Chapter 10 begins by summarising the conclusions from the case studies in terms of the model of ruler conversion, but its main aim is to adopt a global perspective on ruler conversions and on conversion more generally at times. It first underscores how vanishingly rare ruler conversions between Islam and Christianity are in the historical record and yet how open to monotheism immanentist regions, such as the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, Africa have been. Some scholars have already noticed the resilience of Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian societies to the proselytising drives of Christianity and Islam. The chapter summarises why this makes sense in terms of the mechanism of transcendentalist intransigence. It then offers a brief overview of how this affected Eurasian history by reference to the Ottoman, Mughal, Manchu and Mongol empires. The second half of the chapter offers a more detailed appraisal of the fortunes of Christianity and Islam in attempting to secure ruler conversions in South Asia, East Asia and both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Even though missionaries developed some of their most sophisticated strategies in these regions, the result was largely a failure. The conclusion to the chapter, and the book, reflects on the role of culture and the question of scale in historical analysis.

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.

Chapter 1 explains the theoretical framework deployed throughout the book, largely drawn from the companion volume, Unearthly Powers. Above all, this means explaining the two forms of religiosity – immanentism and transcendentalism – and how they related to each other. While immanentism is a default or universal strand of human life, transcendentalism defines what is distinctive about the religions of salvation that emerged from the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE. These world religions also contained an immanentist element, however, even as they produced reform movements that insisted on the transcendentalist dimension. These modes also gave rise to two different means by which rulers could be sacralised: divinised kingship (immanentism) and righteous kingship (transcendentalism). The chapter then fleshes out a tripartite model for ruler conversion: (1) religious diplomacy often first induced rulers to favour foreign missionaries; (2) immanent power, or supernatural assistance in this life, tended to be crucial in convincing them to make a change of allegiance, and (3) the Christianisation of their realms was linked to its capacity to enhance their authority. Lastly, the themes of cultural glamour and intellectual appeal are introduced.

This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

This chapter explores how the three Middle English Otuel romances grapple with concerns about the power of non-Christian empires, Christian military vulnerability, and rash crusader conduct caused by the Mongol conquests, the Mamlūk recovery of Acre, and Ottoman victories at Nicopolis and Constantinople. The first part of the chapter reads the Otuel romances against the development of a dialectic of fear and hope in contemporary political discourse: fear about Christendom’s vulnerability and hope that a powerful non-Christian ally would infuse the Christian community with much-needed strength. The second part of the chapter discusses how these romances engage with and adapt what I call “reverse Orientalism”: a pan-European mode in which Muslim figures (real or imaginary) are made to look down on and offer damning critiques of Christians.

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

This chapter deals with the processes of conversion and Christianization as they are explored in Old Norse literature, focusing on skaldic verse composed in Norway and Iceland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It begins by discussing the poetry of Hallfreðr Óttarsson vandræðaskáld as a representation of a poet’s experience of conversion, through looking at the poems Hallfreðr composed for the pagan Norwegian ruler Hákon jarl and the Christianizing king Óláfr Tryggvason. It then considers the prominent role played by skaldic verse in the conversion of Iceland, in which skaldic poems gave voice both to pagan resistance and to Christian attacks on the pagan gods. Finally, the chapter discusses how poets in eleventh-century Norway were able to adapt their verse to reorient it away from its associations with paganism, allowing them to praise the Christian king Óláfr Haraldsson while preserving the cultural value their art form had traditionally possessed.

The Life of Gregory the Great, who died in 604 just a few years after sending Augustine to Canterbury to reintroduce Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons, was written around 705 by an anonymous writer apparently associated with the monastery of Whitby which was an important cultural centre in the seventh century. The work also provides some information about life in Britain. The Latin displays certain syntactical and orthographic idiosyncrasies which may be due to the author or the later scribe.

Having discussed how the law of torts protects a person’s physical integrity and freedom of movement in the previous chapter, we will now consider how the law protects a person’s interests in property against certain types of interference, including trespass to land and trespass to personal property

In this chapter, we will explore the definitions and features of these trespass actions.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

This final chapter wraps up the study as a whole, assessing how this argument about gentile incorporation into Israel and the role of Torah in Paul’s thought fits into the larger context of Paul’s thought and why, if Paul believes gentile men are being transformed into Israelites, he argues against requiring physical circumcision of non-Jewish men who receive the spirit. The chapter closes with an assessment of how this model accounts for the development of Pauline thought in early Christianity as the movement became more gentile-dominated.

This chapter evaluates the landscape of Pauline studies, demonstrating the need for reevaluation of Paul’s understanding of the relationship between Israel, the Jews, and the non-Jewish individuals receiving the spirit through Paul’s ministry. Contrary to many modern readings, Paul’s gospel is not systematically opposed to “legalism” or “ethnocentrism,” and his treatment of (former) gentiles as descendants not only of Abraham but of Israel begs explanation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the composition and interpretive capacity of the recipients of Paul’s letters and a discussion of key terms in the Pauline letters.

The nation-state is undoubtedly the most important political formation in modern world history. It is universally recognized and aspired to, but not universally realized. The nation is never a finished project, and nationalism, which is understood here as the cultural politics that has the nation as its subject and its object, derives its energy and motivating force from perceived threats from within and without. While nationalism is a modern phenomenon, religion is often regarded as either ancient or transcending history. Before the nineteenth century, religion everywhere in the world was an integral part of statecraft. The legitimation of rulers came from heaven and was mediated by priestly and monastic classes. This is true in Christendom, but also in other major religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism.

In the 1910s, human and animal populations all over the Lushai Hills were pounded by a chance series of calamities - environmental, financial, agricultural, and epidemiological - forever altering the social landscape. This chapter is about how people attempting to escape the crush of bamboo famine, debt, crop failure, and disease were set in motion across mountains. As traditional coping strategies were constrained by new political, economic, and environmental realities, shattered clan groups began to forge new survival mechanisms out of missionary medicine and Christianity itself. Shattered families, scattered clans, sickly refugees, and indebted labourers were dashed across mountainsides to become seekers of new powers as older survival mechanisms failed or were ruled out, regulated, or lost. Disasters reordered not only by catalyzing opportunities for spiritual searching, but also by remixing splintered clan groups of survivors - once disparate kin groups and communities that, according to contemporary upland cultural logics, were in dire need of communal healing, restoration, and reconciliation. Foregrounding local terminology in the telling of these pasts opens up causal explanations, interpretative pathways, and complexities otherwise obscured by using Western categories and frameworks alone, and points to the multiple meanings of the conversion process itself. Christianity advanced through catastrophe as shattered populations folded it back into the normal healing structures of upland life.