In the seventeenth century, the Lutheran territories of the Holy Roman Empire saw a flood of publications on pedagogical method and matters of education in general. This chapter examines the changes that the Zwickau curriculum underwent in the seventeenth century. It links these changes closely to the scholarly interests of Johannes Zechendorf and Christian Daum, whose terms of rectorship spanned almost the entire seventeenth century. The chapter discusses the introduction of oriental languages, then the adaptation of new teaching methods, in particular that of Wolfgang Ratke, Jan Amos Komenský and Johannes Rhenius. Though now largely forgotten, Rhenius' work was better known and more influential in Saxony than Ratke's or Komenský's during the seventeenth century. The chapter examines the negotiations between the teachers and the council during which both parties revealed what knowledge they thought should be passed on to the next generation of Zwickauers.

One group [of commentators] has intellectually accepted the philosophy, moral concepts and social principles on which Western civilization and culture are based. They consider life and its problems from the same viewpoint as was adopted by the architects of modern Europe, and now they want to mould the social pattern of their respective homelands also after the same Western pattern. They sincerely believe that the real aim of education for a woman is to enable her to earn her living and to acquire the arts of appearing attractive to the male. Her real position in the family according to them is that, like the man, she should also be an earning member, so as to subscribe fully her share to the common family budget. They think that a woman is meant to add charm and sweetness to communal life by her beauty, elegance and attractive manners. She should warm people up by her sweet, musical words, she should send them to ecstasy by her rhythmic movements and she should dance them to the highest pitch of pleasure and excitement. They think that the woman’s role in national life consists in doing social work, attending municipal councils, participating in conferences and congresses, and devoting her time and abilities to tackle political, cultural and social problems. She should take part in physical exercise and sports, compete in swimming, jumping and racing contests, and set new records in long-distance flights. In short, she should do anything and everything outside the house and concern herself less with what is inside the house. This is their ideal for womanhood. It leads to worldly prosperity, and all the moral concepts that run counter to it are devoid of sense and meaningless. To suit the purposes of the new life, therefore, these people have exchanged the old moral concepts for the new ones, just as Europe did. For them, material gain and sensual pleasures are of real worth, whereas a sense of honour, chastity, moral purity, matrimonial loyalty, undefiled lineage and the like virtues are not only worthless but antiquated whims which must be destroyed for the sake of making progress. These people are indeed the true followers [Urdu momin] of the Western creed. They are now trying their utmost to spread and propagate it in Eastern countries also by the same techniques and devices as have already been adopted in the West.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

The chapter examines the cultural contact between the Waorani indigenous group and Ecuadorian society that occurred between the years 1950 and 1970. The Waorani are a group of 4,000 hunter-gatherers from the Amazon jungle that remained in voluntary isolation until the arrival of missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Historically, the Waorani were represented as the “other”; the savage with a history of attacking neighboring indigenous people and the nascent Ecuadorian oil industry that wanted to exploit indigenous territories with the support of American evangelists. Among the strategies and consequences of evangelization were population movements, a reduction of enemy tribes in a single territory, infections and deaths from diseases, the expansion of the community’s agricultural and economic frontiers (colonization and extractivist industry), and socioeconomic changes. The Waorani responses reflected a sui generis interpretation of the Christian message that attempted to reconcile distinct universes of meaning and significance. The chapter highlights the recorded testimonies of the first Waorani converts and accounts from SIL missionaries.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

Maududi articulated a deep critique of nationalism, and this section details some of his concerns about the possibility of majoritarian oppression and legitimate exclusion built into democratic nationalism. Written between the 1930s and mid 1940s the essays selected detail Maududi’s critique of nationalism. In the highly charged context of declining but violent colonial power and increasing enthusiasm for anti-colonial nationalism, Maududi made his arguments against Muslim nationalists who supported the formation of a separate nation-state for Muslims, as well as nationalist Muslims, those who supported the formation of an Indian nation-state after independence from British rule.

Nature has created man, like other species, as male and female, each possessing a strong natural urge for the other. The study of other animal species has shown that their division into male and female and the natural urge in them for the opposite sex is confined to the propagation of the species only. That is why their sexual urge is just proportionate to requirements to that end. Moreover, this urge has been so controlled in them instinctively that they never transgress sexually the limits set for their nature. Contrary to this, man has been endowed with this urge in an unlimited, unparallelled measure, knowing no discipline whatever. Man knows no restriction of time and clime. Man and woman have a perpetual appeal for each other. They have been endowed with a powerful urge for sexual love, with an unlimited capacity to attract and be attracted sexually. Their physical constitution, its proportions and shape, its complexion, touch and each element, all have a strange attraction for the opposite sex. Their voice, their gait, their manner and appearance, each has a magnetic power. Moreover, the world around them abounds in factors that further arouse this sexual impulse and make the one inclined to the other. The soft murmuring breeze, the running water, the natural hues of vegetation, the sweet smell of flowers, the chirping of birds, dark clouds, the charms of the moonlit night, in short, all the beauties and all the graces of nature stimulate directly or indirectly this relationship between the male and female.

The primary source at the center of this chapter’s analysis is produced by a Colombian evangelical pioneer and focuses on the expulsion of his family and the evangelical church in the village of La Tulia, Valle, Colombia, in 1949. The autobiographical account, written some years after the event, recounts memories of the experience and its interpretation considering what it meant for him to be an evangelical Christian in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion occurred against the backdrop of a struggle between liberals and conservatives that involved the Catholic Church and the evangelicals, resulting in an unraveling of the social fabric of the communities where the evangelical presence was very important. Pedro Aguirre, author of the text, was the founder of the town of La Tulia, Valle, and a social and liberal leader who, after having supported the construction of the Catholic temple, abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism. The analysis aims to identify the elements at play in the construction of evangelical memories, which will facilitate not only the use of the source itself but also a deeper understanding of the context in which it was produced.

Reflecting on the enduring impact of early Evangelicals in Latin America, the epilogue highlights how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformers challenged Catholic dominance and advocated for religious freedom and biblical literacy while also reflecting the biases of their colonial context. It traces the evolution of the region’s religious landscape from Catholic hegemony to one defined by pluralism that was shaped by Evangelical growth, the rising number of religious unaffiliated (“nones”), and shifting church-state relations. It concludes by recognizing that despite these transformations, Latin America remains deeply religious, continuing to express faith as a visible element of identity and public life.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.