The introduction to this volume captures virtue's dizzying variety by explaining its roots in classical ethics, transformation through theological appropriation, and engagement with global wisdom traditions. We propose that the work of Shakespeare patches together virtue's many realizations, active both on the horizontal axis of Aristotelian capacity and dynamism and the vertical axis of Judeo-Christian valuation. Threading together exemplary passages from Shakespeare and previews of the volume's contributions, the introduction proposes that Shakespeare creates virtue ecologies -- worlds that allow for person-affirming capacities to be tested and flourish. Alive to virtue's textual and performative dimensions, we establish a vocabulary and background for the essays that follow.

Greggs examines how creaturely gratitude has been disrupted by the Fall, but is restored by grace. Rather than accepting the Thomist or Calvinist account of gratitude as an obligation, stemming from the Fall, Greggs sees true creaturely gratitude as movement within grace, in anticipation of redemption; an outpouring of thankfulness into all areas of life.

Civil war has beset France yet again. Victor Hugo reacts to the slaughter of the Commune in 1872 by telling – like Vergil, Lucan, and Augustine – a story from the past. Quatrevingt-treize is set during the Terror (1793) following the French Revolution. Paradigmatic characters and places instantiate ideologies that have mapped positions since ancient Rome. As in Augustine, no history has managed to overcome civil war. Christianity has merely enabled the shift to a new form of domination in monarchy. A new republic is needed that will refound France – a universal paradigm like Rome – on secularized Christian values that will finally bring new order to the world.

In Purgatory where Dante learns how all the purposes of the journey thus far which had progressed from the terrifying dark mountainside, through Hell and into Purgatory, are achieved in his finally passing beyond the whole purgatorial mentality itself into a place of the recovery of the original innocence of Eden. Here Dante learns from Beatrice that the burdens of sin can be finally laid down in the Earthly Paradise, and that he should now have learned, at last, how to smile. For here, she says, sin no longer has any place on the agenda of Dante’s recovery, which takes the form of a redemptive act of memory, recalling the innocence lost in Eden; and now, with the recovery of that true memory, he is now able truly to narrate the journey thus far. Now he can write the Comedy.

Paul’s gospel of divine self-sacrifice, according to this chapter, is rejectable by humans. In fact, many people do reject it, for various reasons, even after careful reflection. Most scholarly attention to Paul on God focuses on his position on divine grace and promised triumph, in a way that neglects his position on divine frustration and failure in redemptive purpose. This chapter counters that neglect with a presentation of Paul’s case for human frustration of God and God’s redemptive aim. It identifies how this case bears on Paul’s understanding of the divine redemption of humans, and it observes how many commentators have missed the important role of human frustration of God in Paul’s theology. The chapter thus acknowledges a role for human power in redemption, according to Paul, as a response to the gospel of divine self-sacrifice. The result does not compromise, however, Paul’s understanding of redemption by divine grace through faith in God. The human power in question enables God to be blameless, by Paul’s lights, in the human frustration of the intended divine redemption for humans. The chapter identifies how divine election works in this context.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

Drawing on biblical texts and theological reflections from early Christianity to the present, three prominent ways in which the sacramentality of creation has been nuanced over the centuries are explored: (1) Experiencing the presence of God in the world with focus on Ignatius of Loyola’s final contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises; (2) reflecting on manifestations of God’s goodness, power and wisdom that eminent patristic and medieval theologians discerned when studying the world and novel attributes that are discernible today when informed by current scientific findings; and (3) receiving the Eucharist as a heightened encounter with God that can strengthen individuals and communities to act cooperatively. These three ways of perceiving the world within which we encounter God constitute a formula for venerating Earth that should stimulate Christian attitudes and actions aimed at mitigating impediments to the flourishing of our common home.

Methodism – the Christian tradition that traces its heritage to John Wesley – became the largest religious group in the United States by the 1840s. Its rapid growth began during the early years of the American republic and extended throughout the decades of the nineteenth century. The Methodist tradition as a whole remained the largest expression of American Protestant Christianity from the 1840s to the 1920s; religious historians refer to the 1800s as “the Methodist age in America.” The Wesleyan family of Methodist and Holiness churches has remained the third largest religious group of denominations and the second largest Protestant tradition in America throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Owing to the breadth of geography, ethnicity, and social class that characterizes Methodism’s demographic spread, historians and sociologists often view Methodism as the quintessential example of American religious identity.

Chapter 4 synthesizes the concerns of the first three chapters. It is about four topics that underlie the Anthropocene: gradients (the way qualities vary in their intensity over space and time, and the ways such variations relate to causal processes); grading (the ways agents assess and alter such intensities and experience and intervene in causal processes); degradation (the ways highly valuable variations in qualitative intensities are lowered or lost); and grace (the way agents work to maintain gradients, care for those whose lives have been degraded, and value those agents who work and care in such ways). It reframes a few universal thermodynamic variables as (soon to be, if not already) global sociocultural values: energy, entropy, work, and temperature. In addition, it details some of the key features of one important nineteenth-century cosmology in regard to the origins of the Anthropocene (and the discipline of anthropology).

After a brief survey of his life, this chapter examines the theology of St. Augustine, focusing on his views on faith and reason, theology of the Trinity and the psychological analogy, salvation, and spirituality (frui and uti).

The complex interaction of different Christian systems created a series of uncertainties: about how to coordinate different ritual systems (e.g. baptism and the ritual year), about hierarchy (e.g. relation of the chain of command to status hierarchy), about the relation between the clerical elite and the monastic elite, and about the ritual status of heretics.

Influence of the dualist ‘Encratite’ tradition helps account for the pessimistic colouring of Augustine’s view of human nature, but this is far from being the whole story, in which a turning point was his attempt to explain what it could mean to say that God hated Esau. The sacred books which both Augustine and Pelagius accepted without question could bear either of their probably honest interpretations of grace. Even modern scholars can react strongly in opposite directions to this fifth-century controversy, on a spectrum from barely concealed dislike of Augustine’s idea of grace to apparently heartfelt eloquence in presenting it. While twenty-first-century society is comfortable with pluralism, at least on these topics, fifth-century Christianity was not. Contradictory certainties must have generated both uncertainty and unease among those not committed to either side.

Southern Alaska provides an ideal setting to assess how surface mass changes can influence crustal deformation and seismicity amidst rapid tectonic deformation. Since the end of the Little Ice Age, the glaciers of southern Alaska have undergone extensive wastage, retreating by kilometres and thinning by hundreds of metres. Superimposed on this are seasonal mass fluctuations due to snow accumulation and rainfall of up to metres of equivalent water height in fall and winter, followed by melting of gigatons of snow and ice in spring and summer and changes in permafrost. These processes produce stress changes in the solid Earth that modulate seismicity and promote failure on upper-crustal faults. Here we quantify and review these effects and how they combine with tectonic loading to influence faulting in the southeast, St. Elias and southwest regions of mainland Alaska.

This chapter examines Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998), written by famed Chinese American activist Grace Lee Boggs, and considers this text’s status within the field of Asian American literary studies. As an autobiography that details Boggs’s activist history, including the history of state neglect in her home base of Detroit, and as a text that decenters Boggs’s experience as a Chinese American woman, Living for Change opens uncommon ground for Asian American literary inquiry. Rather than opening up questions around racial authenticity, the governing framework for Asian American autobiographical criticism, Boggs’s autobiography instead demonstrates how ethnic American autobiography might respond to the death-dealing force of urban infrastructural abandonment. It thus showcases the pliability of a generic category that has often proved vexing for scholars of Asian American studies. Taking its cues from Boggs’s text, which prioritizes her relationship to place over and above her Chinese American identity, this chapter furthers a framework of place-consciousness, proposed by scholar Karin Aguilar San-Juan, that considers forms of belonging both alongside and in excess of race and ethnicity. In so doing, it demonstrates how Living for Change expands dominant understandings of ethnic American autobiography’s cultural and political imperatives.