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The modern world is often described as highly secularized. This secularization can distort our view of the past, and also of societies in which secularization holds less sway than in other places. In this essay, I examine Confucianism and Dharmaśāstra as two paradigms for the study of pre-secular or non-secular societies, comparing and contrasting Confucian and Hindu societies while comparing and contrasting both with the current, "secular age".Is death larger than life and does it annihilate life altogether? This is the basic question discussed in this essay, within a philosophical/existential context. The central argument is that the concept of death is problematic and, following Levinas, the author holds that death cannot lead to nothingness. This accords with the teaching of all religious traditions, which hold that there is life beyond death, and Plato's and Aristotle's theories about the immortality of the soul. In modernity, since the Enlightenment, God and religion have been placed in the margin or rejected in rational discourse. Consequently, the anthropocentric promethean view of man has been stressed and the reality of the limits placed on humans by death deemphasised or ignored. Yet, death remains at the centre of nature and human life, and its reality and threat become evident in the spread of a single virus. So, death always remains a mystery, relating to life and morality.This article explores contagion alongside and in relation to its ever-attendant metaphors, examining Heinrich von Kleist's short story "The Foundling", and finding here a particularly revealing concatenation of ideas of human contact, trade and infection.This essay is an exercise in what might be called Metaphysical Sociology. It suggests that in the secular modern Western world immortality has become the great question mark. It explores possible responses, drawing on a range of fictional examples, including the novel and film Gone with the Wind and Nicolas Poussin's painting of The Last Supper. It draws a contrast between vitality and ego, on the one hand, and soul, on the other.Upwards of 70% of the Covid19 death toll in Sweden has been people in elderly care services (as of mid-May 2020). We summarize the Covid19 tragedy in elderly care in Sweden, particularly in the City of Stockholm. We explain the institutional structure of elderly care administration and service provision. Those who died of Covid19 in Stockholm's nursing homes had a life-remaining median somewhere in the range of 5 to 9 months. Having contextualized the Covid19 problem in City of Stockholm, we present an interview of Barbro Karlsson, who works at the administrative heart of the Stockholm elderly care system. Her institutional knowledge and sentiment offer great insight into the concrete problems and challenges. There are really two sides to the elderly care Covid19 challenge The vulnerability and frailty of those in nursing homes and the problem of nosocomial infection-that is, infection caused by contact with others involved in the elderly care experience. The problem calls for targeted solutions by those close to the vulnerable individuals.Social distance has been a topic of interest in sociology for more than a century before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas in the past it referred to the distance between groups in more recent times it signifies the space between individuals. The aspiration for safe space and personal boundaries in recent years indicated that social distancing has acquired an increasingly individuated and privatised form. This article suggests that the demand for safe space can be interpreted as a demand for a quarantine from psychic threats. This pre-existing demand for a quarantine from criticism and pressure has seamlessly meshed with the imperative of social distancing in the COVID-19 era.Present-day mass tourism uncannily resembles an auto-immune disease. Yet, self-destructive as it may be, it is also self-regenerating, changing its appearance and purpose. They are two modes that stand in contrast to each other. We can see them as opposites that delimit a conceptual dimension ordering varieties of present-day mass tourism. The first pole calls forth tourism as a force leaving ruin and destruction in its wake or at best a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, the other sees tourism as a force endlessly resuscitating and re-inventing itself. This paper article highlights both sides of the story. These times of the Covid-19 pandemic, with large swathes of public life emptied by social lock-down, remind us of a second, cross-cutting conceptual dimension, ranging from public space brimming with human life to its post-apocalyptic opposite eerily empty and silent. buy Vardenafil The final part of my argument will touch on imagined evocations of precisely such dystopian landscapes.As in much of the world, the Coronovirus pandemic has dominated South Korean politics in 2020. Compared to other countries, Seoul's approach has been highly nationalist and politicized, as the ruling party lauded its pandemic response as the global standard and linked it to a larger, leftist-nationalist agenda. This "pandemic-leftist" discourse peaked around the April 15 midterm elections, but subsided the following month, as domestic and foreign setbacks arose. To explain, firstly, a competitive-nationalist race to flatten the infection curve encouraged the government to infringe on the civil liberties of infected patients, and society to stigmatize them. Other countries contained Covid-19 without such rights violations and stigma. Secondly, critics distinguished between the government's relative success in pandemic response and its general failures in economic and foreign policies. Instead of asking other countries to learn from one's country, each country would do well to learn from the experiences of others and to continually improve its own policies.Family has resurfaced in many ways as its contemporary face has changed, often challenging the transmission of Jewry in traditional ways. Gender fluidity and equality had nearly camouflaged the contribution of gender to the transmission of Jewry for a majority of the American Jewish population, at least. But revelations of persisting and underlying gendered patterns beyond the family have alerted us to its particular dynamic, which itself has multiple implications for family as well as institutional life. In this address, we will discuss the changes that are occurring and their implications, as well as research implications, drawing on previous research and approaches that the Sklare awardee has taken and is taking.