Chapter 3 examines capitalism’s core principles through a three-way comparative analysis of American capitalism, Nordic capitalism, and Soviet socialism. It establishes capitalism’s defining features – private ownership and market mechanisms – while revealing crucial variations in how different societies implement these principles. The chapter introduces the distinction between oligarchic and democratic capitalism, highlighting how power distribution shapes market outcomes. Through detailed examination of property rights, labor markets, and price mechanisms, it demonstrates how Nordic and American capitalism differ despite sharing fundamental market principles. The chapter concludes by exploring sustainable capitalism’s dependence on democratic institutions, arguing that well-functioning democracy is essential for markets to serve broader societal interests. This analysis sets up the book’s central argument that Nordic-style democratic capitalism offers valuable lessons for realizing sustainable capitalism.

Into the twentieth century, a tradition of domestic fiction communicated that Irish Catholic women must endure hardship, consoled by faith. Mary Anne Sadlier’s fiction propagates this lesson within an Irish diasporic readership. Yet anti-Catholic novels offered contrary narratives of gratuitous cruelty in Catholic life, as in works by Maria Monk and Rebecca Theresa Reed. In anti-Catholic lecture tours organised by Protestant activists, speakers such as former nun Edith O’Gorman alleged a humiliating convent life to which the Church lured girls with promises of peaceful devotion. Catholic responses attempted to silence O’Gorman, discounting her claims with suggestions of emotionalism and inconsistency. Like O’Gorman’s work, accounts of other ‘escaped nuns’ tended to be either instrumentalised or ridiculed by commentators in ways that overlooked the substance of the women’s claims.

Sound and hearing play a crucial role in the conceptualisation and perception of divine entities, cultic places, and ritual processes. Sound phenomena can evoke religious experiences, structure ritual communication and stimulate desired emotional responses, whilst exposure to certain resonance frequencies can affect the human body, thereby influencing one’s perceptions and states of consciousness. This essay analyses the Dodonean soundscape, exploring the potential affect of the various sonic experiences in relation to the process of consultation. In addition to the diverse sensory input from the natural environment, which in the case of Dodona is crucial, as it can be surmised from the traditional accounts of the oracular oak, special consideration is given to the chalkeion of Dodona, a remarkable sonic installation that offered one of the most unusual auditory experiences to the pilgrims. Based on the symbolic and sound properties of the chalkeion, it is possible to suggest that the soundscape at Dodona invited a form of ecstasy or meditation, with the potential to alter the focus of attention and consciousness, thus allowing for new forms of knowledge to become available.

Scholars have noted that many of the surviving tablets from Dodona pose agriculturally related questions of a general manner. My essay suggests this is because agricultural resources were religiously framed in the ancient Greek world. In this context, I argue that oracles functioned as sites where material practices of daily life could be negotiated with the gods in a ritual as well as communal context. Oracles, in other words, presented a way of communicating with the natural world. On the other hand, they were also places where the individual could present himself (or herself) in relation to this world: how he or she depended on its fruits for survival; but also how he (or she) could make or remake the resources it had to offer so that it would flourish. As I want to show, this particular interrelationship between agricultural labour and oracular consultation relied as much on the performative act of enquiry as it did on practical knowledge. In order to illustrate these interconnections, the essay draws on recent trends in environmental history and in resilience studies. It will reconsider the ancient evidence of the Zeus Oracle at Dodona in light of these approaches.

Chinese Daoism contains unexpected affinities with Irish spirituality. The identifications with nature in the Song of Amergin and ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ are comparable to principles that pervade works by Laozi and Zhuiangzi. Oscar Wilde, the first major Irish writer to read a Daoist text, was drawn to the concept of wuwei, which to Wilde was a mischievous commitment to inaction. Yeats’s work indicates wider reading on translated Daoist texts, and it is probably from Yeats (if not direct influence) that Daoist parallels occur in such canonical Irish texts as Finnegans Wake and Waiting for Godot. More recent writers Michael Hartnett and Thomas Kinsella turn their reading of Daoism back to the ancient Irish connection to nature.

Since its introduction to Early Ireland, Marianism has changed considerably, conforming to trends on the Continent to an extent but also developing idiosyncratically, as in fusions of Mary with St Brigid, and spoken charms. The Blessed Virgin became a paradigm for Irish femininity in the Free State and Republic. While the Second Vatican Council attempted to suppress Marianism, the devotion persisted in Ireland, with incidents such as the Moving Statues often taken by commentators to represent a clash between tradition and modernisation. To writers such as Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, and John McGahern, the debate over Marian apparitions anticipated a lacuna that could lead to the decline of Irish Catholicism. Written in this process of decline, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy – with Neil Jordan’s film adaptation – and Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary use Marianism to examine institutions and the function of belief, and to consider a Marianism that might exist apart from Christianity.

The first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered on the first night of the nineteenth century. There are now more than 800,000 numbered asteroids. Numerous properties link most meteorite groups to asteroids. These include cooling rates, the presence in some specimens of solar-wind gas, formation ages and CRE ages, orbital parameters, and the retrieval of chondritic material from asteroids visited by spacecraft. In addition, the spectral reflectance properties of meteorites match those of particular asteroids. Space-weathering can account for differences between OC spectra and those of S-complex and Q-complex asteroids. Ordinary-chondrite parent asteroids probably initially had an onion-shell-like structure due to internal heating by 26Al. These bodies were likely collisionally disrupted and gravitationally reassembled while still hot.

This introduction to the volume explains the origin of these essays, which began as papers given at a workshop to support the development of the Virtual Reality Oracle, which created a virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Dodona. An ancient Greek oracular site comprised an encounter with ‘unknowing’: the sanctuary was a space to which visitors brought questions concerned with many different areas of their lives. In that respect, we also drew a parallel with the experience of those who ‘visit’, as researchers, an oracle about which little is certain. The essay then reflects on this process of research, to consider how in examining the way our historical subjects engage with the affordances of their environments, we, in turn, as historians, ourselves engage with the affordances of our historical evidence, using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.

Long prior to public revelations of institutional abuse, novelists such as Kate O’Brien and Edna O’Brien portrayed the realities of institutions such as Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools, and Mother and Baby Homes. Works such as The Land of Spices and the Country Girls trilogy examine private and individual experiences of these institutions, and their effects on the subsequent lives of women. Catholic institutions in such fiction are populated by abusive clergymen, cruel nuns, and exploited chidren. More recent fiction has adjusted its focus to scrutinise the enabling role of the public in institutional abuse. Claire Keegan and Emma Donoghue are among the authors who remind us that Catholic institutional cruelty has been facilitated by society economically – by use of Magdalene Laundries, for example – and by wilful obliviousness to inconvenient truths.

Focusing on the third-person formulation of many of the texts on the question tablets, and drawing on psychological and narratological research, this essay explores the mind-set of those who came to consult Zeus, asking if these texts reveal a sense of the self as fragmented in the face of crisis – which may also suggest how processes of consultation at an oracle could have provided psychological relief to pilgrims. Using analytical approaches from cognitive linguistics, this essay examines these texts for what they may reveal in terms of a cognitive blending of Viewpoints – both mortal and divine – aiding self-integration and, thus, decision making. Finally, this essay argues that awe in the face of the divine may have been a key component of the experience of consultation, with significant impacts on our brain and body.