Chapter 3 examines the blood libel invented by Hyppolitus Guarinoni in 1619, Tyrol, Austria. The fictional murder of the boy, Andreas of Rinn, would have taken place in July of 1462. The accepted explanation for this unusual blood libel is a response to Protestant incursions into the Tyrol area, where Rinn is located. The chapter provides a systemic account of the blood libel, which includes complex responses to drought, plague, famine, along with the continuing influence of pagan magic. These elements created an internal dissonance within the Catholic system that Guarinoni was trying to fortify.

The interpretation of Hegelian theodicy that has emerged over previous chapters finally allows us to understand Hegel’s accusation that Leibnizian theodicy is undermined by its ‘abstract’ and ‘indeterminate’ categories. As Hegel’s fuller discussion of Leibniz’s theodicy shows, the root of the problem is that his theodicy is afflicted by two kinds of ‘arbitrariness’: first, Leibniz’s application of axiological criteria to worldly instances eludes rational comprehension; second, Leibniz simply presupposes those criteria, with the result that the mutual implication of good and evil remains an unexplained given. Hegel’s own theodical enterprise, however, is not without its internal tensions. Following through on the logic of Hegel’s theodicy as geared towards effecting reconciliation means seeing it as effecting a break with the juridical model found in Kant and Leibniz: the goal of justification must be renounced not as unrealisable, but as misconceived. Nevertheless, Hegel’s own presentations of the goal of his philosophy frequently betrays a justificatory ambition that marks a fundamental continuity with his predecessors, seemingly invoking a teleological logic, whereby history can be measured by an absolute end or standard. The ultimate assessment of Hegelian theodicy turns, in large part, on whether this should be understood as rhetoric or rationale.

The unprecedented experience of economic growth, full employment, immigration from all over the world and ever-rising living standards both delighted and shocked independent Ireland in the early twenty-first century. Many Irish businesses achieved global success. In 2004, 10 per cent of people living in Ireland were not born here. Immigration slowed a little after the global crash of 2008 when emigration rose again, and unemployment, but it soon recovered. Swingeing austerity measures and cuts in public services after this made a kind of economic recovery possible, and Ireland by the centenary of the 1916 Rising seemed buoyant once more, with inclusive emphasis on the ‘New Irish’ of all ethnicities. Workers in health care and education however felt the impact of cuts, and in the private sector trade union membership fell. Homelessness rose as house prices and rents soared. Investment in public amenities and green energy, however, were positive developments.

Northern Ireland also saw enhancement of public space but did not experience the same economic boom. Political developments led to the two political extremes, Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, working together. Tensions remained but peace prevailed. In 2016, Northern Ireland’s preference to remain in the European Union was negated by an overall UK vote to leave.

A summing-up of the previous chapters by exploring aspects of Ireland that remain distinctively Irish in the early twenty-first century, involving a discussion of Irish names, landscape and folk beliefs.

Chapter 6 outlines three embodied systems – schema, image, and global – in order to explain the nature of systemic dissonance in the human body, along with the signal generated by this dissonance. The chapter discusses a number of religious cases of embodied dissonance, including spirit possession in India, body modification in the United States, the Hindu Kavadi practitioner in Southeast Asia, and the complicated bodily phenomena that characterize the life of the twelfth-century mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux. Systemic theory allows us to understand some embodied religious practices as complex responses to an internal body-self dissonance rather than the effect of a single cause.

Chapter 7 examines the function of humor, clowns, and fools within religious systems. The systems under discussion are from India, biblical Israel, Nepal, Europe, and even corporate England. The chapter argues that clowns and fools act as signal generators reflecting the dissonance within the systems and challenging the internal boundaries on which systems depend to maintain order. This humorous disruption enhances the dynamic quality of the systems, permitting its viability over time.

This chapter analyses the Federal Reserve’s mandate and statutory objectives and how they have evolved since the Fed was established in 1913, and considers the mandate in the context of environmental and social sustainability challenges. The chapter argues that the Fed’s mandate and statutory objectives historically were interpreted broadly to allow discretion for the Fed and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to manage monetary policy in support of Government policy. The chapter further argues that the legislative history behind the adoption of the dual mandate to achieve price stability and full employment allows the FOMC and the Board of Governors discretion to use their powers to mitigate the risks emanating from the broader economy and society that might impact the price stability and full employment objectives. Despite the conventional interpretation by Fed officials that the Fed ‘should stick to its knitting’ by focusing on short-to-medium term risks to price stability, the chapter concludes that the economic evidence is compelling that climate finance risks and other sustainability challenges can undermine price stability and full employment and therefore should be factored into the Fed’s monetary policy and financial stability strategy.

This chapter addresses central aspects of Kant’s late engagement with the internal obstacle to the realisation of the highest good, the inadequacy of the human will. It argues that his idea of a moral ‘revolution’, whereby the good disposition of a human fallen into evil is restored to its original power, involves an account of moral progress that produces an irresolvable tension: in necessitating an appeal to a doctrine of grace, it in fact reintroduces the paradox of Kantian theodicy. However, Kant’s account also points the way beyond the paradox, opening up a second path towards implicating the will in its concrete phenomenal environment. The possibility Kant brings into view is that neither whether an agent has adopted an end nor what that adoption commits them to is ascertainable independently of the pursuit of the end itself. What prevents Kant from taking this path is his enduring understanding of the very nature of moral constraint. That understanding, however, which also underlies his introduction of radical evil, arguably reflects a misguided conflation, between his core thesis about the logic of autonomy and a strictly independent metaphysics of the human person.

Ireland’s two bloodiest centuries began with Henry VIII’s break with Rome and culminated in the brutal and unforgiving conquest of the entire island. Now, Anglo-Normans became ‘Old English’, faithful to Rome making common cause with the Gaelic-Irish. The ‘New English’ and later, Scottish, settled Leix, Offaly and Munster in the sixteenth century, Ulster and (under Cromwell) everywhere, in the seventeenth. Resistance was strong and sometimes, as in the Nine Years War, 1594–1603, and the Catholic Confederacy of the 1640s during England’s Civil War, almost successful. Ireland was later the sideshow of a larger European conflict, when several nationalities fought in the Williamite wars of the 1690s.

There were some Irish conversions to the Church of Ireland (i.e. the official Protestant church), but the continental-trained clergy of the Catholic Reformation defied persecution to keep Catholicism the majority religion. Protestants were a majority only in the north-east. However, the majority ownership of land in the country as a whole moved from Catholic to Protestant.

The shiring of Ireland was completed, transport and communication was improved, cities grew, trade remained lively. Irish remained the majority language, and a flowering of Irish-language scholarship preserved old texts and created new ones.