Chapter 9 considers how Augustine features some of the most extreme expressions of the spiritual resurrection and of hope for the fleshly resurrection as Christians approach their bodily deaths and handle those of others. Augustine’s teaching and preaching on Christian dying, celebrating the Christian martyrs, handling Christian funerary and commemorative practices, and consoling Christian survivors serve to highlight the embodied spiritual life and activities of Christians whose souls have already been resurrected and whose bodies will eventually be resurrected, hopefully to eternal life. Among these discussions, Augustine acknowledges that Paul, the martyred apostle of the resurrection, provides some of the deepest theological insights not only into the mystery of the resurrection, but also into the interim condition of the human person after physical death and before fleshly resurrection. Despite the personal brokenness of death, Augustine sees that the continuity of human identity always remains in the hands of God.

This chapter examines how the rise of populist nationalism in Saudi Arabia interacts with Wahhabism and the role of Western power in controlling the outcome of this interaction. As a result of its founding agreement, the Saudi ruling family needs the support of Wahhabi clerks for internal legitimacy and of the West, mainly the US, for technological help and defense and security backing. These Saudi rulers have instrumentalized Wahhabism to advance a pan-Islamic ideology (da?wa) in an effort to fight rivals at home and combat Arab nationalism and liberal, socialist, and Marxist trends in the Arab region and Islamic societies. This ideology was also used to achieve global influence. The chapter explains that Saudi Arabia is a case in which an extreme interpretation of religious doctrine was needed to legitimize an authoritarian regime and ultimately became a tool of domestic governance and foreign policy.

This chapter explores the Custody of the Holy Land as a legal, spiritual and cultural product of the Holy Land. It explores its roots in Catholic spirituality and pilgrimage, the Holy Land as a shared religious landscape, and the influence of Islamic law/Ottoman governance.

After the First Crusade, which resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem, the shrines in the Holy Land fell into the hands of the western Latin crusaders. Most of them, especially those located in large cathedral churches, were given by the Latin authorities to new foundations of Latin canons following the Rule of Augustine, which was the norm for cathedrals in the West. This chapter examines in turn the major communities of Augustinian canons, beginning with the most important shrine, the Holy Sepulchre, and also considering the Templum Domini, Mt Zion, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Nazareth and others. The circumstances of foundation, the manner in which the communities were governed and the important role they played as major landowners in the Crusader States provide the main approach to the chapter.

The chapter discusses the material realities of Bale, describing its variety of topographical and ecological particularities. It underscores these landscapes as more than empty canvases for human activities, discussing how they affected and shaped human lives, and how the people imprinted themselves upon the land. The chapter moreover explores the history of the Arsi Oromo in Bale, paying attention to the process of gradual Islamization and how the Muslim Arsi Oromo came to put their own mark on the new religion, carving it into the landscape in the form of shrines and through well-traveled paths leading to these shrines. It emphasizes how the Islamic dimension became crucial in the formation of Islaama peoplehood, which on the one hand was locally emplaced and on the other hand transcended local boundaries. It similarly points to how Islam was embodied in genealogies of religious figures that were fused with narratives of Oromo ancestors, rooted in experiences of embodied kinship relations. Extending this to a discussion of the sociocultural features of the Arsi Oromo, the chapters underscores Islaama peoplehood as not merely an exclusively religious category but something encompassing both ethnicity and religion as foundational dimensions, thus denoting belonging in a strong affective manner.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Although much about holiness in Chaucer’s works remains disputed, elliptical, or even contradictory, many of his images of religious devotion and popular piety are themselves situated in a broader cultural context than is usually recognised. For Chaucer, as for most late medieval Christians of his day, holiness was instantiated in matter, present and manifest in shrines, relics, holy objects and in the natural world, and he shows himself attentive to such materiality in his images of popular religion. Many of the Tales celebrate orthodox Christian materiality in ways that align his devotional interests with those found in a broad range of English religious writings by authors with whom he is not typically connected, including Julian of Norwich and the Carthusian Nicholas Love. Other Tales offer an incisive critique of holiness in the context of contemporary practices within the Church. Chaucer’s many-sided works hold these glimmering tensions in balance.