What does it mean to build digital worlds in the Anthropocene? Despite their compromised provenance, computer and video games offer a potent avenue for designing and partaking in environmental scenarios. As a review of the varied approaches to ludic world design suggests, differences in opinion as to who or what constitutes a viable game world – broadly speaking, designers, players, software or spaces – bear on environmental impasses in our shared world, which is marked by multispecies entanglements and obligations. If the essence of world-building lies primarily not in a singular, authorial intent or vision but in a collective imagining and realisation, then designed worlds may serve as both inspirations and cautionary tales for our ecologically compromised times.

In this chapter we examine the intersection of drumming and disability by foregrounding the experiences of drummer and co-author Cornel Hrisca-Munn, who describes his disability as multi-limb deficient. Commencing with a discussion of concepts from the field of disability studies, we explain how drumming exposes the inadequacy of either/or medical- and social-model thinking. Nuanced understandings of lived experiences help to make sense of disability theory, and we use examples from Cornel’s life as a drummer to highlight the importance of complexity and context. We proceed with a narrative by Cornel on how he has experienced others’ perceptions of him through his online presence on internet and social media platforms. Cornel’s experiences of being the object of others’ inspiration porn or trolling on social media highlight how difficult it is for him to be regarded solely as a drummer; instead, he is compartmentalized as a ‘disabled drummer’. Following, we provide a detailed description of how Cornel plays the song ‘Everlong’ by Foo Fighters to illustrate that how people see Cornel play drums changes how they hear him play drums. Finally, Cornel details how he is often compared to Rick Allen of Def Leppard, and explains why this comparison is problematic.

In this autoethnographic essay, the author – a drummer – describes how he derives meaning from playing the drum kit. He presents accounts of playing drums both alone and in the context of an original rock band. Drawing from existing scholarship on aesthetic experience and meaning in music making, the author argues that while he plays drums often in a state of flow, it may be unhelpful to construe this – as others have done – as music making for its own sake. Rather than positioning his drumming as autotelic or intrinsically worthwhile, the author explains how he plays for the fulfilment derived therefrom, as part of a life lived in search of eudaimonia – flourishing both individually and as part of a community. Drumming in these contexts is, the author argues, a locus of spirituality, understood through the lenses of embodiment, authenticity, and personal agency as a form of success. Playing drums – for this drummer – provides a connection to, and a window into, his soul.

It was the culmination of a months-long legislative fight, not to mention some eighty years of swirling allegations about Catholic sexual deviance, when the local sheriff and health commissioner arrived at St. Joseph Academy in remote Mena, Arkansas, where Catholics represented a tiny minority of the population. The county officials entered the school under authority bestowed by the state’s new Convent Inspection Act of 1915, designed to end the rumored practice of Catholic institutions harboring girls for the sexual gratification, as one enraged Arkansan put it, of a “lecherous bunch” of priests.1 Discovering no evidence of crime or malfeasance among the several Sisters of Mercy and the small number of female students at the school, the sheriff, evidently impressed by his hosts, apologized to them and promised to return for a social visit with his wife. Meanwhile, elected officials in Georgia successfully installed a similar law aimed at routing out Catholic perversion, and legislators in seven other states – from Iowa to Oregon to Minnesota – debated their own versions of a convent inspection bill. Together, these largely forgotten efforts at policing sexual activity in Catholic institutions hint at how significant and controversial Catholicism has been in the history of gender and sexuality in the United States.

The document known to us as the Epistle to Diognetus is a perplexing text. Its origins are obscure since the author is anonymous, the identity of the recipient remains unknown, the text has several lacunae, the integrity of the final two chapters is questionable, and nothing in the document indicates a specific date or provenance. What is more, Diogn. is entirely unknown to Christian authors of the patristic and medieval periods since no-one mentions or cites the document as far as we know.

The Shepherd of Hermas packs a striking number of conundrums, textual, compositional, theological, and reception historical. To begin with, despite the fact that there are more papyri of this book than any of the other Apostolic Fathers, as well as than most New Testament books taken separately, we still do not have the complete text in Greek. As a result, in current critical editions the last chapters are supplied from the Latin (and Ethiopic) translations. It is also the longest AF book, replete of allegorical material, occasionally inconsistent and largely repetitive, which leads modern readers every now and again to describe it as naive, dilettante, and incompetent, or plainly boring. Moreover, the manner in which the book is written in large narrative sections with seemingly poor connection from one to another has occasioned several theories of multiple authorship.

Christianity and Judaism as we know them today can both be traced back to the richly diverse Judaism that flourished in Palestine in late Second Temple times, but it was only after 70 CE that the two traditions began to define themselves over against each other in mutually exclusive ways. The period between the First Jewish Revolt (66–74 CE) and the Bar Kokhba war (132–135 CE) – the period in which much of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers was written – was crucial in this development. The aim of this study will be to throw light on this parting of the ways. It will outline briefly what we know about Rabbinic Judaism in Palestine and synagogal Judaism in the Diaspora at this time, and then read against this picture the references to Jews and Judaism in the Apostolic Fathers, especially in the Epistle of Barnabas. What Barnabas shows is a Christianity that sharply differentiates itself from Judaism, but at the same time does not want to sever all ties. It wants to hold on to the Jewish Scriptures as word of God, but through a process of allegorization to appropriate them as Christian Scripture.

This chapter directs our attention to the drum kit played outside the jazz and rock realm, which most commonly dominates the efforts of scholars in their research. The case of Brazil serves as a backdrop to discuss the development of Brazilian rhythms on the drum kit, highlighting different approaches to play samba like batucada and samba jazz. Firstly, the text presents a Historical Overview, pointing to seminal drummers such as Luciano Perrone, Edison Machado, Dom Um Romão and Airto Moreira. Secondly, it investigates Technical Characteristics of Brazilian Drum Kit Playing, in an attempt to describe what is generally referred to as ‘the Brazilian feel’. Within that discussion, the limitations of music notation in order to capture nuances of Brazilian rhythms emerge, especially in the context of irregular spacing between sixteenth notes. Lastly, through a brief survey of drummers from more recent decades, it becomes evident that newer generations of musicians have continued to expand Brazilian drum kit playing with their own interpretation of traditional rhythms, applying new concepts, techniques and creative ideas.

Music leadership is a foggy notion with many meanings. Leaders may be chosen, unchosen, appointed, unappointed, or self-appointed. As a powerful dimension of collaborative performance, leadership is framed here first as a linear-hierarchical model– a ‘one-way street’; second, as a visionary-transformational model – a ‘two-way street’; and third, as a plural-distributed model – a ‘shared street’. All three are examined in the light of Leader-Member Exchange theory of leadership (LMX). The extent to which the leader and subordinate exchange resources and support beyond what is expected based on the formal employment contract evidences a high LMX. A low LMX relationship is one in which the employee performs within the bounds of the employment contract but contributes nothing extra. Nine musicians, selected for their many years of experience in giving, receiving, and sharing leadership functions, provided interview data. Analysis generated a number of different elements that were identified as having a reported impact on music decision making. This chapter uses those elements to contribute to a growing body of knowledge of use to the drummer in her development of a suite of 'off-instrument' skills now seen as every bit important as her suite of 'on-instrument' ones.

The discrete texts known collectively as the Apostolic Fathers may each be dated somewhere between the end of the first century CE and the end of the second century, with the majority written in the first half of the second century, variously in Rome or in Roman provinces around the eastern Mediterranean.

In June 1908, Pope Pius X published an apostolic constitution reorganizing the Roman curia. Apart from a few members of the clergy, virtually none of the roughly fourteen million Catholics in the United States in that year could have said, if asked, what an “apostolic constitution” was, nor could they have named the various departments in the remade curia or explain what any of them did. The church’s central administrative structures had no bearing on their religious lives or their identity as Catholics: Sunday Mass was the same next week as it had been last week. But the obscure papal decree had symbolic significance, even if laypeople were blissfully unaware of it. The responsibilities of one of those departments – the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide (“Propagation of the Faith”), whose origins lay in the supervision of missionaries to China and Japan in the sixteenth century – encompassed, the pope said, “those regions in which, the sacred hierarchy not being yet constituted, the missionary state still exists.” By that standard, there were parts of the world that had once qualified as mission lands but now did not. Establishment of their own native churches had moved them into a different category. In 1850, for example, a system of dioceses and bishops had been reconstituted in Great Britain for the first time since the Reformation, allowing England and Scotland not to be considered missions anymore. In the New World, a century of growth also justified recognizing that the United States had ceased to be missionary territory; likewise Canada and Newfoundland (not yet a part of the Canadian confederation).1 In less than a sentence in the middle of a document about something else, the status of the Catholic Church in America had been changed. No longer an uncertain outpost, it was a regular part of the church worldwide, as much as that in Italy or France. Coming as it did at the opening of a new century, this technical papal order can be seen as marking the suitable beginning of a new era for the church in the United States.

Fossil fuels represent one of the primary drivers of the Anthropocene’s geological and ecological transformations while their production is bound up in different social, political and economic systems. This chapter traces some of the most striking features of recent literature engaging withfossil fuels, covering examples from theatre (Ella Hickson’s 2016 transhistorical play Oil), fiction (Jennifer Haigh’s 2016 fracking novel Heat and Light) and poetry (Juliana Spahr’s 2015 long poem on Deepwater Horizon, ‘Dynamic Positioning’). Moving through considerations of resource conflict, hydrocarbon extraction, environmental justice and industrial disaster, as well as the way the petrochemical industry permeates every facet of contemporary life, the chapter argues that emergent ‘petroliterature’ is at its most interesting when it tries to find a formal response – whether through stagecraft or metaphor or metre – to negotiate the duality of fossil fuels as both volatile substances and abstract commodities.

In November 2000, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a pastoral letter, Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity, which reiterated the fact that the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States was greatly dependent upon immigrants from “many races and cultures.”1 In looking at the changing face of the US Catholic population, it recognized the increasing presence of Asian and Pacific Island Catholics, a community that has been largely invisible within the history of American Catholicism. Awareness of the growing Asian Catholic population prompted the bishops the following year to issue Asian and Pacific Presence: Harmony in Faith, a statement that more clearly acknowledged their presence in the church. Noting that “Christ Was Born in Asia,” the document encouraged a fuller appreciation of the gifts and contributions of Asian and Pacific peoples to the life of the church and acknowledged the need to respond with a “welcoming spirit.”2 A companion statement in 2018, Encountering Christ in Harmony: A Pastoral Response to Our Asian and Pacific Island Brothers and Sisters, laid out a national pastoral plan for Asian and Pacific Island Catholics in the United States. The product of the work of the bishops’ Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Island Affairs, the report recognized the “richness of the spiritual and cultural backgrounds” that Asian and Pacific Island Catholics bring to the church and their contributions to the faith.3 Taken together, these pastoral statements draw attention to two key themes, presence and faith, that have been central to the Asian-American Catholic experience.