Humanism represented a far-reaching endeavor. It attempted to reinterpret reality in a radical manner and to renew all forms of knowledge. It thus caused a profound break with the contemporary intellectual landscape; but it also established a new relationship with the past and brought to completion previously unresolved questions. It highlighted the individual liberty of humans in the face of a worldview that put God at the center; against the misery of the human condition it defended the dignity of humankind and proposed a new relationship between earth and heaven. But all of this came into being over a long and tortuous process, during a period of much unrest and profound religious uneasiness that permeated all of society and often expressed itself in an exasperated prophetism.

This chapter examines the politics of American immigrant fiction in the twentieth century, a time period that saw three large waves of immigration. The first took place between 1880 and 1924 and consisted primarily of European immigrants and Asian immigrants. The second wave ranged from 1924 to 1965 and was much smaller than the first, largely due to shifting political views toward immigrants which resulted in legislation that significantly restricted the flow of newcomers. The third wave was triggered in 1965 by another change in both national attitude and policy and it lasted into the early decades of the twentieth century. During this time, the immigrant novel reflected political realities through its portrayal of how migration to the United States brought success for some and marginalization for others. The genre confronted the myth that all newcomers enjoy equal potential to achieve the “American Dream” by exposing how racialization, the process of assigning individuals to categories based on characteristics such as skin color or facial features, significantly determined inclusion or exclusion.

Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a classic of politically aware American environmentalist fiction. While a literary descendant of Henry David Thoreau and a rough contemporary of figures such as Rachel Carson, Abbey’s politics are not entirely one with earlier nature writers and environmentalists. His novel is perhaps best known for bringing ecotage to the consciousness of a broad audience and inspiring such real-world actions as the political theater of groups such as Earth First. Some of the book’s success is certainly due to the degree to which it provokes critical reflection on problematic tensions in several areas central to environmentally conscious writing. One such tension is that which arises between, on the one hand, representations of environmental politics and, on the other, the politics of representations of nature. A second pertains to the question of the degree and manner in which issues of social justice intersect with environmentalist agendas. Along the way, the novel tests different models of ecological awareness, dramatizes the virtues and challenges of politically engaged grassroots environmentalism, and, perhaps especially due to its setting in the desert southwest, anticipates the increasingly urgent and globally relevant cluster of issues related to water rights, damming, and irrigation.

The members of the faculty of theology in Louvain, which was founded in 1432, within the university that had been established there seven years prior, fully engaged in the controversies that raged in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The theologians debated the right method of doing theology with Erasmus, who lived in the university town from the summer of 1517. Erasmus and the humanists emphasized that theology should be based upon the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, while they distrusted Scholastic theology. The Louvain theologians, and Jacob Latomus (ca. 1475–1544) especially, retorted that the Scriptures did not contain every revealed truth and certainly not all of the liturgical and disciplinary traditions which had been handed down in the church from the apostolic era.

This Introduction surveys the long, inextricable relationship between American politics and the American novel in the twentieth century. After defining twentieth-century “politics” broadly as the theoretical intersection between power, freedom, and justice within the framework of American liberalism, it explains why the American novel is a unique aperture through which to view political conflict and change, arguing that the novel form illuminates how official power relations overlap with personal power relations. While surveying previous scholarship on American politics and the novel, it explains why the volume does not restrict itself to the narrow subgenre of “political fiction.” The Introduction then addresses the rationale for each major section: “Ideologies and Movements,” “The Politics of Genre and Form,” and “Case Studies.” It concludes by considering how a robust engagement with the politics of the twentieth-century American novel can help us make sense of our political present.

The development of theological discourse during the Reformation period coincided with epochal shifts in Europe’s political culture. Church-state relations were redefined, traditional social hierarchies saw themselves challenged, cities demanded greater autonomy while princes sought greater authority, Europeans encountered entirely new worlds, and Christians tried to reimagine their churches. All of these dynamics impacted theological discourse. They forced theologians to take up new topics, explore new fields, and reexamine traditional doctrines. The opposite is true, as well: theological ideas instigated changes and drove political dynamics, both directly and indirectly, wittingly and unwittingly.

Revisiting Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here in the wake of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency, this chapter argues that the novel is still valuable for gauging the distinct contours of American fascism. On the one hand, the novel provides a remarkably prescient reading of the complex class dynamics and populist coalitions that remain crucial to understanding white nationalist politics and successful neofascist movements. It also strikingly captures the nature of American fascist rhetoric and how it is registered by those outside the fascist “base.” On the other hand, in projecting white Midwestern farmers as the main site of resistance, the novel shows the serious limitations of the early twentieth-century socialist populism that animated Lewis’s political imagination. The chapter concludes with a reflection on possibilities and constraints of populism as an antifascist political frame.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian fiction dramatizes her reform agenda, which turned on redressing an “unnatural” division back in human history that resulted in the excessively feminine women and humanized men who defined the norm in her own day. Her 1915 novel Herland challenges by flipping traditional gender hierarchies and roles even as it retains while naturalizing other forms of privileged status. Throughout her career, Gilman grounded her politics in the domain of biological existence, initially endorsing the view that natural laws and processes left unimpeded would inevitably work to facilitate the progressively meliorative course of evolution. But the more she became convinced that humans had deviated from this course, the more ardently she advocated for an interventionist, biopolitical approach. By the time she wrote Herland, she was diagnosing a nation’s “health and vitality” based on the extent of degeneracy and impurity she detected in the social body under examination and prescribing drastic cures as needed. Herland thus reveals the author’s conservative tendencies; these increased as she aged and soured on the prospect of sweeping social reform, but they had been there all along, even in her seemingly radical theories of gender.

“… that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy Word and we respond to him through prayer and praise.”1 These famous words from Martin Luther’s sermon at the Dedication of the Castle Church in Torgau (1544) describe worship as a “word event” between God and human beings. For Luther the sacraments functioned as bodily words and analogously the proclamation of the word functioned in a sacramental way.2 Worship is the Sitz im Leben of theology or its point of reference; therefore, changes in theology manifest themselves in liturgy. Debates over the sacraments, their understanding, practice, and number were at the center of the debates among the Reformation movements and with the Roman church. There was a considerable variety of theologies and practices of sacraments and worship in the Reformation, though common structures can also be identified. In what follows, the central role of preaching in Reformation worship as a common feature will be highlighted first.

The regulation of theology in the Reformation era took many forms. Among the factors that shaped the procedures were the practices of the ancient and medieval church, the particular ecclesiology and polity adopted by various denominations and the authority they gave to their church officials and to new institutions, their credal statements, and the wishes of the Christian rulers in whose territories they functioned.

Since the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, James Baldwin’s life and work have undergone a renaissance in and outside of the academy. His penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, which recounts the story of a young African American man who is falsely imprisoned, resonates not only with the Black Lives Matter movement but with the history of mass incarceration. As scholars such as Elizabeth Hinton have demonstrated, draconian prison sentences and police surveillance were inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement. If Beale Street Could Talk can be read as a novel that responds directly to the oppressive shifts in policing measures during the 1960s. In fact, as scholars such as D. Quentin Miller have argued, much of Baldwin’s work is preoccupied with what the writer called “the criminal power” of white authority. Examining one of Baldwin’s least studied novels through the lens of carceral studies sheds light on his development as a writer at a point in his career when critics were dismissing him as out of touch with the harsh realities of American political life.

To think about Jesuit theology in terms of a distinctive “school” means to grapple with fundamental issues in the history of early modern theology and in the development of modern Western thought more generally. On the one hand, the world of post-Reformation theologians was assuming an increasingly globalized, plural, and multi-faceted dimension, and the Society of Jesus was theologically, intellectually, and structurally better equipped than other religious orders to engage with the manifold challenges of this rapidly widening context. On the other hand, the Society made a sustained effort to keep this multiplicity solidly tied around a specific theological, and not just institutional or cultural, unity. The fact that the Society was distinctively subject to, and thrived on, this tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces is at the core of the Jesuits’ theological identity, which is itself characterized by a complex and intellectually vibrant tension between unity and multiplicity.

From the sixteenth to early mid-seventeenth centuries the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese East Indies pioneered the missionary concept and practice of omnia omnibus. The theological views of Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society in 1540, formed Jesuit global missionary principles. The meditations in Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises depict an image of a missionary God in the divine act of self-sending and becoming incarnate.1 This God calls on the Jesuits to go and “help souls” of diverse persons in the whole “circuit of the world” by becoming like them.

The quest for an appropriate method of acquiring and presenting true and sound knowledge was one of the most important factors driving the development of early modern science. That general philosophical motive had a religious counterpart, the quest for truth and certainty in matters of Christian faith. Because answering that question largely determined the course of early modern religious history, the search for proper method was a key priority for all confessions and branches of theology. Theology, however, was not simply an intellectual and methodologically disciplined activity. Rather, it was also constituted by theologians’ personal ethos. While prior to the Reformation that ethos may have been shaped mainly by celibate clerical lifestyles, whether in monastic and mendicant studia or in university settings, it was now determined, personally and institutionally, by a variety of methodological and sociological factors.

After an unsettled late medieval period, the sixteenth century in Europe presented itself as a new historical cycle, full of vitality and original perspectives. It was a time of significant changes as a consequence of the late medieval crises of plagues, famine, warfare, civil unrest, and the Great Western Schism, and also due to important phenomena such as Renaissance humanism and the budding Protestant Reformation.

Examining Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), this chapter argues that Butler uses an Afrofuturist aesthetic to create an imagined future that is not simply a description of American life, but a possible direction for rethinking who we are and how we live. It explores the prescient politics of Butler’s science fiction by showing how the political and economic systems in which the characters move both deeply impact how they live and are also strikingly absent. At its most basic political level, the Parable series offers a dystopian warning about possible futures and about the present. Responding to the neoliberal undermining of the values of public services under Reagan and beyond, the novels warn about both power-seekers filling political vacuums and our own willingness to ignore the consequences. The chapter ends with an examination of the benefits and drawbacks of Earthseed, the protagonist’s fictional religion, that prompts readers to reconsider the value of community itself, one dedicated to new ways of living that will challenge people to grow in new ways.