This chapter articulates God’s purpose, which could be identified with the term ‘election’, but which here I break down into three themes – incarnation, creation and eschatology. If God’s character is not to change, God’s way of bringing about that purpose must be entirely consistent with the nature of that purpose. Thus the incarnation is both the means and the end of God’s purpose. God’s ultimate purpose is for us to be with God: God achieves that purpose by being with us. The incarnation is God being with us: the eschaton is us being with God. Creation is incarnational, because the purpose of creation is to be the theatre of God’s relationship with humankind, and because Jesus demonstrates what creation is and where it belongs in the story of God. The gospels portray the incarnate Jesus as the one through whom creation turns into heaven, and the flaws in existence are overwhelmed by the foretaste of essence.

The eight dimensions of being with, outlined in detail in my A Nazareth Manifesto and elsewhere in their missiological, ethical and public policy implications, are here explored in their full scriptural dimensions. Presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment and glory each have profound resonances in Old and New Testaments, and each provides a continuous thread through incarnation, the reason for creation, the nature of Jesus’ ministry and death, the work of the Holy Spirit, the church and heavenly destiny – in relation to God, to one another and to the whole creation. They affirm how the incarnation is not a means to an end (such as saving us from our sins) but an end in itself, and they expand the notion of being with into a multidimensional concept with rich resonances.

The lack of citizenship or statelessness may be brought about by action, misaction and inaction of not only the state but the society in the country as well. The state and society often join hands in depriving a community of citizenship and, in so doing, both parties may act legally and extra-legally against recognizing and giving identity documentation to the community in question, again according to the text of the law, its implementation, or both. The society in question may opt to return citizenship to the same community and encourage the state or state-like entities to implement it. This chapter discusses the situation of the Rohingyas during the political transition in Myanmar (from 2011 to 2020) when the state and society joined hands in legally, extralegally, and/or socially depriving the Rohingyas of citizenship and identity documentation and arbitrarily implementing and mis-implementing the Myanmar Citizenship Law. The main part of the chapter traces the Rohingya moment during the Myanmar Spring (February 2021) and discusses four positive developments in the situation of the Rohingyas after the February 1, 2021 coup, concluding with a caution and some suggestions for the way ahead.

Setting Up Shop

I was with Momtaz Khatun inside her small shop one afternoon in June 2018, during the heart of the monsoon season. The summer humidity coupled with the thunderous bellowing of windy rain shook the open thatched dwelling as Momtaz sat at the back, crouched on a small table, intricately embroidering the sides of the dress for her friend's daughter under a lightly dimmed hariken, as her husband manned the front table. Eid was only a few days away and Momtaz had two more orders to get through before the holiday arrived. They had set up this small makeshift shop at the end of their lane under a bamboo roof without walls to take orders and sew on demand if anybody required the services. ‘There is a lot of demand around Eid time. I know many women are sewing but, in this zone, I am the only one with a shop and so many people know I am here, so they come to me if they need quick service.’ Prior to arriving in Bangladesh, Momtaz tells me that she did not ‘imagine’ ever working for an income, much less having a shop set up for her. In her hometown of Buthidaung, Myanmar, her husband Ahmed was the sole provider, working as a labourer in the village, and her responsibilities revolved primarily around childcare and taking care of the home.

‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’

On a cool, windy evening in March 2018, as the light of dusk spread throughout the vast dusty camps and people began retreating to their shelters, I stood on the edge of a hill with Khatun Khalamma as she tended to a small potted plant of chilli leaves, the chillies beginning to bloom with the arrival of spring. We had been talking for hours – her stories, like that of many refugees like her, vividly encompassed a life of oppression, erasure, and ‘running’ that were etched into her memory. Tears rolled down her eyes as she fiddled with the chilli plant. She was from Buthidaung township in Rakhine State, Myanmar, and had fled with her son, daughter-in-law, and nine-year-old grandson in the 2017 mass exodus. Her three daughters were raped and killed in Myanmar, and her daughter-in-law died during childbirth once they reached the camps in Bangladesh. The pain of her immense loss and of leaving her homeland was still fresh in her mind. At one point, she began singing a tarana (Rohingya song) entitled ‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’, which she had heard shared throughout the camp, composed by a fellow Rohingya refugee.

The tarana was haunting, evoking the trauma of displacement and the suppression of their voices when they screamed out to be heard. The life stories of Rohingyas spanned generations, ultimately leading to a migration that was tremendous in its scale and level of desperation. This chapter provides the context to understanding the gendered nature of violence against the Rohingyas and the chaotic nature of their displacement to Bangladesh. By situating the recent migration of Rohingyas from Myanmar to Southeast Asia within the greater context of conflict and systemic violence and oppression in Myanmar's recent history, the chapter is an introduction to the Rohingyas as a borderland people in Myanmar, their life under siege, and provides a glimpse into Rohingya gender relations and roles prior to displacement.

The Category Embedding Theorem (CET) is a result in infinite combinatorics related to the Kestelman–Borwein–Ditor Theorem KBD, and also to the concept of shift-compactness. The relationships between KBD, CET and various forms of No Trumps NT are given.

After Rai returned to India in December 1919, he sought to apply what he had learned in America to his own activism in India. Inspired by the Rand School of Social Science, Rai formed the Tilak School of Politics in 1921 to educate underprivileged Indians. He also started his own newspaper, The People, to circulate his ideas on caste and racial science, and his opinions on Gandhian non-violence tactics. Rai's views regarding the effectiveness of Gandhian techniques evolved throughout the 1920s. At the start of the decade, he supported Gandhi's non-violence strategy. However, Rai questioned passive resistance as a viable method for overthrowing White supremacy and the British Raj following the failure of the non-cooperation movement in 1922 and his exposure to Du Bois's articles in The Crisis describing the mass lynchings of Black Americans in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Rai came to see violent encounters as an inevitability during social clashes predicated upon race and class. Sadly, this violence came to claim Rai's life. On October 30, 1928, Rai himself led a protest against the British to challenge their lack of inclusion of Indians on the Indian Statutory Commission, which was a group of seven White British members of parliament chosen by the British government to study constitutional reform in India. During the protest, British police superintendent James A. Scott ordered the police to attack the protesters and Scott personally assaulted Rai. Rai died a month later, never recovering from the injuries inflicted upon him.

Up until his death, Rai's outlook continued to evolve. Alongside his thoughts on violent protest, his perception of caste changed throughout the 1920s. While Rai saw India's caste problem as a secondary issue early in the decade, by the tail end of his life, Rai had brought the matter to the forefront of the Indian independence movement. He actively sought the abolition of caste discrimination and sub-castes even to the point that he considered postponing Swaraj to solve the issue of caste. This showed that Rai actively sought caste reform and advocated for the abolition of sub-castes. In the many articles that Rai wrote in The People, he condemned caste discrimination explicitly and stressed that India could never achieve unity and become a functional democracy so long as caste discrimination remained.

Chapter 5 introduces a family of exactly soluble spin-1/2 lattice Hamiltonians: The spin-1/2 cluster “c” chains. Each member of this family is gapped and nondegenerate when periodic boundary conditions hold. The nondegeneracy of the ground state is lifted for all members of this family except for one member, owing to the presence of zero modes bound to the boundaries when open boundary conditions hold. The notion of symmetry fractionalization is thereby introduced. This family of exactly soluble Hamiltonians is mapped of a family of exactly soluble Majorana lattice Hamiltonians, one of which is an example of a Kitaev chain, though the Jordan–Wigner transformation. The stability of the degeneracy of the zero modes to integrability-breaking but symmetry-preserving interactions is derived through the explicit construction of the stacking rules.

The materialist turn in contemporary literary theory – comprising of multiple discourses such as new materialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism, speculative realism, affect theory, and others – has been deeply influential in the field of nineteenth-century American literature. However, one key tension within these materialist theories is the question of its politics: how does a turn to materialism, which privileges the actual physical matter of bodies and things over the ideological and linguistic categories of ideas, advance any political or ethical imperatives? Is a world of matter a world without human meaning? This chapter outlines both optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on this question in recent nineteenth-century American literary study. It then seeks to redraw the political impasse between them as one of scale. To that end, I examine two mid-century texts – the anonymously authored “The Ultra-Moral Reformer” (1842) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sphinx” (1846) – as depictions of the challenges (and opportunities) of scalar distortion. These texts suggest that the political and ethical impasse within materialism can be described within materialist terms itself, and that doing so offers a way of understanding the value judgments inherent in materialist methodological commitments as scale dependent.