The day was the most important legal unit, for it was linked most directly to actions. Surviving sources make the relationship between days and action appear much more straightforward than it actually was. Roman jurisprudence assigned days to clear classes which might then be associated with permissible or impermissible activities. But classes sometimes overlapped with others, producing situations when particular days possessed different assemblages of norms. Unique events affected the significance of particular dates, a practice close to calendrical divination. Concern for the accumulation of norms on particular dates also affected record-keeping. Inscriptions and literary sources from at least as early as the beginning of the second century reveal a practice of placing events on definite months and days, but exhibit no concern for identifying years.

This chapter offers an in-depth reflection on the significance of time and temporality to the practice of toleration. Time-shaped Christian imagining of the other as “becoming” and growing into its own image. Constitutions, too, exist within certain temporal rhythms: they bind people within a specific space and in a specific time to a set of fundamental rules and arrangements. The binding of time by constitutions is an assertion of power in the saeculum, but also an expression of a need to better live with diversity. It is vital to the “emancipation” of modern constitutionalism from toleration that the constitution does not require a dominant or exclusive set of temporalities to establish order. Rather, constitutions need to allow for citizens to keep time differently, for example through the protection of rights and freedoms.

The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

This chapter analyses the Laudian attitude to Sunday sports, in a discussion designed to include the meaning of the altar and the sacrament in the constitution of the Christian community. Allowing Sunday sports re-inscribed the line between the secular and the spiritual as defined by the Laudian notions of holy places and holy times. It allowed affirmations of two different versions of the social body to be made on the same day, the one reinforcing the other, and it also prevented the day being dominated, and the social body being divided, by the essentially private, household-based, religious observances of the puritans. Here was affirmation of a broad-based Laudian version of the Christian community being enabled and maintained by the rites and observances of the national church against the divisive practices and beliefs of the puritans.

Trakl was the master of transfiguration and poetic enigma. His poetry uses a very specific number of colours (black, purple, blue), strikingly simple rhyme and – at times obstinate – repetition to unmatched effects. The expressive quality of his poetry never amounts to dogmatic expressionism but relates, and reflects, the deeper qualities of introspection. It tries to identify the very roots of expression in the troubled human existence. His poetry originated in feelings of guilt (often connected with the biographical fact that he had induced his sister to the misuse of drugs) and utter desolation. We have seen already that to him the self-destruction of occidental culture was a certainty years before the outbreak of World War One. This chapter discusses whether it can be argued that Trakl’s poetry reflects, to a certain extent, an anticipation of the horrors that became manifest and unbearable to him already in the very first weeks of this European tragedy with disastrous global implications.

Chapters 9.1 (by Tim Rowse and Jennifer Green) and 9.2 (by Daryle Rigney, Denis Rose, Alison Vivian, Miriam Jorgensen, Steve Hemming and Shaun Berg) present case studies of past and present of Indigenous governance. In 9.1 Rowse and Green show that Arrernte jurisdiction has persisted in certain ways in Alice Springs/Mparntwe since the 1870s, notwithstanding the colonists’ expectation – at least until the reforms of ‘welfare colonialism’ in the 1970s – that ‘detribalisation’ was rapidly and inevitably extinguishing customary law. Their chapter outlines some episodes of recognition that have arisen from the overlapping of two systems of law in a space inhabited by both Arrernte and non-Arrernte people. The first example discussed is the acknowledgement and protection of sacred sites, and the second the decreasing accommodation of customary law within the criminal law. In 9.2 Rigney et al explore the experiences of two Aboriginal nations, the Gunditjmara People and the Ngarrindjeri Nation, asserting their status as distinct peoples and, in so doing, demonstrating their capacity to achieve their Indigenous Nation Building goals. While both face significant challenges in establishing Indigenous self-governing systems and accommodating them within the Australian federation, their intention to self-govern according to Gunditjmara and Ngarrindjeri norms is indisputable.

This dark parable of the Anthropocene describes the terrible assault of the Anthropoi on the sacred Living Mountain and on those who once flourished in its shadow. The Anthropoi with their armies and their savants who justify their actions enter the Valley, and desecration follows. They force the Valley-dwellers to aid their assault on their revered Living Mountain. Worse, the Anthropoi's insatiable desire eventually infects the Valley-dwellers themselves until they too willingly join the assault, climbing, digging, and exploiting the heights, even as its snows melt, crevasses widen, and avalanches destroy the Valley floor. The lone exception is one old woman who can still feel the Mountain's heartbeat with the soles of her feet and knows no one can master it. "The Ascent of the Anthropoi" lays bare modernity's consoling lie that growth is the key to justice and that instrumental knowledge trumps the sensuous acceptance of life within the constraints of Earth's bounty.

It is a truism that we live in a secular and disenchanted world. This chapter explores what is at stake in our abandonment/eclipse/rejection of a characterization of this world and its life as sacred. Wirzba examines how modern writers came to experience their life as fragmented and disconnected from a sacred cosmos, and how this feeling for life results in varying forms of homelessness. The forced migration of peoples and the destruction of homeplaces in never-before-seen rates testifies to a need to reinvigorate the sense that places are homes for living and for the cherishing of life as a sacred gift. What our refugee world and our mass extinction time needs is a recovery of the goodness, beauty, and hospitable character of our given life.