The pandemic’s recessive effect on the global economy created a ‘de-globalized’ process that detrimentally causes financial turmoil to countries whose economy depends on tourism, urban passenger transport services and civil aviation, among others. The need to help the most vulnerable industries non-resilient to the pandemic reopen to aid economic recovery amid the pandemic’s threat is a very urgent concern. With the move to start the vaccination program against the threat of Covid-19, faking Covid-19 diagnostic testing certification pose a severe problem to matters of ethics and economics. If not taken seriously, falsifying documents that certify a person who has undergone Covid-19 vaccination could also happen. This paper argues that everyone’s collective effort could be the real embodiment of hope toward a new normal world immune from the virus and malpractices.

In a world where everything seems to be measured in reference to money and economic progress, the problem of poverty becomes an increasingly urgent concern. The experience of poverty is even becoming problematic when the world seemed to be unprepared for times of pandemic. COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the suffering of the poor more than just a health risk, especially in the Philippine setting. In such a situation, people wonder, where is the church? Most critics of the Catholic Church in the Philippines utilized the social media platform in crying out their denunciation to Catholic Church leaders. It is in this context that the paper explores the 'Liberation Theology' of Gustavo Gutiérrez in relation to the Catholic Church's Social Teaching, whether the experience of poverty and crisis is part of the socio-spiritual responsibility of the church. To do this, the paper utilized the exploratory method of textual analysis. Through examining the text of extant literature on Gustavo Gutiérrez's Liberation Theology and the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church, the paper constructed a holistic understanding of "Preferential Option for the Poor." The arguments presented in this paper could serve as the basis for current praxis of the different catholic congregations in the Philippines in mitigating the experience of crisis among Filipino poor amid COVID-19 pandemic.

It has been a matter of public knowledge that physical and mental health are intertwining concerns. With a high association between the individuals’ experience of the novel Corona Virus Disease in 2019 (COVID-19) and their psychological distress, mental health experts recognized mental health as a coterminous public health concern with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this journal, a systematic review study pointed out that mental health is the most affected issue concerning implementing governments worldwide adopted policies like staying at home, social distancing and ‘lockdown’ measures. However, we argue that these containment measures could be non-detrimental to mental health when one transforms his or her experience of anxious loneliness into an avenue of practicing meditation as a strategy of mental health self-care.

With the recent claim that the maintenance of population immunity will not depend on continued vaccinations but on the endemic presence of the virus, the proper understanding of the value of public health allows us to configure human living conditions as it thrives in a world where the novel Corona Virus Disease in 2019 (Covid-19) becomes endemic. World leaders and economic managers need to redefine public health not just as a means that enables economic productivity but as a substantially primordial goal—an end that every functional society must achieve via living an economically sustainable lifestyle. This paper argues that economic and societal sustainability thus must be framed and delimited within the human ecological boundary—a crucial viewpoint that could sustain public health amid a Covid-19 endemic world while preventing another viral pandemic from occurring.

The film Bicentennial Man (1999) pictured in a nutshell a robot who/that became human via his personality by plunging into the realities of freedom and death. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the notion of personality in the case of what this paper coins as a ‘robot-incarnate’ with the name Andrew, the first man who lived for two hundred years from his inception as an artificial machine. The method of exposition proceeds from (1) utilizing a philosophical reflection on the film concerning the determinacy of Andrew as a person and (2) then anchoring his case as a subject for the understanding of machine ethics. Regarding the first, the paper focuses on the questions of personality, death, and freedom. Regarding the second, the paper exposes the discussions of machine ethics and the issue of moral agency. Deducing from the already existing literature on the matter, the paper concludes that machine ethics must stand as the principle that serves as law and limitation to any scientific machine advancement showing promising potentials.