The swarming logic of inversion and the elevation of Satan

Editors' prefac

The Imperceptible Work of God: Pamela Sue Anderson's Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness

"This paper offers a response to Pamela Sue Anderson’s book, Re-visioning Gender. It focuses on three key aspects of Anderson’s work: first, her concern with the often imperceptible reality of gender exclusions; secondly, her discussion of ineffability in dialogue with Adrian Moore’s work and thirdly, her defence of realism in response to Grace Jantzen. These themes constitute a welcome articulation of rationality within a feminist framework, whilst opening up rationality to the validity of non-propositional truths. The paper ends by suggesting that Anderson does more to work out new conceptualizations of the divine, arguing that her work and that of Jantzen are not so far apart on this point as might first appear.

The Schizoid Dialectic Theses on winning the Union back

Bringing together Anderson's work as a cultural activist in performance (the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (www.twoaddthree.org)) and his role as Branch Chair of his institution's union for teaching staff (University and College Union), this performative paper will argue that a dialectical, agonistic blurring of boundaries across the borders of conflicting identities and interests is not only productive and desirable, but also liberatory and could constitute a small act of social justice. From lived experience the paper stages a series of arguments - in dialogue form - between Gary the anarchist art-activist and Gary the reformist trade unionist branch chair. Whilst both would agree that social justice is the 'bottom line' neither would agree that the task of institutional transformation is in part to recognise the dialectical flux inherent in their (Gary's) conflicting identities. Yet, this is what emerges when these identities are juxtaposed to engage in agonistic debate. The dialogues focus on the institutional context of higher education in particular, and suggests that agonistically robust debate produces not a winner and a loser, but a dialectical schizoid (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, London: Continuum Impacts. [Google Scholar]) who occupies both positions, more or less, simultaneously. The dialogues deploys two texts: Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach (1845) - of which the union chair is enamoured - and the rewritten Theses on Winning the Union Back - which the art-activist performance artist has vandalised. The paper contains the full text of the rewritten Theses on Winning the Union Back

The Logic of the ‘As If’ and the Existence of God: An Inquiry into the Nature of Belief in the Work of Jacques Derrida

The religious thematics at play in the work of Jacques Derrida have often provided an ongoing platform from which to struggle with the entire scope of his work, thus moving the seemingly peripheral discourses on religion within his oeuvre to the center stage. Despite repeated attempts to come to terms both theologically and philosophically with the conditional nature of representations, the problematics of representation are perhaps nowhere more forcefully demonstrated than in the work of Derrida. Indeed, for Derrida, the ‘as if’, as a regulative principle directly appropriated and modified from its Kantian context, becomes the central lynchpin for understanding, not only Derrida’s philosophical system as a whole, but also his numerous seemingly enigmatic references to his ‘jewishness’, as I intend to demonstrate in what follows. Through an analysis of the function of the ‘as if’ within the history of thought, from Greek tragedy to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I hope to show how Derrida can only appropriate his Judaic roots as an act of mourning that seeks to render the lost object as present, ‘as if’ it were incorporated by the subject for whom this act nevertheless remains an impossibility. As Derrida discerns within the poetry of Paul Celan, bringing a sense of presence/presentness to our experiences, and as a confirmation of the subject which the human being struggles to assert, is the poetic task par excellence. It is seemingly also, if Derrida is to be understood on this point, the only option left to a humanity wherein poetry comes to express what religious formulations can no longer justify

C. L. Downing, Salvation from Cinema: The Medium is the Message. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Pp. viii, 196. Pb. £33.99. ISBN 978-1-138-91394-3

Review of this book on theology and film for Modern Believing

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Standard setting, external regulation and professional autonomy: exploring the implications for university education

This chapter looks at the implications of standards, external regulations and professional autonomy for university education. Protocols are seen as one way of representing (and enacting) professional practice, ranging along trajectories from negotiated to non-negotiableand from context-specific to non-context-specific. The challenge for higher education is to prepare students to meet professional standards and at the same time re-negotiate them