This chapter examines early scholastic discussions of the ontology of grace and how grace is related to the theological virtues and other spiritual gifts conferred on the soul.

Religious beliefs are a profound source of motivation and purpose for many people. This is especially true of fundamentalists of different faiths, who strive to strictly adhere to what they believe to be scriptural guidance for how to live their lives. However, given the high rates of religious illiteracy across American citizens, belief in a religion does not necessarily indicate knowledge of the contents of one’s religious teachings. Perhaps as a consequence, people belonging to the same religion, and the clergy who guide them, have used different aspects of the scriptures to express divergent viewpoints (for and against slavery, homophobia, violence, etc.). The complexity of religious scriptures and interpretations across history has meant that members of religions who have sought to follow the righteous path have, at times, been taught that expressing bias against certain groups is the virtuous thing to do. As such, religion has been used to justify strategic beliefs (based on power and political motives) which then become fused with religious identity in private beliefs and public discourse. This chapter addresses how the noble purpose associated with being a virtuous person can be reclaimed from the forces that exploit the power of religion to create division and discord. We call on people to educate themselves about the content and context of various religious scriptures, to value diversity and avoid bias, and to cultivate spiritual and intellectual humility.

In Kierkegaard, a three-part dialectical structure is set, first, by the two elements that comprise parts I and II of Either/Or, the “esthetic” and then the “ethical life.” A subsequent, third stage comes with a “teleological suspension of the ethical” (by which Kierkegaard means “suspension of the moral” in the modern sense) and a committing “leap” of faith. Unlike Marx’s version, Kierkegaard’s dialectic takes place not at the social level, but within an individual’s life in a way that can bring about an essentially individual authenticity and what Kierkegaard called “existential inwardness.” But if Kierkegaard’s dialectic, unlike Hegel’s and Marx’s, is decidedly not world historical, thus different from Hegel’s and Marx’s, the notions of individuality and authenticity that Kierkegaard develops are nonetheless themselves distinctively modern ethical ideas, more modern, indeed, than any idea of individuality that is in place in early modern moral philosophy. Kierkegaard’s concept of the “single individual” is more closely related to Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual,” to “individuality” in John Stuart Mill, and to the radically free subject of the twentieth-century existentialists, than it is to the “forensic” notion of the individual person or moral agent as, for example, in Locke or Kant.

In two of Kierkegaard’s earliest works, The Concept of Irony and Either/Or, imaginary construction (i.e., thought experiment, or Experiment) is often characterized negatively. However, the three core features of thought experiment shared by Ørsted and Mach also begin to emerge, laying foundations for a more positive view in other works. Kierkegaard’s characterizations of thought experiment indicate that imaginary construction guides mental action. This focus contrasts with the standard emphasis in Kierkegaard scholarship on thought experiment as supplying the concreteness of (empirical) actuality. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard critiques irony as a retreat from reality but also shows it can be used to achieve new kinds of wholeheartedness and unity. In this chapter, I will argue that thought experiments can similarly lead the experimenter away from reality but, like irony, may also be a useful tool for self-development.

Chapter 7 offers a culminating test for competing rationalities, given how thoroughly Julian’s and Cyril’s texts are focused on re-narrating episodes from their rival. It returns to three specific arguments to consider if MacIntyre’s further claim about incommensurable forms of reasoning obtains in Julian’s and Cyril’s engagement. Three case studies in rationality, focusing on words (genētos, pronoia, and pistis) used by Julian and Cyril at crucial points in their reasoning, provide occasion to query whether non-intersecting forms of reasoning are at play in these specific arguments. Intellectual impasses on particular topics can suggest, after all, that the traditions inhabited by individuals engaged in intellectual conflict are more broadly incommensurable.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.

This chapter addresses the challenge of socially "starting from scratch" when moving into a community of approximately 150,000 older adults. It suggests that most residents integrate into overlapping place-, leisure-, and faith-based communities, and experience varying levels of psychological sense of community (PSOC). The chapter also explores the few instances where no PSOC was reported and examines the multiple tensions between different groups based on age, type of residency, and political orientation.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.