Having established that God is the goal of belief, that God is physically visible in Jesus, and that physical sight can lead to belief, Chapter 6, ‘Seeing Jesus and Seeing God’, draws these three points together by asking whether John portrays visual encounters with Jesus as visual encounters with God. The chapter argues that the physical act of seeing Jesus is a necessary condition for seeing God in him despite the challenge that God emerges as most visible in Jesus’s most acutely human moments. Evidence for this position arises from exegesis of three passages in which Johannine characters see Jesus (John 6:19; 19:6; 20:14–29) as well as John’s account of the crucifixion as glorification (12:1–50; 19:28–37). The chapter closes by turning to the crucifixion and examining the profound irony of Jesus’s death as the high point of divine visibility in the Gospel.

This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

Statelessness in Central Asian republics historically stems from the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991, of which they all were a constituent part. Even though these republics had adopted inclusive and gender-neutral citizenship laws in the post-Soviet period, such laws failed to stipulate legal safeguards against hidden statelessness dimensions in the specific regional context of state succession. These laws, coupled with a conflict between formal law and indigenous practices, restoration of traditionalist societal tendencies, and bureaucratic administrative and technical procedures, created numerous stateless persons of undetermined citizenship, including across the border areas. As in many other parts of the world where statelessness exists, in Central Asia, it mostly affected the rights of women and children. Whereas recent policies of each republic positively address the statelessness problem within their own jurisdiction, such individual initiatives do not offer a long-term solution in a wider regional perspective. For state and non-state actors to be more successful in eliminating future incidences of statelessness, they must consider multiple challenges, including the relationship between gender and statelessness, not just within each separate jurisdiction but from a wider Central Asian regional perspective.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

The book so far has focused on the interaction between L2 and L1 speakers in Chapters 2 to 4 and on how distinct those interactions are, given the same tasks, compared to interactions between L1 and L1 speakers. However, we have no sense of how naturalistic the interactions in the exams that are the focus of these chapters are. In this chapter we present a short-text MDA of discourse units in general conversational English, using the BNC 2014 as our data. The analysis reveals a range of discourse functions at both the micro- and macro-structural levels.

Like the military coups that give them life, projects of extra-constitutional political reform are “reflective and transformative occasions, moments between and betwixt ordinary times, when axiomatic values are invoked even as they are questioned and reformulated” (Coronil 1997: 124). Pakistan's head of state Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan ruled under martial law from 1958 to 1961 and then as president under a constitution of his regime's own design until a mass-resistance campaign led to his regime's demise in 1969. His administration relied upon emergency powers to contain regional and leftist political forces that had become increasingly aligned in the years preceding the coup against the centralizing tendencies of the postcolonial state. Paying attention to the discursive, spatial, and institutional connections between the powers of exception and the regulation and agency of everyday citizens, this chapter examines cultural and spatial pedagogies of nation-state building and citizenship that were launched in the context of Pakistan's first military dictatorship.

Much of this work in nation-state building took place under the Bureau of National Reconstruction, a “revolutionary” state institution created shortly after the 1958 coup. The bureau spearheaded two significant projects of authoritarian political reform. The first sought to impose a unitary Muslim national subject to the exclusion of native ethnic and regional identities, an initiative that centered Urdu, north Indian Islamicate history, and, to a related and lesser degree, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs as pedagogical models of Muslim nationality. This project was launched in conjunction with another initiative also housed within the bureau known as the “Basic Democracies” (BD) scheme. It sought to remake Pakistan's electoral-political landscape by limiting electoral franchise to locally bounded constituencies, leaving Pakistani citizens with few mechanisms at their disposal to represent problems – such as the inequities arising from industrial and agrarian capitalist control, and the growing economic and political dominance of Punjab – that confronted the nation at large. Both projects were part of a larger and coherent extra-constitutional strategy to enhance centralized state control over the country's provincial units (F. Ahmad 1998; Ayres 2009; F. H. Siddiqui 2012; Caron 2016).

This loosely argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the twenty-first century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit "untimely"). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service and experience generally, not anything specifically “high church.”) The first involves the attitudes that characterize what I call the “liturgical stance" towards various doctrines. The second focuses on the “vested” propositional objects of those attitudes. The third looks at how those doctrines are represented, evoked, and embodied in liturgical contexts. My untimely rallying-cry is that younger philosophers of religion might do well to set aside debates regarding knowledge and justified belief, just as their elders set aside debates regarding religious language. When we set aside knowledge in this way, we make room for discussions of faith that in turn shed light on neglected but philosophically interesting aspects of lived religious practice.

This chapter introduces the research, justifies the methodological choices and outlines the structure of the book.

Agents are forward-looking and incorporate their future behavior into today’s decisions. This is captured by the Bellman equation. We break this axiomatically into preference for flexibility and rational expectations.