In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh sets out to explore how literary forms and conventions have contributed to a ‘narrative imagination’ that is ill-equipped to grapple with climate change. He claims in passing that in comparison with the novel, which is his primary generic focus, literary non-fiction has been better able to circumvent culturally embedded ‘modes of concealment’ that prevent us from thinking the ‘unthinkable’. Yet, Ghosh does not explore how and why creative non-fiction might be more amenable to addressing climate change. Through a reading of The Great Derangement as creative non-fiction, as well as other examples of the genre, this chapter examines the genre’s potential benefits and limitations for shaping a ‘narrative imagination’ that disrupts the ‘modes of concealment’ bequeathed by colonial modernity.

When discussing diversity among early Christians, one can point to both geographic dispersion and to doctrinal difference. The first kind, geographic diversity, can be treated briefly, since its contours have been catalogued in detail by other scholars. The larger task for this essay is to reassess various doctrinally distinct groups in light of recent scholarly debates to see what conclusions can be drawn for the second century, with special reference to the corpus known as the Apostolic Fathers.

The title of this essay assumes that “church” was an operative category for those second-century Christian authors whose writings are included in the collection called “the Apostolic Fathers.” Such an assumption is valid, provided that it is accompanied with the caveat that the Greek noun ekklēsia, which is typically rendered with the English word “church,” is but one image among many used to describe communities of Christ-followers in these writings, even as ekklēsia is of particular importance because it is found as a designation for these groups in each of the documents under consideration in this essay. Another necessary qualification is that statements about and reflections on Christ-following ekklēsiai (“churches, assemblies”) in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers are contingent and not systematic. The modern theological discipline of “ecclesiology” tends to frame its considerations of the identity and mission of the church in conversation with Scripture (especially the New Testament) and tradition. Yet the second-century writings known as the Apostolic Fathers were penned before there was a New Testament as such and at a time when Christian tradition was yet in its infancy. Thus, we find in these important nascent witnesses snapshots of early Christ-followers debating and defining the identity, mission, and organization of their groups. In order to manage the disparate available evidence from 1 Clement, 2 Clement, the Letters of Ignatius, the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, this essay concentrates on three separate but related questions: (1) How is the identity of the church presented? (2) What is the work of the church? (3) What, if anything, is said about the ordering and structures of the church?

The Catholic Church in the United States includes among its institutions a vast social welfare network that has been important for countless individuals, including the Catholics who support it, the Catholics who benefit from it, and the non-Catholics who have been recipients of its services. This essay provides a narrative of that development, identifying the key characters and turning points from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the intersection of “American” and “Catholic”: what the church learned from the American culture around it, and what the church contributed to it through its teachings about charity and its example of putting those teachings into action.

We investigate the most critical personal and musical competencies associated with successful drum kit playing. Invoking our combined teaching and performance experiences, we identify a set of interpersonal, aesthetic, and performance competencies, apply them to profiles of successful drummers, and situate them as instructional objectives for novice drummers. We analyse musical expression as personal interpretative response, isolation of temporal elements, expressive use of the drum kit, and perspectives of expert drummers. Popular music performers clearly use signature techniques and gestures to extend their personalities through performance. We review the creative competencies in this process, then focus on techniques: swing, groove, and pocket, the overlapping 'feel'-based constructs that invoke beat subdivision, beat centredness, elasticity in interpretation of time, and dynamic balance among voices on the drum kit; centredness, indicating how 'on top' of the beat drummers play; elasticity, the dynamic manipulation of time when entering or exiting phrases, playing fills, set-ups, or ensemble hits; and dynamic balance in the drum kit, the distribution of timekeeping in the hi-hat in relation to the kick and snare drum. We consider these various personal and musical competencies in the social context of ensemble music making, and make recommendations for future instruction and critical discourse.

The definition of the drum kit – and consensus regarding its appropriate study – have changed dramatically over the course of the instrument’s history. This chapter is a rough guide to unpacking that history, and in doing so it treats the drum kit not as a fixed object, but a theoretical concept. What follows is a discussion of the drum kit in theory divided into three parts: (1) the invention and changing status of the instrument; (2) the trajectory of drum kit studies within the wider field of musical instrument scholarship; and (3) a discussion of the ‘drumscape’ as a theoretical tool. Building on Kevin Dawe’s concept of the ‘guitarscape’, the drumscape is a lens through which to consider how the drum kit has been written about, thought about and talked about; the power and agency of the drum kit in culture and society; and what kind of experience it is to play the drum kit (an experience involving both the mind and the body). Viewed through the lens of the drumscape, the seemingly simple term ‘drum kit’ can be understood from at least four different but related perspectives: the drum kit is a technology, an ideological object, a material object, and a social relationship.

On Easter Sunday in 2010, nineteen elementary and middle school students in the District of Columbia awoke to find themselves featured in The Washington Post.1 These children had captured the newspaper’s attention because the previous night they became members of the Catholic Church. During the Easter Vigil at St. Augustine’s, “the mother church of Black Catholics” in the nation’s capital, these girls and boys received the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. All of these new Catholics attended St. Augustine parochial school where non-Catholic children constituted the majority. However, on their first day back at school after the Easter Vigil, the number of Catholic students enrolled at St. Augustine’s rose from 51 to 70 out of a total of 185.

The perception of Roman Catholic faith, practice, and polity as being either corrupt, superstitious, undemocratic, or somehow “un-American,” dates back to the arrival of British Protestants in New England in the seventeenth century, and has morphed into newer shapes more recently in social media. It has been labeled “the deepest bias in the history of the American people” by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; others have termed it the “anti-Semitism of the intellectuals” and “the last acceptable prejudice.”1

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.