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Purpose – This chapter sketches the major historical shifts in American circumcision discourse and examines the sociopolitics of those shifts.

Methodology/approach – The chapter centers on a critical analysis of competing narratives and knowledge claims about circumcision. It re-examines these narratives and claims, most of which are packaged in a rhetoric of health, specifically for their political valence.

Findings – The medical necessity of circumcision in the United States cannot be ascertained without attending to the disciplinary systems designed to produce and maintain religious, sexual and other cultural norms.

Contribution to the field – The chapter provides a clear and focused synthesis of many different literatures and contentions about circumcision that have yet to be brought together into a single narrative accessible for students and scholars of the medical humanities and medical politics.

There have been many challenges and uncertainties in determining the future direction(s) for performance measurement (PM) in Florida public libraries over the years. Social pressures for establishing increased accountability and community needs combined with the library administrators need to respond to these pressures served as the catalysts for the need to evolve PM processes in Florida public libraries.

This chapter applies science mapping analysis (SciMat) and literature review as research methods to examine literature about higher education institutions (HEIs) during the Covid-19 pandemic. User acceptance, satisfaction, and perception are identified as the most productive research themes in the sample of 561 Web of Science (WoS) indexed articles about HEIs during the pandemic. The literature review of the top themes reveals that user acceptance is influenced by the perceived usefulness of online learning and ease of using online tools. The level of satisfaction among students in online learning is relatively high and linked with the perceived benefits of online courses. Conditions influencing user acceptance and perceived satisfaction differ between students and lecturers. Technology-related themes appeared to be relatively under-researched as standalone themes, but technological aspects turned out to be important components of the most prolific research themes identified.

I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

The United States of America is on the verge of a possible revolution in civil-military relations in an era marked by increased defensive alertness stemming from the attacks of 11 September 2001. As we anticipate the normalization of terror as a way of life, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift from the use of violence towards some political end to the use of violence as an end in itself (Jenkins, 2001). 1 It is tempting to frame our analysis in terms of the broader notion of asymmetric warfare, since the arguments we make in this paper may be applied to a wide range of settings, including those in which vastly unequal forces are pitted against one another and one side may make use of irregular fighters employing unconventional tactics. However, this would serve only to shift the emphasis away from our central argument. Terrorism may be a form of asymmetric warfare, but what distinguishes it is the fact that it intentionally targets civilians, and that among civilians, it is indiscriminate in the devastation it wreaks. Terrorism is important because of the way in which it socializes danger, breaking down the barriers between combatant and noncombatant and subjecting all to the worst of harrowing and potentially lethal attacks. It is this socialization of danger produced by terrorism, in turn, that is critical in assessing whether and how civilian and military authorities elect to treat its use against their own societies not as a crime, but as an act of war. Bioterrorism in turn, as we argue below, has unique attributes that distinguish it from other forms of terrorism.1 And where, for most nations, homeland defense is the primary mission of the armed forces, the United States had to establish a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security due to the primarily expeditionary nature of American armed forces for the past half-century. The military has been a unique institution in modern societies. It has acted as the agent for the state’s possession of a monopoly on the means of large-scale organized violence and war-making. The establishment of a second executive agency responsible for homeland security makes the equation more complex. As a result, ever greater attention must be given to the balance of civil-military relations in American society.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the alarming spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) began to shock the world on 31 December 2019, and it was first detected in Wuhan, Hubei, in China when a patient presented with pneumonia. To date, the virus has recorded over 2,088,663 cases worldwide. The impact of COVID-19 would be precisely worrying as it aggravated not only tourism but also the learning behaviour of tourism students. What are the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the learning behaviour of tourism students? What lessons could be learned to make it more sustainable for the students? And finally, what would be the suggested resilient strategies for the tourism students in the post-pandemic era? There is no original study conducted to focalise investigation on revealing the negative characteristics of COVID-19 and the learning curve of university students in Malaysia. However, the main objectives of this chapter are to provide an overview of the effects of COVID-19 in the learning behaviour of tourism students for sustainable education and the factors that distress students' minds and how these helped students to share the positive aspects with others. It is gradually visible that the effects of COVID-19 on learning behaviour and dangers to university students in Malaysia and their significance on students' emotional change or learning behaviours are not well perceived. This chapter recommends that educational institutions produce studies to proliferate and document the pandemic's impact on the educational system. It is crucial for tourism students for sustainable education in the current time.