This chapter begins with an essay of David Tracy’s from 1991 that celebrates how feminist thinkers insist on contextualising all thought and experience while still pressing universal demands for justice. Many feminist theologians then add further religious layers of material contextualisation and theocentric universalisation, rendering their work, in Tracy’s eyes, ‘the unexampled challenge’ for all theology. Bingemer’s own Roman Catholic feminism is related to liberation theology and its ‘option for the poor’ in a Latin American continent where women often find themselves ‘doubly poor’. Tracy’s favoured selection of European women mystics– from Angela of Foligno to Madame Jeanne de Guyon– are explored as practising and contemplating, in Tracy’s expression, a divine–human ‘excessive love’, for God and often also the poor. Finally, the essay draws Dorothy Day and Simone Weil– two remarkable twentieth-century women valued by Tracy and yet placed by many outside the canons of feminism– to the side of more recent theological feminism, for the hope for a church and a future in which divine–human love and desire for justice challenges patriarchy, sexism, and all oppressions of the poor.

The importance of Herbert’s musico-poetic activities for an understanding of his devotional verse is summarised, transforming our reading of his verse and challenging us to think beyond a silent encounter with the written page. At the heart of Herbert’s music lies the tension of paradox: between abstract ideal and the imperfect reality of the world; between simple expression and more elaborate, ornamented modes; between the evanescent temporality of earthly existence and the eternity of God’s time. In conclusion, the Epilogue turns to the work of Herbert’s twentieth-century reader Simone Weil, who like Herbert recognises the paradoxical tension of music, what she calls ‘Harmony in the Pythagorean sense; the just balance of contraries’.

This essay argues that Simone Weil and her early editors fashioned her as a modern iteration of the medieval mystics, replicating a key feature of the archive of medieval women’s mystical writing: the construction of medieval women’s textual afterlives by male clerics. Though scholars have often observed parallels between Weil and the medieval mystics, the ways in which Weil and her editors effect this parallel have not been thoroughly explored. Weil and her editors constructed her as a Christian mystic – drawing both on contemporary discussions of the topic, and on the archive of medieval mysticism for points of comparison – in a distinctly modern sense of the term, as it was coming to be understood in twentieth-century France. Together, they transform her image much as the advisors and amanuenses of the medieval mystics did in transmitting their works into modernity.

Chapter 2 investigates Macbeth as representative of the next stage of Shakespeare’s political thinking in the tragic period, focusing on issues of power specifically to reveal the version of instrumental reason (or power for power’s sake) Shakespeare explores in this dark play. This includes the play’s implied conception of the political and its relation to dramatic structure. In the specific case of Macbeth, the form of politics is best described using Simone Weil’s 1940s anti-war essay “The lliad, or the Poem of Force” to define the issues involved, seeing the play as an anatomy of political force manifesting like The Iliad the destructive effects on both its agents and its victims of the deadly instrumental politics of warfare. In this analysis, Macbeth emerges as a consummate man of force parallel to Homer’s Achilles as described by Weil, while Lady Macbeth is a figure sharing his commitment to force but constrained by her society’s patriarchal structure and values to a publicly subordinate (though privately powerful) role. The Macbeths’ political actions enable the introduction of modern autotelic instrumental power to a fictional and temporally complex Scotland.

Simone Weil was an unsettled thinker intent on disturbing preconceived categories and thinking in opposites. Kinsella’s essay invites us to re-read this compulsive outsider both for her theoretical contributions and for the ways in which she challenged conventional notions of what it meant to be an intellectual. Her asceticism, androgyny and complex religious identity made her a ‘lonely’ figure and prefigured her erasure as an international thinker. Kinsella roots Weil’s political philosophy in a penetrating analysis of colonialism. The despoliation of human beings and their environment lay at its core. Colonialism’s end could not be brought about by political means but on grounds that transcended politics and comprised an empathetic understanding of the degradation of people and land, an understanding she sought to achieve through the attempt to obliterate any collective identities in her person. Reading Weil invites readers to re-think the connection between international relations, empire and the spiritual.

One of the many fascinating ironies about the 1930s and 1940s is the prevailing assumption in the west that the world was secular, even while Christian thinkers and theologians played prominent public roles and incorporated Christian ethics into their world views. Christians during the period sometimes saw themselves as the beleaguered other and other times embraced “secular” norms of social and political interaction as integral to their Christian ethics. These norms were embodied in movements ranging from communism and anti-imperialism to rampant bureaucratization and militarization. Many British and US (if not French) elites, including government leaders, academics, and the new legal professionals, came from a Christian formation, and scholars are recovering the ethical, including religious, formations of influential figures such as Herbert Butterfield, Norman Angel, and Arnold Toynbee, precursors of the contemporary English School.1 John Foster Dulles’s religious world view and its influence on the Commission for a Just and Durable Peace, Reinhold Niebuhr’s political theology and its foundational role in postwar international relations theory, and Jacques Maritain’s infusion of Christian personalism into transnational human rights all had theoretical and policy repercussions far beyond national boundaries. Other Christian activists and theologians – including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, A. J. Muste, Simone Weil, and the religious writers of the Harlem Renaissance – created lasting legacies on the ethics of addressing not only violence but also poverty, class, and race. As a result, they also need to be included in the Christian/IR/ethical pantheon of this era.