This chapter follows the trajectory of an early Cold War ideal of a pro-American Islam that could serve US foreign policy goals. It asks how and why Islamic mysticism generally, and Sufism specifically, came to be seen as the West-friendly “moderate Islam.” What role did transculturation and comparativism between Türkiye and Iran under America’s global hegemony play in forming this common perception?

Chapter 6 explores five outlier cases, called “The Unfortunate Five,” in which the US Supreme Court rejected landowners’ challenges to land use and environmental regulations despite the Court’s strong protection of private property rights against regulations generally. These five cases have one factor in common: the developers’ plans to build affordable housing. After exploring the potential that Supreme Court justices are motivated by explicit race and class biases, the chapter delves into the potential for implicit bias to explain why these cases deviate from the norm: the justices believe that they are protecting the private property interests of neighboring landowners against unwanted affordable housing developments. Strategies are proposed, based on a number of empirical studies, for convincing courts that affordable housing does not pose a threat to the property values of nearby landowners and that, therefore, many government policies reflect an unconstitutional, irrational prejudice against low-income people of color who need affordable housing and the developers who seek to build it.

Publicity created a central position for the politician in a transnational communicative space. The politician played a ‘personal’ role as a public persona. Competition forced commercial newspapers to focus on entertainment, which hurt political coverage but benefitted individual politicians. Particularly politicians with eccentric physiques and props profited from human interest journalism. Politicians’ ‘complex’ personalities, moreover, provided food for psychological analyses. Possibilities to visualize politicians and their private lives – literally in photographs; figuratively in character sketches – completed this personal appeal. Mass media favoured political personalities over abstract institutions. Newspapers projected family values onto politicians that enabled bourgeois readers to identify with them. This focus on politicians and their private lives made them ‘celebrities’. In celebrity reporting, monarchs enjoyed an advantage: they were famous by descent, provided entertaining pomp, and stood above partisanship. Yet journalists described charismatic career politicians, greeted by excited crowds on political journeys, in royal terms as well. These celebrities functioned as ‘brands’. A brand name buttressed a politician’s position but could also be exploited commercially. The media focus on the personal shaped expectations for politicians to become mediagenic and ‘special’ – to make the private public. The celebrity culture surrounding a brand-name politician finally underpinned the imagined community and widened the scope of politics.

Prominent policy debates about environmental justice center on drinking water. In California’s Central Valley, this engages a complex, multilayered regulatory landscape. Traditionally, a key gap has been protecting access to groundwater for disadvantaged communities that rely on domestic wells. Addressing this gap requires conceptualizing "what matters" to include groundwater levels, and "who matters" to include these communities. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act substantially reformed California’s groundwater law. It addresses groundwater levels but deals unevenly with disadvantaged communities. It also misses a regulatory opportunity to take a cumulative view of these communities that would recognize that a threat to drinking water is one burden among many that adds to environmental injustice. This chapter introduces the use of the CIRCle Framework to assess rules for conceptualization and how they link to the other CIRCle Framework functions of information, regulatory intervention and coordination. It reveals omissions and mismatches that pose an ongoing challenge to securing environmental justice for communities facing critical threats to groundwater resources used for drinking.

In this introduction, we highlight the importance of psychological viewpoints to understand the dynamics of how, why and in what way relations between social groups do and do not change. Systems are defined as sets of interconnected elements that form a complex whole that is more than the sum of their parts. This definition underlies our discussions of how social systems change and the resistance to social change through the chapters. In this introduction, the main focus of each chapter is briefly presented, as well as the interconnections between them.

Jan Schnell picks up the thread in the formative period of the late Middle Ages and early modernity, the era of the Reformation. She surveys the ways in which Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Jean Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, and John Knox, among others, brought about substantial adaptations to the traditional liturgies they had inherited from Catholicism, and what motivated them theologically to do so.

The introduction sets the scene at the catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples, where our only early Christian fresco from the Shepherd of Hermas is painted on a tomb wall. I lay out the thesis and roadmap for the book, namely, that the Shepherd crafts obedient early Christian subjects within the ancient Mediterranean discourse of enslavement. A brief overview of the Shepherd’s content is provided, as well as regarding its popularity and transmission history across the ancient, late ancient, and medieval worlds. I especially note how the Shepherd became a pedagogical tool in late antiquity, and that the Shepherd’s teachings are even placed in Jesus’s own mouth by some late ancient writers, heightening the stakes for understanding how enslavement is utilized in a text used to shape Christian thought and practice for centuries after its composition. Also provided is a brief introduction to slavery in antiquity to situate the reader, as well as outline some of the major influences on my approach to reading the text, especially womanist translational theory and Chris de Wet’s concept of doulology.