The Healing on the Sabbath parable’s focus on higher and lower standing at a feast affirms humility over ostentation. Evoked is the grand meal given by Joseph in honor of his brothers who, on account of his high and their low standing, could not sit with him at his table.

Chapter 10 shows how what began with philosophy’s rendering God superfluous ended in a war against the God of Abraham. Here we have the singularity of the Holocaust, which lies in a singular assault on the Jewish people as the perennial witnesses to that God the God of Abraham. Drawing on the testimony of the Holocaust diaries, written within the whirlwind of the assault on God, this chapter demonstrates that this defining feature of the Holocaust can be seen, for example, in the Nazis’ use of the holy calendar in the execution of their actions, in the prohibitions against prayer and Sabbath observance, in the destruction of synagogues and Hebrew Bibles, and in the targeting of children, elders, and mothers. What the diaries reveal about the essence of Holocaust that the historians cannot, it is argued, is this: The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of not just of the bodies but of the souls of the Jews as a means of annihilating the God of the Jews. It is unprecedented and unparalleled.

It is a truism that we live in a secular and disenchanted world. This chapter explores what is at stake in our abandonment/eclipse/rejection of a characterization of this world and its life as sacred. Wirzba examines how modern writers came to experience their life as fragmented and disconnected from a sacred cosmos, and how this feeling for life results in varying forms of homelessness. The forced migration of peoples and the destruction of homeplaces in never-before-seen rates testifies to a need to reinvigorate the sense that places are homes for living and for the cherishing of life as a sacred gift. What our refugee world and our mass extinction time needs is a recovery of the goodness, beauty, and hospitable character of our given life.

Moving beyond the familiar focus on the radical puritan reaction, Chapter 3 examines the full range of expressed opposition to the Laudian programme, not just from hard-line puritans, but also from conformists including those in the senior ranks of the Church. These arguments consistently adopted a remarkably conservative mode of defending established orthodoxy in doctrine and practice against recent Laudian innovations, with even puritans invoking the Prayer Book and the 1604 Canons. Even radical presses run by sectarians abroad could juggle with more conservative rhetoric. Most of the arguments of the famous anti-Laudian puritans Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne still followed more conservative lines (despite the violence of their language) although they radicalised after their punishments. The Scottish opposition to the new Prayer Book, it is argued, was mostly directed against pre-Laudian grievances (with the exception of Robert Baillie’s Ladensium Autokatakrisis which was aimed at English MPs in the Short Parliament). The chapter also analyses the Short Parliament and opposition to the etcetera oath, noting that tactical moderation still meant that the pre-eminent (although not the sole) mode of public debate concerning the Church of England was a conservative one that left the door open for moderate reforms.