Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

In this chapter, we will explore Israel’s book of worship – Psalms. These “songs,” collected over hundreds of years, nevertheless convey timeless expressions of Israel’s faith. This Old Testament collection has been organized into five books, and many of the individual psalms have titles, musical notations, or historical details.

Scholarship in the discipline of form criticism has furthered our understanding of how the original materials (sources behind the present texts) may have functioned in Israel’s life situations (German, Sitz im Leben). In general, we can identify larger categories of praise and lament, and of individual and corporate psalms. Specific forms include hymns, communal and individual laments, thanksgiving songs, and royal psalms. Thus, for example, the form of lament corresponds to a crisis situation; a royal psalm form is situated in events surrounding the king. These forms, preserved and presented as the collected psalms, represent an overview of Israel’s religious worldview. We will not necessarily observe statements of strict monotheism, but we will hear Israel “sing” of Yahweh, who alone is worthy of praise.

In conversation with Walter Benjamin the notion of the historian as the prophet looking backward leads to rethink the notions of time, highlighting that it is always in the now that the historian starts and remains while thinking about the past in light of the future.

This chapter focuses on the Works of Love deliberation “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” (and, where relevant, Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourses on that topic), exploring the figure of the “one who loves” [den Kjerlige]. Drawing on the deliberation’s discussion of silence, mitigation explanations, and forgiveness, and some arguments from my book Love’s Forgiveness about love’s way of seeing ambiguous evidence, I sketch the contours of a virtue manifested in den Kjerlige: generosity of spirit. I then ask: If we took seriously Kierkegaard’s portrait of den Kjerlige, what are the implications for contemporary moral and social discourse? How would such a person engage in moral criticism or social critique? What does this suggest about the controversial category of “microaggressions?” Through a consideration of “Love Hides,” some recent work on the ethics of “social punishment,” especially online public shaming, and contemporary debates about microaggressions, this exercise in “applied Kierkegaard” will argue that Kierkegaard’s deliberation offers an important counterweight to hyper-suspicion, judgmentalism, and self-righteousness in a polarized world.

The nundinal and intercalary cycles were probably intended to operate with great regularity, and scholars often assume that they did so. Ancient calendars, however, were often managed calendars, and officials often intervened in their operations for a variety of purposes. There is virtually no evidence for the nundinal cycle, but the pontiffs, who were in charge of the calendar, intercalated with some irregularity. One can also find traces of criticism of pontifical practice, which was often conducted in terms of speculation about ideal political orders and the gods. In this way, it reveals a long-term tension between ideals and the actual conduct of public and cultic activity.

Commentators on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love have typically taken spiritual love to mean the same as neighborly love, an unconditional moral duty owed by all humans to all humans. Ostensibly, this contrasts with the preferential love typical of a friend or spouse. We, however, take spiritual love to refer to the Trinitarian love that, when emulated by human beings, is called Christian love. This type of love either transcends or engenders both neighborly and preferential love. First, we show how the economy of salvation expresses the Father’s love in both neighborly and preferential ways, corresponding to the Son’s mediation of the Father’s love through the Incarnation and the Spirit’s mediation of the Father’s love through Pentecost. Second, we use the Trinitarian approach to elucidate Kierkegaard’s claim that God is love’s “middle term.” Third, we use this approach to resolve the apparent conflict between self-interest and self-denial in Works of Love.

This chapter examines the essential links between antiquarianism, the writing of histories, and jurisprudence, for all were concerned in varying degrees with clarifying the essential nature of institutions and with ordering the rules associated with them. Roman writers produced a history of the calendar which they tied to other crucial institutions and to the lunar and solar cycles. Close examination reveals that they knew only of the calendar that governed the republic’s last centuries and that they wrote of its links to celestial phenomena through the lens of Caesar’s reform and the resulting Julian calendar. In this way, core features of the structure of the republican calendar, such as its intercalary and nundinal cycles, remain unaddressed.

What is monastic law for? This chapter explores the goals of monastic law, beyond its concerns with regulation and governance. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and survey research, it examines the various ‘nonpositivist’ aims pursued by monastic jurists: preserving unity and unanimity (sāmaggi) among monks; maintaining discretion and protecting reputations; avoiding (further) conflict and identifying the root causes of strife; minimising judicial prejudice by eliminating the mental defilements (kilesa) that give rise to them; restoring offenders to the community by applying therapeutic sanctions; aligning the conduct of monks with the concerns of local laity and temple donors; and, most importantly, shortening saṃsāra and hastening nirvana. This chapter highlights the intertwining of positivist and nonpositivist elements in monastic law, shining light on a legal order that not only enforces standards of conduct but also impacts karma, saṃsāra and the path to nirvana.

First and Second Kings continue the stories of monarchic rule. Textual sources from the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires aid us considerably in the historical reconstruction of these centuries, but we will quickly observe that a religious agenda is central. First, the narrative accounts are connected by a recurring literary formula that evaluates each king – not primarily on political and military achievements but on the basis of that king’s faithfulness to Yahweh. Insertions of the so-called Elijah and Elisha cycles further demonstrate a concern to emphasize prophetic authority, which demands exclusive loyalty to Yahweh.

Second, content bears out the overriding religious motivation. For example, Solomon is associated with the great wisdom tradition in Israel. Nevertheless, for these biblical authors success is measured by obedience to Yahweh, and Solomon’s devotion to Yahweh is compromised because of his many wives and religious unfaithfulness. His downfall is also Israel’s – the United Monarchy is divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Religious unfaithfulness, exhibited by most of the kings, accounts for the fall of Israel to the Assyrians in 722 bceand of Jerusalem (Judah) to the Babylonians in 586 bce.

In Rome, as elsewhere in the ancient world, formal timekeeping practices were deeply embedded in views about the proper relationship between political orders, the surrounding world, and the powers that governed them. Ancient polities were cultic communities, and central practices within them were aimed at securing the favor of gods who were linked in various ways to events in the visible world. Rites were the chief instruments for securing this favor, but they rested on rules, either written or oral, that were intended to ensure their proper performance. At a more fundamental level, however, were ideas and assumptions, some more coherent and explicit than others, about the ways that the world worked. Here, it was widely assumed that polities should function in some form of alignment with rhythms that were revealed in the heavens.

Historians look for evidence, this chapter looks for what historians are not looking for – the space in-between those layers that provide evidence, discusses the stratification of our historical terrain and resulting knowledge.

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

We have already encountered prophets in the historical books. We will look now at four of the Old Testament’s writing prophets: Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah. Eighth-century Israel witnessed increased accessibility to writing and an expanded role for the prophet. The recurrent phrase, “Thus says Yahweh” (messenger formula), epitomizes the primary role of the prophet as a messenger speaking on behalf of God.

Sources from Mari in the eighteenth century bceand others from seventh-century Assyria verify the antiquity of divination practices, of which prophecy is a type. Israel demonstrated opposition to certain divination practices, but its prophets consistently delivered messages from Yahweh, distinguished by their ethical and moral vision. Of the three basic types of Old Testament prophetic speech, prophecies are the most common and represent messages to an individual or corporate entity. Utterances are the confessions or prayers of the prophet to God, and narratives offer historical details corresponding to the prophet. Two important features will become evident as we explore the content of these books: covenant loyalty to Yahweh and the international extent of Yahweh’s authority.

In the deliberation entitled, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own,” Kierkegaard develops his notion of distinctiveness [Ejendommelighed] vis-à-vis neighbor love. He introduces a dialectical tension between the duty to seek one’s own as a human task implicated by the divine gift of distinctiveness and the imperative to seek only the neighbor’s own. This chapter unpacks Kierkegaard’s notion of Eiendommelighed, its relationship to courage, Frimodighed [bold confidence], the love commands, and self-sacrifice. Despite his strongly self-sacrificial rhetoric, love demands the cultivation of one’s own distinctiveness, which itself must be understood dialectically as both being one’s own and not one’s own. A dialectical approach affords a more nuanced reading of Works of Love that better reflects the existential complexity of navigating the tension of self-development and self-sacrifice on the ground. To fulfill the duty to develop distinctiveness in both self and other, love must both seek and not seek its own.