SEPTEMBER 2012

7(3) – 2012 special issue no.2

This year’s second special issue contains papers presented at the latest summer meeting of the Nordic Summer University’s (NSU) study group called “Conceptions of ethical and social values in post-secular society: Towards a new ethical imagination in a cosmopolitan world society”. An introduction to the study group, its regular meetings and the papers hereby collected is available inside the special issue of our journal.

We wish to thank the study group’s coordinator, Prof. Jacob Dahl Rendtorff of Roskilde University in Denmark, and all the contributors for their submissions to Nordicum-Mediterraneum. Also, we are pleased to highlight the truly Nordic-Mediterranean character of most papers, which are tokens of Nordic scholarship of contemporary French and Italian social theory and philosophy.

MARCH 2012

7(2) – 2012 special issue no.1

This year’s first special issue contains the papers presented at, or derived from, the latest winter meeting of the NSU study group called “Conceptions of ethical and social values in post-secular society: Towards a new ethical imagination in a cosmopolitan world society”. A detailed introduction to the meeting itself and the resulting papers is available in the actual special issue of our journal qua opening text, written by the group’s coordinator, Prof Jacob Dahl Rendtorff of Roskilde University in Denmark. We thank him and all contributors for their valuable submissions to our journal.

7(1) – 2012 regular issue

This year’s regular issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum opens with two new articles, which have passed the double blind peer-review process of selection for all article-level submissions to our journal. The former, by Floriana Ferro, offers a token of truly Nordic and Mediterranean scholarship, as it compares and discusses the notions of subjectivity and otherness in the philosophical theologies of Danish Søren Kierkegaard and French Emmanuel Levinas. The latter, by Birgir Guðmundsson and Markus Meckl, recalls and reconstructs from archival sources an interesting episode in modern Icelandic history, namely the case of an Icelandic Stasi “contact person” during the Cold War.

The present issue comprises also Peter Kemp’s keynote address at last year’s meeting of a new study group established under the aegis of a longtime partner of our journal, i.e. the Nordic Summer University (NSU). The new study group is called “Conceptions of ethical and social values in post-secular society: Towards a new ethical imagination in a cosmopolitan world society”. Its activities are to extend over a three-year period (2011-2013) and its aim is to study ethics in a cosmopolitan society from several scholarly perspectives, which include business ethics, sociology, history and economics. Nordicum-Mediterraneum is the main venue chosen in order to disseminate the results of such activities.

Furthermore, this issue contains an extensive assessment of recent books–fifteen reviews and one essay–which should be of interest to Nordic and Mediterranean scholars, researchers and academics. In particular, a few volumes were reviewed that relate directly to the journal’s tracking of the ongoing economic crisis, which has been engulfing most countries in the world, not least the European ones, especially though not exclusively in the southern part of the Continent, as the notorious financial meltdown of Iceland has exemplified in the recent past.

Finally, a longtime collaborator of our journal, Hungarian jurist Gabór Hamza, contributed two short pieces on private law and intellectual history, whilst former Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church, cardinal Jorge Mejía, provided us with his reflections on a visit to Iceland. We wish to thank both of them for their kind collaboration.