St. Paul speaks about the church as the body of Christ, and he also speaks about the Eucharist as the body of Christ. How are these two affirmations related? Christian medieval authors gave consideration to the notion of the church as the “mystical body” of Christ and understood the church as the fruit or result of eucharistic communion in the “true body” of Christ. This chapter examines the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the church and its relation to the sacraments. It also shows how this conception has deeply informed the modern idea of the church as a sign and instrument of grace for all human beings, called to communion in the one Christ.

Focusing on Romans 11, this chapter argues that Paul here concludes his larger argument by making the case that gentile incorporation does not suggest that God has abandoned his people Israel but rather is the very means by which God is saving not only one subset of Israel (that is, the Jews) but all Israel (Judah and Israel), with transformed gentiles effectively becoming resurrected Israelites. In the process, the chapter addresses Paul’s arguments about the remnant and the olive tree and observes that Paul concludes his argument by highlighting God’s removal of “impiety” from “Jacob,” tying this passage to the very beginning of the argument in Romans 1.

This chapter contends that in Romans 2, Paul argues that the prophetic promises to make Israel obedient via the “Torah written on the heart” and the “circumcision of the heart” and a “new heart and new spirit” are presently being fulfilled. But in a startling twist, he includes uncircumcised gentiles among those receiving these things promised to Israel, building on his case in Rom 1 that Israel’s historic idolatry and immorality opened the door for gentiles to be included due to God’s impartiality.

This chapter explicates the language of mystery, which was one of the Laudians’ preferred modes for treating the topic of predestination. The workings of the divine will were held to be so far above the puny categories of human reason that the process of subjecting the former to the demands of the latter was taken to be in itself a form of the presumption, perhaps even the sacrilege, of which the Laudians so frequently accused the puritans. The fine print of predestination was thus far better left wreathed in the language of mystery, a language that wise divines also used to deal with topics like the Trinity or Christology. There were, the Laudians maintained, central features of the Christian faith which were best simply believed rather than reduced to a list of numbered doctrinal propositions, to be then defended through entirely human procedures of syllogistic reasoning. In some circumstances, and certain moods, the Laudians held predestination to be one of those areas of difficulty, presented by God for human belief, rather than for theological enquiry.

As Christianity continued to transition from school churches to the monepiscopate, the role of hiddenness and openness in Christian teaching become an increasingly contested issue. Three writings associated with the so-called Hippolytan school – the Traditio apostolica, the Commentarium in Canticum Canticorum, and De Christo et antichristo – shed light on the tensions between hiddenness and secrecy in baptismal instruction.

This chapter examines US pulp crime fiction published between the 1920s and the 1960s, focusing on its formal distinctiveness and its development. It shows how the forms of organization taken by pulp labor related to the literary forms found in the stories, exploring how the principles of fungibility and economy, recognizable from the industrial factory system of mass-production, were accommodated or challenged by two key crime writers: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It examines how the rhythms of pulp labor intersected with the stories’ formal composition. Finally, it discusses the interpellation of a white, male, working-class readership by interwar pulp crime fiction, and the way its ideological valences were reconfigured in the postwar period by writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Chester Himes.

Who wrote and circulated the first detailed account of the investigation? Depending entirely on this mysterious text, from the 1830s to the 1890s, Mexico’s most influential writers, thinkers, and political commentators retold the story of the deaths of Dongo and his servants, Emparan’s investigations, and the rapid resolution of the crime. These nineteenth-century retellings appeared in various kinds of publications, from periodicals to multi-volume novels. Each of these versions had its own interpretative angle, but all of the nineteenth-century authors contextualized the massacre as an important symbol of the legacy of the Spanish empire. The case also provided Mexican intellectuals with a starting point for discussions about morality and free will, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church, and, above all, the effective Novohispanic judiciary in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of law enforcement in their new nation. This text provided fuel for political critique and its insider legal perspective strengthened the points of anyone who deployed it to argue their own views about the independent nation of nineteenth-century Mexico.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

The introduction opens by asking the reader to imagine encountering the mysterious environment where the Tunguska explosion had occurred. It describes the Tunguska event in broad terms and explains why it remains an unsolved mystery. After reflecting on the potent role of meteorites in world history and the status of mystery as both a property of the natural world and a cultural imposition, the introduction foregrounds the main argument of the book. The site of the Tunguska blast has been a landscape of mystery, where distinctive interactions with the natural world, alternative forms of knowledge, and concerns about catastrophe have dominated environmental relations.

Don DeLillo is a profoundly religious writer. He is a religious writer because of the questions he asks rather than the answers he finds. He is a religious writer because of how he depicts characters wrestling with moral problems, not because of how those characters emerge victorious from such battles. He is a religious writer because his work is persistently drawn to sacred encounters with the numinous, immanent, and transcendent, even though such moments may prove illusory and are always transient. This chapter traces the evolution of critical perspectives on DeLillo as a religious writer, beginning with postmodern critiques of his metaphysical preoccupations, to defenses of DeLillo’s redemptive moral vision, through post-secular reassessments of his enduring reverence for quotidian mystery. The chapter then examines specific manifestations of spirituality in several DeLillo works, particularly White Noise, Libra, and Underworld. DeLillo raises religious questions and offers responses ranging from parodic skepticism to partial faith. He features religious meditations which glow with quotidian mystery yet remain enveloped by an impenetrable cloud of unknowing.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the world’s most beloved composers. Yet, his greatest work remains his most enigmatic. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 was the last major work he completed before his untimely death at the age of 53. Its title is the Pathétique, which in French means passionate or emotional. The symphony certainly lives up to that title, particularly its fourth and final movement. Unlike the traditional boisterous or triumphant climax of a major symphony, Tchaikovsky experimented with an extended lament. Not only that, but the first few lines of the movement introduce the melody in an unprecedented way: distributed across the first and second violins so that no individual instrument actually plays the melody. In other words, this “emergent melody” is heard but not explicitly played! Why would Tchaikovsky introduce such a peculiar innovation? Efforts to answer this question have yet to succeed.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the Hegelian background to Marx’s thought and then attempts to situate him in the radical German emigration in Paris, Brussels and London, between 1843 and 1850. Until the summer of 1850, Marx continued to believe that a working-class uprising in France would provoke a revolutionary upheaval that would engulf Europe. In Class Struggles and The 18th Brumaire, Marx draws lessons for the German working class from the defeats of the French proletariat between 1848 and 1851. He does so by systematically contrasting the world of historical reality, the class struggle, and the realm of shadow and illusion in which historical actors fancy that their speeches and parliamentary manoeuvres make a difference. He explains brilliantly how Louis-Napoleon could have appeared as a saviour to the impoverished small peasantry. What is most striking about these essays is their rhetorical power – the literary skill with which Marx evokes the ghosts and shadows, the dreams, riddles and masquerades that constitute the realm of ideology and illusion. Marx’s essays on 1848–1851 give substance to his theories of ideology and false consciousness and do so in a way that fuses the spellbinding power of the imagery with the spell-banishing power of the historian.