This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop (...) more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories. (shrink)

Recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has prompted renewed concerns about women’s rights in Muslim societies. It has also raised questions about women’s agency and activism in religious contexts. This article draws on ethnographic research with women activists in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, to address such concerns. My fieldwork shows that some Muslim women activists in democratizing Indonesia manifest pious critical agency. Pious critical agency is the capacity to engage critically and publicly (...) with religious texts. While some scholars have argued that pious and feminist subjectivity are inherently at odds, the emergence of pious critical agency in Indonesia demonstrates that piety and feminism can intersect in surprising and unexpected ways. Moreover, it shows that women’s agency can draw on both secular and religious resources and that religion can be used to promote critical discourses on gender. (shrink)

In _The Long Emancipation_ Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet (...) to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With _The Long Emancipation_, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people. (shrink)

Rosenzweig's "new thinking" can be seen, among other things, as the vanishing point of two gazes: one addressed to the "old philosophy" of the past, the other to the postmodernity of the present. The goal of the present essay is therefore twofold: on the one hand, to go back retrospectively to the relationship between critical idealism and the theoretical proposal represented by "Der Stern der Erlösung"; on the other hand, to evaluate, in a perspectival way, what the latter has to (...) say in relation to the philosophy of difference. It is thus possible to investigate the meaning of philosophizing in general and to assess the relevance of Rosenzweig's thought in particular. New thinking is all the more fruitful because it exists in a close dialectic relationship with modern rationality, grasping its "up-to-here-and-no-further" boundary; at the same time, it presents analogies with the postmodern philosophy of difference, without, however, reaching the same antirational conclusions. As for the meaning of philosophizing, Rosenzweig famously thought that the religious experience of revelation could offer a space-time orientation, which is why it was the keystone of his new thinking. However, if one wants to prescind from the "belief" element and find a meaning and orientation in the alogical and purposeless context of postmodernity, one has to yearn for a form that is present in absence: this tension finds its foundation in the up-to-here-and-no-further of critical idealism and is continually reconfigured in relation to difference, both thought-of and experienced. (shrink)

We propose a discrete time branching process to model the appearance of drug resistance under treatment. Under our assumptions at every discrete time a pathogen may die with probability 1−p or divide in two with probability p. Each newborn pathogen is drug resistant with probability μ. We start with N drug sensitive pathogens and with no drug resistant pathogens. We declare the treatment successful if all pathogens are eradicated before drug resistance appears. The model predicts that success is possible only (...) if p<1/2. Even in this case the probability of success decreases exponentially with the parameter m=μN. In particular, even with a very potent drug (i.e. p very small) drug resistance is likely if m is large. (shrink)

Bibliography of the writings of Andrea Poma.

The issue of organ donation and of how the donor pool can or should be increased is one with significant practical, ethical and logistic implications. Here we comment on an article advocating a paradigm change in the so-called.

This paper attempts to articular a notion of a Black ontological order or form experienced through a set of conditions that seek to produce a coherent incoherent blackness. I argue that Black being is one that is only known through an external essential imposition of a Euro-American narrative of what I call global niggerdom in which all Black people are made the same through post-Enlightenment modernist antiblack logics. The conditions, identifications, and practices that constitute global niggerdom, however, only hold insofar (...) as Black people are specified from without. The paper turns to the debates on reparations and their ethnicization to make the case that the Euro-American logics that produce global niggerdom also collapse when Black people turn to nation as the force through which to make sense of themselves. (shrink)

Il contributo intende rilevare le tracce della presenza di Feuerbach negli scritti di Franz Rosenzweig, al fine di rilevare un percorso interpretativo appena intrapreso dall'autore della "Stella della redenzione", ma che pure è stato per lui significativo ai fini della formulazione del "nuovo pensiero".

This analysis of Cohen's reception of Spinoza's thought draws attention to theoretical issues: the nature of thinking and the thinking of nature. In a synoptic way it refers to several of Cohen's works, trying to determine continuity and discontinuity in his interpretation of Spinoza, with a specific focus on "Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata". Thus, Cohen's reception of Spinoza's thought seems to be characterized by a continuity similar to what we can find in Cohen's philosophical system as a whole. Discrepancies in (...) his interpretation of Spinoza correspond to a progressive refinement of his own speculative approach. (shrink)

Il concetto di nulla viene assunto come chiave ermeneutica per accostare la proposta teoretica di uno dei maggiori rappresentanti del pensiero ebraico contemporaneo: Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). Attraverso l'analisi dei luoghi, delle accezioni e delle valenze con cui il nulla si presenta nelle pagine della "Stella della redenzione", si evidenzia come ai diversi significati attribuiti da Rosenzweig a questo concetto corrispondano differenti modi di intendere la filosofia. I temi della filosofia del nulla, della creatio ex nihilo e della morte intesa come (...) nulla esistenziale scandiscono la lettura dell'opus maius di Rosenzweig e mostrano come egli, nel teorizzare un "nuovo pensiero" che vuole rendere conto dell'esperienza religiosa attraverso categorie alternative a quelle onnicomprensive della tradizione filosofica, rimanga per certi versi ancora legato all'idealismo critico. (shrink)