Facing the Ruler, Facing the Village: On the Roads to Complicity Following Mengzi and Benda

In his article, “Facing the Ruler, Facing the Village,” Zvi Ben-Dor Benite seeks to broaden the boundaries of the discussion about complicity by taking it away from late 20th-century and contemporary debates about it. At the same time, he wishes to highlight the many faces that the problem of complicity could have in different historical moments. Following Czesław Miłosz, this article understands that there are many roads to complicity that have been articulated in different ways across time and space. This article is, therefore, an integrated meditation on complicity bringing together two radically distant approaches to the question. Reading the ancient Chinese thinker Mengzi, this article highlights two key situations leading to what we should call “complicity.” The first is concerned with the thorny issue of the intellectual at the court facing the ruler. The second place the intellectual within the people, “the village” in Mengzi\u27s words. Mengzi identifies both of these situations as highly problematic and potentially leading to the deviation from past moral principles to which one must adhere. With this insight, this article turns to Julien Benda\u27s famous, notorious, portrayal of the “treason of the intellectuals,” and discusses it along the parameters articulated by Mengzi

“Como los hebreos en España”: El encuentro de los jesuitas con los musulmanes y el problema del cambio cultural

This essay is concerned with the possibility of cultural change in the writings of Matteo Ricci. In order to elucidate this question, this essay discusses aspects of Matteo Ricci’s perception of Islam and Muslims in China and identifies the moments when they changed. I show that over time Ricci developed a much more nuanced perception of Islam in China, but argue still that his views remained quite limited because of lack of dialogue with Muslims he saw in China. These limitations, I also argue, reflect the limitations of European views of Islam in the early modern Euro-Mediterranean world. Recognizing these limitations, I suggest, might help us to develop new approaches to questions of religion in early modern China.Este trabajo trata de las posibilidades del cambio cultural en los escritos de Matteo Ricci. Para poder conocer mejor esta cuestión, este estudio discute diversos aspectos de la percepción de Matteo Ricci sobre el Islam y los musulmanes en China, identificando los momentos en los que cambia. He podido mostrar cómo, a lo largo del tiempo, Ricci desarrolló una percepción cada vez más matizada del Islam en China, pero sostengo que sus opiniones se mantuvieron bastante fijas debido a su falta de diálogo con los musulmanes de esa zona. Esta percepción tiene mucho que ver con los limitados puntos de vista del Islam en la Europa mediterránea moderna. Conocer estas limitaciones, sugiero, nos podrá ayudar a desarrollar nuevos enfoques sobre la investigación de la religión en China

Enhanced production yields of rVSV-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine using Fibra-Cel® macrocarriers

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to high global demand for vaccines to safeguard public health. To that end, our institute has developed a recombinant viral vector vaccine utilizing a modified vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) construct, wherein the G protein of VSV is replaced with the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 (rVSV-ΔG-spike). Previous studies have demonstrated the production of a VSV-based vaccine in Vero cells adsorbed on Cytodex 1 microcarriers or in suspension. However, the titers were limited by both the carrier surface area and shear forces. Here, we describe the development of a bioprocess for rVSV-ΔG-spike production in serum-free Vero cells using porous Fibra-Cel® macrocarriers in fixed-bed BioBLU®320 5p bioreactors, leading to high-end titers. We identified core factors that significantly improved virus production, such as the kinetics of virus production, the use of macrospargers for oxygen supply, and medium replenishment. Implementing these parameters, among others, in a series of GMP production processes improved the titer yields by at least two orders of magnitude (2e9 PFU/mL) over previously reported values. The developed process was highly effective, repeatable, and robust, creating potent and genetically stable vaccine viruses and introducing new opportunities for application in other viral vaccine platforms

Chinese Islam: A Complete Concert

Matthew S. Erie, China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 472 pp. $140 (cloth/e-book). Jonathan Lipman, ed., Islamic Thought in China: Sino-Muslim Intellectual Evolution from the 17th to the 20th Century. Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 288 pp. £70 (cloth; e-book). Roberta Tontini, Muslim Sanzijing: Shifts and Continuities in the Definition of Islam in China. Brill, 2016. 238 pp.$125 (cloth). Why study a Chinese “minority” and its history? The task of scholars of Chinese Islam since the 1990s has been twofold: on the one hand, we have wanted to study Islam in China in its Chinese social and cultural context, as opposed to imagining it as a single separate entity, and to show that its history is relevant and meaningful for Chinese history in general. One could almost say that this goal was achieved a while ago. The next task has been to make the study of Chinese Islam and its history meaningful and useful for the greater community of scholars of Islam in general. It seems to me that with the books reviewed here, and with others in the making, we are getting close to reaching this target. In 1910, Marshall Broomhall’s Islam in China declared that Chinese Islam was a “neglected problem.” These books show that it is no longer neglected, and no longer a “problem”; rather, it is an exciting topic. Indeed, a complete, even if not harmonious, concert

The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China

286 p

The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China

286 p