In the received view, God is perfect, meaning that He is complete, lacking in nothing, without undeveloped potentialities; He is always full. Contemporary English tends to use the term “perfect” differently, in the sense of what is entirely good. Though one might anticipate that if God is perfect, then He is entirely good, the question of His goodness per se is not explored until Question 6. Here we are asking only about His fullness or complete actuality.

Who has the authority to decide on behalf of children the balance between advancing the child rights regime over the legal certainty of real children? This question is put to the test with the Swedish incorporation of the CRC into the national legal system without adhering to normal democratic safeguards; pairing the hierarchy of norms with the corresponding hierarchy of sources when conducing judicial review, or a political question doctrine to maintain the line between the courts and the democratically elected legislator. To incorporate the CRC directly without a process of transference, an international treaty that is as wide in scope and open for interpretation to be directly applicable in concrete cases has caused a persistent condition akin to Agamben’s state of exception, read through Swedish scholar Herbert Tingsten.

Many polytheists would be perfectly happy to borrow yet another god from Christianity, but only so long as they could demote Him from the One God to a god among gods: “What have you got against the others?” The naïve assumption is that God belongs to the genus “gods” – that He is just one more of those things (but in Christian belief, the real one). St. Thomas has argued that He is not that sort of thing at all – in fact, He is not a “sort of thing.” Moreover He is of such a nature that there could not be more than of Him. But how do we know He is one? Even someone who considers the many gods of polytheism false, foolish, base, demonic, or all too human may ask, “But is monotheism true?”

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

Chapter 2 tells the story of the conversion of the kings of Kongo. Nzinka a Nkuwu (King João) was baptised in 1491 but later apostatised and was succeeded by his son, King Afonso, who established an enduring Catholic dynasty in west central Africa. After acknowledging the significance of religious diplomacy, the chapter shows how the realm of immanent power was the most critical factor in the Kongo case. A close reading of the evidence indicates that the Portuguese or their ruler may have been considered to have a special association with the realm of the ancestors, while baptism was received as an initiation granting unusual powers, particularly in battle. This helps explain King João’s apostasy and is most apparent in the miraculous interpretation of the military victory that brought Afonso to the throne in 1506. However, it is also argued that conversion may have helped Afonso solidify his control of the religious field, as expressed in the iconoclastic sweeps that happened at several points in 1480–1530. The theme of cultural appeal is illustrated by a more general importation of the Portuguese culture by elites. Afonso is presented as a visionary with ambitions for societal recreation.

The imposition of ‘civilising measures’ in the context of a policy of indirect rule included reinforcing the position of the king while at the same time weakening and eventually destroying his symbolic power base. This led to a dramatic shift of authority, as did the imposition of central rule to the entire country and the introduction of a uniform and ‘rational’ administration, even where the kingdom had no historical presence or legitimacy. Together with this extension of the central kingdom’s reach, the spreading of the Tutsi political monopoly, while Hutu had held political office in the past, greatly contributed to Hutu resentment.

In the introduction, the field of experimental sociology is outlined and the core concepts of manipulation and control, as well as two crucial conditions of control, are introduced. The random allocation of participants to the treatment and the control group ensures that exogenous factors are distributed equally across these groups, which allows to evaluate the effect of the manipulated condition. Incentivization helps operationalizing behavioral assumptions into the experimental condition. The chapter then briefly elaborates on the topics of the following chapters.