This article examines the church’s sacramental life – baptism and the Eucharist – as enactments of trauma that mirror Christ’s suffering and death, shaping its vocation of self-giving for a broken world. Drawing on a psychoanalytical lens inspired by Lacan and Žižek, itexplores how these sacraments resymbolise trauma as redemptive, plunging the church into the realm of Christ’s cross – a traumatic rupture that shatters sacrificial systems and redefines divine being (Lau 2016). Baptism, a drowning into Christ’s death (Rm. 6:3-4), initiates believers into a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17), historically defiant – from early martyrs to modern persecuted churches – and politically potent, confronting domination with resurrection hope (Wright 2013; Jinkins 1999). The Eucharist, a shocking presencing of the eternal in bread and wine, counters alienation with brokenness, uniting the church in Christ’s suffering to heal societal divides(Pound 2007; Lewis 2006). Integrating a theology of Holy Saturday, where God embraces death to end worldly violence, the article argues that these sacraments are not private rituals but public acts of resistance and renewal (Cavanaugh 1998). They compel the church to embody Christ’s trauma – dying to self, serving the marginalised – transforming suffering into a political witness of grace andreconciliation in a violent world.

The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas by Kevin W. Young (review)

The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas, by YoungKevin W.Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024. 252 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781469679013.

The Violent World of Broadus Miller: A Story of Murder, Lynch Mobs, and Judicial Punishment in the Carolinas by Kevin W. Young (review)

Tom Franklin's novella Poachers deals with the themes of violence, poverty, and loneliness, which are the basic elements of Southern Gothic literature. The work is a complex narrative of violence that takes place in the American South and focuses on the darker aspects of human nature. The story of the main characters, Kirxy and the Gates brothers, reveals the physical and psychological effects of violence. Franklin draws the reader into the violent world of the characters by intertwining nature descriptions with violence. Regional elements of Southern culture and social exclusion reinforce the characters' tendency towards violence. In addition, personal reasons such as war traumas are among the reasons for the characters' violence. Poachers reveals the human tendency towards evil and deeply examines the individual and social dimensions of violence. The purpose of this article is to exhibit Franklin's representation of violence in Poachers and analyze its effects on the characters.

This article examines Cornell Woolrich’s representations of his female protagonists’ black angels, that is, self-sacrificing but vengeful and dangerous women. As black angels, female characters in Woolrich’s novels, such as Julie Killeen in The Bride Wore Black (1940) and Alberta Murray in The Black Angel (1943), are seemingly defending their homes and standing up for justice but ultimately, they get caught up in a violent world and face the inescapability of failure. It is argued here that Woolrich’s trope of the black angel subverts the stereotype of the femme fatale by mirroring and simultaneously challenging the depiction of the roles of women during the turbulent sociopolitical period around the Second World War in the US, as well as the shift in gender dynamics at that time. Woolrich’s narratives become a vehicle to express this very sense of insecurity and anxiety and the need to both articulate and subvert the pressing need for order and control, particularly in relation to women. This article also illustrates that Woolrich’s black angels are complex creations that are part and parcel of the recipe of sex, paranoia and violence that fill the pages of Woolrich’s noir novels, and it is this recipe that destabilizes both gender norms and legal codes as far as the portrayal of female criminality is concerned.

Necropower often relies on taxonomic distinctions between self and Other, a binary structure that is associated with gender binarism, digital dualism, and negations of life’s entanglement with death. This essay discusses deployments of paradox against these necropolitical binaries by Lukas Avendaño, a Binni Zaa (Zapotec) and muxe (nonbinary gender) artist and anthropologist, and Muxx Project, an artistic collective founded in 2020 by Avendaño and multimedia artists EYIBRA, Óldo Erréve, and Nnux. The essay’s “dialogical body” traces Avendaño and Muxx Project’s understandings of how their body-based and digital performances attempt to disrupt gender binarism and digital dualism, to then focus on Avendaño’s paradoxical view of life and death forged through artistic practice, and, most importantly, his experience as an activist confronting the complexities of necropower in contemporary Mexican politics. Following Avendaño’s theorization of the ouroboros as an embodiment of life’s paradoxical entanglement with death and the artist’s prioritization of action over theory, the essay concludes by reflecting on the potential of an ouroboric, or para-paradoxical, ontopolitics that might undo emergent necropolitical dichotomizations, such as that between the digital and the virtual, as they occur, potentially laying the ground for living, and dying, outside and beyond the binaries that undergird a violent world.

ABSTRACT Girls in South African young adult (YA) fiction typically represent a heteropatriarchal, sexually passive model of femininity that allows for neither sexual autonomy nor sexual desire. This article examines six prominent South African YA novels that are unusual in that the sexual desires of their teenage heroines play an important role in shaping plot or character: S. A. Partridge’s Dark Poppy’s Demise (2011); Adeline Radloff’s Sidekick (2010); Sonwabiso Ngcowa’s In Search of Happiness (2014); and Lily Herne’s Mall Rats series of three books. The study finds that even in these rare examples of South African texts that treat girls’ desires as significant, desire mostly remains ambivalent or is treated evasively, while violence, by contrast, is embedded in each novel’s social context and routinely described at length, in explicit detail. South African girls live in a violent world, but the article argues that reducing their lives to a single violent dimension only perpetuates that violence. And in correlating girls’ desire indissociably with violence, these texts normalize the violent punishment of girls whose femininity is not sexually passive.

This research paper examines strength and resistance in female characters in Anthony Doerr’s ‘All the Light We Cannot See’. This study reveals the themes of women’s independence and perseverance as depicted in the novel through a feminist lens. It focuses on the lives of female characters such as Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Madame Manec, as well as their agency and ability to recover from misfortune in a patriarchal and violent world. This study examines the experiences of female characters such as Marie-Laure LeBlanc and Madame Manec in order to highlight the different ways in which women challenge gender norms and assert their power as they are portrayed in the book. It does this by analyzing their behaviors, relationships, and social roles. The study inspects how individuals behave, interact with others, and play social roles to show how they challenge gender stereotypes and demand agency in a patriarchal and war-torn society. Additionally, the study underscores the complex effects of war on women, demonstrating the fundamental ways in which hostilities upend their lives, shape their experiences, and put to the test their ability to persevere in the face of unfathomable adversity. The experiences of Marie-Laure and Madame Manec, among others, provide a poignant account of the effects of war on the women in the study, highlighting their fortitude, sacrifice, and suffering in the midst of chaos and destruction.

Representing the Virgin Mary holding the martyred body of her son, Jesus Christ, the Pietà is an iconic motif in Christian culture. By focusing on the representation of the mother’s pain in the face of her son’s exposure to violence and death, this iconography became popular beyond its religious sense, being continually revisited by artists to this day. This article discusses the representation of Pietà in the Portuguese painter Graça Morais’ work at different production stages from the beginning of the 1980s to the present day. The theme assumes countless formalizations in her work, concerning either traumatic individual experiences or the manifestation of her daily anxieties in the face of the dramas and hopes of the human being, within a violent world.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereinafter, Congo) is one of the most volatile countries in the world. In An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo, Rachel Marie Niehuus presents a compelling, disruptive and theoretically informed ethnography of healing, spotlighting presents and futures otherwise and rejecting the disposability of Congolese life in the context of dense global antiblackness which characterises Congo as an ‘enduring heart of darkness’ (page 10). Drawing on her background as a surgeon and anthropologist working in Congo for over a decade, her text explores the processes of wounding, scarring, healing and repairing in eastern Congo, amidst chronic war, displacement, corruption and poverty. Niehuus sets the scene by contextualising and historicising current social, political, economic and health challenges in eastern Congo and the profit-making humanitarian-industrial complex that has expanded its tentacles to fill the gaps created by state failure. Each chapter focuses on a register of healing and repair, anchored to the lives of ordinary Congolese folk whom she encounters and whose lived experiences are woven through the book as illuminating case studies. She draws on key ideas in Black critical studies literature such as Achille Mbembe, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Franz Fanon and others, and explores registers of healing that centre Black/Congolese epistemology to communicate a language of possibilities, archived in this book. Niehuus focuses on six areas through her chapters: Congolese land as a site of violence and displacement and renegotiation as a form of public healing; the constant insecurity which governs Congo and mutual affective attunement as a register of healing; the hospital as a site of socialisation of pain where visions of presents otherwise validate and affirm subjecthood; the healing potential of necropolitical violence which begets an emphasis on a future otherwise; Afrofuturism and performing arts creating a poetic register imagining that other futures beyond survival and pain are possible; and the radical nature of cohabiting with violence as a commitment to survive. Each chapter draws on lived experiences with vivid storytelling of registers of healing. The movement trajectories of her Congolese residence guard who is constantly fleeing the land is contrasted with a nurse-midwife friend who chooses to stay and farm her ancestral land as ‘to be Congolese is to have soil on your hands’ (34). Tales of heart-breaking maternity experiences, where labouring women say ‘Nifanka: I am dying’ (page 79) and are told to ‘close their heart’ (page 80) as bundles of stillbirth babies accumulate on the floor raise the question of whether hospitals harm or heal as suffering becomes survival. Violent phenomena of children who stop eating, youths who mock death and armed groups who commit brutal massacres are re-imagined as a rejection of the present and hope for a better future. Vibrant poetry festivals, space programmes and ecological entrepreneurship open ‘ways of seeing, speaking, being, creating otherwise’. Niehuus asks profound and difficult questions around identity, values, motivation, belonging and, fundamentally, whose life matters and what it means to be human and alive, with urgency and compassion. She highlights the extraordinary strength and resilience of the human spirit through the Congolese experience which finds healing and repair in a violent world committed to Black death with originality and authenticity, whilst remaining reflexive of her privileged position as a White researcher. Whilst attention to surgery and public health is surprisingly limited given the author's clinical background, Niehuus reflects on how the shift in her focus away from global surgery and burden of disease in the book to centre social and political action and registers of healing helped teach her the difference between health and healing by looking ‘beyond the physical body, towards the metaphysical wounds that antiblackness creates’ (page 153). This is a thought-provoking ethnography grounded in radical compassion and a concern for Black/Congolese aliveneness, with dynamic human stories of hope and survival that have the potential to profoundly transform not just conflict studies, researchers or humanitarians but also healthcare professionals and students in how they view the nexus of trauma, health and healing, and to appreciate its complex human and sociopolitical dimensions, which are often overlooked. The author has nothing to report.

In recent years, concerns have increased over the lack of contributor diversity in open source software (OSS), despite its status as a paragon of open collaboration. OSS is an important form of digital infrastructure and part of a career path for many developers. While there exists a growing body of literature on cisgender women's under-representation in OSS, the experiences of contributors from other marginalized groups are comparatively absent from the literature. Such is the case for trans contributors, a historically influential group in OSS. In this study, we interviewed 21 trans participants to understand and represent their experiences in the OSS literature. From their experiences, we theorize two related paradoxes of openness in OSS: the paradox of openness and display and the paradox of openness and governance. In an increasingly violent world for trans people, we draw on our theorizing to build recommendations for more inclusive and safer OSS projects for contributors.

Disciples and Friends: Investigations in Disability, Dementia, and Mental Health

DISCIPLES AND FRIENDS: Investigations in Disability, Dementia, and Mental Health by Armand Léon van Ommen and Brian R. Brock, eds. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2022. 330 pages. Hardcover; $59.99. ISBN: 9781481317009. *It has been almost fifty years since I started supporting individuals affected by intellectual and developmental disabilities, and I wish this edited book had been available at that time. While the focus of the different chapters in this book touches on subjects having to do with disability, dementia, and mental health, the real emphasis is on the practical theology of John Swinton, and the ways friendship in and through Jesus informs the "tension between reflection and action, and research and practice" (p. 56). *The book has an introduction and an afterword, and it is divided into four sections: (1) Practical Theology in a Swintonian Key, (2) Vulnerability Subverted, (3) Quests for Faithful Embodiment, and (4) Gently Living in a Violent World. According to the publisher's description of the book, it is directed toward "students and scholars of practical theology, disability theology, mental health, dementia and cognate fields" (https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481317009/disciples-and-friends/). While some of the language is almost inaccessible without a theological background, much of the writing is practical and applicable to those of us who see working for and with people affected by disability, dementia, and mental health as a vocation rather than as a career. *Readers will each have their favorite authors based on their own interests and passions. As a behavior support practitioner as well as a social work professor, I was most affected by the chapter written by Grant Macaskill, a theologian from the University of Aberdeen who identifies as autistic. He writes movingly about the autistic gain for the church when we radically empower the neurodiversity model to discontinue talking about normalcy as a goal and embrace the differences diversity brings within the rich tapestry of the body of Christ. In a similar way, Bill Gaventa's chapter, entitled "All God's Children Got a Place in the Choir" provides another view of the many members of the body whose differences make the body stronger by embracing Paul's vision of God's choice to use the "weak" to bring strength and the "foolish" to bring wisdom to the world the church ministers to (e.g., 1 Corinthians 1 & 2). In his chapter, he asks three questions that I wish I had been asking years ago: (1) Who am I? (2) Why am I? and (3) Whose am I? *I have spent some hours reflecting on these three questions, trying to move past the role definitions we so easily gravitate to. Finding the "why" of my existence, the purpose I have in life, is an equally deep question, and asking who I belong to within our kingdom relationships will hopefully help me find my place in God's choir. Reading this book will, I believe, prompt readers to ask the same questions I asked myself. Finding the "why" of our existence and the purpose of our lives are deep questions for all of us. In our Christian lives, finding out who we belong to will help us to find our place in God's choir with all the other critters. For some of us, the call is to be "disciples and friends" to persons with disabilities, dementia, and neurodiversity, and this book may bring that into focus for some readers. *The body of Christ is far more than the worship center of the Christian faith; it is the place where Jesus interacts with all the people Jesus came to minister to as recorded in Luke 14:13-23--"the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, the prisoners, the poor, the weak." According to the United Nations, the largest minority group in the world is people affected by various disabilities, accounting for approximately 650 million people out of a population of 7.88 billion people (https://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/toolaction/pwdfs.pdf). It is with and for these people that John Swinton's work seeks to create opportunities for friendships to develop amongst people who come together to experience the friendship of Jesus. Within these relationships we come to know the peace of Jesus, and as Medi Ann Volpe writes in one of the chapters, Jesus is our peace, Jesus makes our peace, and Jesus preaches our peace. The people I have known over the years whose differences were labeled and diagnosed have ministered the peace of Jesus to me in ways that are too deep for words. They have taught me what friendship is, and reading this book I have come to understand that John Swinton's life and teaching is devoted to cultivating friendship and creating communities in which there are no dividing walls--where all people in need of grace and redemption, love and forgiveness, healing and hope come together as one body with many members. *There are precious few things I would change about this book. I would make the last chapters in the section "Gently Living in a Violent World" the first chapters: I think they are much more inviting to readers, and from my perspective, they contain more information on how to live out this theology of friendship. *Overall, I would encourage all Christians whose lives intertwine with people on the margins of ability and disability to read this book and let it speak to their hearts and their minds. I am looking forward to being able to use this book both as a practitioner and a professor, and in these roles, I am thankful to have read about all the ways I can learn to be a deeper and better friend and human being. *Reviewed by Bob Bowen, Adjunct Professor of Social Work, Malone University, Canton, OH 44709.

This paper analyzes how the proposal of Education for Peace is insufficient to ensure that the world in which we live reaches the long-awaited era in which wars are not the way to solve global problems. The role played by hegemonic powers in the objective plane of existence is valued, fueling military conflicts in order to be able to dispute the resources of the world. Thus, it must be assumed they propose to the school to educate for peace in a world of violence, which will be a task overwhelmed by historical realities. According to the analyses developed in this work, education for peace must start by eliminating once and for all the poverty that overwhelms millions of human beings in the world. We cannot talk about peace in the name of the hunger and the impoverishment of millions of human beings, nor of the dispossession of resources from poor countries done by the most powerful ones.

Severely criticized almost unanimously at the time of its release, Francesco Nuti’s “OcchioPinocchio” (1994) represents a rare case of a “cursed” Italian film from the 1990s. It became notorious for its extremely costly and troubled production, whose release was delayed by a year, as well as for the massive flop that followed, so severe that it marked the decline of Nuti’s career and personal life, despite his previous success as a comedian and director. Twenty years after its release, perhaps it is time to reevaluate its worth, if not critically, then at least by scientifically identifying the prominent place it occupies within the myriad of cinematic adaptations of Collodi’s Pinocchio. Nuti’s film is indeed, not only in Italy but also in the international Pinocchio galaxy, the creator of an apocryphal Pinocchio: an adult yet somehow a child due to life’s circumstances, the son of a Geppetto who wants to make him a puppet, forced to flee through a land of toys that is the wildest and most inhospitable America, in love with a dark version of the fairy whom he ultimately helps. A disoriented Pinocchio made of flesh that must learn to discover itself, even timidly encountering sexuality, unable to lie and thus unsuitable for a world of deceitful adults (starting with his father); a Pinocchio thrown brutally into a world of violence, where he must fend for himself without help (no critique has dwelled on the fleeting yet essential moment when he crushes an insect with his shoe while uttering “Fuck you, cricket”, thereby affirming his solitude). Thus, “OcchioPinocchio” juggles various aspects of the Collodian discourse, both diegetically (up to the bad ending), and in terms of the physical and psychological construction of the character, who is hurled from Tuscany to the United States, embodying a specific form of Italian identity.

[Excerpt] This is the third issue of Child Studies, a scientific journal published since 2022 by the Research Centre on Child Studies (CIEC) of the Institute of Education at the University of Minho. Overall, the empirical and/or theoretical studies published by Child Studies aim at substantiate the interdisciplinary and the multidisciplinary dimensions, and reflect the research on children and childhood from a holistic perspective that CIEC researchers carry out in their daily work. The papers published by Child Studies focuses on children’s social contexts and practices, children’s health, the environment and physical education, childcare professionals, pedagogical resources and cultural productions for children, lines that also structure CIEC’s research.

This article attends to the intimate contradictions that differentially shape and limit caring capacities and relations in a violent world, and the embodied ethical and political transformations at the heart of learning to care otherwise. From manifestos calling for ‘universal care’ in defiance of the state-sanctioned horrors of the pandemic era, to the abolitionist politics of care developed by BLM organizers through movement building and healing, and the proliferation of mutual-aid infrastructures to meet needs and distribute resources in the face of overwhelming crisis and neglect—these examples and so many others illustrate with undeniable clarity that radical care is finally on the agenda. In what follows, I hope to contribute to this urgent conversation by pointing to how care is shaped in fundamentally contradictory ways under conditions of entrenched structural violence, and the limitations of normative frameworks when confronting this reality. To unambiguously valorize care in ethical and political life is to risk occluding the constitutive violence of existing social structures and norms, its impact on the intimacies of caring relations, and ultimately the ways that communities mobilize alternate economies and practices of care towards healing and social change. While it is crucial to value care and work for a more caring society, I claim that efforts to transform patterns of relational harm and develop new sensibilities should also be highlighted as integral components of radical caring praxis.

The Death of Alexander the Great Zak Salih (bio) When they pass Mr. Nestor’s house, Mike asks his parents to turn on WMMS. A boy again, at twenty-one, in the back-seat of his parents’ car, his own car in the front drive with its broken transmission, asking Mom and Dad to play some music. Through their cigarette smoke, he watches the morning release the Cleveland suburbs from sleep. Cars and buses flash silver on their way downtown. Trees lie wrecked on lawns after last week’s storm. A mackerel cat stalks a finch along the eaves of the corner store. Mike’s mother turns the radio on. “—of 271 American lives lost this week, a stark report that—” She quickly changes the station. “—remains had recently arrived in New York City for her funeral, barred to reporters and the public, who nevertheless lined up to pay respects to the woman they said could make even the most rock-hearted man cry.” “So sad,” his mother says. She blows smoke out into the morning and starts to whistle “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Dead soldiers. Dead film stars. No one, on this station or WMMS or any other, says a word about Alexander, as if the brief mention Mike caught on the television news last night, between a segment on his brother and other hometown war heroes and sick elephants at the Metroparks Zoo, had been a mixed signal from another state, another universe. An old woman out for a morning walk in Trumbull Park had found the body left like litter in the meadow. A body later identified as Alexander Rush. Mike said nothing when he heard the name. He sat on the sofa and sucked his cigarette dry and remembered Alexander’s advice. Never look sad. They won’t pay for a crybaby. [End Page 107] The police mentioned guns, gangs, heroin. Mike’s father, high on his oldest son’s celebrity, scoffed. A woman held shaking hands to her face, spoke of a son she felt she’d never known, and Mike tried to find Alexander in the gaps between her fingers. During the weather, the lotto numbers, Mike thought of the cautionary films from high school about what heroin did to a body. The bleary eyes, the needle marks like bug bites, the inexplicable rage and paranoia. But Alexander hadn’t been angry or suspicious. His arms had been clean of everything save the scattered moles Mike liked to count when he was too nervous to look into Alexander’s eyes. Alexander had no need for heroin in Trumbull Park. The other boys, maybe. But not Alexander. Breathing in the backdraft of his parents’ exhaust, Mike yearns for his own pack of cigarettes, which he’s forgotten at home, which he can see on the garish yellow felt of the armchair in his bedroom. Sure, he could bum one of his mother’s White Horses or his father’s Solents, but Alexander had exclusively smoked Rothmans, which means Mike exclusively smokes Rothmans. To do otherwise, especially this morning, would feel sacrilegious. Goddamn cigarettes on the goddamn chair, he thinks. His mother brought the ugly beast home last year from an estate sale. A chair for listening to your music, she had said. Mike had seen right through the gift, of course, all the way down to her desperate desire to keep him safe from the violent world to which she’d handed over George, now off flying his planes somewhere in Southeast Asia. It was broken, too, the chair. The springs had long lost their tension, the weak wood slats on its underside felt ready to snap. Still, the chair wasn’t without its use. One evening, when Alexander was a no-show at the school, Mike had come home to his room, turned up WMMS, and pulled the slats out of the chair, one by one, like rotten teeth. Here, under a stack of bath towels, he stored the shoebox that held the money he’d made, his mother’s gift an illicit bank for the illicit income he had hoped to one day present to Alexander like an offering before a king...

After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival