This study analyzes the little known Manchukuo Young Girl Envoys – Manchukuo's first government-appointed diplomats – and their official visit to Japan between June 22 and July 12, 1932. Existing studies on the Envoys tend to interpret them from an angle of contemporary Japanese people's national sentiment and deem their visit to Japan a show that the Japanese authorities in Manchukuo and Japan orchestrated together, to render Japan a strong world power. This study problematizes that view and considers the Envoys more of a product of intense power struggles inside Manchukuo's highest Japanese ruling strata, suggesting that Manchukuo's decision-making circle in 1932 was far from being a unified entity. Examining the Envoys' interactions in Japan and comparing relevant Japanese- and Chinese-language news coverage on them, this study argues for the possibility of tracing the intertwined national ideals of Manchukuo's Chinese and Japanese government leaders based on the inspiring example of the Envoys.

This article concerns the development of archaeology and museology, in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Greece, through the life and career of Théodore Macridy. Macridy participated in knowledge transfer in more than one discipline and more than one country. Through his links with Western academic circles in archaeology and museology, he made a significant contribution to their development in the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and Greece. Living between the Ottoman and Greek epistemic communities as an Ottoman citizen of Greek origin, he excavated numerous sites of the Ottoman Empire, worked at the Ottoman Imperial Museum, and contributed to the foundation of the Benaki Museum in Athens at the end of his career. This makes him a good example of an Ottoman Greek scholar whose liminal identity led to his relative neglect in both Greek and Turkish archaeology and museology.

Although diverging influences have always characterized the relation between religion and democracy, in Italy, tensions arising from these divergences are especially exacerbated by the country’s current religious diversity and plurality, and they are magnified when combined with chronic emergencies such as immigration and international terrorism. These critical factors complicate the application of freedom of religion and the supreme principle of secularism (principio supremo di laicità), which are essential parts of the Italian legal system. This article analyzes these aspects of the law by considering the relation between Islamic communities and the state. In particular, the article focuses on both endogenous influences (Italy’s traditional system of state-church relationship) and exogenous influences (immigration and international terrorism). These factors muddle the interpretation of constitutional rights, including the right of Muslims and Islamic groups to be equal and equally free before the law.

Over recent decades, several global tech giants have gained enormous power while at the same time generating various disputes with their end-users, local governments, and regulators. We propose that the Jewish concept of covenant can help the above parties, legal scholars, and wider society in addressing this complex legal reality. We present the challenge of disequilibrium between the above four parties against the main points of conflict: the requirement of customer consent; clear contractual provisions upon entry; options for reasonable customer exit; limitations on the platform’s ability to exercise unilateral termination; profile-based discrimination; and liability for mere intermediation. We introduce the biblical concept of covenant, and we review its unfolding in Jewish tradition. Further, we conceptualize three main covenantal principles: (1) responsibility—God and humans are both conceived as moral agents; (2) reciprocity—God as a caring law giver, open to human appeals; and (3) reasonability—divine instruction as initially intelligible. We demonstrate how the latter principle of explainability is exercised in the biblical law narratives and how the story of Balaam stresses the significance of moral agency that cannot hide behind “mere intermediary” claims. In light of this analysis, we revisit the relationship between tech giants and tech users to demonstrate how covenantality offers novel ways to conceptualize the noted conflicts between the parties.

In 1995, the German legislature introduced the rule that a woman who terminates her pregnancy in the first trimester, which is illegal, would not be punished if she had previously undergone a legally prescribed counseling session. The counseling session, while oriented toward the protection of unborn life, is also open-ended, respectful of the decision-making right and duty of the pregnant woman. At the request of the pope, the German bishops instructed the existing counseling centers of the Catholic welfare organizations not to issue any written certificates of such counseling, as such certificates could ultimately be used to evade punishment. In order to continue to be able to offer counseling, Catholics, among them Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, founded the association Donum Vitae (Gift of Life), which continues to issue certificates when requested. For the German bishops, the association, founded by Catholics for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is external to the church. But what precisely is Donum Vitae? What does it stand for? Why are assessments of the association divided until this day? The essay examines these questions theologically and legally.

This article analyzes Old English vocabulary of time to shed light on the historical, sociocultural dimensions of space–time metaphorical mappings in English. First, we offer an overview of the most significant theoretical and experimental findings on the metaphorical conceptualization of time in Modern English. Then we analyze the sense of time in Old English and describe how native cultural conventions and cross-cultural contact might have contributed to shaping the perception of time in the Old English period. Finally, through corpus and dictionary searches, we explore how space and time were intertwined to convey time notions in the earliest attestations of English. Results show a persistent metaphorical link between space and time in Old English vocabulary and provide evidence for a circular and linear conceptualization of time that flexibly recruited the vertical and sagittal (front–back) axes, and that allowed for time-based and ego-based metaphorical construals, including the time-moving and ego-moving subcases. These data suggest that a baseline conceptualization of time grounded in spatial relations and sensitive to sociocultural factors has existed through time surviving to the present day.

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde (1930–2019) was one of Germany’s foremost postwar legal scholars. He coined or popularized key terms and ideas that have left their mark on postwar German political debate to an extent matched by only few, from the chain of legitimation to the concept of the constitution as an ordering frame, the importance of the idea of subsidiarity in the European Union’s political competency, and his insistence that society must continuously work toward agreement on the things that cannot be voted on: the ultimate agreements in society that lie beyond the ballot box. Böckenförde was a lifelong commentator on Catholic affairs in Germany and involved in several important inner-Catholic reform initiatives. At the age of thirty-one, he became known to a wider German public with an article that presented a critical historical appraisal of the role of the Catholic Church under National Socialism. While still a postdoc, he co-authored a widely publicized critique of Jesuit Gustav Gundlach’s justification on theological grounds of a war of nuclear deterrence. In 1968, he was the first to publish a German edition of De Libertate Religiosa, the final declaration of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), and provided an authoritative commentary.

Three case studies depict different attitudes of anthropologists toward the politics of nationalism promoted by the prewar Polish state. Ethnographer Stanisław Dworakowski, involved in a governmental Committee for the Issues of Petty Nobility in Eastern Poland, elaborated a study on this social stratum. Although based on reliable field research, it can hardly be considered scientific work, as it has many features of political propaganda. Quite opposite is the case of folklorist Joachim Chajes, secretary of the Ethnographical Commission of YIVO. Contemporary Soviet folklore was one of the fields of his research, which Polish anticommunist and antisemitic authorities found suspicious. Accused of communist activity, he was imprisoned. Social anthropologist Józef Obrębski can be situated between those two extremes. His field research among East Slavic peasants in Eastern Poland, concerning their developing national identity, although conducted within a national scientific program and financed by the state, is an example of intellectual independence. By revealing the negative attitude of the peasants toward Polish authorities, Obrębski achieved an outcome, which did not fulfill the official political expectations. These three trajectories show competitive coexistence of the meta-field of power and the scientific field, focused on their respective stakes: power and recognition.

Belarus is one of the least religious societies of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, two Christian denominations – the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church – do have a specific impact on social discourse, be it through facilitating the discourse on conservative moral values or linking their political and societal strategies to their Russian or Polish mother churches. However, neither of the churches has actively participated in civil protests criticizing the political regime. The protests before and after the Belarusian presidential election in August 2020 affected the churches and seriously challenged their self-perception. This article shows how the churches turned out to be heterogeneous structures with different levels of theological awareness in political crisis, civil self-consciousness, and the ability to mobilize. These findings and the fact that religion became a visible element of the 2020 protests significantly questions the concept of the church as a homogeneous and state loyal institution. Combining both empirical and theological approaches makes it possible to reassess the role of religion in post-Soviet social and political processes.

Atheistic modal realism asserts roughly that there are many concrete possible worlds and that the actual world is entirely godless. Here I will refine this position using the modal realism of David Lewis. For Lewis, all gods (including the Christian God) are contingent superhuman persons, who inhabit non-actual worlds. Although gods are concrete world-bound particulars, atheistic modal realism has room for impersonal absolutes and ultimates (which are not gods). Since no gods are actual, atheism is true. Yet there are infinitely many non-actual gods. Non-actual gods and worlds provide resources for analysing religious beliefs and practices. Lewisian theology provides a powerful new way for atheists to understand religion.

This study examines the relationship between personal experience with intimate partner violence (IPV) and political attitudes. I argue that by adopting salient legislation on violence against women, the state enables survivors to evaluate government performance on the basis of their ability to access resources for victims. As such, when survivors are unable to reach specialized public services, they might downgrade their evaluations of government performance. Focusing on Brazil and using survey data and qualitative interviews, this study finds that IPV survivors who have not used specialized services hold more negative views of government performance compared to nonvictims. Further analysis, including a series of placebo tests, lends additional support to the main results. This study has an intersectional component, as it also examines the relationship between race and access to services. These findings have implications for victims’ democratic rights and access to justice.