The conservative side of the quest for true Christianity – what traditionalists call the “rule of faith” – can also be organized in terms of doctrine, culture, and politics. The second chapter begins by looking at the doctrinal quest, which focuses on the retrieval of “historic Christianity.” John Henry Newman, Karl Barth, and C. S. Lewis represent key moments in the rise of retrievalism among Protestants.

When Comparative Politics emerged in the early 1960s, drawing on functionalist theory, the concept of political culture featured prominently in how political development might be best studied. In the prevailing functionalist perspective, political culture was defined as the sum of the views, values, and attitudes people hold towards the political system. Over time, with the decline of functionalism and the rise of positivist theory, political culture was marginalized and reduced to data collected (e.g., in interview surveys). Drawing conclusions about national political cultures using such instruments, however, is problematic. Following influences from hermeneutics, the concept has since been reinvented with a focus on discourse and empowerment. This involves accepting the public sphere as the forum for political discourse, and a recognition of public opinion as a driving force in shaping and changing political culture. This chapter traces the evolution of the study of political culture in mainstream Comparative Politics. It emphasizes the role that political culture has been playing as explanatory variable in the study of both development and democratization. Western countries have viewed themselves as embarked on a mission to disseminate progressive values to the rest of the world, arguing in their approach to political culture in Africa that reforms are needed. Originally conceived as “traditional”, the initial calls were to make it “civic”. The same premise has underpinned more recent research on democratization. In placing research on African political culture in its wider Comparative Politics context, the chapter highlights why approaching it through Western eyes has its limits. More attention needs to be paid not only to the values that underpin political culture in Africa but also to the voice of African political scientists and their interpretation of the success and failure of democratization on the continent.

Chapter 11 turns to a discussion of the competing arguments concerning the new public nuisance law advanced by practicing attorneys, interest group allies, judges, scholars, and law-and-economics professors. Almost all criticisms of the new public nuisance law have been negative, characterizing expansion of public nuisance law as illegitimate and dysfunctional. These critiques are examined through the lens of various categories of criticism: (1) traditional, (2) formal, (3) institutional, (4) rule of law, (5) democratic theory, and (5) law and economics. The critics all draw on negative examples from the mass tort public nuisance cases in the 21st century (lead paint, firearms, opioids, vaping, climate change). At least one commentator, however, has offered tempered praise for the new public nuisance law as the second best solution to community-wide harms. She believes that the development of the new public nuisance law is in the finest traditon of a flexible, developing common law to meet changed circumsatnces. This commentator would permit continued development of the new public nuisance law, enhanced with several guardrails and transparency in proceedings.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

Although Christianity and Islam dominate the religious landscape in Lagos, ‘Yoruba religion’ still plays a vital role. To conceptualize religious pluralism in a setting where ‘Yoruba religion’ does not exist as an ossified tradition but is part and parcel of Islam and Christianity, I use the term ‘Yoruba religion’ enclosed within inverted commas. Chapter 5 shows how the adherents of The Indigenous Faith of Africa (IFA), Ijo Orunmila Ato – a movement that was founded in 1920 by an Anglican Yoruba after he had a vision in which the orisa (deity) Orunmila appeared to him – have revived ‘Yoruba religion’ by appropriating Christian elements. While Ijo Orunmila’s doctrines are based on Ifa – a divination cult – the group’s worship is composed of hymns, prayers, and sermons modelled closely on those of the mission church, and, more recently, the Pentecostal church. Challenging the evolutionary perspective that typifies the study of religion in Africa, this chapter studies ‘traditional’ Yoruba religion and the ‘world’ religions as contemporaries, thereby opening conceptual space for rethinking the anthropological trope of ‘tradition’, as well as the ingrained tradition–modernity schism.

This chapter locates the place of Salafism among other vying movements at the time, particularly Islamic Modernism and Traditionalism. By the end of the thirteenth century, Traditionalism had reached its mature, institutional form. At the core of Traditionalism were the four madhhabs that provided systematic interpretations of Islamic law and to which Muslim scholars and their educational systems held guild-like loyalty. Islamic Modernists largely viewed and interpreted the principal Islamic texts, and called for ijtihād, through the prism of modernity. For Modernists, it was essential to reform Islamic teachings in light of modern advancements. They were concerned with making Islam relevant and meaningful to the present. I end this chapter with a discussion of the different types of Salafis.

Justice Antonin Scalia was a towering figure in jurisprudence and legal culture. Among other things, he was the most eloquent and prominent proponent of the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its “original meaning.” Scalia was also a devout Christian: a traditional Catholic who set forth his Christian beliefs with honesty, pungency, and wit. He frequently told the story how during his college oral examinations, he was asked the most significant event in history; he answered, the Battle of Waterloo, whereupon the professor “shook his head sadly and said, ‘No, Mr. Scalia. The Incarnation.’” The lesson for the young Scalia: “[Never] separate your religious life from your intellectual life.” Yet this most publicly devout justice also frequently made clear that his beliefs had nothing to do with his judicial role. His job, he emphasized, was merely to apply the meaning of the text without regard to policy considerations or moral values, including religious values. “I’m a worldly judge,” he often said. This presents a puzzle: did Scalia end up separating his religious life from his jurisprudence, the core of his intellectual life? Or was he still somehow a distinctively Christian judge? The solution, I suggest, lies in distinguishing his first-order legal conclusions, which were driven largely (although not solely) by his positivist judicial method, from his second-order choice of that method, which may well have reflected aspects of his personal outlook on the world, including his faith.