Life interviews can take many forms. Their purpose is to provide a biography of a person's life or, more commonly, a part of a person's life. This chapter focuses on two forms of life interview, McAdams' life story interview and the narrative life interview. McAdams' approach is to consider the whole of life, split into chapters, and examining key elements such as important memories, events, stressors and the person's world view. McAdams explores key issues such as redemption and contamination. The narrative life interview is designed to focus on specific key transitions in a person's life and to explore the impact of these transitions on people's behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Examples are provided.

In Chapter 8, we provide frequencies of narrative identity themes concerning negative and positive consequences of mental illness as well as sources of well-being. We find that costs to relationships, self, and identity are widespread themes and that many participants story their illness as an obstacle to educational and vocational success. Furthermore, about half of our participants narrate negative aspects of treatment into their identity. Some participants evidence positive themes when they interpreted their mental illness as leading to helpful changes in terms of heightened insight, showing strength, and increased care for others. In terms of narrative identity as a source of well-being, relationship themes rank high as do themes concerning self and identity. In addition, participants narrate well-being into their identities through the themes revolving around education, vocation, and leisure activities. Finally, some experiences from psychiatric treatment and care were storied with well-being when constructing identity.

The relationship between law and religion can be imagined as a conjunction or a disjunction. Beginning with the suggestion that the terms “law” and “religion,” when their meaning has not been taken for granted, have become too invested with ideological weight, as a result of debates over secularism, to be of much use for analytical purposes, this essay substitutes a series of alternative dichotomies: among others, auctoritas versus potestas, the constituting versus the constituted power, and charisma versus law. Examining the history and interplay of such categories, I suggest that such dualities often describe the dynamic tension between sovereignty and legality that defines an existing order. Special attention is given to the historical examples of the pardon power and the Pauline opposition between charis and nomos, as well as to David Daube’s argument that redemption in biblical traditions was a sacralized legal concept. Through a series of thought experiments, I suggest that law and religion may be understood in some cases as twins, born together and inseparable, just as law cannot be fully distinguished from sovereignty.

If the Jews were the target of the Nazis’ extermination project, we must ask: Why the Jews? Who are the Jews? What makes them Jews? One premise for this investigation, as already stated, is that Judaism is the key to the connections between antisemitism and the Holocaust that it spawned. Therefore these reflections on the connections among Judaism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust begin with the Judaism that makes Jews Jewish, which is the focus of the first chapter. The key to the matter of who is a Jew is Judaism. Whether a particular Jew is reform, orthodox, or atheist, his or her identity as a Jew ultimately stems from Judaism, from the Covenant of Torah: Without the Torah, there would be no Jews. The Covenant of Torah comes with certain categories of thought, beginning with the categories of creation, revelation, and redemption. It comes with a certain teaching and testimony concerning God, world, and humanity. The Jewish people signify that teaching and testimony by their very presence in the world.

Here I argue that, inasmuch as antisemitism has a theological or ideological dimension, it manifests itself in three fundamental ways: the appropriation of the Word, the accusation and spilling of blood, and the determination of redemption. Always originating with highly sophisticated thinkers, antisemitism requires the appropriation or removal of the Holy Word in order to have the final word on the value of the human being and the higher relation that defines our humanity. In religious traditions this shows up as an appropriation of sacred texts; in the secular world we see it in texts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Similarly, the antisemite demands purity, a demand manifest in blood libel, blood purification, and bloodletting: For the antisemite, sanctity means purity, and purity requires the elimination of the contagion, which is the Jew and the Judaism, and the contagion is in his or her blood. Finally, the antisemite must be the guardian of the gate to redemption, whether it lies in the salvation of the soul or in a utopian totalitarianism.

This chapter examines (1) the connection between the movement of return and a messianic redemption, (2) the distinctively Jewish teachings on the Messiah, and (3) the relation between Jewish messianism and a Jewish understanding of history as sacred history. The key to these connections lies in the principle that our humanity is rooted in a responsibility to and for the other human being, which is ultimately a messianic responsibility: If the Messiah tarries it is because we tarry, because we are forever late for the appointment, late in answering, “Here I am for you,” to the anguished outcry of our fellow human being, beginning with the stranger, the other, the child of Adam. This blindness to what Emmanuel Levinas calls “the exigency of the holy,” in the face of the other, which is fundamental to Judaism, lies at the heart of antisemitism.

This new chapter considers the achievements of remarkable writer, composer and visionary Hildegard of Bingen. After an outline of her life and her writings, her views on creation, humankind as microcosm, fall and redemption receive particular attention.

The prologue dwells on the ambigous status of enslaved Africans and their offspring in the Spanish Indies and the early Spanish American republics. Since there existed no consistent theory or justification of slavery, who exactly slaves were before the law remained a puzzle. The revolutionaries who achieved emancipation from Spain chose the concept of “captive” to frame their gradual, limited emancipation approach. Regarding slaves as Christian captives crying for deliverance and spiritual redemption rather than as individuals denied access to citizenship, this approach left slaves in a legal limbo. The redemption of captives was a spiritual commitment with no single beginning or clearly identifiable end. It was an ongoing, gradual process rather than a sudden change. By reading litigation as a sphere of politics, however, we know that slaves struggled (conceptually and legally) to propose alternatives to continuing captivity. In this process, often times slaves and their free descendants stood at the forefront of legal change. Their vital and complicated engagements with magistrates and legislators reframed, expanded, refined and even defined citizenship for entire nations.

The conclusion examines two stories from 2016 that reflect broader themes of veterans returning to Việt Nam. The appointment of Vietnam veteran and alleged war criminal Bob Kerrey to Chair of Fulbright University Vietnam revived the now-familiar narrative about American redemption in Việt Nam, while the pilgrimage of thousands of Australians to Việt Nam for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan demonstrated a profound sense of entitlement to Vietnamese spaces. The conclusion summarizes that veterans returned in search of resolution or peace, which manifested in nostalgia. Upon return, many returnees found a measure of peace, but were challenged by the erasure of their wartime presence. Veterans negotiated this displacement by drawing from wartime narratives and performing nostalgic practices to reclaim their sense of belonging in Việt Nam. Yet the 2016 stories indicate that veteran influence in the country will decline as Việt Nam moves on from war.

Jeffrey Hammond outlines a biblical theology of conscience. A Christian conscience is an ever-growing, recalibrating capacity of the regenerated (converted) person. Then, through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, the Christian can seek to fulfill the great commands of the New Testament: to love God and love the neighbor. Working out these commands involves judgment of what to do in any given situation. However, in making any difficult judgment, the Christian is always aided by the “still, small” voice of the Holy Spirit, counselors, prayer, and the certain knowledge that the conscientious decision will always line up with the will of God as revealed in the Word of God. The redeemed conscience is one that is both bound and freed. The Christian is bound to follow the moral instruction in the New Testament, but at the same time, she is also freed to do it. The redeemed conscience is one that judges and will be judged by the God who perceives the deliberations of all consciences. The Christian, however, sensitive to the Spirit in both deciding and acting, can rest upon her decisions with a sense of equanimity and peace, knowing that she has faithfully exercised her conscience.

Too little scholarly attention has been paid to the paradox that those from the southern kingdom of Judah wrote, collected, and edited a foundational narrative not of Judah but of Israel, the ethnonym more closely associated with the northern kingdom even within the biblical narratives. This chapter argues that, rather than staking their claim to be the sole heirs to the heritage of the covenant with YHWH, the Judahite biblical editors constructed a biblical narrative that emphasizes that Judah is only one portion of a larger Israel that is presently—from the perspective of the editors and their implied audience—incomplete and awaiting reunion and restoration. By constructing an Israel of the past and rhetorically situating the reader in exile, the editors of the Primary History (Genesis–2 Kings) and 1–2 Chronicles establish a perspective of restoration eschatology in which an idealized biblical Israel (of course under the leadership of Judah) does not presently exist, having lost its status due to covenantal disobedience and disunity, but remains a social and theological aspiration.

This chapter investigates the function of a biblically-derived rhetoric of redemption in writings by turn-of-the century Black narrators who discussed slavery in the United States of America. I focus on three key texts: Venture Smith’s A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, A Native of Africa, But resident above seventy years in the United States of America (1798); George White’s A Brief Account of the Life, Experiences, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, An African (1810); and John Jea’s Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, The African Preacher. White and Jea infuse the account of their freedom from the bondage of sin and their subsequent regeneration in God with a riveting chronicle of their experiences both as slaves and as roving Atlantic freedmen, while Smith incorporates his experiences as a slave and a freedman within a Franklinesque account of personal fiscal successes and exploits. Operating as a principal and a vocabulary, the rhetoric of redemption enlarged possibilities for Black narratives to critique both the early practices of racial slavery and the historical character of freedom in the North American context. The word “redemption” carries theological and economic meanings that bore directly upon the historical character of (and possibilities for) Black liberation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary, this chapter focuses particularly on the philosopher’s key concept of “redemption.” A fascinating yet significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates to the power of the literary imagination and becomes increasingly important in his consideration of solidarity and social justice. We will explore the development of this concept in Rorty’s oeuvre with particular reference to John Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Uniting the work of Rorty and Boyne, we will argue, is a critique of standard religious practice and an affirmation of the human as ultimately redemptive.

This essay advocates that “theology” as “God-talk” is endemic to Jewish discourse throughout the ages. Jewish theology is a dialectic between prescriptive halakhah or law on one side, and descriptive aggadah or narration on the other side. While the term “theology” itself is usually taken to mean human talk about God, Jewish “theology” as the explication of God’s revealed word (dvar Adonai) means, as Abraham Joshua Heschel (the foremost 20th century Jewish theologian) put it, “God’s anthropology.” Thus Jewish theology is the explication of what Jews have accepted as revealed truth, namely, what God wants humans to know of God’s concern for them as evidenced in history, and what God wants humans to do in response to God’s concern for them.