This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. This chapter wrestles with the philosophical inheritances that scholars in this field must navigate as both an intellectual exercise on the matter of Black existence, and as an ethical problem with regard to how to account for both the experience of domination and the manifold examples of Black religious innovation which sit at the crux of the study of Black religions. Thus, it effectively argues that scholars cannot sidestep attention to the Black body and its interdependence on the fraught category of religion.

“The Black Body in Nature” considers writers who, in their critical and imaginative work, map the contours of an African American nature writing tradition. In this environmental canon, authors persistently attend to the violence associated with the outdoors, lurking in forests, woods, and other secluded areas.These geographies, while environmentally rich, can be threatening spaces, isolated and hostile.Yet, as the story of birder Christian Cooper attests, menacing areas needn’t always be sheltered, but are manifest in city streets, urban parks, and brightly lit neighborhoods. The African American environmental tradition is nuanced and, as such, the experience of danger and disenfranchisement is counterpointed by an equally strong and persistent affiliation with the natural world that offers, for some, a measure of relief from structural forms of oppression.Situated at the nexus of race and ecocritical thought, this chapter considers the complicated positionality of the Black body in nature through the lens of exile and belonging.

This chapter examines Puccini’s early life in the Tuscan town of Lucca. Puccini came from a long line of church musicians and was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfathers as maestro di cappella at the Cattedrale di San Martino. The chapter briefly outlines the careers of these musical forebears and their influence upon the young Puccini, whose musical career would ultimately take a very different course. It examines Puccini’s musical training and the family members and other figures who provided funding for his education. The composer’s move to study at the Conservatorio in Milan is briefly considered, with a particular emphasis on the composers and critics who were his teachers and mentors. These figures played a vital role in helping him gain a foothold in the Italian operatic world of the 1880s, setting him on the path to musical greatness.

In this chapter I trace the origin of the idea of evolutionary ancestors back to pre-evolutionary archetype concepts in the thinking of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Richard Owen. Ancestors and archetypes were both used to explain unity of type, homology, and the origins of organismal form, but due to their metaphysical dissimilarity, they achieved this in fundamentally different ways. The archetypal thinking of these authors each illuminates a distinctive aspect of this explanatory strategy. I also diagnose and defuse a modern myth that has arisen about the views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which claims that he thought that the ventral surface of arthropods corresponds to the dorsal surface of vertebrates. When Darwin reinterpreted the archetype as an ancestor, evolutionary storytelling became possible, with hypothetical ancestors becoming the central subjects in phylogenetic narratives. But the emergence of ancestors as actors in evolutionary stories also required reconceptualizing the systematic relationships between taxa to provide pathways along which evolutionary stories could flow.

What is the significance of Christians’ new identity in 1 Peter 2:11-5:11? This chapter argues that this identity is foundational for the exhortation that follows. The exhortation in 2:11-5:11 is deeply informed by the structures and conventions of Jewish and Greco-Roman exemplarity discourse. Greek, Roman, and Jewish discourse exhibited a strong preference for domestic role models. As a new γένος, ἔθνος, and λαός, Christians needed new Christian exemplars, which 1 Peter supplies. At the family level, the best exemplars for young Roman elite were their own illustrious ancestors. Similarly, Christians, as one family in the house of God, now have a host of their own illustrious ancestors from the scriptures and Christian tradition to aspire to and imitate, such as Sarah, Noah, Christian elders, and, especially, Jesus Christ, who is Christianity’s exemplar par excellence. This chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of Jesus’ exemplarity in the exhortation to slaves (and all believers) in 2:21-25. Through his passion, Jesus provided an example for Christian to imitate in their own suffering.

Chapter 2 explores how the transhumanist attempt to achieve immortality in avatar form through the technology of mind cloning, compares and contrasts with the many attempts our species has made to achieve immortality in ancestral form. It asks: what are the conditions that make certain modes of immortality conceivable and desirable? What kind of practices, understandings, and forms of self-discipline are these modes of immortality predicated upon? What kinds of experiences do, and might, these modes of immortality give rise to? Why are these modes of immortality meaningful to the people who pursue them. By juxtaposing the ubiquitous making of ancestors with the making of avatars among transhumanists, the chapter further illuminates the values and beliefs that animate the transhumanist technological imagination, and once again demonstrates that thinking comparatively can sharpen our abilities to grasp the features of a given social phenomenon.

The chapter analyses Cato the Elder as the ‘inventor’ of a novel ethos of principled thrift and pride in peasant parsimony in response to the massive and unprecedented influx of war spoils and other riches into Rome in the first half of the second century BCE. It explores how Cato turned aspects of prudent and parsimonious husbandry as allegedly practiced by earlier generations of Roman peasants into a normative benchmark for all Romans, and in particular members of the senatorial elite and endowed his vision with authoritative and exemplary force by projecting it back into the past. The argument then shifts to resistance to this reconfiguration of material moderation as an ancestral ideal and concludes with a look at the self-promotion of Scipio Aemilianus, who aligns himself in some respects with the Catonian persona but distances himself from it in others, not least in his explicit if partial embrace of Greek culture – or rather those aspects of Greek culture that could be presented as compatible with Roman tradition.

Like all institutions, polities are physical things only in certain restricted senses. They can be materialised in practical facilities and visible symbolic expressions, both manifestations of the bundled schemas and resources that compose their structure. Yet in their conditioning of individual and group behaviour within idealised communities, polities emerge from, and essentially remain, “states of mind” (Yoffee 2005: 38–41). If we are to appreciate the sources of legitimacy and empowerment integral to governing authorities, we must turn our attention to how those minds saw politics as inherently entwined with the transcendent. The Classic Maya were far from alone in believing that political communities encompassed supernatural beings and the ancestral dead, not simply as distant abstractions but role-playing constituents.

This chapter critically reviews existing works on democracy and civil society, asking why they are oblivious to the role of community. It discusses the production of internal enemies and the related idea of bad gemeinschaft.