Acts of worship typically involve expressions of fealty: One takes off one’s shoes, bows low, or falls on one’s face. Experiences that naturally prompt such expressions – the sense that one is in the presence of God in an unusual and profound way – raise interesting metaphysical questions about divine presence and absence. Talk of special divine presence poses serious puzzles. In the Jewish scriptures – and in the writings and words of those who treat these scriptures with reverence, whatever their religion – there is much talk of God’s presence and of God’s absence. And yet, God is also affirmed to be everywhere. How can God be everywhere, but also absent from some places, and especially present in others? Metaphysics is a likely place to look for a range of possible answers to this simple but puzzling question.

The eight dimensions of being with, outlined in detail in my A Nazareth Manifesto and elsewhere in their missiological, ethical and public policy implications, are here explored in their full scriptural dimensions. Presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment and glory each have profound resonances in Old and New Testaments, and each provides a continuous thread through incarnation, the reason for creation, the nature of Jesus’ ministry and death, the work of the Holy Spirit, the church and heavenly destiny – in relation to God, to one another and to the whole creation. They affirm how the incarnation is not a means to an end (such as saving us from our sins) but an end in itself, and they expand the notion of being with into a multidimensional concept with rich resonances.

After discussing different phenomenological modes of presence, I argue that the full force of the icon’s visual language is meant to bring us into an encounter with the listening presence of a person. This begins to emerge through the painting’s natural aesthetic presence as a portrait, but can only come to full fruition for the one who prays. After a phenomenological account of the act of prayer, I show how the experience of the icon takes on a critical structural difference for those who come before the icon in the conviction that the words that they say and actions that they perform are truly communicated to the person who is visibly present.

Given China’s position in Pacific Asia, defining its regional centrality might seem a simple task. But centralities grander than merely geographical have been alleged and contested. Currently some maintain that China is the central kingdom because of its power. But it was conquered by the Mongols and the Manchus, and its present centrality is due more to its economic mass and connectivity than to its military. Others claim that hierarchy is natural to Asian culture, and China is the apex. But neighbors were often cynical about China’s moral stature, and China’s soft power is now at a low ebb. I argue that China was the center of regional attention in the premodern era, and that it has returned to center stage since 2008. The three basic reasons for China’s original centrality and its return were situational: presence, population, and production. The salience of all three disappeared with Western imperialism’s global presence, the devaluation of mere demography, and industrial production. Traditional and current centrality created asymmetric relationships between China and its neighbors, but the regional situations differ fundamentally.

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

The Introduction has three aims. First, it offers a new interpretation of the Seikilos epitaph, one of the most important musical documents from the ancient world. The chapter shows that we can use the Seikilos epitaph as a model for reading carpe diem. Second, the Introduction offers a short history of the carpe diem motif from Homer to late antiquity, analysing its key features and function. Third, the Introduction lays out the methodological framework of the thesis: it is argued that close analysis of the carpe diem motif can advance our understanding of presence, performance, and textuality. These themes have been central to literary studies in Classics and beyond.

Chapters 2 analyses the carpe diem motif in Horace and pays particular attention to wine and calendars. In doing so, the chapter shows how Horace’s lyric is distinct from any lyric poem that was written in archaic Greece. Rich Romans possessed thousands of wine amphorae, and consular dates marked the age of each amphora. The chapter argues that this made wine storage places into huge drinkable calendars, in which the oldest wines were stored at the back, and the younger wines at the front. Every time Horace mentions vintage wines, he accesses this calendar. Time is expressed through wine: opening an old wine creates a moment of present enjoyment, which cannot be repeated. Yet, through vintage wines Horace also brings moments of the past to the present. The chapter combines close readings of some of Horace’s poems with research into epigraphical sources, and ultimately advances our understanding of Roman calendars and fasti.

The Epilogue includes a new interpretation of a late antique poem by Pentadius. The Epilogue also summarises the findings of the book.

Chapter 6, “The Ethic of Presence” synthesizes the fine-grained analysis of the previous chapters with a broad-based, quantitative study of royal depictions and provides a general theory of the role of inscribed bronze vessels in the formation of the Zhou state. Drawing on theories of subject–object entanglement, the chapter captures how the ancestral cult and its accoutrements facilitated both the dissemination and the appropriation of royal ideology, helping balance interests within a shared Zhou interaction sphere.

Spirituality is a deeply personal universal human experience, and people with intellectual disability may miss out on the expression of this vital part of their identity, which is a fundamental human right. An understanding of people with intellectual disability as creative communicators has been gained through action research, but spirituality is still a poorly understood aspect of their lives, giving rise to unmet needs. Outdated practices and beliefs about the origins of disability have led to a culture of exclusion or, at best, tokenism. Around the world, reports are still emerging of marginalization, discrimination and even abuse because of negative spiritual attribution or views about cognitive abilities and consequent economic worth. Faith communities and secular care providers need to incorporate new learning about the importance of spirituality for mental health into mainstream planning of care with the involvement of people with intellectual disabilities who communicate creatively as co-producers.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

Drawing on biblical texts and theological reflections from early Christianity to the present, three prominent ways in which the sacramentality of creation has been nuanced over the centuries are explored: (1) Experiencing the presence of God in the world with focus on Ignatius of Loyola’s final contemplation in his Spiritual Exercises; (2) reflecting on manifestations of God’s goodness, power and wisdom that eminent patristic and medieval theologians discerned when studying the world and novel attributes that are discernible today when informed by current scientific findings; and (3) receiving the Eucharist as a heightened encounter with God that can strengthen individuals and communities to act cooperatively. These three ways of perceiving the world within which we encounter God constitute a formula for venerating Earth that should stimulate Christian attitudes and actions aimed at mitigating impediments to the flourishing of our common home.

Chapter 5 explores Derrida’s analysis of the problem of judgement through an extended analysis of Derrida’s analysis of presence and différance. It analyses three of Derrida’s readings of other philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Husserl, with the aim of showing how in each case, Derrida believes that the priority of presence (and hence judgement) rests on a transcendental idea that exceeds the given. It argues that despite Derrida’s apparent hostility to the phenomenological tradition, his work is indebted to Sartre, and echoes Bergson’s analysis of resemblance.