...which require a whole host of presumptions about justice and how best to achieve it.” While the rule of law is assumed to govern from a neutral public space that...
Best/feed//Users/Olivia/Downloads/with Malay/Javanese interlinear translations
Aggressive prayers, curses, and maledictions
Malediction, exorcism, and evil
by Thomas J. CsordasIt is best to begin by considering the word malediction in the simple sense of speaking evil or evil-saying. The idea of evil—male—is conceptually, existentially, morally, and cosmologically complex, so...
Notes from the field
After atheism (Part II)
by Joseph Blankholm...is for the best. We might consider such a process the intellectual equivalent of the slow food movement—though to be clear, I’m implying an analogy, not a genealogy. In this...
American Grace
A historian’s reaction to American Grace
by Jon Butler...access to more than five billion birth records—a gold mine for historians (it’s by far the best route to fully digitized U.S. census returns up to 1930), genealogists of all...
here & there
Remembering Martin Riesebrodt
by Loren D. Lybarger and Kelly H. Chong...Historian of religions Bruce Lincoln described Pious Passion as “the best study of fundamentalism that’s ever been produced.” Riesebrodt would later expand his explorations of “the return of religion” in...
Is this all there is
What it isn’t: Or, historical periodization by erasure
by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
...cultural, or philosophical constellations, then I think we can best capture the present with a phrase often attributed to William Gibson—“The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”...
here & there
Eschatology and foreign policy
by Charles GelmanDespite my conviction that it is best, in general, to avoid posting Palin-related news items, I want to highlight this post by Matt Yglesias. Following Palin’s comments to the effect...
here & there
Urban planning in Saudi Arabia
by Jessica Polebaum...The idea is to create islands from which change would seep out, drop by drop, without antagonizing powerful conservative forces within the country. If the plan works, at best it...
Minding the Modern
Stacking the deck: Thomas Pfau’s strange history of the West
by Victoria Kahn...Leviathan, Hobbes makes it clear that individuals disagree about the appropriate ends of action, and in chapter 13 he makes it clear that the best metaphor for this disagreement is...
Crossing and conversion 
by
Peter van der Veer
Crossing and conversion: Conclusion
by
Peter van der Veer
...enabled to gain residency in a country of immigration. Conversion is best regarded as one among a wide set of issues producing legal probing into people’s true motivations, their agency,...