Chapter 7 discusses how the Transfiguration is seen within the Synoptic Gospels – and especially in the careful New Testament and Patristic scholarship of Daniel Kirk, Teresa Morgan and Peter Anthony-- as the principal occasion when the moral and spiritual perfection of Jesus received divine affirmation. Alongside the patriarch Moses and the prophet Elijah, Jesus is glimpsed in the Transfiguration narratives, falteringly, as someone immensely special and divinely endorsed, by three of his disciples, who (in Luke and two sixth-century church mosaics) are themselves included within the cloud (perhaps even theösis) that envelops Jesus, Moses and Elijah. This chapter examines both Aquinas’ and recent Eastern Orthodox accounts of the social implications of transfiguration. It also notes that transfiguration has been deeply disfigured by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945.

When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, Reverend John MacLean did not rejoice at the mass slaughter. Instead, he accepted the notion that the bombs brought an end to the war, but he felt that America had a duty to help rebuild. On January 6, 1946, MacLean announced to his church that God wanted him to raise money among American Christians for the restoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He chose not to declare the atomic bombings as right or wrong; he simply tip-toed to the edge of calling it immoral. He did not go as far as to claim that the United States needed to apologize for the nuclear attacks. He merely pointed out that “a Christian nation had not only killed many thousands of helpless civilians, but destroyed the homes of countless others, leaving them shocked, wounded, terrified and deprived of a means of livelihood.” What began as a fund-raising drive by American Christians to atone for the atomic bombs quickly morphed into a campaign to build a Christian university in Japan. This chapter follows the American efforts to create this university and the leading ex-officials who played the most vital roles, from Ambassador Joseph Grew to Will Clayton to Eleanor Roosevelt.

The American public is assumed to have overwhelmingly supported the use of atomic bombs on Japan, but this impression comes in part from a Gallup poll conducted just days after the bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The poll found that eighty-five percent of Americans were in favor of the bombs. Only ten percent disapproved, and five percent were unsure. Those figures might suggest a deep current of hatred toward Japan, the depths of which can only be hinted at by polling data. But it must be considered along with another Gallup poll taken in June 1945, barely two months prior to the nuclear strikes. In this survey Americans were asked if they supported the use of poison gas against the Japanese, if doing so would reduce American casualties. Forty percent said yes, but almost fifty percent said no. As horrible as poison gas undeniably is, a nuclear bomb is vastly worse. This suggests that most Americans simply had no concept of what an atom bomb meant. This chapter examines what Americans actually thought about the bomb.

Chapter 10 explores the challenges of representing dissonant historical narratives related to questionable practices of incarceration, particularly of civilians. Heritage sites and institutions have preserved and interpreted the histories of these many sites through encounters with former captives and collection of their stories, objects and artworks, onsite at the physical locations of former captivity. Revisiting the major case studies in Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore, the chapter examines the construction of physical memorials, cemeteries and peace gardens as a reparative practice, with ensuing tensions for national memory-making, asking what lessons might be drawn regarding settler citizenship.

This chapter describes the use of nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices. To date, the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 is the only hostile use of nuclear weapons by one State against another. But in the 1960s to 1980s, around 160 nuclear explosive devices were detonated for so-called ‘peaceful purposes’. Also described is the Cuban missile crisis as well as broken arrow incidents in which major accidents occurred with nuclear weapons.

This chapter focuses on better-known examples of transitional justice’s interaction with cultural heritage law, as well as the literature on dissonant heritage. The chapter engages with the recognizable framework of the World Heritage Convention, examining it through the World Heritage Sites of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland), Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park (Japan), and the Cape Region Floral Area and Robben Island (both in South Africa). The chapter analyses law’s role in shaping the narratives around these sites, and their role in promoting transitional efforts. The chapter also engages with the uses of intangible cultural heritage (colloquially known as folklore) as a living culture in transitional societies, focusing particularly on the efforts to revitalize, through international listing, intangible cultural heritage in North Macedonia (Glasoechko, male two-part singing in Dolni Polog), which is under threat of disappearing because of the dispersal of the community of heritage practitioners during and in the aftermath of the wars that led to the dissolution of Yugoslavia. An example of intangible cultural heritage safeguarding arising from the Colombian conflict is also discussed.

Chapter Two shifts the attention from the combatants to the civilians under fire. After an introductory section in which I summarize the theory of strategic bombing and the milestones of the air war in Europe and Japan in 1940-45, I move on to analyze the catastrophic modernism deployed to narrate the aerial bombing of Germany, France, and Britain. I concentrate on Gert Ledig’s Vergeltung (1956), Alexander Kluge’s Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 (1977), Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Féerie pour une autre fois (1952-54), and James Hanley’s No Directions (1943). Following my discussion of the catastrophic modernism of these works, there comes a section on realist works on the aerial bombing of Britain and Germany; in this section I include, too, modernist texts endowed with a strong representational drive. I analyze novels by Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and Otto Erich Kiesel. In Chapter Two I also explore in detail the narrative voiding of aerial bombing in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Hubert Fichte’s Detlevs Imitationen “Grünspan” (1971). This chapter ends with an analysis of the representation of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in works by Yōko Ōta, Tamiki Hara, Masuji Ibuse, and Takashi Nagai, among others.