Contrary to the narrative of the Irish Catholic Church’s decline, there exists a range of evidence for a twenty-first-century religious revival. Some of the modern religious deviate from formal practice, engaging with Christianity away from the major churches, while other spiritual practices accord with twenty-first-century Ireland’s cultural diversity. Irish literature has challenged literature but, at times, idealised it. As the religious landscape of Ireland changes, Irish culture finds new ways to explore faith.

Much of Pascal’s philosophy, though applicable to a variety of problems and issues we face today, is couched in religious terms that, even for religious believers today, may not resonate. This chapter explores some possibilities of developing some key Pascalian ideas – the limits of reason and experience, the ambiguity of the world, the heart, our sometimes-misplaced desires, and the wager – in secular terms. One possibility that emerges as particularly fruitful is to replace Pascal’s “God” with William James’s “religious belief” that the good will ultimately triumph, and that it is important and beneficial for us to believe it.

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.

This chapter explains why right-wing strategies of adaptation and survival had varying degrees of success during and after the left turn. It argues that right-wing parties were most likely to survive and remain competitive in national elections when they relied on strong party brands and organizations. These strong party brands and organizations depended, in turn, on when the parties were founded and whether they had roots in an authoritarian regime.

How was Buridan’s thought shaped by its institutional setting and by pedagogical practice in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris? This essay argues that local circumstances are crucial not only for interpreting Buridan’s arguments, but also for understanding his larger contribution to the history of philosophy. Thus, we find that even working within the constraints of the arts curriculum, Buridan was always able to segue from established modes of instruction and prescribed topics to discuss philosophical problems of interest to him; in this he was no different from other arts masters of the period, and indeed, from university lecturers even today. But he also used his independence to embody, in ways he himself may not have fully understood, a new way of being a philosopher. Whereas a century earlier, Thomas Aquinas saw himself as a theologian and regarded philosophy as an activity proper to pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, Buridan sought to define what he was doing in contradistinction to theology, and on grounds we would now recognize as secular.

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.

This chapter explains the logic behind the choice of institutions that the book highlights. A liberal order is impossible without the capacity to form organizations able to act on behalf of private constituencies. Apart from providing shared goods, private organizations restrain entities capable of repression, including the state. Hence, a section of the book is devoted to exploring the political effects of Islamic and modern waqfs. Whereas the former played key roles in keeping civil society anemic, the latter is now invigorating civic life. Religious repression has been ubiquitous in the Middle East. In inducing preference and knowledge falsification in broad domains, it conceals doubts about policies promoted in the name of religion. In the process, it impoverishes and distorts public discourse. For these reasons alone, religious freedoms are also essential to liberal governance. Economic freedoms are pivotal because they shape political incentives and capacities. Private property rights, the freedom to invest, and predictable taxation are among the determinants of private political capacities. So are characteristics of the available forms of economic organization. Institutions that limit the scale, longevity, and complexity of Middle Eastern enterprises have reduced the political reach of private economic actors.

Salman Rushdie’s work has been linked to innovations in form in relation to the genre of the novel. What he has been most credited for is the bringing of subcontinental storytelling traditions into the Indian novel in English. This chapter traces these origins with reference to prose and poetry contexts of Urdu and Hindustani, so important to Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Enchantress of Florence, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Moreover, the chapter considers his engagement with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a family friend and a much admired poet. Rushdie’s position in relation to Urdu opens up stylistic innovations on his part as well as an indebtedness to the storytellers and writers who have engaged with the tradition/modernity debate before him. This chapter thus considers Rushdie as part of a wider contextual framework of ideas of the secular and sacred on the Indian subcontinent, often neglected in discussions of his work.

“Faith: Impersonating Faith, or How We Came to Have Faith in Fictions” analyzes how faith was taken up by Reformation theologians, by political theorist Thomas Hobbes, and by Aphra Behn in her earliest prose fiction. The chapter takes up “faith” at a key point in its history, in order to account for what it meant before secularization and for what its role would be in a secular epistemology, politics, and culture. It analyzes Thomas Hobbes and Aphra Behn in order to see how they link the idea of faith to the emergent category of fiction: In Hobbes, the political project of contract relies on fictionality for its form, while in Behn, the fictional project of the nascent novel relies on faith for its form.

Religion is universal across human societies and this chapter reviews the earliest evidence of spiritual belief from the fossil and archaeological record. Religions have very specific roles in societies, depending on the complexity and institutional structures of the society, and this chapter explores the ways these roles have shifted over the course of the last 5,000 years. In particular, it discusses the institutional relationships, such as those seen in the use of sacred knowledge and authority, that characterize the interrelationship between government and religion, seen in such diverse states ranging from ancient Egypt to pre-war Japan. It discusses the transitions from polytheism to monotheism, especially in the light of Hume’s hypotheses on the evolution of religion, but also noting that polytheism is alive and well in modern Hinduism. Finally, it discusses the appearance of alternatives to religion, emphasizing the appearance of science during the Enlightenment as a viable alternative for knowledge about the material world, but also reviewing more philosophical critiques; contrasting, for example, Descartes with Hume, but also reviewing Marx and Freud.

In On the Rights of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) pushes natural law thinking into an international law form, shaping not only the origins of international law but a particular vision of the nation-state as the primary political form of modernity. Along the way, he frames the conditions through which just war thinking will move from being a tradition into becoming a theory (with its preoccupying focus on jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria) and the modern self will become the primary political agent. One implication of his revolutionary thought is that it gives license to colonizing powers to use military force to acquire and defend property, especially the resources of the new world, thereby shaping modern understandings of the natural world as composed of things that can become owned. Another is that it makes refugees all-but-invisible, which will create increasingly acute problems as climate change and violence, together, will dramatically increase the number of displaced persons in the world.

This chapter examines pitfalls in current methodological approaches to studying secular apocalyptic thought and proposes an alternative. Over a half-century ago, Judith Shklar and Hans Blumenberg argued that secular apocalyptic thought is an unhelpful and vague concept, which too often functions as a rhetorical weapon. Their critiques largely have been neglected. I make the case for taking these critiques seriously and suggest a strategy to address them: the study of secular apocalyptic thought should focus on examples where secular thinkers explicitly reference religious apocalyptic texts, figures, and concepts so as to avoid making spurious connections and reading into texts influences that are not there.

The book opens with a parable to introduce three central figures in the chapters to come – Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Engels – and their approaches to apocalyptic thought. It then defines key concepts and gives an overview of the three main arguments advanced in Apocalypse without God. The first argument is methodological: the study of secular apocalyptic thought would place itself on firmer ground by focusing on cases where secular thinkers explicitly reference religious apocalyptic texts, figures, and concepts. The second argument is interpretive: apocalyptic thought’s political appeal partly lies in offering resources to navigate persistent challenges that arise in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. And the third argument is normative: ideal theory and apocalyptic thought both rest on faith and are best suited to be sources of utopian hope, but not guides for collective action by a society.

Why would secular thinkers find in Christian apocalyptic beliefs – often dismissed as bizarre – appealing tools for interpreting politics? This chapter aims to unpack that puzzle. A helpful approach for understanding apocalyptic thought’s appeal is the lens of ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. Ideal theory faces a daunting task: outlining a goal that is both utopian and feasible. To be worth striving for, the ideal must be utopian and possess sufficient moral appeal to justify the transition costs needed to achieve it. Yet the ideal also must be feasible, since it is difficult to justify dedicating limited resources to pursue the impossible. These competing goals result in a catch-22: a more utopian ideal is a less feasible moral goal, which diminishes reasons to strive for it, but a more modest and feasible ideal is a less appealing moral goal, which also diminishes reasons to strive for it. What I call cataclysmic apocalyptic thought proposes a way out of this dilemma. It embraces a utopian goal and declares it feasible by pointing to crisis as the vehicle to wipe away corruption and bring the seemingly impossible within reach.

Chapter 3 examines the decisive break between religious and secular utilitarianism in the thought of William Paley and Jeremy Bentham. Paley, the better known and more widely respected thinker of the two at the time, is in many ways the paradigm case of the theological version of morality as legislation. Paley, like Locke, used human legislative deliberation as a paradigm of rationality for thinking about the content of the divine law. Bentham’s project must be understood in part as motivated by a desire to reject the theological assumptions of theories like Paley’s that stood in the way of radical reform. It also encouraged a reframing of moral expression as a kind of legislative act. Bentham saw reputational sanctions as one substitute for religious motives for moral action, but this also required a perspectival shift towards a legislative approach when making moral statements.