This essay examines the sermons of St. Augustine (mainly nos. 184–96, ranging in date from 391 to 420) where he preaches on the nature as well as the effects of Christ’s birth. Augustine relates this revolutionary event to the festivities of January 1 as well as to the Solemnity of the Epiphany. As argued herein, Augustine’s homilies for each of these celebrations (1) stress how they fall and relate to the rest of the liturgical year, (2) focus on how the lowliness of God’s birth achieves humanity’s salvation, and (3) highlight Mary’s role in uniting heaven and earth.

The story in Genesis 38 about the salvation of the line of Judah by Tamar inspires the Widow and the Unjust Judge parable. The widow in the parable evokes the oppression experienced by the widow Tamar, who was the victim of Judah’s failure as head of family to implement the levirate duty to reestablish her dead husband’s estate. The Pharisee and the Tax Collector parable depicts a Pharisee extolling his own virtue who would not be “acquitted of his sins,” and a tax collector who berates himself for his sinfulness who would “be exalted.” In the background is Judah’s acknowledgment that Tamar had been more righteous than he because he had not compelled his son Shelah to fulfill the levirate requirement, a neglect that, in turn, prompted her to prostitute herself with Judah to attain a much desired child.

Chapter 6 sets out in detail Paul Tillich’s formulation of the doctrine of salvation. Particular focus is placed upon Tillich’s existentialist framing of fallenness and his understanding of personal salvation as a transformation from Old Being to New Being.

The aims and scope of ’Salvation in the Block Universe’ are set out.

Chapter 7 contains Qureshi-Hurst’s articulation of the problem of salvation in the block universe and explores in detail her original solution. She argues that salvation is best understood as a subjective transformation.

The main arguments are summarised, and Qureshi-Hurst looks ahead to promising areas of future scholarship.

Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.

While we call programs that are new and exciting ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), the ultimate goal – to produce an artificial general intelligence that can equal to human intelligence – always seems to be in the future. AI can, thus, be viewed as a millenarian project. Groups predicting the second coming of Christ or some other form of salvation have flourished in times of societal stress, as they promise a solution to current problems that is delivered from outside. Today, we project both our hopes and our fears onto AI. Utopian visions range from the personally soteriological prospect of uploading our brains to a vision of a world in which AI has found solutions to our problems. Dystopian scenarios involve the creation of a superintelligent AI that slips from our control or is used as a weapon by malicious actors. Will AI save us or destroy us? Probably neither, but as we shape the trajectory of its future, we also shape our own.

We saw at the outset of the book that Thomas Aquinas considers reason a preamble to faith. But to faith in what? Human life is triply haunted, by the specter of absurdity, by the burden of brokenness and guilt, and by the dread of mortality and incompleteness. Can there be meaning, can there be healing and forgiveness, can we be everlastingly fulfilled? According to St. Thomas, the answers to these three questions are provided in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who bore our sins and opened the path to the Father. This scandalizes us because if the Gospel is true, then the facile and comforting proposal of “many roads to heaven” is false. It scandalizes us even more because it asks something of us. And so the Treatise on the One God is not the end of our investigation, but the beginning.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

The connections between senses and morality are located in politics, religion, music, food, and other practices and metaphors of consumption. Such associations point to desired or positive values that are demonstrated through particular sensory behaviour. These together form social structures that reflect propriety and moral decorum. The governance of good behaviour and subscription to moral codes similarly extend to the metaphysical world of spirits through a variety of corporeal and cognitive modalities. Building upon the phenomenological anthropology of morality, I show how the senses serve as intermediaries of moral binaries. Cases are drawn from myths, legends, folktales, poetry, and ethnographies. Overall, varying sociocultural associations of the different senses with morality, virtue, and disposition present a type of sensory attunement to apprehend moral economies and social structures. I argue that sensory moral economies are, in effect, the product of specific sensory action. Social actors are expected to perform particular ways of being that actualise alignment with ideal, righteous states or dispositions mediated through the senses. The outcome of such sense acts is a combination of immaterial interests and moral sentiments. As sociocultural arbiters, the senses bring to light the moral organisation of society.

The conclusion reemphasizes some of the main points of the book: that sectarian identities are not fixed, but remain fluid and adaptable to different situations. As such, they present grand narratives that human beings can emplot themselves within, and orient themselves accordingly. The chapter also notes how sect and school narratives seem to encompass notions of salvation. Similarly, human beings might adapt and develop the grand narratives to fit their own situations, thereby contributing to the history and accumulating tradition of any given sect or school. The medieval figure of al-Ghazālī is given as an example of such a reformer.