This essay argues that understanding religion and the history of religion in the United States can help scholars, students, and the American public be more aware of the dynamics around war and wiser in the conclusions they reach about experiences of war and their relationship to American society. Put differently, when those who study war and society in America keep religion out of their stories, they remove from consideration not only some of the nation’s most influential institutions and voices, but also many of the ideas, stories, and symbols that help women and men find meaning and purpose in the uncertainty, the suffering, and the loss that go along with war.

The religiosity of British soldiers naturally reflected patterns in civilian society but had distinctive features. The Army had long been a target of missionary effort by civilian religious agencies, and this work continued to be felt, especially in the distribution of Scripture. While the religious profile of the Army mirrored the decline of the mainstream churches and the weakening Christendom culture of the Army, this was qualified by several significant factors. If only for instrumental reasons, officers were still expected to show a modicum of religious leadership. Recruitment also mattered. By the 2000s, the Army drew disproportionate numbers of recruits from Northern Ireland’s Protestant community and from culturally conservative regions of mainland Britain. The vitality of global Christianity was also injected by ‘Foreign and Commonwealth’ recruits. Active service also served as a spur to religiosity, with prolonged operations in Afghanistan revealing that there were still relatively few ‘atheists in foxholes’. Furthermore, religion still framed potent idioms of mourning and Remembrance, especially in the poignant repatriation and vigil services arising from the ‘War on Terror’.

The Conclusion focuses on the book’s principal arguments and offers thoughts for further reflection. Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Macrina the Younger treat the devil as a live enemy in their midst. The devil is central to their respective theological projects and to their visions of the Christian life, appearing in one form or another across the full breadth of their corpora. They utilise a range of biblical, philosophical, theological, and spiritual resources as they respond to the enemy of salvation and as they teach the church to do the same. Reflection on the devil is not simply a strategy for explaining the problem of evil in the world—the devil himself is the problem.

This explores the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) as an example of entanglements of spirituality and psychopathology, and looks at ‘spiritually significant voices’ (identified by those who hear them as having spiritual/religious significance). Some have proposed making a differential diagnosis between ‘genuine’ spiritual experiences and mental illness, but the criteria for making such distinctions can be controversial and misleading, based on a false presupposition that the two are mutually exclusive. Research shows that patients identify some experiences as both part of an illness and spiritually significant. Patients with a psychiatric diagnosis are often subjected to epistemic injustice, wherein their claim to know things (e.g. spiritually) is discredited owing to prejudice associated with their diagnosis. A case study explores entanglement of spirituality with AVHs and considers implications for assessment/treatment. Voices of this kind may be meaningful for those who hear them, whether or not associated with a diagnosis, and affirmation of this and patients’ positive spiritual coping, where possible, can be a positive factor in promoting recovery.

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.

This chapter explores the many uses of Scripture in the Confessions. Augustine draws words, images, and themes from Scripture; he tells the story of his own successive (and sometimes unsuccessful) encounters with Scripture; he invites his readers into a lively relationship with Scripture. Augustine presents himself as living out the stories of Biblical characters – Adam, the prodigal son, Moses, the Apostle Paul – and as speaking the words of Scripture in his own voice, as his own words. Augustine’s extensive appropriation of the Psalms is of particular importance: “The Psalms do more than stage or frame Augustine’s narrative; they shape its presentation and supply its substance.” Scripture proves to be central both for Augustine’s self-dispossession, his casting away of the old life, and for his self-conception, his understanding and inhabiting of the new.

In the first paragraph of the modern translation of the Rationale divinorum officiorum of William Durand (c. 1230–1296) are markers of the change this book seeks to chart. One is immediately visible. The translator, Timothy M. Thibodeau, chose to distinguish through the use of italics what he then identifies, through the use of brackets, as biblical texts. Those italics and those brackets do not simply mark the modern sense of “source,” of a particular relationship between Durand and Scripture, that postdates Durand himself. They distinguish Scripture and, in so doing, obscure Durand’s understanding of revelation and its relationship to “ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus ac ornamentis.” There in the opening paragraph of the Prologue and throughout the Rationale, Durand presents a different relationship entirely among ecclesiasticis officiis, rebus and ornamentis, and biblical history, prophecies, psalms, Gospels, and Epistles.

This chapter explores the development of debates on the moral among theologians from the mid twelfth century to the first half of the thirteenth century. It identifies a crucial turning point in the early decades of the thirteenth century, when interest in understanding the very nature of the human being and its faculties paved the way for a general reassessment of the issue of the different kinds of law.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

Cas Wepener argues that there is a closer connection between liturgics and homiletics than one usually assumes. The proclamation of the Word has always been a crucial part of the Church’s liturgical services, but, maybe more significantly, it continues to co-shape the contexts in which its relevance can be shown and lived.

This chapter argues that many New Testament authors develop their Christologies through the use of quotations of Scripture. Images for figures in Jewish interpretation provide a rich resource for these authors as they describe the significance of the work of Jesus for the people of God. This chapter features four passages with a network of scriptural references to illustrate the breadth of Christology represented in the New Testament Epistles.

Chapter 1 introduces the instrument doctrine in Aquinas’s thought and explores its foundations in Scripture, focusing on Aquinas’s biblical commentaries. In his commentaries on Romans and 1 Corinthians, among others, Aquinas argues that the logic of scriptural teaching suggests that Christs’ humanity causes divine effects as instrument of the divinity, including our resurrection. The chapter shows how Aquinas interpreted the Scriptures as coherent with the Catholic tradition, especially the conciliar teaching on Christ in the early ecumenical councils. Aquinas thinks that the doctrine should be understood within the conceptual matrix of these early councils’ teaching on Christ.

This chapter argues that Augustine preaches on the Trinity both in sermons devoted particularly to particular trinitarian questions, and throughout his homiletic corpus insofar as Augustine’s understanding of creation and salvation as a whole is founded on his understanding of the inseparability and co-equality of Father, Son and Spirit. Through these different types of sermons Augustine also consistently emphasizes both the importance of accepting in faith knowledge handed on to us, but which we cannot yet comprehend, and the importance of struggling to think of God in terms beyond the material and the temporal. It is also noticeable that Augustine makes little use of the language of persona and natura in his preaching, preferring to define his belief through a series of Nicene principles (such as the inseparability of the divine three in their acts), and through presenting Nicene exegeses of key verses as hermeneutical keys.

This chapter explores Augustine’s preaching on the Old Testament in three primary collections: 1) Sermons to the People, 2) Explanations of the Psalms, and 3) the Dolbeau sermons. It begins by considering Augustine’s Christo-ecclesial hermeneutic for the interpretation of Scripture, which Augustine employs while preaching in the context of liturgical worship. Then it provides an overview of Augustine’s developing figurative exegesis of the Old Testament, especially during his debates with the Manicheans. Next, it examines how Augustine engages the different kinds of literature in the Old Testament, such as the Pentateuch, Psalms, and wisdom literature, in the aforementioned collections. The chapter concludes by arguing that Augustine’s sermons on the Old Testament demonstrate the unity of Scripture and the underlying Christo-ecclesial meaning of the Old Testament in Augustine’s thought.