Blander’s epilogue contextualizes Ezrahi’s current work within his previous research corpus as well as interweaving new concepts: depth skepticism, modest democracy, and the right to dream. Blander describes three spheres of democratic backsliding and the rise of populism: legal-institutional, social, and intellectual freedom. She suggests that Ezrahi introduces a deep explanation of these troubling trends. Blander introduces the concept of “Depth Skepticism,” which applies to philosophers, among them Ezrahi, who searched for deeper layers of the human experience in order to identify the causes of sociopolitical phenomena. The epilogue follows Ezrahi’s intellectual journey, identifying a connecting thread from his early work “The Descent of Icarus,” revealing the interaction between science, enlightenment, and democracy through “Imagined Democracies,” portraying the role of science in creating the epistemological foundations of modern democracy, to the current volume introducing the cosmological shift from Nature/Culture to a blurred “HumaNature” cosmology and how it affects democratic foundations. This shift calls for a “modest democracy” that accommodates reason, emotions, and ambivalence. It views democracy as a constructive utopia, allowing individuals and groups the “right to dream” within nonviolent pursuits. This democracy fosters compromise, balances power, and tolerates contradictions, embodying a constant state of becoming.

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

Does postcolonial studies present a theoretical framework appropriate to Romanization studies? Does Romanization studies have evidence appropriate for postcolonial theories? Even though postcolonial theories did not stem from ancient Roman imperialism per se, they provide a heuristical tool to destabilize the discourse that has sustained imperial systems through history. They help Roman historians and archaeologists to reach a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of imperial discourses and to deconstruct the imperial discourses built through the complex layers of histories. This chapter does not deliver an exhaustive analysis or a landscape overview of postcolonial studies according to a certain order of significance or thematic categorization as is the common practice in the discipline, for example, along the triad of Said-Bhabha-Spivak or along the axis of theoretical and materialist approaches. Instead, here I explore postcolonial ideas which have influenced and reoriented Romanization studies.

This chapter describes both the centrality of Morris’s work as a public lecturer and his feelings of ambivalence about speaking out in this way. It moves from Raymond Williams’s characterisation of the lectures as where Morris spoke as a ‘whole man’ to Thomas Carlyle’s mixed feelings about the form, poised as it was between conflicting ideas about preaching, about political life and about celebrity. It examines how Morris’s career as a lecturer was an aspect of his deepening engagement with public controversy from 1877, and was imagined as a duty that Morris was obliged to take up. It considers Morris’s resistance to rhetoric, which he connected to the deceiving modes of contemporary conventional politics. It argues that Morris’s own rhetoric was more compelling when he spoke at dramatic occasions, such as his Oxford lecture on ‘Art and Democracy’, rather than when he considered the lecture to be part of the grind of socialist agitation, where Morris sometimes worried about the capacities of his working-class audiences to understand his central message. The chapter ends by considering Morris’s speaking in Northumberland in 1887, as a temporary utopian moment when public speaking and the condition of the people were integrated and not separated.

The times in between significant medical events allow for different conversations with patients about living with uncertainty, the effects of their disease and its treatment, the fear of the next crisis, or figuring out who they are now and what they might hope for their future. Sometimes worry about becoming more ill or dying shows up in conversations in disguise, like being fixated on a particular test that a clinician might consider medically less important or even unnecessary. Sometimes completing cancer therapy brings a mix of emotion, relief that it is done and worry that it may not really be. Other times patients who have recovered from an exacerbation, like in heart failure, realize how much they have changed due to the disease and its treatment, and while glad they survived are simultaneously unhappy about how their life has changed. The roadmap for clinicians in these more calm but uncertain times is to ask your patient’s perspective, respond to their emotion (often exploring to create a deeper understanding), and offer your clinical experience of other patients which might apply to help clarify the issues at hand, provide different perspective, and offer support.

This chapter situates Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the sociopolitical contexts of the Romantic “age of exile.” It argues that the drama centers on what Shelley calls “sad exile,” a phrase that deliberately toggles between the archaic and traditional meanings of “sad” as both sorrowful and steadfast. In the play, sad exile registers as an ambivalent process that neither ends nor anticipates a return to a former state or place. Rather, it becomes fundamental to maintaining the renovated society’s mutually determined livelihood. As an ongoing re-visionary and recalibrating condition, this method of self-inquiry and critical distancing permits the drama’s key transformation from complicity to collaboration.

Detailed description of ComB treatment begins in this chapter. The importance of establishing a strong therapist/client relationship is emphasized as a basis for productive, targeted treatment for the BFRB, but also for its potential impact on common, secondary issues such as shame, interpersonal problems, and diminished self-confidence. Specific recommendations and examples are provided for maximizing effective communication with the client about basic information about BFRBs, their treatment, and addressing common obstacles that may impede effective treatment, such as unrealistic expectations for treatment, ambivalence about recovery, perfectionism, frustration, and low motivation for treatment. Also presented are recommended approaches for introducing the five categories of variables relevant to Comb conceptualization and treatment (sensory, cognitive, affective, motor, and place – the anagram “SCAMP” is suggested as a memory facilitator). The remainder of the chapter describes the five phases of ComB treatment that are detailed in later chapters.

This chapter, “God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too”: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church, investigates the trend in Nigerian Pentecostal churches where comedians intersperse various church programs with comedy performances. In this chapter, I look at performance of power beyond acquisition and contestation to how power identity of an authority figure can be affirmed publicly and contested privately. Comedy performance has consistently been treated as a site of resistance by the marginalized subject, but my study of comedy in Pentecostal churches shows some complications in this functionalization of the art form. Using both ethnographic methods in my fieldwork with various interviews with “gospel comedians” (as some refer to themselves), I consider exchanges that constitute power identity whose radicality is not found in the public sites but in the backrooms where negotiations take place between the artist and the producers.

A psychologically informed service is one where the design, practice, and principles of the service are informed by the best understandings of the psychological and emotional needs of people who the service is intended for, with particular consideration to those who struggle to use the service in an uncomplicated way. The need for the concept of a ‘psychologically informed’ service arises because a proportion of people have psychological and emotional needs that may not be appropriately catered for within standard health and social care designs. Care-seeking is one of the most primitive and early relational dynamics we engage in. Experiences described as developmental trauma, neglect, and other mistreatment occur in relationships, often within relationships that are expected to provide safety, security, and comfort. One of the longest legacies of early relational adversity may be a loss of trust in others, which can subsequently give rise to complicated relationships with caring figures. Making a service psychologically informed can be understood as a necessary provision for those who have the highest levels of psychological need. We look at several themes to do with developing psychologically informed services: reflective practice, language used by staff, beginnings and endings of contact, time, ambivalence, and treatment.

Chapter 4 provides a rich ethnographic analysis of everyday transnational practices of relatedness, including calling, texting, visiting, and sending remittances. It begins by considering power and affect in moral economies of transnational kinship, along with various communicative means of staying in touch across space, to illuminate the factors, contexts, and modes that inform the ways in which kinship dilemmas are experienced. What follows is a look at interactions and exchanges in which kin draw on the discourses and logics of ‘tradition’ and born-again Christianity to negotiate what being related means and entails. In considering specific familial dilemmas, I show how they call into question ideas of migrant personhood and who is materially responsible for whom, illuminating the moral, affective, material, and existential stakes of these transnational practices.

Freud wrote some admittedly far-fetched speculative works addressing what he considered to be fundaments of the human psyche. Chapter 7 considers two of his most speculative pieces, “The return of totemism in childhood,” the fourth essay of his Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).

Both writings, despite their fantastical nature, contain a coherence and completeness The Interpretation of Dreams lacks. Throughout the Totem and Taboo excerpt, Freud examines his suppositions and, in the end, offers an enlightening, if hypothetical, account of totemism, the evolution of religion, and a prehistoric piece of modern mentality. The steps, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through which he reaches his improbable anchoring of mental life in dueling life and death instincts are clear, if avowedly extreme at the time.

Prior to shaping literary depictions of a nature classed both wondrous and terrible, sublime discourse addressed uplifting, transporting encounters with the written word. Nicolas Boileau’s influential French translation of Longinus’ ancient treatise On the Sublime (ca. first century CE) restyled the branch of sublime discourse dedicated to discourse itself, suggesting that sublime literature is not elevated simply because it is complex or because it is marked by a high or lofty style. Rather sublime works of verbal art carry a peculiar charge, a charge or spark relayed to audiences taking in sublime textual encounters. This emphasis on a charged sublime encounter would underwrite prominent philosophical and aesthetic accounts of sublime nature penned by Kant, Wordsworth, Burke, and Keats. Such literary representations of sublime nature are famously ambivalent, with aesthetic renderings of earthquakes, fires, or floods bearing out fraught questions of agency. Kantian and Wordsworthian models of sublime nature suggest human agencies of mind transcend vast powers of nature. Burkean and Keatsian accounts of dread nature or astounding material sublimities ultimately humble humankind.

Revenge probably features in most, if not all, lust killing. This chapter exemplifies where revenge for perceived transgression comes into the clearest focus and seems to occupy center stage. Of course, the revenge was disproportionate to the ‘offence’, a feature of displaced aggression and ‘revenge collecting’. Part of the trigger to revenge is a blow to self-esteem. The antagonism that Peter Sutcliffe felt towards women appeared to derive from suspicions over his partner’s infidelity and being cheated by a sex worker. Sutcliffe seemed to have a kind of love-hate relationship with sex workers. He was fascinated by them and engaged them in sex but was alsodisgusted by them and killed them. It can be speculated that Levi Bellfield’s toxic trajectory started when as a boy he was jilted by a blond girl. Most of his victims were blond girls, yet he sought this type as his girlfriends. Sergey Golovkin targeted boys.

Drugs and addiction are relevant to the present study: (1) by analogy with drug-taking, the term ‘addiction’ can be applied to serial killing even where drugs are not involved and (2) drugs play an important role in the lives of some serial lust killers. The discussion first turns to two killers where the term ‘addiction’ has been applied but where it appears that drugs were not used. It then looks at two examples of drug-associated killing. Serial lust killer Michael Ross described feeling assailed by intrusive thoughts urging the rape and murder of women. He published an account of his experience in an academic journal concerned with addiction. Joel Rifkin was adopted and seriously bullied by his peers. He described his sexual behaviour as addictive and gave evidence of ambivalence in his killings. Anthony Sowell appears to have been influenced in his sexual addiction by extensive use of crack cocaine.

Throughout his writing life, Anthony Trollope denied that his style, or any writer’s style, was worthy of much notice.  Despite the much-vaunted plainness of Trollope’s prose, this chapter shows that his style, apparently designed to erase itself, becomes the means of involving readers as active participants in unstable processes of moral and political adjudication. Building on recent accounts that have considered the ethics of prose style, the chapter suggests that Trollope’s style fosters a degree of moral ambivalence. His style is influenced by the idea of gentlemanly ease and is at the same time brought into rivalry with the professional lawyer. Although in novels such as Orley Farm (1861) Trollope (unreasonably) railed against lawyers willing to give a good defence to scoundrels, his own ‘elusive style’ is not as strident in judgement as such invective might lead us to expect.