If a Christian account of mythopoiesis owns that not only do all things depend upon God for their being, but that ‘all things exist in Christ’, then following Ward, we can assert that mythopoiesis, as a cultural artefact, is shot through with God’s presence: it is a means by which God is revealing God’s self to us. To the degree a myth speaks truly of God it can be understood as participating in God’s self-disclosure to creation; to the degree it is enmeshed in and occluded by sin, myth speaks less truly. Following Henri de Lubac, I argue that the nature–grace distinction can be overstated and that a paradoxical affirmation of the operation of grace within nature without violating the proper autonomy of creation is necessary in order to meaningfully express how human action (mythopoiesis) apart from Christian formation can be said to speak of God (theology). The interplay of the cultural mediation of God’s grace and God’s already-there-ness in nature offers a way of speaking about mythopoiesis’ theological possibilities without necessarily resorting to a doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity’.

Walter Pater also anticipates Oscar Wilde’s liturgical moves. Pater depicts Marius the Epicurean as a liturgical subject – that is, Marius relishes the forms of liturgy and yet those forms do not become rigid structures but rather gateways into mystery. Wilde pushes this liturgical subjectivity still further. For him, the porosity of the liturgical subject leads to a full-blown liturgical constructivism: If the self remains open before the mystery of ever further aesthetic experience, then perhaps all things – not just the human self – are malleable. In his critical writings, Wilde denounces the mechanistically closed world of the realist novel, which he sees as slavishly imitating nature. By contrast, Wilde argues that art can reshape nature. Liturgical language and ritual action especially reveal how words remake reality: The priest’s Words of Institution and the drama of the Mass transform – even transubstantiate – the bread and wine. As it did for Wordsworth, liturgy helps Wilde imagine nature not as self-enclosed but rather as participating in a higher, transcendent reality.

Certain stories act upon us. They shape the way that we see, encounter, and understand the world. A phenomenological approach to a narrative encounter with the world in terms of the mythic helps to illuminate a certain sensibility that mediates the world to human persons such that it is experienced as meaningful. Understanding the mythic in terms of a sensibility rather than in terms of a genre of literature or a form of cultural expression sheds light on how mythopoiesis is not a phenomenon restricted to archaic societies and the tales of either a bygone age or a culture or religion not our own. Among the most visible places of such mythopoiesis is so-called ‘mythopoieic literature’, fantasies that actively play with the sense of the possible, with narratives shaping the lives of characters, and what can be brought to the surface when meaning and being more closely and obviously co-inhere. A phenomenology of play, both in terms of the ludic fancy of the mythic and fantastic and the perception-shaping power of a game’s rules over the players, opens up the way that stories act upon our perception of the world and the meaning that we encounter.

This chapter begins by interrogating the ideal of authenticity as a paradigmatic modern response to the crisis of master narratives. It critically examines practices of narrative selfhood, and discusses the ways in which social roles offer scaffolds for the development of a self without fully constituting such a self. Role-playing – the inhabitation of social and narrative roles – is an outstanding example of the exercise of imagination, its double function of finding and making, and its for-the-most-part inherited, moulded, and largely habituated practice. The chapter concludes with a theological discussion of the ways our habitual imagination of selfhood can be broken open without pretence that we might be able to find a fully realized authentic self beneath our narrative and social roles.

This introduction broaches the question of how naturalism rose to dominance in the modern West. Naturalism in this context is understood as a rejection of belief in the supernatural. This distinctive feature of Western modernity is at odds, not only with its own religious past, but also with what has been true for virtually all other cultures. Whereas it was once impossible not to assume the existence of the supernatural, this has now become one option among others, and one that is typically thought to be lacking in rational support. The book seeks to account for this unique historical development in two related ways. First, it explores the histories of the two key terms in this understanding—‘belief’ and ‘supernatural’—showing how they came to take on their present meanings in the modern period. Second, it shows how advocates of naturalism necessarily subscribe to a progressive view of history that can vindicate the adoption of these two categories in their modern sense.

This concluding chapter briefly considers the puzzle of why belief in the supernatural is endemic in certain times and places but not, for the most part, in modern Western Europe. It explores a range of theoretical possibilities: salience; the theory dependence of observation; the effects of language, concepts, cultural conditioning; and what might be called cultural and scientific myths and liturgies. It then moves to a brief consideration of how the general thesis of the book relates to other ‘modernity stories’, including those of Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

This chapter removes some obstacles that interfere with the correct understanding of ‘Teleology’ in Hegel’s Logic. According to a common mistake, ‘Teleology’ addresses the external purposiveness of human intentions. This misconstruction emerges from Hegel’s discussion of ‘subjective purposes’ therein and then apparently of the means employed by a person trying to achieve them. Another important misunderstanding affects the kind of reflexive argument that ‘Teleology’ develops. Among those who take it that the chapter addresses the difficulties of realising intentions, some claim that it provides an anti-sceptical transcendental argument to prove the effectiveness of some purposes. I make my case against this kind of interpretation before I present my own alternative account in the following chapter.

Chapter 2 is a reflection on how people in Western societies seem to struggle to understand the ongoing place of religion, which means that they also and perhaps particularly struggle with the idea of a divine revelation and the possibility that there is anything more than the immanence of the world. The average person growing up today – whether or not he or she is religious in some way – inhabits the world as a secular reality. That person might have links to a religious community, might have a sense of openness to the transcendent and might name that transcendence 'God' in ways that are shaped by the tradition of that community. Any commitment to transcendence will be challenged, however, not only in the face of the encounter with multiple other beliefs and worldviews, and not only because something like Charles Taylor's 'immanent frame' overwhelms the social imaginary, but also in the face of the radical interruption and forgetting of traditional symbolic networks on which particular religious systems and their communities depend. The injunction to remember that is at the heart of the three Abrahamic religious traditions simply no longer comes to mind in the once-Christian West.

Conceptions of negative liberty invariably refer to the removal of objective hindrances to physical action. Conceptions of positive liberty, by contrast, refer to the provision of goods that facilitate forms of empowerment and capacitation. This chapter argues that some of the goods necessary for empowerment and capacitation are subjective, or psychological, most (if not all) of which depends, in one form or another, on what philosophers since Hegel has dubbed "recognition." This chapter has three parts. Drawing from a sample of recognition theorists (Taylor, Honneth, Habermas, and Pippin), Part One defends the salience of recognition for empowerment, capacitation, and agency. Part two then describes forms of psycho-social pathology (damaged agency) that misrecognition of the absence of recognition typically causes. Part three concludes by defending the psychological and ontological validity of recognition as a coherent dimension of social freedom against some frequently raised objections.

Chapter 1 lays out two common ways of thinking about the relationship between the religious and the secular. The first assumes that secular and religious approaches to the world are mutually exclusive; where one is ascendant the other must be in decline. The second considers the secular and religious to be paradoxically dependent on each other; one is always a curious inversion of the other. I suggest a better, third way inspired by Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and William Connolly’s A World of Becoming. A scene from Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the sequel to Robinson Crusoe (1719), shows how letting go of certain assumptions about the secular and religious can help us notice more of what is happening in the novel. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of what is at stake for literary studies in rethinking the secular, what we stand to lose if we do not and what we stand to gain if we do.

Charles Taylor was President of Liberia between 1997 and 2003, trader in arms, timber and minerals and initiator of the first phase of the Liberian civil war. He is currently serving a fifty year prison sentence for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the armed conflict in Sierra Leone. This chapter examines how the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) established the linkage between Taylor as a high level economic actor in Liberia and international crimes in neighbouring Sierra Leone through modes of liability, in particular aiding and abetting. Further, in view of Taylor's position as head of State for most of the period covered by the SCSL indictment and the nature of groups such as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), issues of State and organizational responsibility are addressed, including the reasons for prioritising individual criminal responsibility. Finally, the chapter considers the findings and recommendations of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning the role of economic actors and economic activities in contributing to, and benefiting from the armed conflict in Liberia.

This chapter, which serves as a conclusion, aims to tighten the strands linking the wide spectrum of international and domestic legal instruments discussed in the book. The chapter notes that the relationship between economic crime and atrocity crime may open opportunities to achieve accountability where the economic crime route is open while other routes are effectively blocked. After providing an account of the efforts to secure Charles Taylor’s assets in the context of his trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the chapter proceeds to offer ideas for the way forward via the economic crime and other routes.

This chapter uses the work of Charles Taylor to frame the way in which time operates in the early Gothic. Taylor follows Friedrich Schiller in describing the cleavage between the modern and pre-modern worlds as the difference between ‘naïve’ enchantment and ‘sentimental’ disenchantment (‘radical reflexivity’, as Taylor terms it). Enchanted subjectivity was ‘porous’, meaning that the self had no defences beyond magic to regulate against animistic intrusions. Modern subjectivity, by contrast, is ‘buffered’. For Taylor, the Romantic period was that moment in which the process of disenchantment completed itself as a widely accepted, scarcely noted, norm. From across the unbridgeable divide of radical reflexivity, Gothic writers imagine encounters with an enchanted world where time is represented either as ‘kairotic knots’ affording glimpses into higher times that radically shift the subjectivity of the protagonist, or as senseless repetitions undermining the linear logic of modern character development. The chapter demonstrates how this dynamic plays out in three canonical Gothic texts: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Gottfried Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ and S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’.

This chapter discusses the contributions of the landmark trial of Liberian President Charles Taylor, the first African former head of State, to be tried and convicted by an international criminal tribunal in a contested proceeding. Taylor was convicted in April 2013 for his role in planning, aiding, and abetting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law which occurred during the Sierra Leone Conflict. The chapter examines the controversies associated with former President Taylor’s prosecution and the novel arguments addressing the waiver of immunity by a tribunal that was treaty-based and not created using the Security Council’s Chapter VII powers. Taylor argued that he was entitled to immunity under international law because the Special Court was a domestic court. In addition to examining the caselaw of the International Court of Justice, on which the Special Court relied to find that Taylor was not immune from prosecution, the chapter continues to discuss the historical and symbolic implications of this major prosecution for international criminal law. Finally, the chapter examines how the Special Court Taylor immunity decision has impacted the current case law relating to immunities and prosecution of heads of State at the International Criminal Court.

Christianity, like “religion” in general, evokes passionate responses, positive and negative. Yet many of these reactions, on the part of scholars and broader publics alike, indicate that at least two problems continue to pervade thinking about religion, including Christianity. First, observers too often think of given religions as single entities defined by rigid dogma, an oversimplification that ignores the fluidity, contestation, and multiple manifestations within all religious traditions. Religions simultaneously encompass sets of practices, ethical guidelines, doctrines and sacred texts or text analogs, imagined ideas, and historical legacies. Second, oversimplifying religion lends itself to emphasizing and caricaturizing extremist interpretations of religious traditions, especially by those who use religious teachings to justify violence, terror, and coerced conformity on the part of others. It also risks representing such interpretations as an easily definable core of complex religious traditions themselves.1