Provides a brief overview of elements of the Islamic normative tradition. I consider three key concepts – justice, the common good and community – and ambiguities of their contemporary application. The primary focus of the discussion concerns resources (including wealth and property) – their attribution and distribution. To whom do wealth, property and resources belong, and what are their responsibilities? How, by whom, and for what purposes are wealth and resources to be distributed, and who has the authority to make such determinations? In broad strokes, I outline how, according to religious norms, resources ought to be utilized and managed for the sake of the "common good." The purpose of this discussion is to provide a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the extent to which religious norms have been instrumentalized and at times, reformulated in the conduct of the four oil-financed institutionalized practices explored in subsequent chapters.

This chapter considers compassionate experience, using as examples the Pietist diaconate movement in Germany in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Worker, and the L’Arche movement. The chapter shows that such compassionate practice is usually motivated by a recognition of precarity and need, a “seeing” of suffering or “hearing” of the cry of the other. Those who engage in compassionate experiences identify with the poor and suffering, often to the point of joining them or sharing in their plight. Their actions are marked by compassion, which is more than a feeling of pity, but involves deep commitment to understanding and ameliorating the plight of others or enabling them to improve it themselves. Such generous acts of hospitality often go far beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable or even humanly possible. Compassionate experience is focused less on the religious self but instead is devoted to the other, whether religious or not.

This chapter asks whether Augustine agreed with the Stoics and Platonists that there were no necessary outward differences between the lives of the vicious and the virtuous. Answering this question requires investigating whether he thought in terms of political virtues; this chapter finds that he did not. It finds that, for Augustine, justice – whether human justice or true justice – was not a political virtue, because it was primarily a description of our loves: the humanly just and the truly just differed at the level of their loves, but not at the level of their actions.

In examining how practices of theatregoing were impacted by the war this chapter provides a partner to Claire Cochrane’s examination of theatre-making in Chapter 3. It considers changing audience demographics over the war and reveals how the ‘new’ audiences were often blamed for the deterioration of theatrical quality. It pays particular attention to the two groups of audiences that received the greatest attention during the war: women (especially single women and mothers) and servicemen. Whilst recognising the value of newspaper and magazine commentaries on audience, the chapter also draws on letters, memoirs, commentaries and diary entries to understand and draw out the first-person experience of theatre-going during the war. It highlights the impact of air raids, lighting restrictions, the Amusements Tax and other wartime conditions on audiences. It also shows how changing social realities and relations in the wider world impacted on the theatre, bringing new class and gender dynamics into the auditorium.

This chapter demonstrates that the Laudian avant garde was not limited to the university but encompassed older men in rural livings, whose commitment to Laudian values was, by this point, decades old, but whose views were also connected to the universities. The chapter reveals lively exchanges amongst such provincial ministers, in print and the pulpit, on some of the hot issues of the day. The chapter homes in on three men in rural livings, Robert Shelford, James Buck and Edward Kellett, all of whom have featured prominently throughout the book. Shelford’s works can be connected to firebrands in Cambridge like Richard Crashaw or Edward Martin, and to bulwarks of the provincial puritan establishment like Samuel Ward of Ipswich, who borrowed the image of the lodestone from Shelford in order to refute, in print, some of the central Arminian contentions that underpinned Shelford’s position. Some of the central claims made by Buck developed themes canvassed in the university and elicited a response, again in the pulpit and in print, from Humphrey Sydenham in Somerset. In this way something of the liveliness and fluidity of the theological scene during the 1630s is recaptured.

The Introduction begins by examining the treatment of First World War theatre in academic scholarship over the last century, and identifies reasons for its neglect and the resurgence of interest in the topic over the last decade. It considers this resurgence in relation to work on popular theatre, the focus on cultural histories of the war, and the centrality of theatre and performance to centenary commemorations. In addressing how theatre contributed to the war effort it considers themes including: recruitment and enlistment, fundraising for war charities, and the value of theatre for servicemen and the wouded. It also considers challenges to theatre production created by the wartime conditions. Drawing on the work of the Great War Theatre project it highlights the large number of war-themed plays produced during the war, arguing that plays did not have to ignore the war to be entertaining or popular. The introduction emphasises the importance of looking at the diversity of theatrical production across the country and in both amateur and professional contexts. As such it provides the framework for the in-depth analyses of these and other topics examined across the volume.

This chapter examines the Laudian account of the relation between faith, hope and charity, and thus of that between faith and works. The Laudian answer to the question of how far, in this life, fallen humanity could fulfil the law of God is addressed.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

This chapter explores the various ways that those in the ghetto at the communal and individual level tried to support the poorest of the ghetto. This chapter discusses how charitable groups, Jewish communal organizations, Judenrat, individuals and informal networks attempted to employ many means to support those who were most economically fragile. It examines how foreign aid was able to continue to enter the ghetto albeit at a far reduced rate. It discusses how Judenrat established formal public welfare programs and encouraged the creation of private charitable programs. It also discusses private individual efforts to provide support for the most vulnerable.