This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

This chapter draws on original data on church activism in defense of democracy to test various theories of why churches engage in democratic activism. It demonstrates that churches with more involvement in providing education are more likely to speak out in defense of liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, independent of country-level or denominational trends. In contrast, the data provide limited support for alternative explanations.

This chapter explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to forgoing the introduction of regulations that increase state control over church activities. In particular, churches have greater autocratic risk when they have historically invested in activities, such as church schools, that the state has high capacity to regulate. As a result, churches with significant education systems have greater incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate.

This chapter provides a historical overview of church–state relations and church education provision in sub-Saharan Africa. It also demonstrates that churches have not had partisan coalition partners with closely aligned interests in this context, necessitating alternative approaches to ensuring political representation of their interests.

This chapter discusses the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests, and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to churches beyond Africa. It concludes by explaining how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.

This chapter demonstrates that churches have often engaged in activism for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, and yet existing scholarship provides little guidance in explaining why churches sometimes engage in this type of activism while others do not. It sketches out an argument for why some churches have an interest in liberal democratic institutions because they protect them from rulers unilaterally introducing regulations that reduce their control of key church activities. It argues that church schools have particular risk of regulation by rulers, giving churches that run greater number of schools particular incentives to support liberal democratic institutions. It also argues that this risk is mitigated when churches are highly dependent on the state for financing activities.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

The courts of universal emperors presided over the spread of cosmopolitan elite cultures, literary, artistic and conspicuous. The Indologist Sheldon Pollock has studied this phenomenon for classical Sanskrit, but his vision of cosmopolitan and classical language cultures can easily be extended across Afro-Eurasia to comprise Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian and Classical Chinese, among others. Starting from the Alexander Romance and the image of Orpheus, the chapter explores how Greco-Roman literary culture created an elite language cosmopolis, much as the other examples mentioned here. Rather than studying Greek and Latin, as is often done, as the precursor of the modern Romance and national languages, it is rather in this context of imperial civilizational cosmopoleis that they should be analyzed. Themes include the formation of classical canons and elite distinction, the size of literary cultures based on manuscript rather than the printing press, and the development of transcendental and monotheist forms of religious belief such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam.

Chapter 2 offers a case study centered on the island of Hachijō, where life with the current gave rise to unique economic practices and social organization. It centers on the seasonal rhythm of castaway arrivals and repatriation that, by the mid-eighteenth century, had become an important branch of the local economy. Numbers of castaways were significant because sailors used winds and the eastward current to propel their voyage, even though their crafts were unfit for offshore sailing. In the peak year of 1850 alone, 300 sailors arrived on twenty-seven vessels from western Japan. Historical arrivals of foreign castaways and flotsam have created a virtual geography and local identity that connected the remote island to India, whence the “river” Kuroshio was believed to flow, and China, whence the current was believed to have brought important cultural achievements.

This chapter, the first of two devoted to Julian’s Against the Galileans, begins by mapping the narrative structure of Julian’s text. It then traces Julian’s first major step in re-narrating the Christian tradition: casting the ancient Hebrew tradition as existing harmoniously within the broad contours of the Hellenic tradition. Focusing on Moses’s teachings about the creation of the cosmos and about its governance by a hierarchy of gods, Julian shows that the Hebrew tradition, though not terribly impressive, has teachings compatible with Julian’s Hellenic tradition

This second chapter on Julian’s Against the Galileans traces the second movement of Julian’s strategy of narrative subsumption: charting the apostasies that cascaded from, first, the Hellenic and, then, the Hebrew traditions, culminating in the Christian sect. Having pointed out the basic compatibility between Hebrew and Hellenic doctrine, Julian emphasizes next the most significant difference between the two: the glaring inferiority of the Hebrew to the Hellenic tradition. This basic framework makes sense of Julian’s claim that Christians are double apostates: Christians started out as Hellenes, and their first mistake was of degree rather than kind: they opted for the lesser Hebrew tradition, rather than the Hellenic one. They latched onto a deviation within the Hebrew tradition, however, which became the grounds for their second apostasy, now away from the Hebrews, to create a new sect.

This chapter draws the attention to systems of thought other than international law and that are similarly articulated around a postulation of the necessary presence of some content or substance deemed to be hidden in some way (what is called here the necessity of secret content) and/or the necessary performance of an act of revelation of some content or substance previously unknown (what is called here the necessity of revelation). The attention is drawn on the epistemologies of the secrets at work in Greek logocentric thought, in the Christian governance of the mind, in modern thought, in the idea of critique inherited from modern thought, in bourgeois literature, in Freudian psychoanalysis, in structuralist thought, and in poststructuralist thought.

Jerusalem is at once a place in the world, a historic city in the Holy Land, and an image, an idea, a symbol. Jerusalem’s multiple facets are present in the biblical accounts of the city. Perhaps more than any other place or space on the planet, Jerusalem has been represented in writing and culture, at least since the biblical period. Encounters with the earthly Jerusalem and attempts to apprehend the heavenly Jerusalem are a mainstay of the western Christian tradition of travel writing, as well as of Jewish and Muslim literary and devotional traditions. In this essay I alight on some of key representations of Jerusalem but make no claim to completeness. Rather, in this essay I focus on Jerusalem’s status within the medieval Christian tradition of place pilgrimage, especially with regard to the dominant role Jerusalem has played in global geography, popular pilgrimage, and mnemonic retention.

This chapter focuses on the companion volumes Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration to explore the ways Michael Field’s poetry changed following Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s 1907 conversion to Roman Catholicism. This chapter reviews prior scholarship on Field’s devotional poetry, which has often emphasised the continuity between Field’s pre- and post- conversion work. The chapter builds on this scholarship by arguing that Field’s devotional poetry, informed by their newfound faith, explores new ways of thinking about time, suffering, and the purpose of art. Furthermore, this chapter explores the significance of studying Victorian devotional and religious verse, and the ways women and queer people were able to use the genre to engage with and build upon theological concepts, outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority.

This chapter surveys a range of engagements with religion in the modernist theatre, from T. S. Eliot’s vision for a new Christian drama to Bertolt Brecht’s fascination with the Bible, and from Sylvia Wynter’s staging of Afro-diasporic ritual practices to Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatisation of Buddhist legend. Such works, this chapter shows, tend to favour syncretic and heterodox expressions of religious subjects, frequently drawing together multiple doctrinal or ritual traditions within a single performance. These modern dramas of religion are examined across four sections: ‘Modernist Iconoclasms’, on dramatists who sought to dismantle religion’s influence; ‘Temples of a Living Art’, on artists who sought to remake theatre in the image of religion; ‘Ritual and Sacrifice’, on theatre and metaphysics; and ‘Allegories and Parables of Renewal’, on the intersection of religious allegory with social change. Throughout these sections, the chapter illustrates the plural and paradoxical roles for religion assigned on the modernist stage.