The COVID-19 pandemic, and pandemics in general, affect socioeconomically disadvantaged people more severely. This is due not only to their precarious living, health, and working conditions, but also to public actions and omissions. However, their plight remains mostly invisible to the public, governments, and legislators, which raises many questions regarding respect of their fundamental rights. In this contribution, I explore these questions in light of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). On the basis of the corpus of literature in the field and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law, I show that the Strasbourg Court has developed some protection for people in a precarious situation, especially under the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment and the right to private and family life. This case law is likely to be relevant to the protection of socioeconomically underprivileged people during pandemics. However, this protection is limited and imbued with pitfalls. Against this background, I show that there is an urgent need for practitioners and courts to explore an additional tool under the ECHR: the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of socioeconomic status. This tool can be used to tackle issues of misrecognition which particularly affect socioeconomically underprivileged people, who are more severely affected by public actions and omissions in the context of the current pandemic.

Recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of research papers and books seeking to assess threats of electoral victories of anti-establishment politicians and political parties, described as authoritarian populists. This essay focuses on three books directly addressing the origins and threats of authoritarian populism to democracy. It consists of six sections and the conclusion. The first section presents findings (Norris and Inglehart) based on surveys of values of voters of various age cohorts concluding that authoritarian populism is a temporary backlash provoked by the post-materialist perspective. The second section examines the contention, spelled out in Levitsky and Ziblatt, that increase in openness of American political system produced, unintentionally, a degradation of the American political system. The third section continues brief presentations focusing on to the causes and implications of “illiberal democracy,” and “undemocratic liberalism” (Mounk). The fourth section examines developments in the quality of democracy in the world showing that despite the decline in Democracy Indices, overall there was no slide towards non-democratic forms of government in 2006–2019. The next two sections deal with dimensions missing in reviewed books; the notion of nation-state, international environment, civic culture and, in particular, dangers of radical egalitarianism to democracy. The last section concludes with regrets that the authors ignored rich literature on fragility of democracy and failed to incorporate in their analyses deeper structural factors eroding democracy: by the same token, return to the pre-populist shock trajectory is unlikely to assure survival of liberal democracy.

In 2020, in Poland, a national commemoration of two eminent religious philosophers was celebrated: it was dedicated to the memory of Friar J.M. Bocheński O.P. and Pope St. John Paul II. In the paper, I recapitulate fundamental ideas of The Logic of Religion (1965) by the former author and sum up the key issues of the doctoral thesis The Doctrine of Faith in St. John of the Cross (1948) by the latter. I also mention St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Ascent (1870), because in Polish translation this book is entitled A Logic of Faith. In order to compare those heterogeneous conceptions of religious faith I reach out to logical semiotics, and using its tools I try to find a symbolic meaning of religious speech that could be accepted equally by religious thinkers and by non‑believers. I propose to understand religious speech as having not only literal sense, and not only a metaphysical meaning, but also, as I claim, the power to activate values that guide human behavior. I hope this is a conciliatory proposition because it places semiotics on a neutral footing among religious dogmas. In this perspective, mysticism can be described as a pragmatic aspect of language that emerges when a user refers to a transcendent reality.