As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

Freud’s intense faith in Jung, a man he had called the “Joshua” to his Moses, and whom he declared would be his successor at a time when psychoanalysis needed a “Christ,” ended in a hermeneutic battle over the Prophet Jonah. This chapter explores how the biblical story of Jonah became the site for working out the differentiation between the Viennese school and Zurich school of psychoanalysis. I argue that the forgotten Jonah trail is worth recovering because Freud’s repudiation of the Biblical hermeneutics surrounding the myth of Jonah largely determined the end of Freud and Jung’s collaboration and, at the same time, influenced Freud’s subsequent attitude to and writings on Biblical prophets. Freud’s taciturn, oppositional, and hitherto unanalyzed discursive relationship with the prophet Jonah sheds new light on psychoanalytic literature on Biblical myth, its reception, and even its consequent influence on the movement after 1913.

Was the American revolutionary argument justifiable on classical, Christian natural-law and just war principles? This question is not merely of quaint historical interest but also has been the subject of scholarly discussion in recent years on the basis of Thomistic natural-law and just war principles. Moreover, there has been renewed scholarly interest in the debate between the patriots and the loyalists over whether resistance could be justified on biblical grounds. In this chapter, we argue that the American revolution was justifiable on the grounds of Thomistic jurisprudence. We then turn to reconsider the case for revolution in light of Christian Scripture with particular attention to how Romans 13 was interpreted in the Christian tradition and in the American colonies.

Natural law and natural rights are contested categories among many modern Protestants, but were common legal and theological topics for their sixteenth-century forebearers. Early Protestant reformers echoed classical and scholastic teachings, and their natural law principles and natural rights overlapped with Catholic, humanist, and republican formulations in their day. But the reformers grounded their teachings in distinct accounts of the created order, human nature, the Ten Commandments, law and Gospel, divine sovereignty and natural order in the two kingdoms - giving their views a unique accent. This chapter samples the natural law and rights teachings of Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, the Magdeburg Confession, John Calvin, Christopher Goodman, and Johannes Althusius. They illustrate the hundreds of Protestant sources, by Lutherans and Calvinists, Anabaptists and Anglicans of various denominations. These teachings were a driving force of early modern Western democratic revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic; and influential in modern international declarations of rights, in the civil rights movement in the United States, and in various liberation movements in the Global South.

Shows how the Museum of the Bible produces a bible resistant to moral critique, particularly when it comes to racism, slavery, and civil rights in US history. Argues that the museum’s exhibits engage in selective history-telling and other techniques to protect the Bible from complicity in societal harms and to frame the Christian Bible as in indispensable ally for progress. The museum’s bible participates in the constructions of Christian cultural heritage narratives and Christian nationalism in the United States.

Introduces readers to the Museum of the Bible and its principal founders and funders, the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores. Introduces the distinction between the Bible as cultural icon and material bibles. Argues that the Museum of the Bible constructs and markets a bible that is particularly productive for white evangelical Protestantism in the United States.

Throughout human history, societies have had to solve three economic problems. The first is to ensure that enough goods are produced. The second is that enough of the right goods are produced. The third is that these things are distributed fairly to everyone. The first two are problems of production and the third is a problem of distribution.

How did societies in the distant past solve the problems of production and distribution? John Hicks, in A Theory of Economic History, proposes three ways humans have done so. The first is through custom (sometimes also known as tradition). Imagine a San hunter-gatherer or Nguni farmer: the decision about what to produce and how to distribute that production was almost entirely determined by beliefs or customs that had been handed down from generation to generation. Tasks and occupations, titles and hierarchies were inherited.

Artists and writers placed the figure of a boy king centrally, using images and stories of historical and biblical child rulers as exempla. This chapter focuses on narrative and artistic traditions of models of child kingship to illustrate the positive cultural associations between childhood and kingship. Scholars have almost exclusively assessed cultural representations of rulership from the perspective of an adult king. But authors used a parallel range of models to contextualise and legitimise a boy’s succession and rule. The chapter looks first at Old Testament kings such as Jehoash and Josiah, then turns to representations of the humble child David, which were especially prominent in coronation ordines and psalter illuminations. Growing interest in Latin, vernacular and visual depictions of Jesus’s childhood is considered in the third section. Interrogating the circulation of these positive biblical models challenges the dominant narrative linking child kingship with disruption and political disorder. The chapter’s final section therefore turns a more rigorous spotlight on the oft-cited Ecclesiastes 10:16 verse which warned that a boy king would bring ‘woe to the land’.

In the Introduction, the editors briefly sketch the parametres of the volume, and give an overview of each subsequent chapter.

After Iconoclasm, portraits of the inspired evangelists continue to clearly dominate in number among depictions of biblical authors receiving divine revelations. This chapter’s textual and visual analysis reveals a hierarchy among biblical authors that applies even to those of the canonical Gospels: John is the only evangelist whose divine inspiration is particularly highlighted in the hagiographical literature, and his privileged role is also strongly reflected in art.

Western savants traditionally thought that Earth was young and nearly always peopled.

Theology derives from the Greek word “theologia,” literally discourse about God. For most of the Middle Ages, it referred solely to the study of the divine nature. During the course of the twelfth century, however, the term acquired a more expansive meaning. Under the systematizing and system-building impulse of scholasticism, theology came to refer to the study of almost anything related to God’s activity in creation and salvation. Angels, ethics, last things, and a whole host of other subjects came to fall under its purview. For the anonymous author of the Summa “Antiquitate et tempore” even canon law counted as a form of theology, but many of his contemporaries thought otherwise and, in the end, it was their more restrictive understanding that prevailed. Hostiensis’ (d. 1271) claim that canon law could be called a form of theology because it was of divine rather than human origin, which elicited much criticism from later canonists like Johannes Andreae and Panormitanus, is the exception that proves the rule. The terms “theology” and “canon law” eventually came to refer to distinct – even rival – academic disciplines.

Is hope a virtue? Not necessarily. We hope for many things, some of them good, some bad. What we do or don’t do about our hopes may also reflect on us, for better or for worse. Is hope pleasurable or comforting? Again, not necessarily. Hope may involve anxiety and pain. What about hopes in as well as for others? As good and generous as such hopes may sound, even they are not necessarily virtuous. If hope appears an unqualified good to you, independent of any specific context, it is likely for one of two reasons: first, you belong to or have been influenced by one of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), in which faith-based hope counts as a virtue; second, you are a political liberal. Starting with supporters of the French Revolution, hope has served as shorthand for progressive politics. I start my literary history with the classical counterpoint, in which hope is at best problematic, something in need of regulation and restraint if not extirpation. I then turn to Judeo-Christianity, and European and American Romanticism, and offer a preliminary sketch of the reasons why hope features as a good thing in these over-lapping but distinct contexts.