The chapter offers an analysis of two sources. The first follows the personal testimony of the conversion of an Argentine middle-class man, Matías Fernández Quinquela, an accountant for the Argentine National Congress. This account was originally published in English in the journal of the Anglican South American Missionary Society and contains a very typical exposition of the personal reflections of doubt and dissatisfaction with Catholicism as well as the atheistic positivist freethinking that led educated people, like Quinquela, to look for an alternative in Protestantism. The second offers an account of the proselytizing activities of M. F. Quinquela's wife, Carlota Lubin, and her arrest by order of a Catholic priest in a suburb of Buenos Aires. The story was published in a local magazine, La Reforma. The story demonstrates the active and provocative militancy with which these converts spread their message, the irritation they provoked in the Catholic Church, and the informal power ties between priests and local government office. The Quinquelas were convinced of the possibilities of moral and social renewal that evangelical Protestantism could offer Argentine society.

The chapter analyzes the history of the first Pentecostals in Puerto Rico through the memoir of Juan L. Lugo. This document, published by Lugo circa 1950, recounts his memories as an immigrant in Hawaii, his initial experience with Pentecostal faith, and details his eventual development as a minister ordained by the council of The Assemblies of God Church in the United States. Based on his account, this chapter will address several historiographical considerations about the relationship between forced migration and the exponential growth of Pentecostal movements, particularly in the transition from the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. It is no coincidence that this religious current found fertile ground among the most vulnerable and marginalized populations. As such, the socioeconomic and political panorama in which the birth of Pentecostalism in Puerto Rico took place will also be explained. Finally, the discursive and doctrinal trends emblematic of the founding period of Pentecostalism on the island will be highlighted.

Part III treats systematic challenges to natural perfectionism, and opens with the so-called fact/value dichotomy. This challenge can be parsed in four main ways. First, the metaphysical challenge, which has historical roots in Hobbes and Hume. This holds that the ‘natural’ cannot accommodate the normative: a claim I argue is question-begging, depriving norms, furthermore, of any proper grounds. Second, the inferential challenge, which maintains that one cannot move validly from ‘is’-type propositions to ‘ought’-type ones. This Humean challenge fails, I argue, since natural perfectionism rests its claims on natural facts that are already inextricably inflected with value. Third, G. E. Moore’s semantic challenge. Moore claims that any naturalistic definition of ‘good’ both commits the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and falls foul of the ‘open question argument’. I argue that the former is a pseudo-fallacy and that the latter conflates not seeming ‘closed’ with being ‘open’. Fourth, the conceptual challenge attacks ‘thick’ concepts, these being purportedly inextricable amalgams of ‘fact’ and ‘value’. I argue that thick concepts are defensible, for pragmatic, grounding and moral reasons.

Although basic freedoms (such as freedom of thought) in Nicaragua were decreed in 1869, their implementation did not have major repercussions until 1893 with the approval of La Liberrima – an important transformation in the country. Its introduction reflected a great change in the relationship of religion and the Constitutions of 1838 and 1858. An analysis of La Liberrima is necessary to study the original development of Protestantism as a social phenomenon within modern Nicaragua. Following the irruption of radical liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism expanded and developed new forms of association. In this context, the emergence and meaning of the phenomenon can be linked to modernizing forms of civil participation that created local bases and fomented its expansion including churches, schools, health-related projects, and publications. The chapter also includes an examination of a Protestant publication, principally the magazine Antorcha, to highlight the evolution of Protestantism as a historical process. Based on these documents, this work aims to broadly assess the emergence of local Protestant actions that developed in a less than welcoming environment.

In the early days of the twentieth century, missionaries from the United States were in a spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of Brazilians. As a result, in 1901, the Baptists founded “O Jornal Batista.” Four years later, the Catholic Church established its first paper, “A União.” In their pages, these papers reflected the spiritual battle that was being fought. A significant part of the struggle focused on the idea that the United States was either a civilizing agent (“O Jornal Batista”) or an agent of barbarism (“A União”). Social and political topics gripping the northern country, such as lynching, racism, and prohibition law, were regular topics of discussion in both papers. This chapter aims to provide a brief discussion of the significance of these debates and their meaning in the context of North American missions in Brazil, especially in the northeastern part of the country. The sources highlight how locals used religion to understand and articulate changes in local political dynamics as well as the various ways Protestantism changed the parameters of local political debates.

In mid-twentieth-century Iraq, with the British installed Hashemite monarchy in 1921, many Shi‘i communities experienced exclusion from the state. As ideological politics intensified, disenfranchized Shi‘i communities – notably in the shrine city of Najaf – were drawn to Marxism and communism as vehicles of social justice and empowerment. Shi‘i intellectuals of this period absorbed Western philosophical and socialist ideas, fueling new debates on religion and society. A young Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr began engaging with Marxist thought as he formulated a Shi‘i response to contemporary injustices. In his early treatise, Fadak fi al-Tarikh (1955), Sadr reinterpreted the Fadak inheritance dispute of early Islamic history as an overtly political and revolutionary struggle. Adopting Marxist-influenced language and a historical materialist lens, he analyzed the episode’s underlying power dynamics and socio-economic stakes, arguing that Fatima al-Zahra’s challenge to the first caliph constituted revolutionary action against unjust authority. Sadr transformed Fatima into a symbol of resistance – a model for revolutionary Shi‘i political engagement in the modern era. Sadr’s initial flirtation with Marxist concepts catalyzed a new Shi‘i intellectual current that fused class-conscious social critique with Islamic theological principles, laying the groundwork for an indigenous Shi‘i paradigm of political activism.

In 1902, shortly after Pastor Willis Hoover took charge of the Valparaíso Methodist Church, an intense revival began that eventually gave rise to the Chilean Pentecostal movement. The Valparaíso revival reached its climax in 1909, but in August of that year, the sudden charismatic leadership of “Sister Elena” (Nelly Laidlaw) attracted the attention of the pastors of the First and Second Methodist churches in Santiago (Rice and Robinson). On September 12, when Elena visited both churches, the pastors refused her request to address the congregations, becoming a pivotal moment in the history of the movement. According to local accounts, Chilean Pentecostalism was born that day. Juan Kessler (1967) offers the most rigorous and influential academic reconstruction of the events of that day, although he provides a very negative evaluation of Sister Elena as well as the reasons for the Pentecostal schism. However, Kessler did not consider the story or the reflections put forth by Enrique Jara in the newspaper Chile Evanjelico (Concepción, November 19, 1909), published under the title “Echoes of awakening in Santiago.” This chapter will introduce and revisit Jara’s account of the events of that fateful day.

I begin by explaining why ‘goodness as natural perfection’ is a metaphysical rather than linguistic or conceptual thesis (even J. J. Thomson’s sophisticated version of the latter). I then unpack what I call the ‘Aristotelian functionalist schema’, which informs my view of how human faculties or powers are teleologically ordered to various natural perfections or ultimate intrinsic goods. This schema embodies a ‘bottom-up’ movement, which culminates in our governing, rational, function; and also a ‘top-down’ movement, which reveals how rationality conditions our subordinate (vegetative, perceptual, productive, locomotive) functions. I then go on to look at two post-Darwinian analyses of function, that of Cummins and that sponsored by the ‘standard evolutionary conception’. I argue that the first is relativistic and the second hyper-reductive – so neither gives us reason to abandon the Aristotelian functionalist schema. Finally, I explore the theory of ‘natural goodness’ elaborated by Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson. I maintain that it improperly reduces natural goodness to moral goodness, and, moreover, ends up being more Kantian than Aristotelian – rendering its form of ‘naturalism’ highly etiolated.

The magazine Renacimiento was one of the most important periodical publications in the evangelical world during the first decades of the twentieth century. Founded in 1921 by missionary Juan Ritchie, it became the voice of the Peruvian Evangelical Church (Iglesia Evangélica Peruana – IEP), the first national denomination in Peru. The magazine was part of initial efforts to develop Protestant journalistic work, in which other Protestant missionary agencies also participated. However, the influence of the Renacimiento was decisive in creating a Protestant consciousness and developing reactions to various social and religious topics based in a nascent evangelical identity. This chapter will focus on selections from the first years of the magazine (1921–1930), paying close attention to the political and social dimensions of faith in its articles as well as the construction of evangelical identity. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of this crucial period of evangelical history by analyzing a forum in which the voices of missionaries and national leaders converged.

Chapter 7 begins with Kornblith’s attempt to resurrect a teleology of the mind or intellect. I countenance his semantic, desire and pragmatic arguments, maintaining that none of them shows truth or true belief to be an objective good. By contrast, Aristotle’s idea that the intellect is constitutively directed at truth does show this (in virtue of the Aristotelian functionalist schema: i.e. all functions are correlated with perfections or goods). And Aristotle’s idea is corroborated not only by ‘folk’ and theoretical psychology, but also by cognitive science. For the latter is wedded to the notion that the brain is a cognitive system, functionally directed at cognition (viz. true belief). I go on to address three critiques of this intellectual teleology – those put forward by William James, evolutionary biology and global scepticism respectively – and argue that none of them is cogent. Next, I unpack two alternative accounts of the relation between truth and goodness – those of Ayer and Davidson – and maintain that they, too, fall short. Last, I tackle intellectual goods beyond true belief – such as knowledge and understanding – asking whether they or their objects form discernible hierarchies.