Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

This Introduction explains the characteristics of Western Buddhist travel narratives as a genre and their value as a source of religious insight. These stories are autobiographical accounts of a journey to a Buddhist culture. They often describe a transformative religious experience, “unselfing,” when a person’s sense of self is radically altered. The Buddhist concept of no-self helps authors interpret this kind of experience, and it also provokes and enables such events. No-self is a challenging idea for Westerners trying to understand and reconcile it with their culture’s understanding of the self. Autobiographical accounts, in particular travel narratives, disclose crucial features of self-transformation and interpret the meaning of no-self in diverse ways and in contrast to theoretical and philosophical forms of discourse. The structure and topics of the book’s chapters are outlined.

The introduction opens with the claim that essence of Jew hatred is critical to an understanding of the extermination of the Jews. If the Jews were the target of the Nazis’ extermination project, we must ask: Why the Jews? Who are the Jews? What makes them Jews? What, exactly, were the Nazis attempting to annihilate in the extermination of the Jews? If the Event is driven by antisemitism, what is antisemitism anti-? It explains that the investigation is guided by the categories of Jewish thought. It explains the the book begins with Judaism as the key to making connections between antisemitism and the Holocaust. The introduction also states how this book differs from others, and contains a brief summary of each of the chapters.

What does Paul have to do with religion? The very question seems strange. Should it not be, what does Paul not have to do with religion? Is he not the most important of all the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth? Is he not considered the architect of the religion called Christianity?

As the highest and most dramatic features of the natural landscape, mountains have an extraordinary power to evoke the sacred. The ethereal rise of a ridge in mist, the glint of moonlight on an icy face, a flare of gold on a distant peak – such glimpses of transcendent beauty can reveal our world as a place of unimaginable mystery and splendor. In the fierce play of natural elements that swirl about their summits – thunder, lightning, wind, and clouds – mountains also embody powerful forces beyond our control, physical expressions of an awesome reality that can overwhelm us with feelings of wonder and fear.

Magic was not new to medieval Britain, but traditions of learned magic that reached Britain from the Islamic world in the twelfth century transformed perceptions of the political importance of magic. The figure of Merlin, confabulated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, represented an ideal royal counsellor with mastery of the occult arts. This chapter explores Britain’s reputation for magic from the Roman era onwards and introduces the various occult traditions introduced to Britain the Middle Ages, including the harnessing of occult properties through natural magic, the use of ritual magic to summon spirits, Kabbalism, alchemy, astrology, occult prophecy, and witchcraft. All of these occult traditions had the potential to play a role in politics, whether as threats to be feared by governments or as ‘supernatural technologies’ that were potentially attractive to rulers.

Jesus of Nazareth, apparently a carpenter’s son, lived in the early decades of the first century ce; he became a freelance religious teacher and attracted a following. Eventually, while in his thirties, he was executed in Jerusalem by the Roman imperial authorities. His movement did not die with him but went on after his death, becoming the world religion it still is today. In 2015, it was estimated that Christianity had 2.3 billion adherents (out of 7.3 billion, i.e. 31.2 per cent, of the total world population) and that Islam, which also honours Jesus highly, had 1.8 billion adherents (i.e. 24.1 per cent of total world population).1

It is clear that the impact of Jesus on world history has been extraordinary.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering/bio-enhancement reflect a deep-seated discontent with humanity’s embodied condition. This discontent is a contemporary variation on the long-standing dualisms that elevate mind/soul/intelligence over bodies and materiality. The (increasingly well-funded) desire to redesign human bodies and the habitats of our world grow out of the same logic that is reflected in an impatience with imperfection, vulnerability, and frustration. The end-result of transhumanism leads to a strange outcome, namely the eclipse, surpassing, and obliteration of the form of humanity itself. As such, transhumanism reflects a refusal to be in bodies and places, and thus is a particularly striking example of humanity’s rejection of its creaturely condition.

In recent years, Earth system scientists have acknowledged humanity’s Earth- and life-altering powers by calling our epoch the Anthropocene. This chapter explores the logic at work in this designation and argues that its roots go further back than the origins of industrialism and war capitalism in modernity (the Capitalocene). The essential and enduring issue is whether people can learn to live charitably within a world of limits. The origins of agriculture and the formation of city-states indicate what can be called a “thin Anthropocene” at work in the earliest civilizations evident around the globe. Examining this history, and the logic at work within it, enables us to see how people have thought about Earth and humanity’s place within it.

The Spanish conquest of the Basin of Mexico largely succeeded in eradicating its indigenous religion. The Nahua responded by worshipping the Catholic saints, embracing the Day of the Dead, and turning to figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared to a poor Indian peasant. The chapter also points to Nahua empowerment through education and a written vernacular that the missionaries provided. The Maya and Inca are also briefly considered.

Most psychologists are perfectly content to focus on their clinical sessions and theory-building and don’t feel the additional need to write numerous books on the dynamics of religion. But Freud engaged in both tasks. On the one hand, he had a full day of seeing patients, finding time to write dozens of volumes devoted to original theoretical formulations (his metapsychology), complete with detailed case histories. This aspect of his oeuvre (his clinical works) has rightly dominated over a century of criticism and subsequent modifications of his theories. Freud’s professional life was, after all, that of a medical doctor, psychologist, and scientist. Not only did he frame himself in exactly those terms but he also characterized psychoanalysis as a science born of empirical data and research. His heroes were men like Charles Darwin and the physiologist Ernst Brücke (the latter his teacher at the University of Vienna), and he modeled his theories in a way that later led to him being dubbed a “biologist of the mind.” Freud thought that psychoanalysis, like any scientific theory, should be falsified with the advent of new data, as indeed it was even during his own lifespan.

This chapter lays out the book’s governing thesis - that the differences between the ways traditional Protestant theology and contemporary exegesis read Paul have to do with different assumed implicit narrative substructures of the apostle’s thought. This thesis is introduced and illustrated by studies of Romans 1:1-4 and 1:16-17. The chapter then maps the several strands of Pauline scholarship that this book engages and offers previews of the following chapters.

Dogs know their humans. They recognize our voices, take their cues from our behavior, and sense our emotions. But the canine understanding of humans is limited; they would not be able to understand even a simple text or argument. They lack a language that makes a conceptual world possible. At least, to us, such seems to be doggish existence. Their understanding of humans is limited and instrumental. They know that which is necessary to be fed, walked, and groomed. They know that which is important to keep their humans serving them.

The chapter unites anthropological accounts of blood. It introduces refrains that unify themes of the entire book. It argues that blood marks the bounds of religious and social bodies, using Durkheim, Douglas, and Bildhauer; Irenaeus, Maximus, and Aquinas. Iron compounds make blood red, but societies draft its color and stickiness for their own purposes. Inside, blood carries life. Outside, blood marks the body fertile or at risk. But that’s a social fiction. Skin makes a membrane to pass when a body breathes, eats, perspires, eliminates, menstruates, ejaculates, conceives, or bleeds. Only blood evokes so swift and social a response: It brings parent to child, bystander to victim, ambulance to patient, soldier to comrade, midwife to mother, defender to border. The New Testament names the blood of Christ three times as often as his cross – five times as often as his death. The blood of Jesus is the blood of Christ; the wine of communion is the blood of Christ; the means of atonement is the blood of Christ; the kinship of believers is the blood of Christ; the cup of salvation is the blood of Christ; icons ooze with the blood of Christ; and the blood of Christ is the blood of God.

This chapter explores how the reformer William Tyndale prompts a rethinking of arguments about Protestant biblicism’s capacity for disenchantment. It analyzes Tyndale’s exceptionally elevated portrayals of the Bible’s divine origin, which elide the shaping roles of materiality, history, and human action on the scriptural texts, and which he mobilizes in order to advance his argument about the primacy of Scripture over the institutional authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The chapter challenges the picture of Tyndale put forward by scholars in which he is seen to replace a communal mediation of the sacred with a nascent individualism. It does this by focusing on Tyndale’s representations of Bible reading as the means by which the Christian is caught up in a personal and affective relationship with God, a relationship which in turn transforms the human community. This chapter argues that Tyndale’s apparently disenchanting separation of Scripture’s origin from history is paradoxically the means by which he advances a vision of the human community’s participation in God. Tyndale’s account of Scripture thus disrupts the binary and unidirectional logic of disenchantment.

Chapter 1 discusses how the categories of analysis traditionally used by scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity can be refined, with critical attention paid to terminology, vocabulary, and anachronism. Invoking the work of J. Z. Smith, Stanley Stowers, Eric Hobsbawm, and others, this chapter challenges how Christianity was rhetorically “invented” after the first century and how a figure like Paul the Apostle was transformed into one of the founders of Christianity, despite questions about how effective his so-called ministry was at creating cohesion about presumed Christian “communities.”

One of the most popularly salient images of Thoreau taken from Walden is Thoreau as an asocial hermit, whether an honest one or a hypocrite. The Honest Hermit view sees his time in the woods as a praiseworthy retreat from other people in pursuit of higher values among nature. The Hypocrite Hermit view takes his forays into town – and the assumption that his mother did his laundry especially – as a sign that while he aimed to look holy out there in his hermitage, and would have been holy if he had achieved what he claimed, he did not live up to his own standard.

Essentialism – the belief that Islam is, underlying it all, the same everywhere – and parochialism – the notion that Islam in a particular place is sui generis – has profoundly marred the study of Islam. An alternative approach is suggested.

Kant’s concept of religion is recognizing all duties as divine commands. The concept of God employed in religion is an analogical or symbolic concept. Kant’s relation to Christianity was characterized by a tension between Pietism and Enlightenment rationalism. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason aims to test a hypothesis: that there is such a thing as a religion of pure reason and that its relation to revealed (Christian) religion need not be one of conflict but can and should be harmonious. The publication of Kant’s book involved conflict with the Prussian authorities, in which Kant adopted a position of principled obedience while resisting unjust repression and conforming to the rule of law.