This chapter investigates fundamentalist experience in self-described fundamentalist communities in order to ascertain the structures and motivations of their experiences. It shows how fundamentalist experience provides an alternative space and time, thus separating itself from society and living in highly structured fashion. Such experience is marked by an intense preoccupation with corporeality in particular, although affect also plays an important role. Fundamentalist communities provide a whole vision of the world – a way of being in the world – that makes other ways of living impossible to envision. Fundamentalist experience is essentially not at home in the world and is marked by profound angst about its own existence. It therefore cannot allow individual appropriation of religious life, but imposes tight control on its members. Fundamentalist experience is deeply marked by the desire for assurance and security in the face of the loss of the home, the world, and one’s identity within it.

This chapter sets up the problem of the relationship between Arminianism – defined as a set of propositions on the subject of predestination, at odds with Calvinist orthodoxy – and Laudianism as it has emerged in this book. Predestinarian error played a central role in the Laudian analysis of puritanism – it underlay a great deal of puritan presumption and hypocrisy, as well as their most divisive, indeed sectarian, impulses and behaviour. In addition, puritanism was the organising other of the Laudian project. All of which meant that predestination was a topic of great interest to the Laudians. But when it came to the positive case for Laudian reformation, to Laudianism as a style of piety and way of being Christian, the doctrine was far less central. Indeed, the topic tended to fall within the remit of those things best left unaddressed and certainly not subjected to the sort of assertion and counter-assertion that had recently threatened to plunge the Low Countries into chaos. However, the intensity of the Laudians’ repudiation of the puritans’ Calvinist predestinarianism more than implied the presence of a counter-orthodoxy and certainly called down accusations of Arminianism upon the Laudians’ heads.

Central issues of family business are treated in Chapter 4. It is widely assumed that in establishing a new business family members are preferred employees as they are trusted. As it expands a business increasingly employs non-family members. In these circumstances kinship forms of address, irrespective of kin status, create familiarity and closeness. A significant literature reports that by these means pseudo-kinship or quasi-familial relations are formed in order to cultivate trust with non-kin individuals. Chapter 4 challenges these assumptions. It is shown, firstly, that among family members, rather than trust a number of other factors, including compliance with role obligations as well as monitored forms of reliability, xinyong and face considerations, govern relationships and authority structures. Secondly, as non-kin employees are recruited to a family business neither pseudo-kinship nor quasi-familial relationships are assumed nor market exchange relations engaged; rather, non-kin members of family firms are subject to an intentionally cultivated emotionalized guanxi relationship with the company. This arrangement means that intra-firm relations operate in conjunction with market relations in order to elicit obligatory feelings and maintain them, generating firm-specific social bonds between management and employees as well as between employees.

Chapter 9 draws some conclusions from the book. By way of reiterating the assurance of atheists on which stress has been laid throughout, it offers the case of Giulio Cesare Vanini, executed at Toulouse for his active promotion of atheistic ideas in 1619. It compares this with the case of Aikenhead but contrasts it with that of Pitcairne, who was more discreet in his propagation of his irreligious views. After assessing other examples of free-thought in early eighteenth-century Scotland, it then turns to the state of affairs in England, where prosecutions for apostacy were haphazard. It is argued that what is in evidence was a degree of complacency on part of the orthodox, as is illustrated by the examples of Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke, and the Conclusion ends by noting hints of atheist opinion in England in the eighteenth century, suggesting that a non-theistic outlook was becoming thinkable as an alternative to orthodoxy.

Chapter 1 considers the fear of atheism that gripped early modern thinkers, assessing its nature and extent and seeking to explain its rationale; in the course of this, its association with trends in the thought of the period such as naturalism, secularism and Deism is considered, as is its supposed link with immoralism. The chapter also asserts that the few well-documented examples of actual atheists that are known from the period were characterised by the ‘assurance’ that they showed in propagating their views, in contrast to the doubts suffered by Christian believers, a point that is illustrated by recourse to the history of emotions. The remainder of the chapter summarises the content of the rest of the book, paying particular attention to the Cerne Abbas enquiry of 1594 and to the apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and of John Eliot in Edinburgh in 1694.

Whether patriotism has a valuable part to play in the educational system of a democratic society is now a highly contentious matter. This chapter argues that it does, principally because such a society is a kind of cooperative practice that requires its members to enact, enforce, and – in most cases – obey the laws that govern their self-governing polity. Democracies rely on rules, and especially the rule of law, to provide the reasonably clear expectations necessary to coordinate public activities and to overcome collective-action problems. By encouraging citizens to set aside personal advantage and play a cooperative part in democratic life, patriotism contributes to the public spirit essential to democracy. For that reason, promoting patriotic attitudes is a worthy aim of democratic education.

This chapter presents and discusses key developments in corporate sustainability reporting (CSRep). It shows that the nature of CSRep and its governance have been subject to fundamental changes over the last decades. The chapter introduces students to the rationales for and challenges to companies’ engagement in CSRep. At its core, the chapter explores different alternatives for governing CSRep, distinguishing between voluntary standards and legally binding measures such as disclosure requirements by governments and stock exchanges in European and other countries. Particular attention is given to the most widely used standard for CSRep, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, and the concept of materiality. Finally, countries and industries in which reporting has become a more institutionalised practice are described in more detail.

In the Christian tradition, faith, hope, and charity have God as their object and instigator, and they are the means by which we share in his nature. Hence they are called theological or deiform virtues. But during the Reformation Luther emphatically isolated faith from the other virtues, and from the virtue tradition tout court. This understanding of faith deliberately severed faith from any idea of virtue as human deed, habit, or disposition, and from any works, for that would precisely compromise the exclusive and one-sided donation of faith as a freedom from any necessary conditions of human emotion or thought. In this chapter I examine this trajectory and its logic. I trace the integration of the theological virtues, briefly looking at the allegorical treatment of the virtues in Dante and Spenser, and discussing the implications of this severing in Calvinism especially in its pastoral implications. When it comes to Shakespeare I focus in particular on hope in The Winter’s Tale, and faith in Cymbeline, on the understanding that each play treats these examinations in the context of a ruptured and interrupted love.