The mission in China in the seventeenth century still draws the attention of many theologians and missiologists today. This mission, which in the first hundred years was predominantly led by the Jesuits, was remarkable in several regards: the Jesuit missionaries adopted a policy of accommodation to Chinese culture; they evangelized “from the top down”; they propagated indirectly by using European science and technology; and they adopted an attitude of toleration toward Confucian values and rites. Moreover, the mission is well known for the Chinese Rites Controversy, which fueled theological debates in Europe at the end of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. However, the development of a local theology in China is one of its lesser-known aspects, though nothing comparable can be found in other missions of the same time. This development originated from the European background of the missionaries, but more significantly hinged on the cultural, social, and political context of China. This overview will first discuss this context, and next the theological issues that had impacted theologies of mission.

All the King’s Men is one of the most significant political novels in US literature. Based on the career of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long, the novel follows the rise and fall of the fictional Willie Stark. This chapter traces Stark’s development as a populist, using the work of Michael Kazin and others to argue that populism must be defined by its rhetorical characteristics. We know that a political actor is populist not necessarily by their policy proposals, but always by the way they talk. Populism is performed in a language of grievance. The populist uses an emotive rhetoric that invokes a binary of “the people” against an “elite” above them and a racialized poor below them. The populist politician positions himself as “the people’s” representative, the only one who can speak and act on their behalf. This chapter analyzes speeches in All the King’s Men, demonstrating how they embody the populist binary and its rhetorical moves. Ultimately, the chapter considers the economic and social conditions that can allow a demagogue to rise in fiction and in real life.

This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

The notion of “Eastern Christianity” covers an extensive variety of ecclesiastical traditions – Chalcedonian (“Byzantine”/“Melkite”), pre-Chalcedonian (“Miaphysite”/“Jacobite”), and pre-Ephesian (“Nestorian”/“Chaldean”) – that originated in Late Antiquity in the Eastern Roman Empire and neighboring lands. This vast area, including the region surrounding the Mediterranean from the Balkan peninsula through Asia Minor, south Caucasus, upper Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, gave birth to a diversity of Christian cultures using Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic as the languages of their theological and liturgical traditions. Islamic conquests that began in the seventh century brought about an increasing Arabization of Eastern Christian cultures in the territories under Muslim control, but the identity of Eastern Christianity remained clearly bound to its Late Antique origins.

The horror novel appears in the late twentieth century as a significant genre of popular fiction. Growing out of older traditions of the European Gothic and weird fiction, and their trajectory through American literature, the horror novel has produced some of the most famous names in writing, such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. Debates about the literary merits of horror have been frequent, but the genre undoubtedly holds an important place in fiction and in American culture more widely. The politics of the horror novel, then, are crucial. This chapter traces the history of critical commentary on the political position of horror, asking if it upholds or questions the status quo. It also moves beyond this model to examine modern transformations of the genre and self-conscious literary responses to the legacy of racism and misogyny that has been a subject of critique. Covering the horror novel’s response to varied social changes, including immigration, the sexual revolution, and the Civil Rights Movement, this chapter argues that it is capable of both reflecting on and exploiting social fears, and that its politics are as varied as its form, which has far more variety than narrow genre definitions might suggest.

The terms “systematic theology” and “dogmatics” emerged in the seventeenth century. They were closely connected with the German cultural area and spread only later to other vernacular languages.1 In the following, systematic theology is understood as the normative elaboration of the doctrine of the church. The issues of method and biblical interpretation are intimately connected with systematic theology. As these issues are treated in other chapters of this book, they are here only briefly mentioned when necessary.

Unlike Lutheranism, the Reformed faith lacked both a central personality who gave its life and thought a distinctive shape, and a specific localized context from which it could expand. Instead, it emerged in a number of cities in Switzerland. From there it spread across Europe as it was picked up by exiles whose imaginations were captured by what they witnessed in Switzerland and who carried the theology and the ecclesiastical models of their various exile cities back to their homelands. As a result, the Reformed faith was both eclectic and variegated in its manifestations. It was also shaped intimately by the specific political conditions of the nations where it took root.1

The search for the truth and establishment of consensus through the exchange of viewpoints was a common means of reaching understanding in the early modern period.1 The roots of this process lay in the way in which academic disputations were conducted in the medieval university. It followed firmly established rules, rhetorical models, and techniques. These standard forms of communication were carried over onto a nonacademic, public plane in early modern decision making and formation of public opinion. There the forms of the medieval academic disputation and judicial structures for negotiations blended with each other. The religious divisions that proceeded from the Reformation and the medieval church’s inability to reform provided the impetus for this development. The struggle for correct doctrine, which employed the form of the disputation with theses and antitheses, moved ever more out of the academic realm. That certainly did not end the culture of disputation at the university, within learned circles, however. Instead, a form of exchange, discussion, and dialogue in the vernacular took its place alongside it in the forum of the nonacademic public.

This chapter examines the politics of postmodern metafiction. Starting from the widespread view that 1970s postmodernism was “politically abortive” and interested primarily in language games, the chapter sets out to rethink this position. Turning back to the coining of the term “metafiction” by William Gass and considering some major examples of the form (including work by Kurt Vonnegut, among others), the opening half of the chapter introduces the idea that there is a lurking sense of identity politics beneath much canonical metafiction. Tracing lines of continuity with the work of white male modernist authors, the model of metafictional “author gods” is critically examined. The chapter goes on to establish a counter-tradition, making use of the work of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to explore texts that use metafictional devices while resisting any illusion of supra-textual mastery. Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional science fiction epic Dhalgren is posited as the exemplar of this counter-tradition. The chapter makes the case that Delany’s text, overlooked by many scholars of the form, should sit at the center of any discussion of 1970s metafiction. The conclusion includes a brief survey of the implicit politics detectable in some recent examples of metafictional writing.

This chapter deals with Catholic and Protestant theologies of preaching and the Christian ministry in the Reformation period. A word of clarification is necessary at the outset. The focus of this chapter is not on early modern preaching or pastoral care per se but on theological reflection on preaching and the pastoral office as such. In other words, this chapter is an exercise in the history of Pastoraltheologie, a term that encompasses more than the English “pastoral theology,” which in some contexts refers to a branch of practical theology that deals especially with pastoral care and counsel.1 The definition of pastoral theology adopted here is considerably broader; it includes all that relates to the pastoral office and ministry of the Christian church. Early modern Catholic and Protestant pastoral theologies will be examined briefly in turn.

This chapter suggests that the chief subject of Western genre fiction is the politics of individual freedom. Novels that take the American West as their principal setting and subject, such as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Louis L’Amour’s Hondo (1953), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), along with short stories such as Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997), ask questions that are fundamentally about liberalism. The chapter suggests that early genre Westerns tend to imagine the American West as a romantic space of absolute individual autonomy, whereas post-1970s Westerns reimagine the genre with a critical eye, as if to acknowledge the myriad ways in which the frontier myth was too often a cover story for conquest. Over the course of its twentieth-century invention and reinvention, one persistent feature of the Western genre was the many ways in which it positioned the signifiers of the West in order to imagine individualism in America.

The early modern specialization of “attack theology” aimed at publicizing and refuting doctrinal deviations in works by adversaries, who often responded with defense and counter-argument. Many Reformation-era works of this genre are distasteful today because they attribute base motives to the adversaries in question. While some giant figures wrote controversial works, a broad view of the field reveals only flashes of theological brilliance. Mediocre theology predominates, but the works had the effect of hardening both Protestant-Catholic opposition and intra-Protestant differences, which today’s ecumenical commissions are laboring to reduce in their intensity and even show, in some cases, to be reconcilable differences.

One used to read, in older studies of women in the Reformation, that women were “silenced” during this period. That view has some merit. Surveying the many authors of the era’s elite theological discourse, women are hard to find. In fact, only one woman of the Reformation era has been acknowledged by her own tradition as a “doctor of the church,” and thereby identified as an authoritative contributor to doctrinal theology. She is Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), and it did not happen until 1970.

The influence of Protestantism on natural science is nebulous and difficult to determine. First of all, one should bear in mind that Protestantism did not exist as a unified set of beliefs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Lutherans, the Reformed, and the Anabaptists were all technically Protestant, yet their differences with each other were as great as the differences of each with the Church of Rome. The situation in England was even more complex. Henry VIII’s reformation in the 1530s had not been “Protestant” but dynastic, anticlerical, and national in character.

With the coming of Christ, a divine revelation became manifest in concrete, historical time. Christianity is therefore an intrinsically historical religion. In Christian theology there are several fields related to history, of which church history and the history of doctrine occupy a central place. Church history deals with subjects such as the social, cultural, political, and institutional factors that had an influence on shaping the church and vice versa. The history of doctrine, on the other hand, focuses on the development of thought. It is important to bear in mind that many events that had tremendous significance for church history had no immediate bearing on doctrine. A well-known example of this is the Edict of Milan of 313, which granted religious toleration to Christians in the Roman Empire. It changed the course of church history, but did not contribute directly to the development of doctrine.