Introduction

This chapter advances an innovative framework of political theology in general and its intersection with the German Idealist concepts and archives in particular, arguing for the indispensability of the latter for understanding the Christian-modern condition. The general thrust of this framework is to put into question the legitimacy of the Christian-modern world and its authorities, whether secular or religious. As such, it may be said to reactivate a Gnostic perspective within the political-theological debate, one that refuses the world and its modalities of justification and transcendence. At stake is not only the decoupling of immanence from its equation with the secular world and ungrounding modern forms of sovereignty, but also the subversion of modernity’s (no less than Christianity’s) self-legitimating conceptual narratives. Based on this framework, this essay 1) reconfigures German Idealism as the first speculative attempt to think the (genealogical and conceptual) entanglement of modernity and Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; 2) reconsiders German Idealist conceptions of nothingness, the world, and the absolute as caught between the delegitimating and the theodical tendencies, with special emphasis on the problematics of nihilism and history; and 3) provides an overview of the volume’s contents and interventions.

Response to my critics

Anna Beckers and Ioannis Kampourakis have formulated sophisticated critiques of ‘The Great Shell Game’, and I have learned a great deal from this exchange. Some of their criticism can be answered by clarifying the terms of the debate, which I do briefly below. I wish, however, to maintain the general thrust of my argument, and even to double down. With my title, I make an analogy between CSR and the confidence trick played by street operators who move pennies quickly between plastic cups and ask the assembled crowd to bet on where they end up. This game depends on skill but also on fraud, the operator working with a shill to mislead the audience. I suggest that as academics we must make sure that our sophistication does not place us in the role of the shill—preventing the public from noticing that corporations pocket the pennies.

Commentary: Responsibility-Sensitive Healthcare Funding: Three Responses to Clavien and Hurst’s Critique

Christine Clavien and Samia Hurst1 (henceforth C-H) make at least three valuable contributions to the literature on responsibility and healthcare. They offer an admirably clear and workable set of criteria for determining a patient's degree of responsibility for her health condition; they deploy those criteria to cast doubt on the view that patients with lifestyle-related conditions are typically significantly responsible for their conditions; and they outline several practical difficulties that would be raised by any attempt to introduce responsibility-sensitive healthcare funding. I am sympathetic to the general thrust of their argument, share—at least tentatively—their policy conclusions, and was persuaded by much of the detail of their argument. However, I do have three critical comments.

Lessons from history

Approximately 6 months ago, as COVID-19 became the focus of our day-to-day life, it was constantly referred to as unprecedented. In fact, this word has been used to describe almost everything that has subsequently occurred. Unprecedented of course means ‘without previous instance, never before known or experienced’. At the same time the general thrust of many headlines in the media was to cast SARS-CoV-2 as a killer virus wreaking havoc on an undeserving and unsuspecting population.

Thin or Thick Inclusiveness? The Constitutional Duty to Consult and Accommodate First Nations in Canada

What has the addition of aboriginal rights to the Canadian constitution in 1982 meant for the place of First Nations’ interests in the Canadian constitutional order? This article considers this question in the context of natural resource exploitation – specifically, the exploitation of the oil or tar sands in Alberta. It details some of the leading jurisprudence surrounding Section 35 of the Constitution Act 1982, the section of the Constitution recognizing existing aboriginal and treaty rights. Arguably, Section 35 represented an important effort to improve the status of aboriginal peoples in Canada, to enhance the extent to which Canada included and respected the values and interests of First Nations. The article specifically considers how the judicial interpretation of the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate aboriginal peoples is related to the theme of inclusivity. It argues that the general thrust of judicial interpretation has promoted a thin, or procedural, version of inclusiveness rather than a substantive, or thicker, one. Such a thicker version of inclusiveness would be one in which the pace of oil sands exploitation is moderated or halted in order to allow First Nations to engage in traditional activities connected intimately with aboriginal and treaty rights.

Credit Constraints and Investment in Mexico, an Empirical Test

Despite the vast overhaul the Mexican economy has gone through since the 1980s, the promised high and sustained economic growth has not materialized. Scholars and policy makers are unanimous in pointing to credit constraints as one of the key reasons for the disappointing growth performance. The link between financial restrictions and investment decisions, however, has not been solidly verified in the Mexican literature. This paper intends to start filling this lacuna. Using recent microeconomic, firm-level data which is reasonably nationally representative, it tests the hypothesis that credit constraints have reduced investment among Mexican firms. Consistent with the general thrust of the literature, it is found that indeed financial restrictions have reduced the investment carried out by Mexican firms. The result holds under different econometric estimations.

Scoping Reviews: What is in a Name?

The editorial dwells upon scoping or otherwise called mapping reviews that have recently come to the fore. Starting to appear from the early 2000s, scoping reviews initially came out in medicine and biosciences. The present-day unprecedented boost in the scoping review quantity is spurred by a general thrust for structured analysis and synthesis of scientific information across fields and disciplines. The authors aim to overview the methodology of scoping reviews with regard to their prospects for social sciences and humanities.

Statement by the Managing Director on the Independent Evaluation Office Report on the IMF Advice on Unconventional Monetary Policies

I welcome the report of the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on the IMF Advice on Unconventional Monetary Policies (UMP). The report recognizes that the Fund’s engagement on UMP since the Global Financial Crisis has been wide-ranging and, in many respects, impressive. The report offers valuable insights on how to further improve the timeliness and value added of the IMF’s advice on UMP. Accordingly, I broadly support the general thrust of IEO’s recommendations, which are helpful in informing Management’s consideration of how to push forward the Fund’s work in this area.

Cleavings

Using poems by Emily Dickinson and recent work in cultural and queer theory, this final chapter explores the fine line between “gain” and “loss” in disability studies. Using the author’s own experience of gradual hearing loss, the chapter argues that recent claims for the positive values of “deaf gain” through the use of American Sign Language have vaunted possibilities of cultural inclusiveness to the exclusion of affective realms of frustration, loss, and failure that are seldom acknowledged experiences of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. While endorsing the general thrust of Deaf Gain and its implications for the larger context of disability, the chapter argues for a more critical understanding of loss in the politics of gain.