Imaging Gold Nanoparticles in Living Cells Environments using Heterodyne Digital Holographic Microscopy

This paper describes an imaging microscopic technique based on heterodyne digital holography where subwavelength-sized gold colloids can be imaged in cell environment. Surface cellular receptors of 3T3 mouse fibroblasts are labeled with 40 nm gold nanoparticles, and the biological specimen is imaged in a total internal reflection configuration with holographic microscopy. Due to a higher scattering efficiency of the gold nanoparticles versus that of cellular structures, accurate localization of a gold marker is obtained within a 3D mapping of the entire sample's scattered field, with a lateral precision of 5 nm and 100 nm in the x,y and in the z directions respectively, demonstrating the ability of holographic microscopy to locate nanoparticles in living cells environments

Trump As Heteropolitical Obsessional Neurosis: Presidential Politics After the Death of God

If one blows away all the toxic miasma of American partisan politics, it becomes apparent that Donald Trump is not so much a �problem� as a symptom. Of course, the term �problem� in the context of this collection itself implies an unabashed partisan position, comparable to the present tendency for conservative talk radio hosts to decry the �problem� of the millennial generation enthusiastically embracing socialism, or the constant harping by young people, who have turned away from their evangelical upbringing, about their elders� unflagging support both for Trump himself and their condemnation of gay marriage � unless what we consider truly �problematic� is that half of a certain population sees the issue entirely different from the other. �Problematizing� Trump should run more along the lines of a physician problematizing a fever, which does not mean the kind old doctor takes the patient to task for falling ill, but rather seeks to diagnose, or trace the etiology of, the disorder itself

Sin and Justice: Healing the Breach Between Theology and Political Philosophy

Whatever happened to “sin”? The concept itself, so integral and central to the Western theological tradition, has faded away over the most recent decades and centuries as even a topic for serious contention. While perduring and persistent among Christian conservatives, especially the expansive and highly diverse global population that has come to be labelled by sociologists of religion as “evangelicalism,” the term has gradually succumbed to a dearth of effective meaning and has been replaced by a variety of religiously neutral constructs, implying moral failure, psychological or behavior disorder, or political infamy. Even once trendy imaginaries as “collective sin”, a redeployment of the Augustinian notion of “original sin” (peccatum originalis) favored by Reformed thinkers, while lent a socio-political tweak by Reinhold Niebuhr , has given way to various critico-theoretical adaptations, including such capacious locutions as “patriarchy” or “systemic racism.” In many respects the notion of “sin” in the strict sense, rather than with attention to specific defects in either individual character or conduct, has gradually converged with the general concept of “injustice”, or plain old-fashioned “wrongness.

Religious Studies as Neoliberal “Triple Mediation”: Toward a Deconstruction of Its “Colonial Difference”

This article makes the case, citing the work of David Chidester, Achille Mbembe, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Walter Mignolo, that the academic study of religion (often known as “religious studies„ in the Anglophone world, Religionswissenschften or sciences religieuses in Continental Europe) remains both historically, and to a large extent contemporaneously, a “colonial„ discipline derived from what Michel Foucault termed the structures of “power/knowledge„, imposed on the cognitive and philosophical traditions of non-Western and indigenous peoples. It argues that the “archetype„ of rationality taken for granted in much Western scholarship about “religion„ amounts to what Chidester terms a “triple mediation„ between the imperial domination and colonial classification and administration of subjugated peoples and their symbolical practices and cultural memory—one which, in fact, has been re-inscribed in present day “neoliberal„ fantasies of one world “without religion„. Finally, the article proposes a new “deconstructive„ reading of theories of religion using post-structuralist instead of Enlightenment methodologies

New dimensions in philosophical theology

U.S.Avi, 128 p.; 23 c

Toward a Religious Ethic of Social Equity Through Maximum Productivity in a Post-Pandemic Era

This article discusses the negative impact the coronavirus has had on the economy, social welfare, and health care systems of the United States. The article details the role religions can play in helping those in need when the government is unable to, and related ethical issues. The article references Venezuela and Denmark and the impact COVID-19 has had on their economies and their ability to reallocate wealth