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A review essay covering a book by Paul Apostolidis, Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy (2010).

This essay discusses the genesis of Arendt's concept of natality, & the reasons that led her to claim natality as a fundamental concept of political thought. The essay argues against the widespread thesis that Arendt took her idea of natality from Heidegger's existential analysis of human life. It argues, instead, that Arendt's account of natality should be situated within the discourse of bio-politics, & that it is based on a conception of life that is anti-Heideggerian. Arendt's political thought is a species of bio-politics that counters totalitarianism on its own terrain, namely, by identifying what in life poses a resistance to the totalitarian project of attaining total domination over life. References. Adapted from the source document.

How can feminist moral philosophy redeem the present? In this article I present the idea of a moral imaginary as the habitus of our ethical attitudes and actions, and argue that the moral imaginary of the West is preoccupied with gendered violence and death. I use a psychotherapeutic model of change through analysis and suggestion, and a Foucauldian account of the history of the present, to present the beginnings of an imaginary of natality centred in a symbolic of flourishing as a resource for discursive and material transformation.

Every life has a beginning and an end. Natality and mortality are both profound existential fundaments of life that may lead us to question meaning in life as well as to find meaning. In spiritual care, the focus is often on mortality as a source of existential suffering, and on ways to deal with such suffering according to worldview traditions. In humanist traditions, mortality is not only seen as an existential threat but also as an existential given that people need to embrace to find meaning in life. Natality has received much less attention, both in spiritual care and in humanist thought. In this article, we build on philosophical ideas of Arendt and Butler to explore the significance of natality for a humanist perspective on meaning in life and spiritual care. We argue that taking natality into account results in a relational understanding of humanist spiritual care in which the notion of "relational transcendence" is a central element. Natality also means that we can initiate, create, and act in the world, which highlights the political dimension of humanist spiritual care. We reflect on the implications of natality and relational transcendence for humanist spirituality and chaplaincy and formulate some concrete building blocks for working from this perspective.

SummarySeasonal variation in human natality is examined over a period of several decades for an isolated Inuit settlement in the central Canadian Arctic. The results substantiate earlier reports of the existence of a birth season in the first half of the year. The 2-decade period coinciding with the gradual concentration of the regional population into the settlement experienced a temporary disruption of this traditional rhythmic pattern. Family planning has been introduced in the modern period, yet birth seasonality is even more pronounced than during previous decades. Both planned and unplanned births occur predominantly in the first half of the year, indicating the paramount importance of behavioural and social responses to extreme seasonal variation.