The political history of American Catholics reflects the larger struggle of Catholic outsiders to overcome an often hostile Protestant society. Theirs was ultimately a battle for full citizenship in the American republic, from cultural acceptance to economic achievement to political prominence. And when they finally achieved it, theirs was a victory not only for Catholics, but for those countless other Americans who helped them get there.

Arguing that literature requires alternatives to genres such as cli-fi – that focus on the ‘after’, the catastrophe, rather than causes or solutions – this chapter examines Palestinian literature. It draws on Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun (1962) to narrate a tradition of writing that has emerged from interconnected processes of resource extraction, colonialism and fossil capital; and, historically, from the nakba (‘catastrophe’) – the displacement or ethnic cleansing of 70,000 Palestinians in 1948 – and enforced migration to, for example, an unbearably hot Iraq. He notes that a twentieth-century literary tradition – of poets (Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Marwan Darwish) and novelists (Susan Abulhawa, Liyana Badr) – both recalls a fecund Palestine, pre-oil, and resists the forces and interests of the fossil economy. With the experience of displacement and environmental devastation increasingly globalised, the enduring resistance that characterises Palestinian literature can be an exemplar for literature not as resignation but as resistance to the accelerating, imperialising forces underlying the Capitalocene.

Several patristic authors witness to a tradition of ancient instruction frequently identified as “Teaching of Apostles” (didache apostolōn). While the precise nature of that corpus stayed hidden to scholars for centuries, clearly its contents were considered important in various regions of the early Christian Mediterranean world. This renown is demonstrated, for example, by the fourth-century Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, who observed in his annual letter declaring the time for Easter observance in 367 CE that “Teaching of the Apostles” (didache tōn apostolōn) was accepted in his diocese, though he omitted it from any “canon” of works thought worthy for liturgy. What could be identified about the features of the tradition remained vague from patristic sources generally, however, clarified only in part during the ninth century when Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople described the length of the text in his Stichometry as 200 “lines” (stichoi). Beyond this, little was known of the tradition prior to 1873, at which time Metropolitan Philotheos Bryennios of Nicomedia came upon a version of the text within Codex Hierosolymitanus 54 (= H), stored at the Jerusalem Monastery of the Holy Sepulcher in Constantinople (modern Istanbul). That codex, dated by inscription to June 11, 1056, contains a tractate bearing two distinct titles: a brief heading “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (didache tōn dōdeka apostolōn) and a longer one at the beginning of the opening line, “Teaching of the Lord through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations” (didache kuriou dia tōn dōdeka apostolōn tois ethnesin). While neither header was necessarily original to the tradition – the shorter title having possibly served as an incipit based on the longer form – such markers indicate this manuscript represents some form of the ancient Christian tradition of teaching now known by early church historians as the “Didache” (didache).

How are we to make truthful statements, depictions or communications about a changing world? A fact is not an actuality but a statement about actuality; data are not given but captured and communicated; communication modifies the actuality it describes. We have many tools at our disposal – journalistic and essayistic, photographic, scientific – with which to name and depict things that are too big, too small, too fast or too slow for human perception. This chapter suggests that they share two fundamental procedures: abstraction and anecdote. The former culls large-scale dynamics from massive collections of data; the latter seizes on unique instances of the confluence of forces. Can an investigation of truth-practices in stories, reports, diagrams and images give us tools to redirect the changes we know we are experiencing but for which the means of expression seem suddenly ineffectual?

Between the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of Colombian drummers created a rich percussive lexicon. These musics circulated in Colombia and abroad under different names, cumbia being one of the most popular ones, we use the term 'música tropical sabanera' to group them. This chapter focuses on four drummers and analyses five rhythmic structures of música tropical sabanera to unveil the understudied yet deeply influential work of these Colombian drummers. Through their drumming practices, we trace the networks of music transnationalisms, media technologies, and commercial circuits that afforded the emergence of these musics. In a liminal space between the local and the transnational, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, tdrumming practices we analyse unsettle the discursive predominance that the global north has had in the history of the drum kit and its aesthetic, technical, and musical developments in the twentieth century.

Catholics were in the United States from the very beginning. Some were the descendants of people who had migrated to Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – primarily from England, but to a lesser extent from Ireland, Germany, and Portugal. Others were the descendants of people who had migrated to Florida and Louisiana from Spain, France, and Quebec during those same centuries.

Sociology is not an exact science and sociological trends cannot be used with high confidence to predict the future of the Catholic Church in the United States. It is possible, however, to study the trends that lie in the data collected by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) and other social scientists and to use those trends to formulate some educated forecasts of what may lie ahead for US Catholics in the near future. The research consulted for this chapter is organized into three broad areas: trends in Catholic population, trends in Catholic practice and beliefs, and trends in pastoral leadership. This should help to discern what may lie ahead for the twenty-first century.

Drumming is often pigeonholed as solely a visceral experience. Although it is almost impossible to hide this visceral nature, it undoubtedly has cognitive components, which supports the idea of music as an embodied activity. In this essay, I analyse John Bonham’s performance on Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1971) to demonstrate how cognitive scientist Mark Johnson’s five dimensions of the human body (biological, ecological, phenomenological, social, and cultural) can reveal meaning in drumming. By applying all five levels to the song one at a time, I peel back layers of meaning. In Johnson’s final level, I propose what I term a Tonic Beat Pattern Theory based on tension and release that serves as a method of drum analysis across rock music to explain how drummers contribute to affect and meaning. In any band, the drummer is the main driver of rhythm and groove. Drummers create musical trajectories in songs that not only make fans wiggle our hips, move our feet, and bang our heads, but also, create just about any affect the song calls for. This essay begins to uncover why rock drumming matters.

This chapter charts laywomen’s experiences within and contributions to Roman Catholicism in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, with particular focus on their relationship with and response to the broader women’s rights movement and modern feminism. It addresses the roles that women have played in building up the church and passing on the faith, while also recognizing the struggles they have faced in making their voices heard in an institution governed by patriarchal structures and attitudes. Three distinct eras in Catholic women’s history help illustrate their contributions: the Progressive era, roughly 1890–1920, with the building and flourishing of an organizational network of women’s organizations; the Vatican II era, 1960–1980, including the updating of the church through the Council, as well as the American feminist movement, and the controversy surrounding birth control; and finally, the present moment, 1990–2020, characterized by cultural challenges posed to religions by issues of gender identity and human rights.

If the term “the text of the New Testament” refers to the continuous text of any one or several of the Greek writings that constitute the twenty-seven-document collection that became known as the New Testament, then the writings of the Apostolic Fathers are of virtually no use in reconstructing any significant portion of any one of those writings. Indeed, there appear to be only three sources that may assist with that task. In turn these are the first continuous-text manuscripts of New Testament writings that survive in full or in fragmentary form of which to date there are 133 catalogued papyrus fragments, 323 majuscule manuscripts, and 2,936 minuscule manuscripts. Secondly, there are numerous lectionary texts, the majority of which are manuscripts of the Gospels arranged for liturgical use. To date 2,465 Greek manuscripts of this type have been catalogued. Thirdly, there are commentaries on the Greek text where the text is often broken into lines before exposition of the text is provided. The relative importance of these three witnesses to the text of the New Testament follows the order in which the categories have been listed: that is, continuous Greek manuscripts, lectionaries, and then commentaries.

The multidimensional nature of American Catholicism requires attention to mission and evangelization as one lens through which to understand the global dynamics of the American Catholic experience. Evangelization and mission were more nuanced than simply “converting” or “civilizing” people. Mission encounters in diverse local contexts transformed those on both sides of the relationship. This chapter will explore briefly three themes: mission to America (“transplanting,” or handing on the faith); the growth of an evangelization/mission impetus within the United States; and the effect of mission engagement from the United States. These mission encounters involved much more than simply learning a catechism. Missionaries effected social change, religious development, and humanitarian responses to injustice in many countries, even while at times carrying on practices that sometimes had a negative effect on the people they came to serve.

The so-called Epistle of Barnabas is one of the first writings after the New Testament to deal with two burning issues in early Christianity: How ought the “Old Testament” to be interpreted – over against Jewish interpretations, and how should the Christians define themselves in relation to non-Christian Jews and their beliefs and practices? The author’s rather unique answers are both intriguing and provoking.

The Apostolic Fathers (AF) are a para-apostolic and post-apostolic corpus of writings, a group of texts composed beside and after the New Testament. This corpus constitutes an important precursor to the Christian apologists and pre-Nicene theologians of subsequent centuries. The words intriguing and enigmatic aptly describe both the collection itself as well as the current state of scholarship on them. The AF are an intriguing body of literature because they provide an important window into the lived religion of Christians in the late first and early second century. The intrigue only deepens once we look at and through these windows. Looking at them, the AF offer colourful portraits of key protagonists – much like stained-glass windows, they provide colour but only an outline of the people depicted in the artwork. For example, we know the names and some biographical details and have depictions of Polycarp and Papias, but our knowledge of them is otherwise fragmentary and scant. Looking through the AF, we observe ancient Christian people with their practices, diversities, debates, anxieties, hopes, and worship; this leaves us with many impressions but even more questions.

Although the association behind 1 and 2 Clement with Clement of Rome is ancient, the two texts have different genres and purposes. The former deals with church leadership generally and addresses particular individuals, while the latter focuses on almsgiving and church wealth distribution. Whereas martyrdom of Christians in the Roman arena appears in 1 Clement, the traditional Games of Greek civic life appears in 2 Clement. The two letters also diverge in their references to specific cities: 1 Clement cites Corinth as its destination, but 2 Clement does not repeatedly invoke the circumstances of a particular city. The biggest similarity between the two texts is that neither claims to be written by Clement of Rome, though for the sake of convenience the unknown authors of both are called “Clement.”