Referring to the medical model of frenzy sketched out in the first two chapters, Chapter 3 explores the metaphysical problems which it caused. The model’s insistence on the total dependence of the mind on the brain, it argues, placed pressure on a Christian cosmology in which ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ were supposed to be fully separable. Frenzy forced contemporaries to ask how it was possible for the human mind – made in the ‘image of God’ – to be impaired by organic disease. For most early modern Christians, the mind was a part of the soul, and this soul was immaterial, incorruptible, and immortal. Frenzy gave the impression that it invaded every part of the person, but this impression was false. The soul had to be immune to brain disease. This chapter examines the ancient roots of this problem, and examines how early modern England’s preachers, physicians, and philosophers attempted to solve it.

The Introduction offers an overview of the main themes of the book, focusing especially on Hegel’s claim that our sensuous experience of beauty offers a distinctive access to metaphysical truth. The basic nature and parameters of this sensuous aesthetic experience – what Hegel calls “sensuous intuition” – are explored to set the stage for the analysis that follows. In anticipation of the book’s main claim about the distinctive sort of ontological truth that artworks in particular serve to reveal on Hegel’s account – namely, that they put us in touch with the transformative event of spirit’s birth in and through nature – the chapter includes a sketch of the path of the book from the ontology and aesthetics of nature through to the ontology and aesthetics of artworks.

Chapter 2 considers how the diagnosis of frenzy – in its standard definition, an inflammation of the brain or meninges – both shaped and was shaped by anatomical knowledge. Reading the work of the anatomist Thomas Willis (1621–1675) alongside his various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century interlocutors, it situates his anatomical work within a longer tradition of brain–mind cartography. The chapter argues that Willis’s determination to map the functions of the brain onto its structures was driven, in part, by his clinical experiences of frenzy. His explicit hope was that his anatomy would be the foundation stone on which a new, clinically useful ‘Pathologie of the Brain and nervous stock, might be built’. But not all of his hopes for the project were medical in nature, or even this-worldly. Willis also sought to shore up two vital truths, both of which frenzy seemed to undermine: first, that there was a categorical difference between the human soul and that of all other living beings, and second, that the human soul alone would survive the death of the body.

In this concluding chapter, I summarize my arguments for the study of the global politics of religion, international political theory, and the study of colonial, postcolonial, and de-colonial politics. In the field of religion and politics, I illustrated the productive power of the exclusion narrative and reconstructed the concept of ‘religion’ at work in the rehabilitating narrative of recognition. In the field of IR theory, I emphasize the need to study the costs of recognition and argue for a greater attentiveness to its conditions of possibility, that is to say, the processes through which the subjects and objects of global politics become intelligible, or recognizable, as such. In the field of colonial history, I show how the entwined histories of Pakistan and Israel both structured the possibilities of and were structured by the capacious concepts of ‘religion’, the ‘Muslim’, and the ‘Jew’.

After introducing the twentieth-century academic skepticism about civics and any component of patriotism in it, and the significant educational deficit and civic harm this approach has caused, this chapter turns to two sections: (a) Tocqueville’s Praise of America’s Reflective Patriotism patriotism – including the six components he sketches in a reflective patriotism, with the role of Christianity balanced against self-interest; and (b) American Civic Exemplars of Patriotism and Reform – featuring questions raised by the study of Douglass, Lincoln, Stanton, Anthony, and King.

This chapter is about the global epistemological politics of religion illustrated through a study of the transnational history of Pakistan and Israel. It argues that the entangled nature of these state-building ventures contributed to the circulation of particular understandings of ‘religion’ and its relation to the state, that this structured the minority politics of the British Indian Muslims and the Palestinian Jews, and that it both limited and enabled the claims to the nations and states that came to replace them. The case study focuses on two key individuals in the history of the Indian and Palestine partition and the Pakistani and Israeli independence that followed: Reginald Coupland and Muhammad Zafarullah Khan. It asks how they, the institutions they represented, and the ideas they carried, circulated, and influenced changed over the final decade before independence. It shows how claims for the recognition of religion in international relations are not separate from these forms of colonial epistemological politics but are intimately connected to them.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

This chapter examines the theological and political ramifications of Sancho’s imaginings of the afterlife. While he doesn’t believe in Hell, Sancho uses the figurative language of infernal character to criticize chattel slavery, religious bigotry, and British colonialism. When he describes Heaven, meanwhile, Sancho projects himself and his readers into an ideal religious collective that includes American Quakers, enslaved West Africans, Roman Catholics, Hindus, and Muslim clerics, as well as fellow Anglican Protestants. Attending to Sancho’s notion of the afterlife reveals the distinctiveness of his religious thought among Black anti-slavery intellectuals. His pluralistic definition of religious virtue allows him to extend belonging further than his contemporaries – beyond co-religionists and even beyond the category of the Christian. Logics of mixture and mingling in Sancho’s letters enable him to enlarge divine love and salvation without universalizing belief, holding a multiracial and trans-denominational community together without eliding differences.

Although emperor for over thirty years (306-337), Constantine always shared imperial rule with colleagues, first fellow Tetrarchs, then his sons. During his reign he traveled thousands of miles along the northern and eastern frontiers. But he still relied on senators and municipal notables as administrators. Cities flourished, and traditional cults were still common. Inscriptions provide the most revealing evidence about provinces, cities (including Rome), senators, local notables, and cults.

Western Canada is emerging as a site of rich linguistic variation. Lexical differences are long acknowledged (e.g. bunny hug, jam buster), but distinctions in other grammatical sectors are less frequently reported. More recent work uncovering phonetic differences in key vowel sets, however, suggests that the West Coast (British Columbia) and the Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) are not monolithic. We review the predictions of settler colonialism in the context of westward expansion and the rhetoric of widespread dialectological homogeneity in the literature on Canadian English. Recent research reveals that synchronic variation is primarily ethnic (local) rather than strictly regional. We conclude by highlighting the pervasive effects of settler colonialism in dialectological outcomes, while also highlighting the gains to be made by exploring diversity within local varieties.

Chapter 1 (Introduction): In this chapter, I argue that scholars have tended to focus on how ancient Jews judged and criticized pagan worship (i.e. on the normative elements of ancient Jewish views). I suggest that, by turning our attention instead to how Jews constructed and imagined the religious devotion of their pagan neighbors (i.e. the descriptive elements of ancient Jewish views), we can open up an entirely new arena of investigation into ancient Jewish thought.