This chapter engages the work of two prominent theorists of agonistic democracy, William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. It analyzes their critiques of liberal theory and Western political thought, both of which, they argue, divest politics of its essential vitality by prizing consensus, unity, and agreement. Commending agonism for its recovery of the ineliminable place of contestation in democratic politics, as well as its appreciation of the generative and emancipatory possibilities of conflict, the chapter then raises the question of political community. Must agonism’s safeguarding of difference and its preservation of perpetual contestation entail the abandonment of the concept of community? I argue agonists are right to worry about the ways appeals to community threaten difference, but contend nevertheless that a vision of collectivity is necessary for agonistic politics to survive the pressures of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes by considering a movement of radical theology that has adopted some of agonism’s central insights but which, I argue, remains captive to a form of analogical thinking that insufficiently attends to the nature of creaturehood.

Like religious leaders in any period, the prophets functioned within a religious world that was broader and more diverse than a surface reading might suggest. In “The Book of Isaiah in the History of Israelite Religion,” Christopher B. Hays analyzes various religiohistorical aspects of the book, such as the role of writing and symbolic action; the supernatural images of the divine throne room; the book’s role in developing ideas about death and afterlife; its central role in the formulation of biblical monotheism, including its polemics against idols; and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

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.

Great changes have taken place in the approach of historians to the topic since the publication of East of Byzantium (1980). Instead of centre-periphery or top-down models they now see the relations between Byzantium and the east in terms of connectivity, networks and horizontal ties. This is connected with the spread of late antiquity as a concept and includes a great expansion in Syriac studies. Late antiquity now embraces the emergence of Islam and looks towards Eurasia; another challenge is posed by the rise of global history. But these developments, with the new focus on the fall of the western empire, raise major problems of identity for Byzantium itself, and indeed for western Europe.

We cannot understand the relation of Socratic philosophy to ancient Greek religion unless we first distinguish between the natural religion of the philosophers, the mythic religion of the poets, and the civic religion of the polis. These are not three religions but three differing interpretations of Greek religion. The Socratic philosophers attack the religion of the poets in order to reform the civic religion in the light of natural religion. All three kinds of Greek religion are focused on the relations between gods and humans and on the question of whether a person can traverse the chasm between human and divine. In Greek mythology and cult, some heroic human beings, like Heracles, were able to become gods. For the Socratics, philosophers are the new Greek heroes, able to divinize themselves by dint of rational discipline.

This chapter examines the biblical prophetic texts that refer to legal matters and thus raise important questions about what the authors of these speeches and texts had in mind with these references and how they relate, chronologically and theologically, to the laws of the Pentateuch.

As early as the Hellenistic period but more widely in the imperial age throughout the Roman Empire, we observe consecrations and dedications both to deities known by other theonyms and to a power in its own right, named Panthe(i)os in Greek and Pantheus in Latin. Faced with this formulation, scholars have emphasised the ‘quantitative’ force of the Greek pas, pasa, pan (translated as ‘total, universal’), interpreting this god as reflecting a process of gradual translation from the multitude of gods of Greco-Roman paganism to a ‘total’ and thus ‘universal’ god, which would thereby pave the way for Christian monotheism. The analysis of this term and its contextual applications shows that Panthe(i)os/Pantheus does not portray an abstractly ‘total’ and therefore ‘unique’ god, but a ‘super-god’ with exceptional powers called upon for the sake of pragmatic efficiency, on a religious horizon still fully perceived as plural. By choosing this name, the worshippers thus displayed their privileged relationship with the deity from whom they expected protection in a particularly effective manner.