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.”

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, the matter of who stays Catholic, and how, has become one of the most important questions in American Catholicism. Research about Catholics going their own way captured the attention of the public in general and Catholic leadership in particular, and focused on the notable drop-off in participation in Catholic ritual life, an increasing political independence of the laity from the wishes of Catholic bishops, a widespread abhorrence at the continuing revelations of clerical sexual abuse and episcopal cover-up, and enduring resistance toward active church involvement from post–Vatican II generations.

This chapter details two types of drumbeats used by drummers when playing irregular-meter grooves based on large repeating spans (ten or more beats or pulses). The types – punctuated and split – differ with regard to the subdivision of the repeating cycle. In punctuated irregular grooves an established meter is interrupted at regular intervals by isolated measures in another meter. In split irregular grooves, the cycle is divided into two or more subsections of approximately balanced lengths. The drums play a critical role in decoding these subdivision patterns. Many irregular-meter drumbeats can be related directly to the familiar common-time backbeat, and the ways that an irregular-meter drumbeat diverges from that regular-meter archetype provide a ready guide for metric analysis. At deeper metric levels, drumming conventions such as fills serve as structural landmarks. The theory of punctuated and split metric structures demonstrates the centrality of drum-kit syntax to the performance, perception, and analysis of metrically irregular rock music.

This chapter examines the role recorded music has to play in representing the drummer in the years spanning acoustic and early electric studios. Through archival research, a detailed look at what made it onto the record will help determine how – for better or worse – recordings have continually influenced generations of drummers that followed. This chapter argues that drummers in particular must be careful in how they treat early recordings that feature early drummers, especially when trying to learn from them, as above all else, early recordings have the most influence on early jazz performance today.

Few New York theatergoers who pass Father Francis Duffy’s statue in Times Square know that the beloved chaplain to New York’s “Fighting 69th” regiment was also a leading turn of the century Catholic intellectual. In 1905, Duffy (1871–1932) and colleagues sought to join “the ancient faith and modern thought” in their new journal, The New York Review, arguably the boldest American expression of Catholic intellectual life of its own or any time.1 He and The Review’s other founders hoped to encourage a homegrown Catholic intellectual culture among the nation’s growing body of upwardly mobile Catholics.

Between the first decades of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, the numbers of US Catholics grew from 200,000 to more than 14 million. This growth was made possible by an increasing birth rate but also successive waves of immigration, predominantly from Europe. During this era, US Catholics developed a dense network of imposing and influential institutions: cathedrals (some of surpassing architectural elegance), parish churches, and various types of schools, orphanages, hospitals, convents, monasteries, and seminaries. Even in places where Catholics were a minority or whose Catholic populations grew slowly, Catholic enclaves often flourished.

The drum kit is one of the most explicitly gendered instruments in Western popular music, while drumming culture continues to be male-dominated. Despite the visibility of drummers like Anika Nilles, Taylor Gordon, and Sarah Thawer, women and gender non-conforming drummers remain underrepresented at both amateur and professional levels. This is slowly changing in the digital age, as social media platforms like Instagram provide opportunities for drummers from underrepresented groups to form online communities, make themselves visible, and participate in popular discussions regarding the instrument, musical performance, and gender politics. Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘Drumming Instagram’, where women and gender non-conforming drummers can connect, learn, and find inspiration from each other. Although social media can enhance the visibility of underrepresented percussionists, is Instagram a space where emancipatory feminist politics can emerge? We answer this question by conducting a content analysis of user comments (n=3,370) from three Instagram accounts dedicated to promoting women drummers: @femaledrummers, @tomtommag, and @hitlikeagirlcontest. Our findings suggest that social media visibility both legitimizes women drummers while rendering them vulnerable to public scrutiny and unwanted attention. Although Drumming Instagram makes it easy for women to be seen, it nevertheless remains challenging for feminists to be heard.

This chapter explores a selection of new nature writing by Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Adam Nicolson, David Gange and Amy Liptrot, which features Scottish islands at the British archipelago’s farthest Atlantic edges. These accounts speak to the cognitive and imaginative challenges of the Anthropocene, bringing deep time and planetary interconnections into view, evoking temporal scales that range from 600 million years in the past to millions of years in the future, oceanic tides that move to the pull of celestial bodies, and animals whose migrations trace lines across the globe. They also enable us to think through more elusive Anthropocene effects – its uncanniness, and the way in which it requires us to imagine ourselves as spectres haunting the deep time of the future. At the same time, these works offer a glimpse of alternative, interim narratives in which we learn to be better ancestors for human generations still to come.