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.

This chapter offers an understanding of puritan aesthetics by approaching it through the religious experience of conversion. Insofar as aesthetics are ever thought of in relation to puritanism, the usual scholarly conversation concerns the role, relevance, and consequences of the puritan plain style. Plain style matters, but it does not explain the broader aesthetic intentions or forms of puritan writing. Conversion comes much closer to the heart of it. Radical Protestants in early New England insisted that true religion began with the power of God acting on the individual to produce conversion to a new life of delight in God. The unconverted might seek to “prepare” themselves for that transformation of the heart, but predestinarian theology demanded that the crucial moment of change must be utterly external – a true work of God and not one of self-fashioning. In preaching, in poetry, and in personal conversion relations, puritans used the language of the heart to describe God’s power in conversion. This chapter traces how the response to sorrow and beauty characterizes puritan conversion stories from the first establishment of the colony of Massachusetts.