Evangelical revivalism was the first purely American worship tradition and has been the single largest Protestant movement in America since the 1700s. Liturgical practices that developed during the early American evangelical revival period have affected the worship piety of nearly every American Protestant tradition and movement since, and the revivalist worship piety of evangelicalism has by and large remained consistent and prevalent in American Protestantism to the current day. The chapter provides a broad survey of the worship customs and mindsets that developed in America over the past 300 years through the agency of the evangelical revival movement, identifying significant factors that influenced American evangelical worship practice and piety.

As it transitioned from its late medieval into its early modern forms, the Christian just war tradition did more than shape colonialization, law, and the nation-state; it significantly shaped modernity itself. Its emphases on four big modern ideas – autonomy, immanence, instrumentalism, and universalizability – manifest throughout the modern social imaginary, including in the way both religion/theology and the nonhuman natural world are removed from view in the political realm. Viewing this transition through explicitly theological lenses helps make sense of modernity’s preoccupation with (state) violence, its struggles to negotiate ambiguity, and its commitment to a myth of progress that conceals the ironies, disjunctions, and ambivalences of history. It also helps to explain why modern political thought ignores the nonhuman natural world at a time when the costs of such ignorance are growing exponentially.

The conventional narrative of the history of the Christian just war tradition has dominated the literature of Christian just war thought. It is a deeply problematic and peculiarly modern narrative, repeating both a myth of progress and a great man view of history. Toward constructing a more historically accurate, theologically coherent, and functionally relevant narrative, it helps to have a clearer understanding of the relationship between just war thinking, just war traditions, and just war theory. Moreover, at the entrance to the Anthropocene, as the interplay between natural and political systems becomes more apparent, the relationship between evolving social imaginaries and the movements of traditions through time needs to be better understood. A starting point is recognizing that the primary questions of the tradition are those of theological anthropology: what does it mean to be human, how are human beings valued, who counts among those who are valued, and what social structures do human beings create to shape and reinforce those values?

‘Scientism’ is not the artificial dissolution of an otherwise natural and good boundary that divides modern science from other interpretations of the world, such as religion or metaphysics, but constitutes the essence of modern science precisely to the extent that this latter understands itself as making a radical break with the prior study of the world that called itself ‘natural philosophy’. This chapter argues that science becomes ‘scientism’ the moment it denies it is a philosophy of the whole of reality, and pretends instead to limit itself simply to quantitative abstractions and strictly empirical methods. In restricting the scope of its inquiry, and thus claiming a certain ‘epistemic humility’ or ‘modesty’ for itself, science follows a pattern that can be discovered in other instances of the rise of modernity, such as that in politics or economics, and presents analogous problems. The only way to avoid scientism, that is, the totalitarian domination of an abstract conception of nature, is to recover the original aspiration of science as an inquiry into being qua mobile: science must recognize itself most basically as an interpretation of nature, understood as the internal principle of motion and rest that sets the defining horizon for things.

This chapter explores whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of an African brand of crime fiction. It seeks broad trends in localized examples but, in so doing, it privileges those texts that have resonated beyond national and indeed continental borders. Following a survey of the role played by the Parisian publishing industry in the global dissemination of African crime fiction, the focus turns inwards, examining how authors including Benin’s Florent Couao-Zotti and South Africa’s Margie Orford and Deon Meyer stage the continent’s social realities, typically in the wake of independence. Crucial here is the appropriation of the city. On the other hand, authors including Mali’s Aïda Mady Diallo and Moussa Konaté and Ghana’s Kwei Quartey and Nii Ayikwei Parkes use their work to subvert the literary myths of rural Africa. The chapter argues that Sub-Saharan African crime fiction has an important anthropological function, adapting the genre’s urban DNA in order to map the tensions between the traditions of rural Africa and life in its modern cities.

The introduction lays out the rationale behind Modern Erasures and the approach it takes to the study of cultural memory of China’s recent past. The book breaks down the latter into two types of memory generated by communities and the varied forces of national revolution, respectively – what the book terms communal and revolutionary memory. It also discusses challenges posed by the historical record on early republican China, and on rural areas in particular, and what the prism of disaster events and mutual aid offers researchers in the study of remote, rural communities. It then considers the study of Maoist culture and violence, followed by the implications that historiographic gaps in knowledge on early twentieth-century rural China have for the study and understanding of modernity and colonialism on a global scale. Finally, it explains the use of the terms deinscription and reinscription for the processes of cultural erasure examined throughout the book.

The introduction provides the theoretical and methodological framework of the book and explains key terms, concepts, and historical shifts.

In this chapter the Condemnations of 1277 are discussed. While their impact might have been overstressed in the past, they remain an important landmark, with important consequences for how thinkers conceived of the relation between faith and reason, theology and philosophy. Rather than resulting in a separation of faith and reason, theology and philosophy, it led to a different notion of theological reason (more analytical, more pluralist and less sacramental).

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

British nature writing is a conflict-ridden mode that speaks to contradictions in the modern condition, and a crisis-ridden mode that addresses the modern crises of the environment, of representation and of the alienated self. It returns repeatedly to problems of mimesis and the non-transparency of language, and to the slippages between ecological facts and the cultural imagination. ‘Nature writing’ is a problematic category, and classifications of earlier literature as such must be qualified, recognising the historical overlapping of environmental literature with natural history and other genres. Although British nature writing grew in dialogue with its American equivalent, it has always been less concerned than the latter with the wilderness, addressing more cultivated environments in which wildlife intermingles with human social and economic activity. The genre has long sought spiritual renewal and significance in wildlife and engaged in conservation movements, although its environmentalist ethics have not been consistent. British nature writing has also been deeply shaped by the pastoral and georgic traditions, causing it to waver between the foci of leisurely contemplation and laborious activity.

Chapter 3 addresses the Modern period. As good a way as any of designating the period is via Eric Hobsbawm’s moniker the Short Twentieth Century (1914–91), which he sees as an age of extremes marked, especially in its first half, by a sequence of potentially world-ending catastrophes bookended by the two world wars. Much nature writing of the time evidences this apocalyptic trend, though it also takes heart in the regenerative properties of nature, which is viewed, via the lenses of such fast-developing disciplines as ecology and ethology, with an increasingly scientific eye. The first part of the chapter draws accordingly on writing which, informed by evolving ecological understandings, also debates the protectionist measures needed to combat species extinction in an ecologically threatened world. These ecological threats are then brought to bear on early- to mid-twentieth-century rural writing, which is often all too hastily viewed as reacting against the modern forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, but is better seen as belonging to a complex machinery of rural representation adapted to the cultural needs of post-war England as well as to the new technological demands of a rapidly modernising world.

This chapter rereads The Great Gatsby as a novel deeply concerned with the temptations and dangers of fossil fuel culture. After providing an overview of the contemporaneous Teapot Dome Scandal, Stecopoulos examines Fitzgerald’s subtle linkage of the novel’s more precarious characters with petro-modernity. By analyzing figural accounts of Gatsby as oil detector, Myrtle Wilson as gusher, and George Wilson as depleted energy field, the chapter offers an ecologically oriented account of a classic American novel.

“Political economy” is a Western term that carries its own, evolving ideological baggage. For John Stuart Mill, political economy was a science – that which “traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”1 Adam Smith used the word “science,” but meant what Mill would have called “art”: for him, “political oeconomy” could be “considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” and had as its objectives “enabl[ing]” the people to prosper through their own efforts and “supply[ing] the state or commonwealth” with means of payment for “the public services.”2 Smith takes us closer than Mill to what the authors mentioned in this chapter understood as their mission. It is not that Chinese writers were incapable of identifying infallibly observed regularities, but construction of a disciplinary edifice through the systematic “tracing” of such regularities in economic behavior was not a premodern Chinese project.