The physician and chemist Heinrich Mückter (1914–87) is widely known for his role in developing thalidomide at Grünenthal, whose market launch led to one of the most serious pharmaceutical scandals in history. Less scholarly attention has been paid, however, to his involvement in Nazi Germany’s typhus control and vaccine research and production between 1942 and 1945. Drawing on a variety of historical sources, this article reconstructs his work at a delousing facility in the Białystok District and at the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the German Army High Command in Krakow under hygienist Hermann Eyer (1906–97). We show that Mückter participated in a racially framed typhus control programme and in ethically dubious vaccine production methods. He also conducted unethical and methodologically questionable vaccine experiments on human beings in Krakow, including underage test subjects and exploiting the structural vulnerability of the occupied Polish population. In addition, we reassess assumptions about cooperation between Eyer’s Wehrmacht institute and the research station at Buchenwald concentration camp under SS physician Erwin Ding-Schuler (1912–45). Taken together, we argue that Mückter operated within a broader network of civilian and military scientists, health officials, and representatives of the pharmaceutical industry who accelerated the erosion of ethical boundaries in biomedical research and contributed to an exterminatory health and population policy in the occupied East. These practices, termed the ‘Nazi typhus complex’, reveal how preventive medicine, biomedical research, and exterminatory policies were intertwined in the context of an anti-Slavic war of annihilation and the Holocaust.

Douglas Laycock’s theory of substantive neutrality has had much to say about contemporary debates in U.S. law and religion, particularly for courts and scholars grappling with the problem of religious exemptions from general laws. It is fair to say that the U.S. Supreme Court has in many respects adopted Laycock’s approach in free exercise cases. But Laycock’s work on the Establishment Clause side has unfortunately been less influential on the Supreme Court. In the context of Establishment Clause challenges to government-sponsored religious expression, Laycock has argued that the government endorsement of religion through official sponsorship of religious speech violates substantive neutrality because government endorsement of religion encourages religious belief without leaving room for private individual choice. But the court has moved away from any consideration of endorsement or substantive neutrality in cases considering challenges to official religious expression, focusing instead on vaguely-described historical practices and understandings. In this article, the author explains the correctness and insightfulness of Laycock’s theory, which elucidates and justifies the Supreme Court’s now-abandoned endorsement doctrine and explains why the Supreme Court’s current approach to the issue of official religious speech is much more problematic than the substantive neutrality approach.

While Rawls’s theory has often been used to critique inherited wealth inequalities, this paper explores an underexamined possibility: a Rawlsian justification of inheritance. I argue that the right to bequeath can be justified when regulated by the Difference Principle. According to this principle, bequests can be permissible if they function as an incentive that maximally benefits the least advantaged. To meet this condition, I propose a specific inheritance tax design – sensitive to the disincentive effects of receiving large inheritances and the incentive scope of bequeathing – with progressive rates based both on the amount received and the number of transfers.

This article examines the rise of ecclesial units in US prisons, wherein inmates are trained and certified for Christian evangelism as state-assigned inmate field ministers. Unlike general religious education programs in public prisons, these newer units, referred to within prison communities as God pods, function as ecclesial training centers for Christian ministry undertaken by matriculated state prisoners. The author contrasts the work of inmate field ministers with that of public chaplains governed by mandates of religious neutrality. Drawing from on-site and archival research, the author contends that these new programs instantiate Christian doctrine as government speech while imposing religious tests for public benefits upon state prisoners. The author profiles recent case law advancing a history-and-tradition standard for Establishment Clause cases, while noting the long-standing expectation of religious neutrality by public institutions. The author highlights recent scholarly accounts of US prisons as imbued with Christian theology amid a broader defunding of secular rehabilitation. While religious entrepreneurs have long delivered Christian programming in public prisons, new ecclesiastical units institutionalize Christian doctrine as state rehabilitation, raising urgent questions about religious liberty in the carceral sphere and the future of faith-based programming.

This article revisits the Finnish contribution to the First International Polar Year (IPY) (1882–1883) by examining a largely overlooked primary source: “On the Finnish Research Expedition to Sodankylä and Kultala in 1882–1884, with Sketches from Lapland” (Helsinki, 1885). Contrary to claims in recent scholarship that no detailed accounts of daily life at the Finnish polar station have survived, this volume offers rich descriptions of the expedition’s routines, challenges, and social interactions. Drawing on these narratives, the article reconstructs the everyday realities of scientific work in Sodankylä, including the arduous journey north, the setting up of observation facilities, the strict schedule of meteorological and magnetic observations, and the experimental studies on auroral phenomena led by Professor Selim Lemström. The analysis highlights why these accounts were forgotten – due to linguistic barriers and limited popular dissemination – and argues for their significance in understanding both the material culture of polar science and Finland’s role in the First IPY. By bringing this evidence into the historiography of Arctic research, the article challenges prevailing assumptions and calls for renewed attention to local perspectives in global scientific enterprises.

Indigenous identity politics in South America increasingly mobilize language as a resource for political visibility, cultural continuity, and resistance to homogenizing state agendas. While many Indigenous movements pursue linguistic standardization, the Murui-Muina people of the Colombian Amazon advance an inverse project: they emphasize internal differentiation, maintaining four ethnolinguistic groups (Murui, Mɨka, Mɨnɨka, Nɨpode). Drawing on long-term ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork, this article examines how Murui-Muina speakers construct and sustain these distinctions through ideologically charged lexical contrasts (‘flag words’) that function as shibboleths of subgroup identity. Situated within histories of violence, Indigenous language politics, and Northwest Amazonian multilingual ecologies, the analysis shows how minimal linguistic differences become imbued with cosmological significance, social meaning, and political value. The Murui-Muina case challenges structuralist definitions of ‘language’, demonstrating that what ultimately counts as a language depends on local approaches to language itself, offering a broader insight into how linguistic diversity is lived, valued, and reproduced. (Indigenous identity, linguistic diversity, language standardization, Murui-Muina, Northwest Amazonia, Colombia)

In a recent article, Michael Rea has argued that hope for universalism to be true is incompatible with a lack of belief in its truth, so that hopeful universalists should become believing universalists. His reasoning, in short, is that hope for universalism involves belief that universalism is good, and such belief conflicts with a recognition of what might be God’s perfect will – that universalism is false. In response, I defend hopeful universalism by arguing that at least in some cases, we should align our hopes (or what Eleonore Stump terms our ‘desires of the heart’) with what we take to be not God’s consequent will, but only God’s antecedent will – and it may be only God’s antecedent will, and not God’s consequent will, that universalism be true.