The primary source at the center of this chapter’s analysis is produced by a Colombian evangelical pioneer and focuses on the expulsion of his family and the evangelical church in the village of La Tulia, Valle, Colombia, in 1949. The autobiographical account, written some years after the event, recounts memories of the experience and its interpretation considering what it meant for him to be an evangelical Christian in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century. The expulsion occurred against the backdrop of a struggle between liberals and conservatives that involved the Catholic Church and the evangelicals, resulting in an unraveling of the social fabric of the communities where the evangelical presence was very important. Pedro Aguirre, author of the text, was the founder of the town of La Tulia, Valle, and a social and liberal leader who, after having supported the construction of the Catholic temple, abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism. The analysis aims to identify the elements at play in the construction of evangelical memories, which will facilitate not only the use of the source itself but also a deeper understanding of the context in which it was produced.

The chapter offers an analysis of two sources. The first follows the personal testimony of the conversion of an Argentine middle-class man, Matías Fernández Quinquela, an accountant for the Argentine National Congress. This account was originally published in English in the journal of the Anglican South American Missionary Society and contains a very typical exposition of the personal reflections of doubt and dissatisfaction with Catholicism as well as the atheistic positivist freethinking that led educated people, like Quinquela, to look for an alternative in Protestantism. The second offers an account of the proselytizing activities of M. F. Quinquela's wife, Carlota Lubin, and her arrest by order of a Catholic priest in a suburb of Buenos Aires. The story was published in a local magazine, La Reforma. The story demonstrates the active and provocative militancy with which these converts spread their message, the irritation they provoked in the Catholic Church, and the informal power ties between priests and local government office. The Quinquelas were convinced of the possibilities of moral and social renewal that evangelical Protestantism could offer Argentine society.

Initially, perhaps even unknowingly, the young Mexican Dominican Manuel Aguas was drawn to the path of Martin Luther. Like the German theologian, Aguas read the Bible and his ruminations convinced him to break with the Roman Catholic Church. In response, the ecclesiastical institution excommunicated him. At the heart of this chapter is a letter in which Manuel Aguas provides an account of his conversion to Protestantism. The account caused a great commotion in Mexico City. Aguas's writing was published in El Monitor Republicano on April 26, 1871. Despite the influence of Aguas’ ideas, there is no doubt that he benefited from the past efforts of various converts that attempted to establish Protestantism in Mexico City. In this sense, he fertilized a ground prepared by others but added an activism that, within a few months, garnered public attention for the challenges it posed to the religious and cultural establishment of the time. His account makes visible the construction of a marginalized faith through his vigorous attempts to defend its legitimacy in an environment that overtly denied it.

In independent Ireland, civil war threat receded in 1927 when Eamon de Valera led his anti-Treaty party, Fianna Fáil, into the Dáil, the lower, elected house of the Free State’s bicameral parliament. The pro-Treaty parties were Fine Gael and the Labour Party. Various short-lived parties challenged the supremacy of the Big Three over the decades. There was investment in infrastructure (electricity, transport, agriculture, food processing) and native industry flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s behind high tariff walls, but unemployment and emigration persisted. Health care was improved from the mid-1940s. The Catholic Church exercised huge power.

In Northern Ireland unionists’ majority led to systematic discrimination against Catholics (assumed nationalist) in elections, employment and housing. Economically, apart from the Second World War, Northern Ireland experienced decline but it shared in the social benefits of postwar Britain.

The 1960s brought more questioning of authority of all kinds, all over the island. In independent Ireland, new-found prosperity removed the safety-valve of emigration and free secondary education improved opportunities. Living standards rose. In the North, Catholic dissatisfaction was expressed in civil rights demonstrations which outraged unionists, and the British army was called in to maintain order.

This chapter examines whether decisions of Catholic churches to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions depend on their reliance on state fiscal transfers. It draws on a novel data set that measures the annual pro-democracy activism of churches through an examination of their public pastoral letters. An exogenous policy intervention – the introduction of universal primary education policies across sub-Saharan Africa between 1994 and 2008 – shows that the introduction of policies that increase church dependence on the state for financing of their schools reduces their willingness to speak out in defense of liberal democratic institutions.

Finnegans Wake and confession, in both secular and religious contexts, are each examined through the lens of the other. The aim is to ‘de-confuse’ the fusion, thrice repeated in the Wake, of ‘confession’ and ‘confusion’. Eight observations are illustrated through close reading: i) confession directs the text in two chapters, Shem’s in I.7 and HCE’s in II.3; ii) both present as public not private confessions; iii) there is no auricular confession; iv) widespread inadvertent confessions found in the Wake’s ‘fallen’ language, supposedly Freudian slips, are a source of sense-making power; v) any confession is always a qualified confession – blame is always dispersed; vi) there is no torture leading to involuntary confession; vii) the book doesn’t operate within the tradition of classical confessional texts; viii) it knows that confession split Christianity and projects that split onto the dialectical operations of the narrative. The chapter argues for the productive and overlooked potential of ‘syntagmatic’ or narrative approaches that read the text as sequential form, and it suggests that the plurality of narratives undermines theoretical generalizations of the human as ‘a confessing animal’.

Joyce’s life spans a period when material conditions, political structures, and intellectual life throughout the world were profoundly shaped by the growth and decline of European empires and the flourishing of various nationalisms, both imperialist and anti-imperialist. When Joyce was born in 1882 the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the era that one influential historian has called the ‘age of empire’ had just begun. When he died in 1941 the world was engulfed in WWII, a conflict that would fundamentally alter the balance of global power, and the age of decolonization was under way. A good deal of influential Joyce scholarship has explored Joyce’s relation to this historical trajectory. Much of it has been informed by postcolonial studies, committed to examining the complex set of issues and questions we can group under the general headings of ‘colonialism’ and ‘nationalism’. Ireland’s double status as both centre and periphery, agent and victim of colonialism is important to any investigation of how Joyce’s works engage with such issues and questions.

The Dubliners stories arose from a chance opportunity when George Russell, a prominent revivalist figure, invited Joyce to make a little money by submitting stories to The Irish Homestead. Russell didn’t want the readers to be disconcerted – but that would precisely be the effect of Joyce’s stories. Eventually published ten years later, having overcome threats of censorship and libel law, the expanded collection made a significant intervention in the Irish Literary Revival, pointing unerringly at some unpleasant truths and establishing Joyce as a noted prose realist who disrupted a movement more associated with poets and dramatists. These stories would later come to be seen also as key documents in the development of modernist fiction, their naturalism tempered by symbolism and a multi-layered interpretative openness that makes them among the most prized of modern short stories.

Like many well-known Irish writers, O’Casey chose to spend much of his life away from his homeland. However, this chapter examines how O’Casey rarely succumbed to sentiments of loss and exile that can be found in other similarly positioned writers. He was, in fact, far more likely to use the dual position of the migrant – simultaneously familiar with the home country and able to view it anew from a space of geographical and ideological distance – to query, critique, and satirise Ireland. The chapter spends time examining the way in the late plays Oak Leaves and Lavender, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy, The Drums of Father Ned, and Behind the Green Curtains deal centrally with Irish migrant characters.

Examining rescue during 1940–1945, this chapter asks what possibilities of self-help were available and what strategies were developed to take action? Could Jewish organizations continue to operate under the Nazi regime? What forms of cooperation were forged with non-Jewish organizations and individuals, such as members of the Christian churches, and did these raise chances of survival?

This chapter examines the experiences of children in the Holocaust in various geographic contexts. It raises questions about the avenues for rescue and survival of children and the limits of children’s agency. How did gender, age, and family background play a role? And how did children adjust to or resist their new – and supposedly temporary – separation from their families?

This chapter concentrates on another significant element of the Irish Catholic Church’s transnational fundraising, namely the collecting tours on behalf of church-building projects that Irish clerics regularly conducted in diaspora destinations, including but not limited to the US. Based on close analysis of a series of surviving personal diaries and letters produced by collecting priests in the second half of the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the difficulties, including hostile resident clergy, that collecting priests faced, explores the emotions of religious fundraising, for both giver and receiver, and assesses the place that such epic fundraising tours have in the narratives that surrounded Ireland’s newly built Catholic infrastructure.

This chapter traces how payments made by the laity to the Church changed across the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of the total amount of money given to the Church in the period, and of various attempts to formally regulate dues and fees on the part of the state, the Church, and sections of the laity, is followed by the analysis of some of the most fundamental, day-to-day methods of funding the Church and its personnel. This chapter traces first, at parish level, the evolution of Easter and Christmas dues payments and pew rents. Second, the varied funding of a raft of religious orders that emerged and grew in the period will be dealt with. Finally, the use of Sunday collections of various kinds and their connection to emerging national and international Catholic funding campaigns will be discussed. The key argument here is that this enormous diversification of the Church’s fundraising was a response to changes in the broader economy, including increased access to cash and growing consumption opportunities on the part of the laity.

This chapter explores sacramental fees in respect of baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other life cycle events. One of the most significant aspects of clerical income, these fees were equally a substantial, but vital, financial outlay for the laity, which had meanings that were social, cultural, religious, and personal. This chapter argues that those on either side of the transaction could often value the money involved very differently, a finding that has an important bearing on our understanding of where the balance of power lay between Church and people. This chapter will also emphasise, through its varied examples, that sacramental fees were highly regionalised and could operate very differently depending on the parish or diocese involved.

This chapter argues that by the latter half of the nineteenth century, priests, bishops, and other religious had immense latitude within the diffuse structures of the Church not only to raise money by different means but also to act as the central financial administrator and expert within their own parishes, dioceses, and religious houses, and that this power gave them an influential role in shaping the wider economic culture of Catholic Ireland in the period under review. It first explores levels of accounting and financial management knowledge among clergy and then situates their economic activity, including managing of debt and investments, within a wider transactional framework with wealthy and professional lay Catholics. It finally analyses how clergy were frequently afforded a significant role as arbiters of financial disputes and stewards of financial resources by the laity.

This chapter concentrates on church buildings, arguing that while they were one of the most significant products of the Catholic Church’s fundraising in this period, they were also, in themselves, important sites of both highly public and deeply intimate fundraising. Taking a material culture approach, the chapter treats a sample of churches built in the post-Famine era as sources that illuminate important aspects of the financial relationship between people and priests. It first discusses the widespread understanding of the church as the ‘house of God’. It then analyses the phenomenon of sponsorship of material and sacred items in the church interior via memorial inscriptions, as well as the interaction of lay people with shrines and a variety of collecting boxes commonly located inside chapels.

This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.