Abstract: This article explores early Jewish conceptions of the “bad man” as reflected in the hermeneutic legacy of one seminal biblical passage (Num 15:30-31) in order to discern the most egregious forms of religious wrongs. This offers a prism for gauging whether early iterations of “Judaism” were so fully aligned with law and praxis that this constituted the entirety of religious life and its ultimate measure. Or, alternatively, whether one can already perceive in classical Jewish discourse an acknowledgement, or even an articulation, of a “religious” or “theological” nucleus apart from the normative order.

The classical definition of theology reflects fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). This definition underscores the premier role of faith, reason, and critical thinking in the exercise of theological studies. Religious studies for its part is a social science study of religion, which also applies critical thinking and reason in its research, but does not necessarily require faith. Therefore, both theology and religious studies have thrived by the application of the tools for critical thinking and reason. For undergraduate research in theology or religious studies, the methodological approach of students depends on the focus of the course. The different sub-disciplines of theology or religious studies adopt different approaches to research. Therefore, a course on the history of the Bible would require different research method and approach than a course about social justice or comparative religion. However, regardless of the course, it is important to always bear in mind that a typical piece of research on religious studies or theology will likely adopt diverse research approaches and methods.

There is a tendency, at least among secular readers, to bracket off Dante’s faith as something no longer true, something to which we no longer subscribe. Yet that would seem to miss not just an aspect of the Divine Comedy, but its central point. The episodes in the Inferno this volume focuses on, paradigmatic for the whole work, point to a problem of faith – lack of a shared belief, misreadings of important stories, failed allegiance, and broken promises. But it is the choice of Virgil as a guide, lost because of his belief in “false and lying gods,” that teaches us how to read ancient books whose culture we no longer share. How indeed can we believe in them?

Chapter 4 is about the distinction between natural and supernatural virtue. Natural virtues are acquired through human effort and are studied by philosophical ethics. Supernatural virtues must directly come from God. Their existence is known only through revelation. Thomas’s predecessors and most subsequent theologians typically identified these infused or supernatural virtues with the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Theological virtues are directly about God. But Thomas thinks that there must also be distinct infused moral virtues that exist alongside the acquired moral virtues. These infused virtues are specifically distinct from the acquired moral virtues that share the same matter and from the theological virtues that are about God.

The Elmhirsts emerged from the First World War feeling that orthodox Christianity was no longer adequate as a guide either to belief or to conduct. Like others of their era, they looked for new forms of spiritual meaning, a new guide to moral behaviour, new sources of affective or social fulfilment and different frameworks for understanding the nature of society as a whole. Collectively, this chapter terms these searches ‘socio-spiritual questing’. It considers four approaches taken at Dartington to filling the gap left by Christianity. The Elmhirsts tried re-shaping the Church with the help of the arts, explored the possibilities of Eastern spirituality, worked to advance humankind’s unity through group spiritual exploration and experimented with a planned regime of ‘psycho-physical hygiene’. Interwar socio-spiritual questing was so wide-ranging and amorphous that it defies comprehensive survey. Dartington Hall provides an alternative way of drawing together its various strands: an unusual convergence in a diffuse landscape of seeking.

This chapter explores what apocalyptic thought shares with ideal theory, with a focus on our grounds for believing any proposed account of the ideal society. As John Rawls understands it, ideal theory is based on plausible reasons that others should accept, whereas religious belief is unsuitable to collectively guide society. Some, though, have questioned Rawls’s confidence in ideal theory, and this chapter draws on social science research to place these criticisms on firmer ground. It outlines an argument for why future uncertainty makes it impossible to offer a plausible defense of ideal theory. As a result, ideal theory, like religious belief, ultimately must rest on faith. Though ideal theory must abandon aspirations of outlining an ideal to collectively guide society, there is still a potential role for it as a source of utopian hope.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Key Romantic authors sought to salvage hope and love as virtues separable from theology and without a clear basis in faith. We find in Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Goethe a post-theological insistence on the absolute value of hope and love as forms of imagination that free us from the constraints of experience. For Wordsworth, hope – political, social, though ultimately transcendent – is continuous with imagination, and thus also “intellectual” or spiritual love. Shelley repeatedly sought substitutes for faith within the Christian triad he would otherwise maintain: Queen Mab advances joy, hope, and love; “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” love, hope, and self-esteem. Shelley yokes the re-envisioned theological virtues to the service of an erotic vision of polity, without entirely surrendering hope in individual immortality or its possible secular equivalents. Goethe concludes his masterpiece Faust with a quasi-Dantean vision of Faustus’s redemption by his sublime hopes, intermixed with few if any good deeds and many bad ones, in a heaven without God or evil. Indeterminate hope does the work of faith in Goethe’s poem, just as moral hope does in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

This chapter entertains four questions: first, what are hope’s conceptual relations to the other theological virtues, faith and love? Second, is there eternal hope for some people only, or for everyone – for the rich as well as the poor, for non-Christians as well as Christians? (I argue that Dante, in the Divine Comedy, offers some salvation hope for his pagan guide, Virgil.) Third, is hope inherently self-regarding or not? Fourth, does hope come to an end, as no longer necessary, when eternal life is fully inhabited – or does it continue eternally? In some accounts, hope will no longer be necessary once the kingdom comes, and God is all in all. Yet my chapter title refers to hope as a component of eternal life, hope that motivates eternally. The theological belief that souls eternally strive for perfection is developed in the Greek writings of the early Church Father St. Gregory of Nyssa.

This chapter uses J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer’s (2011) meta-analysis of the evolutionary basis for faith to compare Dylan’s and Lennon’s supernatural beliefs. These manifest as profound spiritual convictions that resisted the conventional strictures of mainstream religion. Their similarities and differences demonstrate, once again, how dual biography elicits outcomes that a stand-alone individual assessment cannot produce. Dylan and Lennon, widely regarded as innovative mavericks, were both active participants in thought-reform movements on at least one occasion. Each also, at different times, identified with the figure of Jesus Christ so completely that this transformation in their private disposition became conspicuous in their public life. As the first study of its type, this chapter demonstrates the potential for further interdisciplinary research between popular music scholars and evolutionary psychologists.

A dynamic multi-stakeholder climate change social movement for climate action has formed that includes progressive institutional investors, business, civil society as well as with educators, students, youth and existing movements, such as the women’s, trade union, social justice, Indigenous and consumer protection movements. This bottom-up climate change social movement has played a critical role in building new partnerships and coalitions to create the political will for the Paris Climate Change Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals Agreement. This movement is now playing a critical role to provide bottom-up pressure on investors, businesses and governments to ensure the Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals are prioritised and implemented. The chapter overviews the latest developments of this movement, and thereby provides an inspiring overview of how you and your business, organisation, government, or community group can partner and join existing cross-sectoral networks to share knowledge, and collectively take action to achieve the scale and speed of greenhouse gas emission reductions required.

Chapter 9 takes a closer look at one of the book’s overarching themes, the relationship between faith and firepower. In the existing literature and the news media alike, much weight is given to the rhetoric Iranian leaders used during (and since) the Iran-Iraq War and the importance of faith and revolutionary fervor in understanding the Islamic Republic and its prosecution of the conflict. As this chapter demonstrates, the IRGC sources and Iran’s actions reveal a different story. By taking those as the basis of analysis, here the book illustrates that Iranian leaders prosecuted the war by relying on all the tools at their disposal, which included both faith—religious commitment, revolutionary ideology, and popular morale—and firepower—military professionalism, strategy, and weapons. In the second half of the chapter the theme of faith and firepower is utilized in another way, to examine how the Guards conceptualized the war in relation to Islam and the Iranian Revolution, and to demonstrate that they did so in order to expound the significance of the conflict.