal responses to new opportunities and challenges at sea.

The following is a list of learning and research resources on topics that are central to this themed section, namely the male-breadwinner and adult worker models, and their alternatives; intersectionality; the views of employers and workplace culture; the role and influence of informal care; and the tendency toward dualisation.