This chapter documents the creation, timeline, and results of the ongoing Hey Drums project. Hey Drums is a collective of female and gender minority drummers and percussionists engaged in community activities around Australia including a blog, print media, and live music events. More than 145 drummers from across the Australian continent have been interviewed on the Hey Drums site since 2016. Hey Drums has grown over this time to include live teaching and performance events for Melbourne Museum’s Nocturnal series, Melbourne Music Week, at the Espy, Testing Grounds Night Markets and the Make it up Club at Bar Open, as well as print media: in Drumscene magazine in Australia and Tom Tom Mag in the United States. All of these activities contribute to raising the profiles of the featured drummers. The initiative has been created by Nat Grant, an independent drummer, percussionist, and composer from Melbourne, Australia.

Describing American Catholic worship demands grappling with the broad expanse of peoples and places that have experienced the Catholic faith between the moment of the first Mass, celebrated by globe-trotting Spanish explorers in 1494, and Mass in the twenty-first century, when the first American-born pope, Francis, assumed leadership of the global church. Yet, American Catholic worship asks that we look at far more than formal ritual experiences such as the Mass, the Divine Office, or the sacraments. For much of American Catholic history, a rich panoply of devotions to Mary, Jesus, the saints, and the Blessed Sacrament played a major, if not central, role in supporting and sustaining Catholic identity on the American continent – a role that would not be challenged until liturgical renewal advocates began to question the relationship of popular piety and formal liturgical prayer in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

When considering the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem for the period of the Apostolic Fathers, we immediately face difficult and debatable decisions regarding the dating of this collection. For a few of these texts, scholarship has settled on a rather narrow range of likely dates. For example, 1 Clement is generally dated in the 90s CE, and the epistles of Ignatius of Antioch are most commonly dated during Trajan’s reign between 98 and 117, though even these have had notable exceptions. On the other hand, over the last several decades some Didache scholars have moved its date of composition from the second century into the late first century; others have settled on an even narrower range of 50–70 CE. Likewise, the Epistle of Barnabas can be reasonably situated either in the years immediately following the First Jewish Revolt (c. 75–80 CE) or those following the Bar Kokhba Revolt (c. 135–140 CE). Also, prominent scholars of the Shepherd of Hermas have imagined its composition or redaction spanning several decades from as early as the 90s to the 140s. And depending on one’s conclusions regarding the unity of Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians, it could be dated anytime between about 110 to 140. Though a few have ventured to date the Epistle to Diognetus in the early second century, most favor a much later date, perhaps in the late second century. The same is true of the so-called Second Epistle of Clement and the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetics of drumming in Americana, focusing particularly on the work of session drummer Jay Bellerose. By attending to the material cultures and various lineages of drumming in the genre – spanning from the blues to country, jazz, rock, and early field recordings – I consider how an underlying aesthetic discourse inflects Americana drum kit performance and reception. Specifically, I outline how discussions about ideal drum tones, ‘less-is-more’ approaches, and preferences for American-made vintage kits signal shared understandings about percussive music making in the genre; highlighting key figures that helped develop recording techniques and drumming conventions.

The contemporary pertinence of green utopianism in its myriad manifestations lies in its trenchant critiques of the ecological deficiencies of the present and its imaginative projections of more ethical modes of human–animal–nature relationality. The extant climate and ecological crisis demands a radical rethink of how we relate to the non-human world. Thus, drawing largely on green utopian and posthuman theory, this chapter features critical assessments of human–non-human relations as depicted in four canonical ecotopian literary texts: Aldous Huxley’s Island (2009), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985). The extent to which the works deconstruct traditional human/nature dualisms and hierarchies is explored and discussed in depth. The chapter concludes with ruminations on potentially ethical modes of relationship that move beyond hierarchical and antagonistic structurings of ‘otherness’ and incorporate reverence and respect for irreducible alterity.

For a community as diverse as those of Latin American and Caribbean descent living in the United States, finding an appropriate term that encapsulates all of its members is a tremendous challenge.  The terms Hispanic or Latino/a are often used interchangeably for this community, yet they do not fully reflect the complicated history of the population. Two additional terms, important to reflections on community identity, include mestizaje and mulatez. Mestizaje refers to the mixing of Spanish and indigenous heritage, while mulatez, the mixing of Spanish and African heritage, which is also part of the Latin American story. Both terms remain contested and have been explored in detail by community theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo, Michelle Gonzalez, Jorge Aquino, Nestor Medina, and Miguel De La Torre. Markers such as race and class play a critical role in understanding the history and intricacy of these terms, too much to tackle in this space. To complicate matters further, many people forgo the terms Hispanic or Latino all together and self-identify by particular nationality, calling themselves “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” or “Ecuadorian,” or by variations born in the US context such as “Guatemalan-American,” “Chicana,” or “Nuyorican.”

This chapter focuses on the precipitous decline of wild animals. It identifies the inception of ‘defaunation’ with the emergence of human empires as well as animals’ philosophical displacement in comparison to the distinguished human, both reaching back to classical antiquity. The chapter then discusses defaunation today – its recent causes and ecological consequences. It argues that this disappearance of animals impoverishes the world by stripping away manifestations of diverse animal minds. Divested of animals' presence and their numinous expressions, landscapes and seascapes also become disenchanted. This reinforces a notion that animist cosmologies are ‘fantastical’ and that the dominant zeitgeist of the universe as mechanical and purposeless is sensible. The chapter ends by decrying the humanisation of the Earth and calls for humanity to scale down and pull back, to allow for a resurgence of wild animal life.

Within the early Christian communities, according to the documents that bear witness to them, the figures of Paul, Peter, and James the brother of Jesus loom large. Already in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Peter (Cephas) and James are noted as “pillars” of the church (Gal. 2.9) and are the only two apostles Paul deemed it necessary to meet during his first trip to Jerusalem (1.18–19). In subsequent decades and centuries, the importance of all three figures was continually reaffirmed through communal memory, traditions, and writings about them or attributed to them. Limited to the writings that comprise the Apostolic Fathers, however, their representation is somewhat sparser. Of the eleven authors now conventionally included among the Apostolic Fathers, five do not explicitly mention Paul, Peter or James at all. Considered individually, appeals to these figures are not evenly distributed: Peter and Paul appear variously while James is entirely absent, with the possible exception of one fragment from Papias, discussed below. Even within the letters of Ignatius, whose seven-letter corpus contains the majority of appeals to Peter and Paul in the Apostolic Fathers, only three or four of the seven mention Peter or Paul. All this amounts to the fact that roughly half of the authors or writings of the Apostolic Fathers do not feel the need to appeal explicitly to any of these apostolic figures in the course of their arguments, however much they may be indebted to them on the level of broader early Christian discourse. This is no doubt due, at least in part, to the artificial and somewhat arbitrary nature of the textual corpus labeled the “Apostolic Fathers,” which arose in the seventeenth century and whose textual contents were not fixed in convention until after the publication of the Didache in 1883. It is perhaps also a function of the nature of the works included in the collection: the occasional nature of the Ignatian letters, the appropriation of apocalyptic discourse in The Shepherd of Hermas, the presumption of many shared, and therefore unstated, traditions in all texts, etc.

This chapter engages with questions around the possibilities and limitations of the novel and narrative in the Anthropocene. It addresses these challenges by drawing on and extending work in econarratology, and applying it to three novels in which floods depict the impact of climate change. In navigating the spatial, temporal and representational challenges of imagining climate crisis, these novels achieve a switching back and forth between the reader's actual world and the textual world. It is this back and forth, and the realisation that results from it, that is central to the role that the novel as a genre might play in depicting the Anthropocene.

This chapter examines how contemporary poetry is responding to the cognitive, representational and ethical questions of the Anthropocene. Rather than focusing on work that extends the traditions of nature poetry, it examines an alternative legacy: that of post-war ‘open-field’ poetics as developed by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Through techniques such as the decentring of the lyric persona, collage and spatial composition, as well as emphasis on the poem as a field of energies and exchanges, open-field poetics provokes a rethinking of relations between figure and ground, subject and object, human and non-human entities. After outlining ‘open-field’ poetics and its implications for ecological thinking, the chapter discusses poems by three contemporary writers – Ed Roberson, Evelyn Reilly and Stephen Collis. These poets rework open-field poetics in the context of ecological crisis.

The recent renewed reflection on the role of catastrophe in literature and culture has received special attention from scholars in the environmental humanities. In particular, the connection between catastrophe and violence came into focus more prominently in an effort to understand how catastrophes have been framed rhetorically and culturally. This chapter shows how the theatre functions as a laboratory for exploring the Anthropocene by way of a reading of a German Expressionist play that focuses on the connection among catastrophe, violence and the negotiation of environmental risks. It also considers how these consequences and risk assessments might be perceived from a culturally decentred position by focusing on a unique conversation that took place in the 1990s between the German tradition of political theatre and its redaction by an Aboriginal Australian playwright, suggesting the continued need for a post-colonial critique of the concept of the Anthropocene.