This paper explores the following question: How does individual religiosity and attachment to a religious community relate to sectarian political loyalties or interpersonal prejudices in a post-conflict, institutionally sectarianized society? The paper explores this question through dialectic, participatory methods with youth involved in community-based youth associations with a religious component. The paper investigates how religiously devout youth in Lebanon conceptualize the personal and communal elements of their religiosity in relation to sectarian politics. In this way, the paper contributes to a study of social sectarianism, in which scholars are striving to understand what individuals mean when they speak about sect, and how discussions surrounding sect mask more complex underlying social realities. Overall, these accounts suggest that personal and social religiosity both positively influence anti-sectarian political outlook among participants, while other factors, such as the institutional sectarianization of public life and a history of violent conflict maintain participants' default attachment to co-sectarian networks in terms of routine, economic security, and communal belonging.

This article draws on a year of ethnography conducted among cis heterosexual couples in contemporary urban Lebanon in order to argue that, in the absence of a serious project of national reconciliation, intersectarian love, despite its short lifespan, constitutes restorative instances in post–civil war Lebanon. Intersectarian hetero desire emerges as a counter-discourse that threatens the masculinist foundations of the Lebanese state. By tracing the timeline of love in the life of Lebanese citizens, this article places personal narratives of “impossible” intersectarian love stories in conversation with queer temporality scholarship in order to recognize the political, albeit limited, potential of romantic love. Here, societal expectations of married life are replaced by an ephemeral unity that operates in contra to hegemonic interpretations of “man and wife.”

The new species Begonia samhaensis, in section Peltaugustia (Warb.) Barkley, is described from the island of Samha in the Socotra archipelago. It differs from the only other species in the section, B. socotrana Hook.f., in a number of gross morphological characters and is likely to be a relict taxon rather than the result of more recent dispersal and divergence. A revision of sect. Peltaugustia is presented. Detailed surveys have been carried out on both species. The new species has a restricted distribution and a total population of fewer than 1000 individuals, and is recommended to be placed in the IUCN category VU D1, 2. Begonia socotrana has been found in new sites, and is locally common in parts of its range. Its current placing in the IUCN ‘Vulnerable’ category is considered to be unwarranted, and it is recommended that the species should be listed as ‘Least Concern’.