Using Moses Maimonides’ theodicy to respond to contemporary formulations of the problem of evil initially seems unpromising. Maimonides is committed to claims that make the task harder rather than easier. Chief among them is his belief that all suffering is deserved by the sufferer. But Maimonides is often misinterpreted: he does not hold that innocent people are never subject to bodily harm, but that it is possible to achieve a kind of ‘psychic immunity’ from suffering via intellectual enlightenment, and that failure to do so is blameworthy. I argue that while the Maimonidean psychic immunity theodicy has some attractive features, it struggles to explain ‘inculpably incomprehensible’ suffering: that of infants and people with serious cognitive disabilities. I propose two responses: defending Maimonides’ intellectual elitism using work on moral status from Singer and McMahan; and defending a more limited version of the theodicy grounded on ‘sceptical’ readings of Maimonides that emphasize the limitations of human knowledge. I conclude that the second is more promising, and that the limits of Maimonides’ theodicy point to more general limits on theodicies that insist on what I call ‘first-personal adequacy’ – the requirement that a theodicy provide a satisfying explanation of suffering to sufferers themselves.

Formalized in the 1970s through the Middlesbrough–Oberhausen Town Twinning partnership (Partnerschaft Oberhausen–Middlesbrough), the connection between the two post-industrial towns dates back further to informal connections in the early 1950s and an age of reconciliation between the two nations. This article explores the origins, mechanisms, benefits and challenges of town twinning by drawing upon a rich body of empirical evidence from local authority records, press coverage, interviews and community reminiscence. The study provides the first academic analysis of the changes, challenges, continuities and continued relevance of town twinning in one of Britain’s leading pro-Brexit areas.

In his article ‘Divine Hiddenness and the Demographics of Theism’ Stephen Maitzen (2006) develops a permutation of the argument from divine hiddenness which focuses on the uneven distribution of theistic belief around the globe. Max Baker-Hytch (2016) responds to this argument by providing a theodicy which appeals to the fact that humans are epistemically interdependent. In this article I argue that Baker-Hytch's response is at best incomplete and at worst relies on a faulty modal judgement. After exploring some ways Baker-Hytch might salvage his theodicy and maintaining their failure, I conclude with the success of Maitzen's argument.

It has long been recognized that, in order to understand economies in the past, we need better information about women's work and tertiary sector work. It is also well known that, while valuable in many ways, nineteenth-century censuses give incomplete information about women's contributions to the economy. Consequently, censuses are a poor basis for estimating the occupational structure. This article offers a solution to these problems by triangulating census data with qualitative information extracted from court records. The result is a more reasonable estimate of the first-level occupational structure in a Swedish local society (Västerås and its surroundings) around 1880. This estimate suggests that just before the onset of industrialization, around eighty per cent of the adult population, women and men, were active in primary and tertiary sector work. Compared to the census, the analysis sets women's share in the primary and the tertiary sectors at higher levels. The article has a strong methodological focus and describes in detail how the court records were analysed and adjusted to be comparable with the census.

This essay takes up the project of engendering capitalism by turning to the household. It situates a gendered analysis of capitalism within recent histories of capitalism, feminist analyses of social reproduction, histories of family and industrialism, histories of sexuality, and histories of women's labor. It argues that to analyze capitalism from a household perspective clarifies three core elements of capitalist political economy. First, capitalism depended on reproductive and productive labor inside the household, from early industrialization through its most recent incarnations. Second, reproductive labor, historically anchored in the household, has served as a crucial site for development of capitalist labor relations. Third, that intensified commodification of reproductive labor has driven capitalist accumulation as well as capitalist social relations, whether that labor occurs within the household or is located beyond it.

This article argues that through historiography, global musical modernisms decolonize Western musical modernism, expanding and bursting the latter's spatial (geographic), vertical (high–low genres), and temporal boundaries. The unsettling of these various boundaries shows how coloniality is the context of, and thoroughly imbricated with, global musical modernisms – and yet the latter has channelled the self-conscious resistance of global music-makers against the colonial condition that characterizes modernity. Examining global musical modernisms both in the real world and in the inter-disciplines, this article addresses material complexities that are elided in purist dichotomous conceptions of resistance and oppression as inhering in different musics and cultures.

This paper examines the crowded landscape of conferences and organizations within which the International Foundation for Science (IFS) was shaped in the early 1970s. The IFS aimed to support scientists from developing countries, circumventing the bureaucracy of established international organizations such as UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The new foundation was a potential rival to such institutions, which ironically provided the conditions essential to its emergence. Their conferences, board meetings and assemblies, where scientists and policy makers convened, provided key infrastructure for the development of the IFS. This infrastructure appears simultaneously both as an almost invisible feature of international science policy, and as a political problem. The solution to this problem was Stockholm: a geographical place that was also placeless, occupying both national and international status, desirable in its political, scientific and geographical neutrality. In an organizational context, academies and scientific societies who found their role circumscribed by existing international institutions used the IFS to argue for their particular role and expertise in funding and promoting scientific development. Geographically and politically, neutral Sweden provided a setting which was located between East and West, and which added to the country's own reputation for championing the causes of developing nations.