The debate about Christ’s incarnation, and the intention behind the incarnation, is wide-ranging and far-reaching. It concerns God’s purpose and the exercise of God’s will; the identity of Christ; the reason for creation; the nature of salvation; and the destiny of humankind. The thirteenth-century Franciscans had a particular perspective on these questions, characterised by their twin emphasis on creation and incarnation. Rupert of Deutz pointed out that if the incarnation was subject to the fall, God must have intended the fall. He countered that God had always intended the Word to have an earthly role in the divine plan for the chosen people. Figures such as Bonaventure, Grosseteste and Duns Scotus amplify and qualify these issues, and Scotus concludes that Christ would have come in the maximal glory of creation – even if there had been no fall.

This chapter sets the stage for the volume, describing an approach to Otto Neurath’s last years that weaves together biographical, historical, and philosophical strands. Neurath can also be examined from the angle of ‘exile studies’, enthusiastically adapting to British life and making contributions to philosophy, economics, and visual education that were ahead of his time. The themes of planning and education are introduced as narrative hooks to understand Neurath’s late work.

State responses to the recent ‘crisis’ caused by misinformation in social media have mainly aimed to impose liability on those who facilitate its dissemination. Internet companies, especially large platforms, have deployed numerous techniques, measures and instruments to address the phenomenon. However, little has been done to assess the importance of who originates disinformation and, in particular, whether some originators of misinformation are acting contrary to their preexisting obligations to the public. My view is that it would be wrong to attribute only to social media a central or exclusive role in the new disinformation crisis that impacts the information ecosystem. I also believe that disinformation has different effects depending on who promotes it – particularly whether it is promoted by a person with a public role. Importantly, the law of many countries already reflects this distinction – across a variety of contexts, public officials are obligated both to affirmatively provide certain types of information, and to take steps to ensure that information is true. In contrast, private individuals rarely bear analogous obligations; instead, law often protects their misstatements, in order to prevent censorship and promote public discourse.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the concept of informality as a crucial legal concept for the understanding of trilogues. It begins from a twofold observation. First, the informal nature of trilogues is stated in black and white in a significant variety of legal instruments. Secondly, the role of legal scholarship is to make sense of that unequivocal characterization. Drawing on institutional theory, this chapter argues that informality is a full-blown concept of EU law, and it sets about defining its characteristics. To that end, it compares trilogues with two other informal bodies, namely the Euro Group and the Informal Council meetings. The core idea of this chapter is that the codification of informality translates into legal terms the intention of the institutions to protect certain spaces from an excessive penetration of legal normativity. This intention, in turn, is indicative of the desire to preserve those spaces for the emergence of powerful social frameworks where genuine exchanges among actors may occur; exchanges that should be conducive to compromise.

What does it mean “to tolerate” in a post-Christian and post-secular state? This chapter argues that antecedents of contemporary conflicts over diversity in Europe can be found in early modernity, specifically in early modern practices of toleration, which impacted on both the belonging and the visibility of minorities. New forms of intolerance pertain to the position of religious, ethnoreligious, and sexual minorities in public life, echoing the concerns of the public visibility of minorities inhering in historical Christendom. The political articulation of certain groups as “other” to “the nation” is increasingly mediated through constitutional repertoires, such as constitutional revision and amendments, developments in the hermeneutics of constitutional concepts, or pseudo-constitutional behaviour. This chapter introduces the main themes: tolerance and intolerance, constitutionalism, secularisation, and their significance across the liberal–illiberal divide.

The last major chapter of the book reflects on the question of ‘happiness’ as discussed by Popper, Hayek, and Neurath, but also presents a case study of how Neurath not only theorized on such matters but also sought to make a practical difference by collaboration in planning projects. He became a consultant for the redevelopment of Bilston, a small town blighted by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution. In discussion with town councillors and architects, he steered plans by taking into account the needs of residents, seeking to represent those whose voice was generally not heard. This finally led to Neurath being interviewed in the mainstream media, marking acceptance and respect for Neurath in British culture. He did not want to use his broad learning to set himself apart as an intellectual but instead to articulate the needs of ordinary people.

The KBD theorem is about embedding subsequences of shifts of a suitably regular set into some target set. Developing work of Kingman (1963, 1964), we extend this here to embedding into all members of a family of sets. Useful here is the idea of shift-compactness. We also begin to pass effortlessly between the category and measure cases by working bitopologically, using the Euclidean topology for the category case and the density topology (Chapter 7) for the measure case.

This chapter first considers the evolution of the concept of the ‘cultural landscape’, expanding from its traditional connection with physical geography and heritage to a broader humanities-based discourse. It examines the interactions among landscapes, societies, and their collective memories, illustrating how these connections transcend geographical boundaries and historical epochs. The chapter underscores the shift towards a landscape culturalism that acknowledges the symbiosis between digital and physical landscapes, which influences cultural and individual identities. In presenting the cultural landscape as a dynamic space where organisations, societies, and consumers’ perceptions vary based on temporal and cultural contexts, it proposes a framework for understanding how brands interact within this landscape, influencing consumer behaviour and the construction of cultural identity both in physical and digital spaces, including digital cities and suburbs.

The New Testament authors take up wine metaphors and signs from the Hebrew Bible and other writings to mark the kingdom of God present in Jesus Christ. Wine is critical to the Eucharist instituted in the Last Supper and at the cross, and offers a vision of abundance through the apocalypse of Revelation in the final judgment and in the new kingdom.

The ILO seized on the reference to ‘forced labour’ in the definition of human trafficking in the UN protocol to carve out a prominent role as a key knowledge producer in the global antislavery governance network. This chapter describes how the ILO’s Forced Labour Convention treats consent as the mark of free labour. Despite this narrow understanding, it argues that, by diagnosing forced labour as a problem resulting from the failure of labour market regulation, the ILO’s prescription extends well beyond unfree labour. It also explains how the traditional territorial format of the ILO’s governance authority, which is rooted in a national sovereignty, makes it difficult to regulate forced labour associated with international migration and global supply chains. The ILO’s biggest challenge: to persuade the employers’ organisation, which along with states and trade unions are the ILO’s constituents, to agree to a convention to govern global supply chains.

Chapter 4 is a detailed description of Neurath’s adaptation to British life and professional re-establishment, mainly in the field of visual education. The Isotype Institute was established in Oxford, and this method was rapidly taken up by documentarist Paul Rotha for use in films for the Ministry of Information. The Neuraths also collaborated in producing books of ‘soft propaganda’ about Britain and its allies, and made a pioneering visualization of the Beveridge Plan of social insurance. Neurath attempted to reconstruct a scholarly environment for himself, and was keen to embrace the English language. He was much in demand as a lecturer and consultant, speaking ‘broken English fluently’. He was supportive of fellow émigrés but wary of Austrian exile politics. Inadvertently, he came into contact with some people later revealed to have been Soviet spies.

The book comes in three parts. In Part I I set out the full extent of incarnational theology, in terms of abundance, relationship, transfiguration and blessing. I explain seven ways in which my account seeks to correct the ways conventional theology departs from a truly theocentric approach. This is a story about God (rather than us). It is a story about Jesus (rather than overcoming sin and death). It is a story of abundance (not deficit). It is a story of God’s sovereignty (not rules God must obey). It is a story about Jesus from the beginning (not just from the annunciation). It is a story of flourishing (not inhibition). It is a story in which God’s means and ends are identical.