The controversial nature of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical writing has had theeffect of sidelining his earlier literary criticism, in particular his engagement withseveral French Catholic writers. A more nuanced exploration of his work as a wholedisplays a complex intersection of secularism and religious feeling. O’Brien, thepublic intellectual determined to fly by the nets of political and religious doctrine,nevertheless produces work saturated with religious language, forms, and structuresof feeling. His writing demonstrates a tension between his secularism and hisrepeated return to the language of suffering, sacrifice, heresy, and schism. O’Brien’sfamily history, with its traumatic relationship to events during the violent formation ofthe Irish state, is a helpful lens through which to view this emotional substratumwithin his writings.  His later writings emphasise the forces in his life that resistedcategorization, and thus offer a kind of apophatic vision, a dark enlightenment.

This chapter introduces the volume, states the argument, identifies the academic discourse(s) that the argument intervenes upon, and lays out the structure of the study. It opens with an inciting incident of examining the Plaza de tres culuras in modern-day Mexico and linked to its past as a birthing ground of colonial education. The narrative of the Colegio de Santa Cruz Tlatelolco emerges as a clear example of places that have housed multiple visions of learning over the centuries. Key topics and themes enter the readers’ minds: Historian Robert Ricard and spiritual conquest discourse, Bernardino de Sahagún and the student-documentarians of the Colegio, Indigenous sense of place as tied to family courtyards, and architecture as an archive for learning environments. The historiography begins with a call to action relating to ethnohistory, art history, education studies, and Spanish colonialism, noting key arguments my predecessors posed and connecting the study to the latest findings of my peers. Highlights include an advocacy for ethnohistory that bridges disciplines and focuses on linguistics to understand local art, religion, and education. The concept of the “learningscape” and how to approach visions of learning studies is a central takeaway, and readers discover the problematic rhetoric of Western terminologies surrounding “tequitqui” art.

After a meteorite reaches the Earth’s surface, it is subject to terrestrial weathering. Metallic Fe-Ni grains develop thin red coatings of goethite; the goethite fills pores within the whole-rocks, eventually decreasing their porosity to zero. Other bulk parameters that change during terrestrial weathering of ordinary chondrites are magnetic susceptibility, thermal conductivity, compressive strength, and tensile strength. Evaporite minerals grow on the surfaces of Antarctic finds with phases including Mg carbonates, Mg sulfates, and Ca sulfate. OC whole rocks become contaminated with terrestrial C and water, affecting their bulk isotopic compositions. Frost wedging can cause rocks to expand and shatter as water seeps into fractures and freezes. There are a few OC ventifacts sculpted by wind erosion in arid environments; these rocks typically have three or four flat sides that meet at angular interfaces. A small number of ordinary chondrites are shatter cones, shocked rocks with striated surfaces that have a horsetail-like appearance. Such structures are produced beneath the floors of impact craters.

High emigration and a low marriage rate caused population to fall to slightly more than half its 1841 level by 1901. Throughout these years schools, churches, shops, post offices and railways modernised rural and urban Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood/Fenians rising of the 1860s, though unsuccessful, focused attention on Irish grievances. However, the land agitation 1879–1891 was led by parliamentary nationalists, the Home Rule party under Parnell, and managed to convert the British Liberal party under William Gladstone to this cause in 1886. Unionists all over the country resisted, but their campaign was concentrated more in the north-east, where unionist sympathies existed at all social levels. By 1903 landlordism had been abolished but the nationalist-unionist struggle was only beginning.

Shipbuilding and textile/garment industries were huge employers in the north-east. Elsewhere food-processing, textile/apparel, and mining and quarrying, held their own but did not expand. Agriculture was the biggest single employer. The rise in white-collar and government jobs for the sons and daughters of the small farming and working class offered the greatest opportunity for social mobility in this period. English was needed for employment, education, and emigration, and the Irish language declined further.

How can we learn about God from the study of nature. What do we learn from the writings of Cicero and the Stoics, Maimonides, and William Blake – and today from the red shift, the anthropic principle, and the challenge of the multiverse?

The physical-force elements in the Northern Ireland conflict were Irish republican illegal organizations versus illegal loyalist organisations; ranged against both but more often aimed against nationalists were the armed police force, its auxiliaries and the British army. Constitutional elements were the SDLP, representing nationalists, various unionist parties ranging from moderate to extreme, Irish politicians and British secretaries of state. Political reform and reconciliation progressed slowly, and 3,663 people of all ethnicities and origins died before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 put an end to hostilities.

Independent Ireland was characterised by political tension, repression, unemployment, emigration and social activism. Some new, short-lived political parties were formed. Ireland voted to join the EEC in 1973 and became more formally integrated with Europe over the succeeding decades. Women entered the workforce in greater numbers and attained high public visibility, clamouring for social welfare, employment and reproductive rights. Birth control was fully legal by 1990, homosexuality decriminalised in 1993 and divorce legalised in 1995. The late 1990s saw investment in public services, rising employment and falling emigration and immigration. The Catholic church, rocked by sexual scandals and challenged by growing secularism, saw its power wane.

The work of Bourdieu and Foucault can help identify the processes and strategies bywhich the Irish Catholic Church gained dominance and control over the lives of itsmembers.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the increasing power ofthe Church in Ireland, not least by its control over key institutions.  People lived ‘inCatholic time and space’, internalizing systems of discipline and codes of conduct.The intricate knotwork of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Irish’ identity meant that Church dominationwas bound up with the drive to modernize and civilize the nation. The keymechanisms used to create obedient subjects were penitential practices, corporalpunishment, confession, and confinement. John McGahern’s fictionand memoir explore the ways in which Catholic corporal punishment and patriarchalauthority extended into domestic spaces. His writings offer a useful representation ofthese mechanisms of control and punishment, but also narrate quiet moments ofresistance.

The Prologue establishes the author’s personal journey of discovering Nordic capitalism as a transformative lens for understanding market economies. Through firsthand experiences living and working in Nordic countries, it reveals how encountering their universal social services, tax systems, and union participation challenged fundamental assumptions about capitalism formed as an American MBA student and corporate employee. The chapter positions Nordic capitalism as a practical alternative to American neoliberalism when mounting sustainability challenges demand new paradigms, likening the present moment to a potential Kuhnian “scientific revolution“ and paradigm shift away from neoliberal ideology. It introduces key features distinguishing Nordic capitalism, including democratic accountability, stakeholder cooperation, and market alignment with sustainability goals. The Prologue frames the book’s investigation of Nordic capitalism not as a pursuit of utopian ideals, but as a pragmatic exploration of proven approaches for evolving capitalism toward sustainability, an approach that provides hope in a challenging world.