Chapter 2 examines two specific religious events in remote cultural settings: the Jewish settlement in the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Hindu destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, India. The chapter argues that existing theories of religious violence or aggression do not account for both the specificity of each of these events nor form a basis for a proper comparison. Instead, the chapter shows that both the religious Zionists and the Hindu nationalists are responding to a sharp internal dissonance within their own religious systems, and the aggressive actions can be compared as an attempted mitigation of dissonance.

This chapter assembles a wide range of evidence to demonstrate that the reputation of Corinth for sexual licentiousness was not, as is usually maintained, solely a thing of the past, relating to the population prior to the destruction of Ancient Corinth in 146 BCE. On this basis, the chapter shows how the influence of stereotypical views about Corinth and its inhabitants helps account for the major emphasis on illicit sex (porneia) in Paul’s correspondence with Corinth.

Chapter 5 brings together two entirely remote and distinct religious systems: the Vineyard Evangelical Church in the United States and the pilgrim worshipers of Krishna in Vrindavan, India. In both cases, religious actors report sensory experiences of God: auditory in the United States and visual in India. The chapter provides a systemic explanation for these reports, considering them as responses to a profound dissonance in systems of faith among committed adherents to a personal God. The chapter also examines psychological theories such as porosity, absorption, decentering, and other mechanisms for altering states of consciousness toward sensory experiences of the divine.

This chapter examines John’s legacy after his death, both at Fécamp and in the wider medieval spiritual landscape. The chapter first shows how John’s students and followers at Fécamp elaborated on the seeds of affective devotion that John’s Confessio theologica planted: a cult to the precious blood of Christ was established at Fécamp; John’s students Maurilius of Rouen and Gerbert of Saint-Wandrille wrote affective prayers to a crucified Christ; Guibert of Nogent, a Norman monk, wrote his own memoir in the style of Augustine’s Confessions thanks to John; and, most famously, Anselm of Bec wrote his prayers and meditations, following in the steps of the greatest Norman abbot of the generation before him. This chapter moves on to discuss how John’s Confessio theologic’s ideas changed in the hands of the Cistercians, and how they circulated in the later Middle Ages, often misattributed in manuscripts to Anselm or Bernard or Francis. This chapter concludes by making clear the parts of John’s Confessio theologica’s devotional method that served as the foundation for later medieval affective devotional practice, and the parts of John’s ideas that abandoned in later iterations of affective devotion practised by Cistercians, mendicants, mystics, and the laity.

How can we learn about God from the study of nature. What do we learn from the writings of Cicero and the Stoics, Maimonides, and William Blake – and today from the red shift, the anthropic principle, and the challenge of the multiverse?

How did a man go about repenting sex with men? Byzantine monks hearing confession drew guidance from the Kanonarion, a penitential manual developed between the sixth and ninth centuries. Unlike sermons that tended to lump together a range of sins between males, the manual separates the penetration of men (arsenokoitia) from the corruption of boys (paidophthoria), and identifies mitigating circumstances, such the penitent’s youth or poverty, or if he was raped. The penances for sex between men were, perhaps surprisingly, the same as for adultery and fornication, and less than for murder or the corruption of children. The Life of Nephon celebrates a repentant sodomite who became a holy man. If Byzantine pastoral care sought to produce the repentant sodomite, the Life of Nephon presents such a subject as a cultural hero. While this material hardly offers a model for contemporary LGBTQ+ liberation, the construction of the repentant sodomite, an identity that Symeon the New Theologian claims for himself, provides an important Byzantine chapter in queer history.

This chapter shows how John’s Confessio theologica was both of a piece with traditional monastic texts and ‘new’ on the monastic scene. In his Confessio theologica, John both built on reform and devotional precedents long-established in the monastic sphere, and developed a distinctive focus on reforming his monks’ interior, emotional practices that was substantially his own. To do this, I first explore John’s sources for the Confessio theologica in this chapter. I start by tracing the age-old monastic precedents that John draws on in his Confessio theologica, precedents that scholars often cite but rarely examine. I also trace more rare sources of John’s, books that he encountered in his childhood monastery in Ravenna, under the guidance of monastic reformer Romualdus of Ravenna, or his time at Cluny or at Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, under the guidance of Odilo of Cluny and William of Volpiano. After carefully tracing his pedigree, I then highlight what is source-less in John’s Confessio theologica, showing which ideas are truly John’s own.

In Greek and Latin literature roughly contemporaneous with Paul, the Galatians were often depicted as people who were liable to quickly swerve off course and to betray their allies. This chapter argues that Paul utilized these stereotypical notions about the Galatians in service of his rhetorical purposes in his letter to the Galatians.