Literature shows the way, public opinion follows the lead and, finally, collective morality, social customs and state law all give way. Such a change becomes inevitable, especially when all the propaganda devices and techniques besides philosophy, history, ethics, science, literature, art, etc., have worked together persistently for a hundred and fifty years or so to mould man’s way of thinking after a particular pattern. Then, it is unlikely that the law of the land remains unaffected by the changing public opinion in a country where government and social institutions are run on democratic principles.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter analyzes the first edition of the health magazine “Vida e Saúde” [Life and Health], published in January of 1939 by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church’s (SDAC) publisher, Casa Publicadora Brasileira. This periodical was released during the dictatorship of Estado Novo (1937–1945) and endorsed some of the eugenist and hygienist public policies of its time. Although the magazine did not advocate Adventist proselytism, it promoted the health message conveyed by the Adventist prophetess Ellen G. White, making this magazine a unique example of print media dedicated to questions of health guided by religious and creationist worldviews. It also highlights the importance of the Adventist print media as one of the hallmarks of this church in Brazil since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century.

This chapter offers a contextual and thematic analysis of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s intellectual production from 1964 to 1972, a period of political, cultural, and ideological upheaval in Iraq and the broader Arab world. It explores how Sadr’s thought evolved in response to the collapse of Arab nationalism, the rise of Ba‘thist authoritarianism, and the ongoing influence of leftist ideologies. The chapter situates his writings – such as the new preface to Iqtisaduna, Al-Insan al-Mu‘asir wa al-Mushkila al-Ijtima‘iyya, and Ahl al-Bayt – within the complex interplay of Iraqi Shi‘i mobilization, epistemological debates on empiricism, and efforts to forge a modern Islamic identity. It shows how Sadr redefined central Shi‘i doctrines like infallibility (‘isma) in a rationalist and activist direction, often using Marxist terminology and framing to make Islamic arguments. Through his engagement with Western philosophical methods in logical positivism and inductive reasoning, Sadr advanced an Islamic framework for modernization and economic development. The chapter underscores his strategic caution amid rising tensions with the Iraqi regime and within the Shi‘i clerical establishment, especially after Khomeini’s arrival in Najaf. This period reveals the breadth of Sadr’s discursive engagement, his reformist vision, and his ongoing struggle to harmonize Islamic theology with contemporary intellectual and political challenges.

The chapter is intended to offer answers to the following crucial questions often raised regarding Islam’s economic system:

• Does Islam offer an economic system and, if so, what is the blueprint of that system? What is the position of land, labour, capital and organization in this blueprint?

• Can the funds of zakāh and sadaqat (mandatory and normal charity) be used for social welfare?

• Can we successfully introduce an interest-free economy?

• What is the interrelationship of the economic, political, social and religious systems in Islam?

Maududi also wrote an immensely popular commentary on the Quran. This genre of writing is often excluded from an assessment of Maududi’s political thought. However, for Maududi, all his endeavours were connected. His commentary and translation of Surah Al Fatiha indicates some abiding concerns.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

Initially, perhaps even unknowingly, the young Mexican Dominican Manuel Aguas was drawn to the path of Martin Luther. Like the German theologian, Aguas read the Bible and his ruminations convinced him to break with the Roman Catholic Church. In response, the ecclesiastical institution excommunicated him. At the heart of this chapter is a letter in which Manuel Aguas provides an account of his conversion to Protestantism. The account caused a great commotion in Mexico City. Aguas's writing was published in El Monitor Republicano on April 26, 1871. Despite the influence of Aguas’ ideas, there is no doubt that he benefited from the past efforts of various converts that attempted to establish Protestantism in Mexico City. In this sense, he fertilized a ground prepared by others but added an activism that, within a few months, garnered public attention for the challenges it posed to the religious and cultural establishment of the time. His account makes visible the construction of a marginalized faith through his vigorous attempts to defend its legitimacy in an environment that overtly denied it.

While researching and defining the plausibility or implausibility of something, the first thing to observe is it in itself. Then, we proceed to analyse it in comparison with other things. It can only be declared worth accepting if it proves better on both counts. From this perspective of research and investigation, we have completed the first phase of inquiry. We now need to undertake the second phase. In this phase of the study, we shall start by comparing Islam with other religions and then compare it with laws of the modern period to investigate how they relate to the Islamic norms. If they permit war, then the question is whether their objectives and methods [English term in text; Urdu manāhij] are better or worse than those of Islam. If they prohibit war, are the teachings of these schools in harmony with human nature, or do the teachings of Islam do that?

This introductory chapters provides a broad overview of the historic development, diffusion, and study of evangelical Christianity in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present. It situates the movement’s tremendous growth within longer trajectories of migration, missionary activity, and local religious change. It also outlines the emergence of Latin American evangelicalism as a field of academic inquiry, tracing shifting paradigms from sociological and political analyses to more recent turns to cultural, intellectual, and ethnographic approaches. In doing so, it underscores the deeply intertwined nature of faith, politics, and social transformation across the shifting terrain of global networks and local innovations that defined the experiences of the region’s earliest evangelicals. To conclude, it offers a blueprint of the book—including primary sources and analyses from scholars within the region—to foreground the voices of early believers and document the movement’s transformation into a permanent feature of Latin America’s religious, political, and social landscape.

David LaRocca’s chapter resituates Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits within Emerson’s transatlanticism, as well as within his intellectual, cultural, and historical moment. In particular, it analyzes and contextualizes Emerson’s comments on race in English Traits in relation to the formation of British and American national mythologies. As LaRocca argues, in contrast to less generous critics, Emerson is indeed egalitarian, his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England. What is more, Emerson’s interest was, in part, personal. He made English Traits a public statement that justified questions about his family tree and, in a larger domain, the way that New England was formed and informed by England, even while he pursued a broader view of human history – of whatever vintage – as inseparable from natural history.

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.