Chapter 9 presents Ratzinger’s theology of creation, in which he emphasizes the ontological goodness of the created world and promotes an integral vision of human ecology.

Chapter 18 reviews Ratzinger’s spiritual insights regarding the understanding and practice of the theological virtues.

Chapter 17 studies Ratzinger’s theological and practical contribution to the challenges of preaching in our times.

Chapter 10 explores key themes of Ratzinger’s Christology, such as the importance of a canonical reading of the Gospels and the personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

Chapter 21 offers a synthetic presentation of Ratzinger’s general contribution to theology and the life of the Church.

In the five decades since the publication of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the satirical mode of discourse has arguably been more prominent in American popular culture than at any point in the nation’s history. Although the 1960s produced innumerable exemplary satires in various genres, the subsequent decades feature an even greater density of significant works that express political, social, and cultural criticisms through the absurdism, parody, polyvocality, and other distinctive characteristics of the satirical mode. Mumbo Jumbo both indicates and accelerates the predominance of what Steven Weisenburger identifies as a "degenerative" satirical mode that fundamentally reorients the nature of both American literature generally and African American literature specifically. Contemporary African American satire remains a literature of dissent, even though it seemingly bears scant relation to either midcentury “protest novels” or the wide range of “uplift” narratives common to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. In the hands of African American authors, degenerative satire is intensely skeptical of a wide range of ideologies that have contributed to the construction, representation, and (de)valuation of blackness as both an individual and collective identity in the contemporary United States.

The Introduction provides an overview of the history, practice, and future directions of the field. It considers the coherence and stability of the category of contemporary African American literature, examines multiple genealogies and questions of periodization, and describes varied aesthetic practices of grief and grievance, experimentation and play. Embedding African American cultural production within the fraught history of the last five decades, this chapter examines various forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods.

Chapter 3 explores Ratzinger’s contributions to the Second Vatican Council, especially to Dei Verbum, and the keys he offers for comprehension of conciliar documents.

This chapter traces the emergence of African American confinement literature in the contemporary African American literary tradition over the past six decades, paying careful attention to the subfield’s examination of racialized and gendered confinement in spaces that include but also extend beyond the carceral geographies of jail and prison. Highlighting the centrality of the literary work of former political prisoner and prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis to the origins and development of this subfield, this chapter demonstrates how works of African American confinement literature fundamentally eclipse the narrow categorization of “prison writing.” These works explore confinement as both a complicated metaphor for and a recurring lived experience within socially and psychically constricting systems of anti-Black racism, gendered social control, racialized economic exploitation, political repression, and incarceration. In sum, authors of contemporary African American confinement literature draw compelling parallels between the confining racist and sexist institutions and practices from previous eras – such as slavery, the convict lease system, chain gang camps, peonage, lynching, and Jim Crow – and those that persist in the contemporary US carceral state, including racial profiling, state violence, prisoner abuse, policing, and the prison-industrial complex.

Chapter 2 discusses Ratzinger’s engagement with thinkers both as collaborators and as contenders in academic and ecclesial debates.

With a focus on the nineteenth century, this chapter shows the ways American essayists responded to the new possibilities of national and international travel in the modern age. Modernity offered the ideal conditions under which American travel essays could proliferate: developing infrastructures in transportation, communication, and the publication and distribution of books and periodicals; the growing commercial and imperial reach of the United States; rising literacy rates, which ensured a market for these texts; Old World tourism as a marker of elite and then middle-class identity; the status of Europe as a site of professional training; transatlantic networks of reformers; missionary activity in Asia and Africa; and hemispheric travel in the Americas. Travel writings were popular, a sign that they were performing significant cultural work. The tourist’s or expatriate’s provisional relationship to other peoples and places lent itself to the genre of the essay; this emphasis informed many travel essays. In rendering the interactions between consciousness and place, Americans pushed the boundaries of the genre, as travel essays blended with journalism, fiction, and autobiography.

Within the framework of the politicization of the personal, this chapter explores the essayistic writing of a loose group of socially conscious actors who belong to the political Left, a capacious category that includes leaders of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New York Intellectuals, the New Left, the environmental movement, and groups with a range of progressive agendas. With a focus on the twentieth century, the wide variety of styles and themes of leftist prose writing is analyzed. The chapter dwells on the contributions of important figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and Richard Rorty. As a form of "prose that thinks," the essay has been an excellent site of intellectual reckoning where writers may publicly take strong positions on various political and social issues, expressing these in a highly personal style.