No abstract

What, if anything, can transnational advocacy networks (TANs) contribute to the democratization of public spheres outside Westphalian frameworks? On the one hand, TANs excel at turning international public campaigns into political influence – connecting people and power across borders. On the other hand, the increasingly policy‐orientated nature of TANs raises questions about their legitimacy in speaking on behalf of multiple publics. In this article, I suggest that a TAN's success in ensuring the political efficacy of public spheres, while at the same time undermining their normative legitimacy, reflects two sides of the same coin. This is a consequence of the recent internal professionalization of advocacy networks. Framing professionalization as a particular form of communicative distortion within TAN decision‐making, I suggest that networks should incorporate internal deliberative mechanisms, adapted from international social forums, to enhance the normative legitimacy of democratic public spheres.

Scholars charting the emergence of transnational public spheres often focus on the socio-spatial sites that are generated by Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in their interactions with the institutions of global governance. These sites can either reflect strong public spheres within the formal decision-making structures of international regimes, or segmented and general public spheres on their periphery. In practice, they all suffer key democratic deficiencies in either the ability to communicatively generate public opinion or achieve collective will-formation. I argue that if CSOs can successfully weave together both general and segmented public spheres on the periphery of international regimes, their individual democratic deficiencies could be addressed. To demonstrate evidence of these interconnected 'informal public spheres' I turn to the nuclear non-proliferation regime where public deliberation has been largely invisible and ineffectual within the formal decision-making structures of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The emergence of a new CSO-led 'humanitarian initiative' on the periphery of the regime comprising multi-stakeholder initiatives in conjunction with CSO social forums, reflects the interconnection of segmented and general public spheres. This innovative initiative has effectively enhanced transnational public debate on disarmament, whilst gaining crucial political traction within the regime.

This article examines the question of when the resurrection of the body begins. Matthew 27:51–53 testifies to the resurrection of bodies on Good Friday; and 2 Corinthians 5:1 speaks of those who die in Christ receiving a building/body from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Eternal life begins for Christians with baptism into Christ’s death; they become members of his Body, the Church. Through the presence of Christ’s Spirit, our bodies undergo a spiritual transformation up to the moment of death. Those who die in Christ pass from resurrected life in the physical body to the fullness of resurrected life at death in Christ’s spiritual body. Whether one is in the (physical) body and away from the Lord or with the Lord and away from the (physical) body, one remains in Christ.

Debate on the resurrection of Jesus tends to focus either on the likelihood of Jesus' body rising physically from the tomb or on the form in which it appears to the witnesses. The first part of this article provides a snapshot of recent literature on Jesus' resurrection. The second part argues that there is no coming to faith in Jesus as Lord and God without accepting the necessity and reality of his death. The resurrection appearances alone are insufficient.