This chapter presents El Evangelista (1877–1886), the first Protestant, Spanish-language newspaper in the Río de la Plata region of Argentina as well as two articles that appeared in El Estandarte (1883–1901) and El Atalaya (1901–1909). These publications were among the most influential journalistic organs that Protestants used for the initial dissemination of their ideas in the port cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario de Santa Fe, and Montevideo in the period 1870–1900. Using these sources, this chapter analyzes how the anti-Catholic discourse wielded by Protestantism contributed to a growing crisis of meaning by questioning Catholic society, its mediations such as the miracle of the mass, prayers for the dead, relics, the cult of saints, the monastic way of life, and its agents. This challenge aimed to establish a religious reformation that would introduce a new moral order to the society and culture of the region.

I open Chapter 1 by outlining ‘agathic pluralism’, namely the view that (ultimate intrinsic) goodness is univocally definable yet also irreducibly plural at the metaphysical level. This is my view, but I do not embark immediately on its defence. Rather, Chapter 1 clears the way for such a view by showing how none of the ‘big three’ ethical theories – namely consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics – manages to capture goodness as I understand it. Consequentialism tries, yet fails, to reduce goodness to a single property; deontology tries to sideline or do without goodness altogether; and virtue ethics substantially mislocates goodness, finding it in our moral dispositions. In order to argue for this, I tackle (first) consequentialism’s failed proxies for goodness, namely pleasure and desire- or preference-satisfaction; and I canvas J. J. Thomson’s a priori semantic argument for the incoherence of consequentialism. Second, I look at deontologists’ paradigm examples of promising, lying and retributive punishment. And third, I look at the Stoics’ and Michael Slote’s strong over-estimation of virtue as the only, or at least primary, good.

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.

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.

Conventional wisdom among philosophers has long held that Aristotelian teleological essentialism is incompatible with Darwinian evolutionary biology. I argue that the appearance of incompatibility here is ill-founded. For a start, Darwinism has no need of the extrinsicist, relational, conception of species sponsored by cladism. Indeed, it requires what Devitt calls intrinsic biological essentialism. The latter, for its part, has no need of eternal, unchanging, species, notwithstanding Aristotle’s own view. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with the claim that species evolve from one another and go extinct. (Those who deny this conflate species with species essences.) As to natural teleology, many philosophers assume that nature cannot contain final ends or goods – but this consensus is open to challenge. As functional biology demonstrates, biologists have never extruded final causation from nature at the local level; indeed, they rely on it, pervasively, in their explanations and descriptions of natural processes. This points, once again, to the compatibility between Aristotelian teleological essentialism and evolutionary biology, and to their deep mutual relevance.

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.

In Chapter 4, I (a) explore three alternative perfectionist theories and show where they fall short. I then (b) move on to three critiques of perfectionism, arguing that they all fail. (a) Tom Hurka’s perfectionist theory jettisons teleological essentialism, yet tacitly relies on it. It advocates an ‘intuitive’ and ‘explanatory’ elucidation of the human essence, though these are not demonstratively superior to Aristotle’s rival method. George Sher’s ‘poor man’s Aristotelianism’ proves similarly unconvincing, yielding (by his own admission) an incomplete roster of perfections. Richard Boyd’s ‘homeostatic cluster’ theory, for its part, also falls short, relying on an intuitionistic and question-begging notion of ‘human need’. (b) Dale Dorsey’s critique of perfectionism fails to grasp the teleological nature of Aristotelian essentialism and relies on a defeasible set of counter-examples. Philip Kitcher’s critique centres on a ‘reductivist challenge’, which assumes (wrongly, I argue) that human nature must be characterisable in a wholly ‘value-free’ way. Last, I tackle the ‘analytic existentialist’ critique, which relies too heavily (I argue) on metaphor and normative abstraction.

I open by charting by the well-worn philosophical distinction between intellection and perception, and unpack the debate over whether (or to what degree) the latter is separable from the former. I conclude that the ‘cognitivist’ position is correct: that human perception is properly infused with conceptual content, this marking us out as the species we are (viz. rational animals). With all this in place, I ask whether there is a cognitive hierarchy among the senses. Aristotle and recent researchers like Viberg answer ‘yes’, vision being at the top, smell at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I argue that this depends on an undue privileging of cognitive extent and precision. I then investigate the imagination and the alleged threat it poses to cognitivism. I argue that the imagination – when functional, and not reducible to fantasy – is in fact a profound aid to cognition (since it enhances it and lends it more ‘colour’). I end by looking at aesthetic perfection, where the role of the imagination is of peculiar importance – though I express scepticism about the traditional hyper-valuation of aesthetic over everyday perceptual experience.

Human enhancement aims to make people ‘better than well’ by interventions in the human genome. I canvas four moral arguments against this – from (1) autonomy, (2) dignity, (3) inequality and (4) mastery – concluding that none is probative. Argument (1) overestimates the cost to autonomy of genetic technologies and underestimates the degree to which ordinary moral training is heteronomous. Argument (2) drives too sharp a wedge between the natural and the artefactual and thereby ignores the extent to which we already treat the body as a site of ameliorative intervention. Argument (3) invokes the spectre of a ‘genetic underclass’ that is ‘gene-poor’, but I argue that this can be guarded against by education and government policy. Argument (4) tends to rest on persuasive description and on consequentialist claims that are empirically weakly supported. I end by mounting my own, formal, argument against human enhancement. This holds that it collapses into transhumanism, this being an ultimately incoherent project, one that abandons the idea of human nature and with it any criteria for determining what it is to be ‘better than well’. Finally, I corroborate this argument from incoherence by unpacking a paper by Groll and Lott.

This chapter explores the contested legacy of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr in Iraqi and regional politics from 1980 to the present. Through four thematic sections, it examines how Sadr’s martyrdom and ideas – especially on authority, khilafa, and popular sovereignty – have been appropriated by competing Shi‘i actors, particularly after 2003. The chapter traces post-2003 struggles over national commemoration, the tension between Iraqi and Iranian narratives of the Iran–Iraq War, and the mobilization of Sadr’s legacy by actors like the Da‘wa Party, SCIRI, Muqtada al-Sadr, and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s son, Ja‘far al-Sadr. Finally, it situates Sadr in post-2011 debates on civil state, pluralism, sectarianism, and anti-sectarianism, and examines his reception among various Islamist movements, the Islamic Left beyond Iraq.