Examining Octavia E. Butler’s post-apocalyptic Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), this chapter argues that Butler uses an Afrofuturist aesthetic to create an imagined future that is not simply a description of American life, but a possible direction for rethinking who we are and how we live. It explores the prescient politics of Butler’s science fiction by showing how the political and economic systems in which the characters move both deeply impact how they live and are also strikingly absent. At its most basic political level, the Parable series offers a dystopian warning about possible futures and about the present. Responding to the neoliberal undermining of the values of public services under Reagan and beyond, the novels warn about both power-seekers filling political vacuums and our own willingness to ignore the consequences. The chapter ends with an examination of the benefits and drawbacks of Earthseed, the protagonist’s fictional religion, that prompts readers to reconsider the value of community itself, one dedicated to new ways of living that will challenge people to grow in new ways.

Nonnus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John lacks a proem in which the author advances the main poetic aims of the poem and gives his intended audience a brief guide to its reading. On the contrary Juvencus’ Evangeliorum libri quattuor includes a number of programmatic spaces (especially the proem and final lines), which have been extensively analysed and related to similar paratexts in other Bible epics. This chapter proposes a new take on the question of the intended audience and possible proselytising aim of these two poems by means of a reading of the reactions to Jesus and his gospel as paradigms for how these poets related to their audiences. It pays special attention to their points of contact and divergences, on (1) symbolic images of the audience (Matthew’s parable of the sower, John’s initial Hymn of the logos), (2) introductions of choral characters as they interact with Jesus, and (3) divisions of the audience, which it relates to the specific context of creation of both poems: the Constantinian Latin-speaking West for Juvencus and 430–60 Alexandria, dominated by the figure of Cyril (bishop 412–44), for Nonnus.