There are many traditions about Patrick, the priest who was born in Roman Britain during the late fourth century and as a young boy came to live in Hibernia, now the modern island of Ireland. The text below survives in several manuscripts, the earliest from the seventh century, and it tells the story of Patrick’s life from his perspective. Though in the manuscript tradition it often bears the generic label of “letter,” it is also titled a Confession and, like the Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, justifies the narrator’s career to detractors, explaining how his work, however different from expectations, is still pious work, made possible by (and thus sanctioned by) the will of God.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was astonishingly prolific, writing sermons, letters, dialogues, a monastic rule, treatises on a variety of subjects, and works of scriptural exegesis, with Genesis and the Psalms being his special interests. Among his best-known works is the Confessions, which is sui generis in ancient literature: an autobiography laced with plaintive prayer, philosophical speculation, and raw self-examination. It relates a journey both spiritual and geographical, one that follows a path of lust and ambition toward conversion and baptism and from the North African countryside where Augustine was born to Carthage, Rome, and Milan, great cities of the western Roman Empire. Written in a gorgeous, protean Latin into which are woven myriad references to classical and biblical texts, the Confessions is a literary masterwork.

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 330–390) was one of the famous “Cappadocian Fathers” (along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa). Gregory was not only an important ecclesiastical leader – indeed, he acted as bishop of several cities and briefly presided over the second Council of Constantinople in 381 – but also an innovative theologian. His understanding of the Trinity helped to articulate and publicize pro-Nicene theology in the 370s and 380s, and his Christological ideas had enduring effects on later Christian thought. Perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of Gregory was his literary genius. Highly trained in classical texts, he was an accomplished epistolographer (more than 240 of his letters survive) and poet (nearly 20,000 lines of his verse survive).

In his autobiographical Confessions, Augustine (354–430) recounted his own circuitous path to Christianity. When he later became bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine oversaw the reception of converts into the church. So Augustine was intimately aware of dynamics of conversion and the many forms it could take from both personal and pastoral experience. In Sermon 279, which was preached in Carthage on Sunday, June 23, 401, Augustine touches upon several facets of conversion to Christianity.

In this final chapter, I explore how the experience of democratic conflict might be conceptualized by religious traditions in theologically and ethically meaningful ways. I return to the Augustinian tradition and its understanding of love as a resource for thematizing agonism theologically. First, I consider the role of love in Augustine’s moral psychology and political theory, showing how pluralist politics can be understood as a practice of discovering and pursuing “common objects of love” amidst difference. Next, I analyze the notion of political friendship in Augustine and Aristotle in order to show how social relations around these common objects of love might incorporate forms of conflict, disagreement, and parrhesia that are ordered to tending these common goods. I conclude by looking at two figures who extend Augustine’s political theology of love in distinctly liberative directions under the notion of enemy-love. Gustavo Gutiérrez and Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue, develop accounts of the imperative to love the enemy in ways that encompass forms of confrontation, opposition, and conflict in seeking to convert enemies to friends.

The relations between medieval and early modern Jews and the popes rested on consistently applied canonical and Roman law principles, alongside Pauline theology, which was itself bifurcated. These principles were fundamentally restrictive, and the restrictions became tighter over time. To speak of a mild early Middle Ages, driven by Augustinian principles, which turned radically hostile after the First Crusade, is a distortion. Nobody mentioned Augustine until Innocent III. There were forced conversions even in the early Middle Ages. Similarly, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 was not a turning point, but a culmination. Subsequent attacks on literature were new, but not papally initiated. Beginning with Benedict XIII in 1415, a move to press conversion – without ignoring old limits, theoretically – began to grow, which culminated in Paul IV’s foundation of the Roman ghetto in 1555, intended be a cauldron of conversion achieved through repression. The policy failed.

Utility models fall within the definition of “Industrial Property” provided for by Art. 2 of the Industrial Property Code (IPC) enacted by legislative decree 30/2005. Accordingly, their protection follows the general rules established by the Code for all industrial property rights (Art. 1-6; Art. 117 ff.), the provisions specifically dedicated to utility models (Art. 82-86), as well as the rules governing patents to the extent they are compatible with the specificities of utility models. Of limited relevance appear Articles 2592 and 2594 of the Civil Code, which offer a summary of the basic rules governing this intellectual property right.

In Germany, the utility model is a type of intellectual property right that provides protection for novel and useful inventions. It is governed by the German Utility Model Act (“Gebrauchsmustergesetz” – GebrMG) which was enacted in 1891, making it the oldest still-existing utility model system in the world. Utility models grant the right holder exclusive control over the use and commercialisation of an invention for a period of ten years from the date of filing, subject to the payment of annual renewal fees. In a way, the utility model is the “little sister” of a full-fledged patent (also called a “petty patent”), protecting the same type of subject matter (technical inventions) with a more limited scope.

Our infrastructure and production is based on fossilized carbon feedstock. This fossil carbon used was once biogenic carbon that has undergone a natural thermochemical conversion and very similar products can be produced from biomass via thermochemical processing; enabling the utilization of the existing infrastructure. The thermochemical processes; pyrolysis, gasification, and combustion, are commercially available for coal but their adaption to biomass is lagging. Understanding both the chemical and physical differences and considering the process chemistry can, however, mitigate this. This chapter talks the reader though the carbon and process chemistry in the thermal and hydrothermal processing of biomass.

Functional movement disorders are the most challenging movement disorders to diagnose and treat. Phenomenology and disease course are variable. This group of disorders includes tremor, dystonia, myoclonus, parkinsonism, speech and gait disturbances, and other movement disorders that are incongruent with patterns of pathophysiologic (organic) disease.

This article explores the notion of worship as a natural and universal disposition, described by Thomas Aquinas in ST II-II, q.81. Worship, however, is for Aquinas most relevant in the context of divine friendship or caritas with God, which Aquinas describes in ST II-II, q.23. This article, therefore, explains a possible connection between worship and love. How can the task to worship God grounded in the debt to God qua creator and the appreciation of the excellence of God be reconciled with the proximity and closeness with God that caritas implies? Drawing from Jewish philosophy, especially Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationships, and new findings in experimental psychology, in particular joint attention, a second-personal model of worship can be developed. This form of worship encompasses, on the one hand, the intimacy and sense of presence of God that worship can involve, and on the other hand, the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of God, essential for a worshipful attitude. The aim of this article is to explore how second-personal relatedness with God is possible in worship directed to God. Since God seems to be present in worship in a twofold manner, the interest is in the role the Holy Spirit can play in worship.

This assessment of Hopkins’s undergraduate years at Oxford, from 1863 to 1867, considers the social and physical environments in which he flourished and flailed, the intellectual and cultural opportunities he seized, and the religious conflicts in which he was embroiled. In terms of his undergraduate work, the chapter analyses how the essential elements of the Victorian zeitgeist – historicism and scientism – were a felt presence throughout Hopkins’s essays. In terms of his personal life, Hopkins’s homoeroticism is linked to the negative, self-recriminating ‘selving’ articulated in diary entries and poems. Contexts for his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism are also explored.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the HAVE perfect in English, paying particular attention to the development of the perfect participle, as a vehicle for discussing what causes directionality in language change, the English HAVE perfect being just one example of the emergence of a category which is a common property of Standard Average European. There are three main claims: that the change to a HAVE perfect only involves one strictly syntactic change, the reanalysis of a complement as an adjunct; that there are semantic changes in the participle driven by the bleaching of HAVE; and that the emergent new category of participle is driven by these semantic changes. The evolution of participles involves the creation of a new linguistic category, in a particular grammatical environment, which is analogous to an ecological niche in evolutionary change.

Beginning in 1840, the acceptance of emancipation among liberals became more general, no doubt, but still remained deeply ambivalent. The chapter uses the example of Baden to show this fact and moves from there to the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, during which pogroms against Jews, first in the French provinces along the border with Germany and then within Germany itself, gradually spread across the country. Once again, the fate of the Jews represented the duality of the overall German situation. Meanwhile, efforts to formulate a new constitution at the Paulskirche did indeed grant full emancipation to the Jews, but soon suffered the fate of the rest of the liberal constitution, with the collapse of the revolution. The Prussian king refused to cooperate with the revolutionaries, but even more important for their final collapse was their own weakness vis-à-vis the forces of reaction and the inner split among them due to their inability to reconcile liberalism, democracy, and nationalism.

Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.