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The article defines the notion of infectious risk and examines the objectified dimensions of risk and the inequalities of exposure at global and local levels, then the subjective and socialized dimensions of risk through its representations and stigmatization, and focuses on its control in public health.

This study seeks to give a reason, in the light of the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, for the words of St James which are at first sight disconcerting: "The demons believe and tremble" (Jm 2:19). We will seek to understand why St Thomas refuses to allow for the supernatural character of this faith and fear, before we take a look to see if such movements exist analogously in human beings. We will be led throughout the reflexion to consider the effects, on the level of nature, of miracles and other signs given by God, and question ourselves on what nature (angelic and human) can do without grace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to give a reason, in the light of the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, for the words of St James which are at first sight disconcerting: "The demons believe and tremble" (Jm 2:19). We will seek to understand why St Thomas refuses to allow for the supernatural character of this faith and fear, before we take a look to see if such movements exist analogously in human beings. We will be led throughout the reflexion to consider the effects, on the level of nature, of miracles and other signs given by God, and question ourselves on what nature (angelic and human) can do without grace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cohort of the Balzacians is enormous and worth admiring. If only we tried to evoke here the names of all those who left us valuable judgments about Balzac and religion in his work, or about Balzac and social life, or about his vision of money (l'argent dans l'oeuvre de Balzac), then we would be privileged to have an iconic lexicographic source. The cohort of those, who continue to decode the "miracle" of Balzac, is renovating and growing year by year. It seems that no writer, in the last 400 years (except W. Shakespeare), has enjoyed so much scientific attention and curiosity. Balzac's creation, like the pyramids in Egypt, fascinates and compels us to conduct new philological investigations in order to decipher his greatness. It is a real fact, which can be explained quite objectively: Balzac is a universe, a planet, Himself, being considered a universe in the universe, a world, because he is the world. We are at the beginning of another age. 220 years from the birth of a genius have become history. But this story is alive, contemporary and always vibrating, because everything Balzac discovered in his monumental work La Comédie Humaine, remains undoubtedly important today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Nahua villages of the region of the High Mountains (in the centre of the state of Veracruz), a form of customary Catholicism and a scheme of social organisation which integrated the civic and the religious in a single symbolic universe predominated until the 1980s. If one could then already observe the presence of certain evangelical churches in some districts, the phenomenon of religious differentiation became increasingly visible in the 1990s in a context of crisis in relation to land, increasing social asymmetry and an intensification of transnational migrant fluxes. Based on a case study, this article illustrates the expansion of evangelical organisations, in particular Pentecostal ones, within the context of a redefinition of interethnic dynamics. The aim is to analyse the capacity of these organisations to provide new paths to autonomy and dissidence in the face of traditional cultural and political structures, and to show how they took part in the production of new forms of socialisation that promoted access to exogenous networks and a redefinition of one's relation to the ethnic space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural and religious phenomena of the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard, associated with the Parisian Jansenism, raises questions concerning the testimonial discourses and its procedures of validation and accreditation within the context of the Eighteenth Century in France. This essay explores the aesthetic and rhetoric strategies of the La Vérité des miracles, edited by Carré de Montgeron (1737). Its aim is to show how fictional procedures linked with poetics of horror and obscenity must be considerate as a part of a whole strategy of accessibility and popularization of the testimonial religious discourse. It highlights the complexity of the links between processes of writing testimony discourses and cultural changes concerning genders, sexuality, science and knowledge within the French society of this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pentecostalism placed miracles at the centre of its theology as a key element of its evangelization activities. Catholicism, on the other hand, has always tried to control all declarations of divine demonstrations. Miraculous appearances and recoveries have been more and more systematically subjected to slow and rigorous procedures of verification. The Pentecostals see God as an external force which manifests itself on earth to drive out the evil which invades it. All believers have the right to be free from evil, and nobody should have to accept pain meekly. But the Catholic pilgrims we studied do not share these Pentecostal convictions. God acts from inside, not by delivering them but by supporting them in their daily tests. Physical recovery is rare and not very sought after so it takes second place to spiritual recovery which is accessible to everyone. It seems to us that these two types of representation place believers in very divergent frames of mind giving rise, in one group or the other, to hopes that correspond to the group's capacity to produce miracles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

L'auteur soutient que le paradigme de la guérison divine qui triomphe au sein de la société congolaise de Brazzaville dans les années 1980 a été largement encouragé par l'imaginaire du régime du parti unique, son culte charismatique des hommes forts, ses rapports ambivalents avec les choses religieuses et les pratiques fétichistes et, surtout, son ethos de la persécution et de la lutte contre la sorcellerie. Les 'structures de causalité' du malheur, les schèmes de la guérison divine et les dispositifs de la confession et de l'investigation travaillent tout le champ du pouvoir politique, thérapeutique et religieux, et facilitent l'irruption des prophètes et des pasteurs anti-sorciers dans l'arène des conflits ethno-nationaux. La violence prophétique se nourrit également de la puissance subversive du fétichisme du corps-sexe féminin, confirmant par l&agrave même le lien fort qui existe entre les affaires du corps et les affaires politiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]