This chapter introduces the long tradition of American thinkers and leaders emphasizing a priority for citizenship education. It then has three sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Affirmation of American Civic Education; (b) Montesquieu’s Philosophy of a Modern and Moderate Civics – including the view of how Christianity can play a moderating role in a modern, democratic-republican civics; and (c) The American Founders on Civic Knowledge and Civic Virtue for Self- Government – including Washington’s great emphasis upon and leadership in civic education.

Did classical antiquity connect ethnicity, moral worth, and skin colour? The conventional answer is ‘no’, but then conventional Classics tends to stop, chronologically, before things get interesting. This chapter explores a set of texts from the Roman period and late antiquity that point towards an emergent if elusive epidermal racism. The drivers of this seem to be both empire, with its systematically reductive approach towards human diversity, and Christianity, with its theologisation of white light and black darkness. Late antique texts are, however, inconsistent: Some (e.g. Heliodorus) portray Blackness as noble and idealised, but others (e.g. Nonnus) certainly connect it with defilement and the infernal. Even in late antiquity, then, there is no coherent, thoroughgoing epidermal racism; but we undoubtedly find what Cord Whittaker has called a ‘shimmer’.

Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

The expansion of the Roman Empire into the Mediterranean in the early second century BCE represented a gradual diminution of the independence and autonomy of the Greek cities. At the same time, processes internal to the poleis were moving them in a more elitist direction, as the “big benefactors,” ultrawealthy men who bestowed ever-greater favors on their cities, moved toward monopolizing participation in civic magistracies. The council and other political bodies became off-limits to citizens who were not among the euergetistic elite. Still, democratic institutions and ideas of the previous period persisted, especially in the popular assembly. Christianity, the centralization of administrative power in the Roman Empire under Constantine, and various crises combined to deprive the cities of the last vestiges of dēmokratia in the fourth century CE, when popular assemblies largely disappear from the poleis.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

Synesius of Cyrene (b. ca. 373–d. ca. 410) was trained in the classical literature that depicted war as an event with armies opposing one another in battle, but he experienced a different kind of conflict in his own life – namely, the periodic and unpredictable raiding that troubled late ancient Libya. Synesius’ letters and his treatise On Kingship show that these conflicts brought sentiment to the surface as a kind of evidence about people that could be implicitly trusted; Synesius’ sentiment was palpably xenophobic, aligned against both “barbarians” and “Scythians,” and so strong as to circumvent rational examinations of the evidence around him. This essay examines the scaffolded construction of stereotype, built in Synesius’ advice to a hypothetical ruler, and demonstrates how knowledge, even knowledge that seems intimate and trustworthy, can be bent through engagements with violence.

The Comedy’s recantation of an error determines Paradiso’s role. The poem recants Convivio’s rationalism, not for the sake of faith but for philosophy properly understood. Dante initiates that change when, in Convivio IV, he pivots from a metaphysical impasse to investigating the meaning of nobility, a focus on human affairs that persists in the Comedy. Because wisdom must be sought, understanding the ground from which the search begins is crucial to its justification and, once it’s undertaken, to forestall passion-induced distortions. As a guide, Dante looks to Aristotle, the genuine Aristotle, not the derivative versions of his contemporaries.

But Dante’s path to the question of happiness, which animates philosophy, differs from Aristotle’s. To defend the philosophic life, Dante must liberate philosophy from subordination to faith. I here sketch the way in which the Comedy’s form aids him in this effort. In thus prosecuting political philosophy’s central task, the defense of the philosophic life, Paradiso fulfills its role not as the poem’s telos but as the portal to that life “figured” in Purgatorio’s Earthly Paradise.

Ireland’s five provinces were ruled over by multiple over and under-kings, with headquarters at Tara, in Midhe/Meath, Cashel in Mumha (later Munster) and Emain Macha in Uladh (later Ulster). Christian settlements from the fifth century (founded by Patrick, Brigid, Columcille, Finnian, Ciarán, Brendan, Íte and many others) forged strong links with Britain and Europe. Learning Latin led to the writing of Irish from the sixth century, and scholarship flourished. Everyone – kings, monks, traders and labourers, bards and the powerful lawyer class, lived in ring fort settlements. They ate mainly the dairy produce abundant in Ireland’s mild climate, meat occasionally, fish near coasts and rivers, pulses, and grains congenial to the region – oats, barley, wheat, rye. A legal tract was devoted to beekeeping. Scandinavian invaders from the late eighth century settled in the trading ports they established – Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick – and were gradually absorbed into Irish life. A high-kingship emerged in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Religion went through several cycles of decay and reform. Dioceses were established in 1152. Conflicts between Irish kings facilitated the invasion of the Anglo-Normans under Strongbow in 1169, bringing the English crown into Irish politics.

This chapter begins by examining the emergence of Kant’s conception of the highest good in his pre-critical engagement with Stoicism and Epicureanism. His critiques of these schools and concomitant endorsement of Christianity anticipate both his later notion of heteronomy and an enduring commitment to the constitutive inadequacy of the human or finite will. The chapter then turns to explaining the nature of Kantian theodicy as an attempt, undertaken solely from the perspective of the autonomous subject, to show that and not just how rational criteria are instantiated. Since the content of Kantian theodicy is the idea of the highest good, we need to understand both why Kant thinks we need to hope for its realisation and the nature of this need, especially given his contention that the very reality of the moral law depends upon the possibility of the highest good. Seeing how the need for the highest good arises from the condition of finite autonomous beings allows us to understand the existential motivation behind Kantian theodicy. But it also alow us to identify a first path opened up, but not taken, by Kant towards rendering the content and possibility of autonomy dependent on the actual conditions of its development and exercise.

Dante’s two reports of his looks back to earth frame this section. After the first, Dante has a vision of Christ himself.Despite this theophany, Dante must undergo an examination of his Christianity, testing him on the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.The eager “bachelor” answers the masters’ queries with definitions memorized from authoritative texts.The test, however, exceeds rote memorization.The question of the texts’ truth, which concern the most significant matter of our happiness, moves the participants to inquire more deeply.

Dante rethinks the Christian virtues as he rethought the sins in Purgatorio.His reassessment reconsiders Adam, the figure most intimately connected with the meaning of Scripture’s supremacy, namely, its discouragement of philosophic inquiry. Through this conversation, Dante reinterprets the text that originates the faith in which he’s tested. He recurs to that origin to direct it onto an alternative path, one that encourages rather than prohibits the philosophic life.

This alternative way of life requires an alternative divinity. In this realm of the fixed stars, to which he traces his origins as man and poet, Dante undertakes the ultimate poetic act, that of theopoiesis. Dante’s vision of Christ, he writes, prepared him to see Beatrice.

Having established the basics of a Pascalian, “cordate” epistemology, this chapter explores the implications for how the world works and applications to some pressing problems today. The way the world looks, and so the reasons your experience gives you, depends on the state of your heart. But the fact that the world can be seen in these ways, according to the different states of heart, is a significant fact about it. Pascal infers much from this built-in ambiguity in the world when it comes to religion. That the world can be seen as both a Godless mechanism and mediating a loving relationship with God confirms one theology (the Augustinian Fall), and disconfirms the rest. A similar situation arises for us today, where the facts about the world can seem equally obvious to both sides of our polarized society, even though they are looking at the same world, albeit from their own “echo chambers.” This chapter explores the relevance of Pascal’s views on ambiguity to the deep disagreements we encounter in society today, applying insights about how the heart influences the way things appear as well as how to communicate with those who profoundly disagree with us.

In this chapter, we will examine the Old Testament’s role in religious communities as an authoritative revelation from God – the concept of “scripture” common to the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These texts hardly began as the books that now comprise the Bible; rather, what we will discover is a lengthy, complex development of authoritative texts from oral to written to canon.

This chapter will take us inside the ancient world of the Old Testament’s formation. Words, considered powerful, were painstakingly preserved through centuries in the hands of anonymous authors and editors, scribes and scholars. Texts were collected into books and went through a process of use and standardization by the ancient Israelites, beginning as early as the tenth century bceand lasting through the Babylonian exile and beyond – emerging finally in the canonical form we know today as the Old Testament.

In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.