This chapter investigates the logic of regulation that animates the AKP’s new securitisation technologies. The chapter begins by examining the new laws on security vetting and archival background checks. Reviewing the conduct of the OHAL Commission tasked to decide on applications by purged citizens for reversal of their refusal or civic death status, the chapter reveals how ambiguities in the new law allow for the extensive use of informal rule of law based on extra-legal practices. By focusing on several denunciation cases, the chapter’s theoretical and empirical strands come together in an analysis of the impact this new securitisation logic of regulation has both on those targeted and on society as a whole. I argue that the new regulatory technologies of citizen-informants and the perfusion of distrust throughout society an ‘atmosfear of terror’, inducing the population as a whole to self-regulate, perform, and participate in their own securitisation.

This chapter engages with social sciences theories about ‘institutions’. It illuminates not only the resilience but also the intensification of overland caravan trade thanks to an efficient organised system involving traders, Bedouin and Ottoman officials. The chapter tries to rely as much as possible on the viewpoint of caravan traders. It offers insights on historiographical debates about the changing roles of state institutions in the Late Ottoman Empire, the State’s legitimisation and its echoes among urban and nonurban caravan practitioners, and the economic and political competition by political entities that are built on the monopolisation of trading routes. The aim is to introduce a new panorama of the political economy of the Middle East that does not focus on the coastal and urban societies but on the hinterlands and steppes and considers theses spaces as elements of a region, that is, the intermediary space connecting the local and the world, on the one hand and connecting cultural affiliation with economic exchange on the other.

While Marius Victorinus was not on the lists of physicalists given by the German liberal Protestants of the nineteenth century, his physicalism is the closest match to Harnack’s definition of physicalism: Victorinus provides a “textbook example” of physicalist soteriology. Victorinus is the only physicalist who teaches that Christ assumes and transforms a platonic-type form of humanity, which then, through its paradigmatic power, transforms all individuals patterned on that form. Victorinus’ physicalism is both a participation in and development of Neoplatonic chain of being logic. Scholarly emphasis on Victorinus’ famous insistence on salvation by faith has obscured the physicalist foundation of Victorinus’ soteriology.

In this chapter, I examine Moses Maimonides’ conception of worship, concentrating on two questions: (1) On what grounds is a being worthy of worship? and (2) How is worship enacted? Concerning (1), I begin with Maimonides’ objects of false worship, aka idolatry, which are not only material but paradigmatically the intellects that were taken to be the ultimate causes of change in the world. Indeed thinking of God Himself as an intellect is the height of anthropomorphism and idolatry for Maimonides. Instead, the deity is worship-worthy as the unknowable necessarily existent being in virtue of itself on which the existence of everything else is causally dependent. Our attitude of radical contingency on this being is the ultimate grounds for His worship. Addressing (2), I argue that what enacts Maimonidean worship are not bodily acts but totally devoted, constant intellectual activities to achieve the humanly possible understanding of God and the natural world. Worship is not distinct from intellectual activity but a manner of engaging in it – worshippingly – and a way of life that embraces everything the worshipper does. Finally, I argue that idolatrous or false worship really consists in activities of the mind directed toward the wrong beings on which we are not contingent – and specifically ourselves and our own intellects.

Arnold Schrier’s study, Ireland and the American Emigration, 1850–1900 (1958) set out to analyse the impact of mass emigration to America on the country of origin. Schrier collaborated with the Irish Folklore Commission to devise a questionnaire to gather data on the cultural and folkloristic reaction to emigration. While conducted in 1955, most of those interviewed were in their seventies and eighties and could provide memories and reflections on emigration and returned migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questionnaire is a significant source for those desiring to learn more about Ireland and America and possible Americanising influences. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the questionnaire and the data which emerged from it. Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh notes the nuanced attitudes towards the returned migrant evident in the survey responses, beyond the stereotype of the ‘show off’ returned Yank. Mac Cárthaigh concludes that the disruptive figure of the returned Yank highlighted the gap between the opportunity and novel experiences represented by emigration and the conservatism of the society left behind.

This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.