bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cervantine Criticism until 1999
Authors: Oakley R. J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter presents a survey of Cervantine criticism until the closing of the twentieth century. With a single exception, the critical fortunes of Cervantes’s works are treated here in the order in which they were originally published. From his first published work in 1585 to the posthumous Persiles in 1617, the Cervantine canon has provided an immeasurable influence on world literature and culture. This chapter analyses their reception in Spain and around the world and describes the most well-known and significant academic studies in the nearly four centuries since the writer’s death.
Cervantine Criticism since 2000 and into the Future
Authors: Burningham Bruce R.
Published: February 2021

The past two decades have seen an explosion in Cervantes scholarship. Indeed, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the last twenty years arguably represent the Golden Age of Cervantes criticism: slightly more than half of scholarly works written since 1888 have been published during the last two decades. In other words, during the last twenty years, the body of Cervantes knowledge has more than doubled, greatly expanding our variety of critical perspectives along the way. This chapter discusses the ‘across the centuries’ trend resulting from the various anniversary celebrations related to Cervantes, the ‘Cervantes and the Americas’ collections, Cervantes’s treatment of Islam, and the modernity of the novel, among other trends that have expanded Cervantine criticism since the turn of the current century.
Cervantes and Empire
Authors: De Armas Frederick A.
Published: February 2021

Born in 1547, at a time when Charles V was leader of the western world and ruled the largest empire ever known, Miguel de Cervantes would reflect on his imperial habitat and experiences throughout his works. Cervantes exhibits his pride at fighting for the empire and foregrounds his role at the famous Battle of Lepanto, a naval battle that saw western powers put a stop to the Ottomans, the second great empire of the period with which it competed for control of the Mediterranean. At the same time, his works often problematize questions of empire, from specific tactics in war, to the morality of waging war against other Christian nations, to general questions of imperial expansionism. This essay will point to a continuing wavering and ambiguity in his relations to empire, starting from his first substantial works in the early 1580s until his demise in 1616.
Don Quixote, Part I (1605)
Authors: Williamson Edwin
Published: February 2021

When it first appeared in 1605, Cervantes’s great novel Don Quixote de la Mancha became an international sensation. This chapter follows the chronology of the plot in a critical manner providing the reader with important insight into why Don Quixote has become the second best-selling book of all time. Including the famous scenes of the windmill, the liquidation of Don Quixote’s library, the funeral of Grisóstomo and redemption of Marcela, Ginés de Pasamonte and the galley slaves, El curioso impertinente, the famous tale of Cardenio the star-crossed lover, and a commentary on the role of drama and novels of chivalry in society, Don Quixote, Part One sets the hero and his trusty country squire against the world at large. This chapter explores its deep cultural significance and answers the question of whether or not it is merely a ‘funny book’.
The Nature of God and the Trinity
Authors: Strobel Kyle C.
Published: February 2021

Commonly recognized as fundamental to his thought as a whole, Edwards’s doctrine of the Trinity has, nonetheless, been the subject of much discord in the secondary literature. After initially mapping the various perspectives (or ‘instincts’) on the issue, this chapter turns to the notion of personalism to explain the inner logic of Edwards’s account. This unique feature of Edwards’s doctrine explains how he can utilize traditional theological machinery in his doctrine of God (i.e. psychological imagery, simplicity, actus purus, filioque, and divine blessedness), to establish his idiosyncratic development of perichoresis and the divine attributes. What this reading of Edwards’s doctrine helps establish is how he articulates human speech about God, and various rules for how that speech functions (e.g. talk about God is to talk about person(s); God’s self-giving is funded by, rather than diminished by, God’s perfection).
The Person of Christ
Authors: Hamilton S. Mark
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the Person of Christ has provoked a flurry of recent curiosity. Much of this curiosity has to do with how we make sense of the philosophical foundations on which the structure of Edwards’s Christology rests. In this chapter, I attempt to locate Edwards’s two-natures doctrine within the larger picture of catholic Christianity by situating his various claims about the God-man within the context of that historic distinction between concrete-nature and abstract-nature Christology, and all this, in light of his philosophical commitment to immaterialism. Putting Edwards’s philosophical speculations about the doctrine of the person of Christ into conversation with such important developments in the tradition is a step that must be taken if we are going to further enrich our understanding of his contribution to catholic Christology.
Pneumatology
Authors: Caldwell Robert W.
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit played a central role in his theology. Beginning with the immanent Trinity, Edwards argued that the Holy Spirit is the bond of union of the Godhead who unites Father and Son in a communion of infinite, divine love. He then applied this concept Christologically to the hypostatic union, and soteriologically to the mystical union the Church enjoys with God. By closely identifying the Spirit with the divine affection that is communicated to the redeemed, Edwards effectively built his pneumatology directly into his discussions of grace, faith, and religious experience, a point which ensured that his doctrine of the Holy Spirit would pervade much of his writing.
History, Providence, and Eschatology
Authors: Stievermann Jan
Published: February 2021

This chapter discusses Edwards’s view of history and the end times. It does so by examining four interlocking frameworks of interpretation that Edwards inherited from Reformed-Puritan theology: first, a general approach to relating the Bible and history; second, an intense kind of providentialism; third, specific forms of biblical theology aiming toward an integrated salvation history; and fourth, a futurist type of millennialist eschatology. What emerges from this is the picture of an Edwards who was, for the most part, a traditionalist. At the same time, he, like many of his peers, engaged with the intellectual discourses of the Enlightenment, both by partaking in them and criticizing their perceived excesses. Edwards’s version of a moderate Protestant Enlightenment produced a deepened, eschatologically inflected interest in redemption history, which he understood as a progressive continuum. Within this framework of history Edwards came to assign crucial significance to revivals.
Ecclesiology and Sacraments
Authors: Bezzant Rhys
Published: February 2021

Edwards’s understanding of the church drew upon traditional Protestant motifs, but his context was one of secularization, the rise of deism, and the fissiparous impact of revivals. He defined the church from its centre out by highlighting its ministry of Word and sacrament, and he sought to defend the church’s distinction from the world while at the same time opposing separatism. The revivals could undermine clerical authority and cause division, but they also promoted the Spirit’s power to bind believers locally and internationally. Though Edwards refused to use the language of secondary causation to explain the sacraments, the Lord’s Supper was explained as intimate participation in the life of God. Ultimately the world was to be ordered to the church, the focus of God’s eschatological design, without neglecting its missiological responsibilities. The church is both rooted in the purposes of God, and responsive to the environment in which it is planted.
Federalism and Reformed Scholasticism
Authors: van Vlastuin Willem
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of the covenant is treated in this chapter. It is made clear that Edwards developed this theology in the broader context of reformed theology and in his own specific context. In his reflections on the covenant, Edwards concluded that one must draw a distinction between the covenant of redemption and the covenant of grace if one is to understand Arminianism and Antinomianism. Drawing this distinction also allows one to interpret God’s works in history. In his understanding of the covenant of grace, Edwards developed a stricter view of the covenant. In comparison with the reformed tradition and the puritan tradition of Westminster, he minimized the instrumental function that the covenant has, because he interpreted it as a marriage between Christ and his believers. The emphasis on the indwelling of the Spirit in the covenanted believers caused him to reject the preaching of law to believers. Ultimately he also rejected the Half-Way Covenant.
Ethics
Authors: Cochran Elizabeth Agnew
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards is increasingly recognized as a thinker whose understanding of virtue offers important contributions to religious ethics. This chapter examines Edwards’s significance for the field in a number of areas: his account of virtue, his view of moral agency, and his accounts of natural and moral goodness. The chapter explains the distinctive character of Edwards’s account of virtue by noting points of continuity and divergence between Edwardsean ‘true virtue,’ a love for God and all created beings that emulates and participates in divine love, and Aristotelian and Thomistic understandings of virtue. The chapter then considers the challenges that Edwards’s soteriology poses for his accounts of moral agency and moral formation. It concludes by arguing that these challenges are partly addressed through exploring the nuances of Edwards’s theology of creation, which also provides a potential starting point for considering how Edwards’s theology may inform contemporary debates in social ethics.
Aesthetics
Authors: Dyrness William A. , Wells Christi
Published: February 2021

Edwards’s aesthetics grounded in the ongoing work of God communicated in creation, not only lies at the centre of his thought but is increasingly recognized as one of his most original contributions to theology. Edwards’s reflection on God’s beauty emerged in the context of his work as a pastor, which allowed him to frame God’s dynamic presence in dramatic and multi-sensory categories. For Edwards Beauty glimpsed in the form of images formed in the mind reflects a consent of being; the visual beauty of symmetry and proportion is meant to move the heart to consent to the will of God reflected in creation—what Edwards calls respectively secondary and primary beauty. All creatures are types and shadows of spiritual realities; beauty and morality are linked, though only the Holy Spirit allows believers to consent to God’s self-disclosure in creation. Edwards’s neo-platonic framework allowed his reflections on the revivals to affirm physical beauty while subordinating its meaning to the spiritual, enhancing its role as revelation but diminishing its value as an end in itself.
Imagination and Hermeneutics
Authors: Reklis Kathryn
Published: February 2021

In most eighteenth-century Anglo-American and European thought, the imagination was a dangerous faculty, at odds with ‘hermeneutics’ as a system of interpretation. This chapter, however, will argue that the sanctified imagination is key to understanding Edwards’s overall hermeneutic, which will be defined as his system of typology whereby any and everything—textual, material, or ideational—can and does point to the nature of being as God’s self-communication. It will trace scholarly debates about Edwards’s place in eighteenth-century epistemological controversies, his conflictual relationship with the idea of the ‘imagination’ within these debates (in relationship to his aesthetic theology), and scholarly attempts to understand his unique system of typology as his particular hermeneutical theory. The chapter ends by exploring future directions for scholarship by thinking of his typological system as a form of ‘imperial epistemology’ that expands how we think of Edwards’s colonial context and relationship to debates about modernity.
Idealism and Aetiology
Authors: Rehnman Sebastian
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards aims to account for causes by reference to the ideas of God. Every finite being not only depends on but consists in God having an idea of it and God is the one immediate cause for anything that exists on each occasion. He takes this idealistic aetiology to be the true factual description of things. However, his argument about ‘the nature of things’ is (partly) definitional and existential, and so he is introducing and recommending a new use for natures being immediate productions out of nothing at each moment. This chapter argues that his inference can be validly drawn only from the ordinary use of ‘substance’ or ‘nature’ but he attempts to draw it from his novel use. His idealism and aetiology thus affirm or presuppose for their intelligibility the existence of conditions that he denies. So, Edwards’s argument for idealistic aetiology is invalid.
Spirituality and Devotion
Authors: Hambrick-Stowe Charles E.
Published: February 2021

The spirituality and devotional practice of Jonathan Edwards, glimpsed in his personal writings and in the first-hand observations of Samuel Hopkins, is illuminated as well in the full range of his writings, including decades of sermons, notes on Scripture, and theological reflection in the ‘Miscellanies’. Pre-eminently biblical in focus, his piety was both intensely personal and integral to his intellectual work and public ministry. Even sensing the divine while meditating in nature, his mind was always fixed on God’s Word and the work of Christ in redemption. Rooted in the Augustinian–Reformed–Puritan tradition, he balanced ecstasy and order in his ‘sense of the heart’ core idea, embraced the new hymnody along with Psalm singing, and engaged Enlightenment empirical methodology in his understanding of religious experience. For Edwards, behaviour and piety were united in a spirituality of beauty and benevolence.
Family Life
Authors: Chamberlain Ava
Published: February 2021

This chapter gives an overview of the family life of Jonathan Edwards. It seeks to establish Edwards’s success as a patriarch in colonial New England according to Puritan standards. Beginning with his relationships with his father, Timothy Edwards, and his maternal grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, both pastors, this chapter traces the relational and familial dynamics throughout Edwards’s life. From a young age, Edwards sought to establish himself as a mature and godly man capable of heading a family. After moving to Northampton, Edwards married Sarah Pierpont at the age of 23 and began a family of his own. Together, they had eleven children and ran their household successfully. Edwards’s discipline, kindness, and faithful presence helped him to become a model Puritan patriarch. While Jonathan and Sarah’s lives were both cut short, they left a legacy of love and domestic flourishing behind them when they passed.
Parish Ministry
Authors: Stout Harry S.
Published: February 2021

This chapter surveys Jonathan Edwards’s time as a pastor serving in four congregations, giving particular attention to his years in Northampton, Massachusetts. It begins by considering Edwards’s father, Timothy Edwards, and the challenges of his ministry. These would have shaped Jonathan Edwards as a young man destined to pursue the pastorate. Timothy Edwards also had a significant impact on Jonathan Edwards’s first pastorates in New York and Bolton, Connecticut. The chapter then describes the innovative pastorate of Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards’s grandfather and predecessor at Northampton, and its attendant controversies—controversies Jonathan Edwards would later inherit as pastor of Northampton. The majority of the chapter explores Edwards’s time at Northampton, from his earliest days of preaching and evangelism to times of revival and success to eventual conflict and expulsion. The chapter closes with a brief look at Edwards’s final years, including his final pastorate at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Biblical Exegesis
Authors: Brown Robert E.
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s exegesis brought together a remarkable constellation of issues in early modern thought and biblical interpretation. Although he lived on the frontier of the British empire, he lived intimately with the core philosophical and theological issues at the heart of that society. The Bible’s status as an unquestioned religious and social authority was under scrutiny during his lifetime, with many concluding that it was hopelessly primitive and outmoded. Edwards sought to fashion an interpretive approach that took seriously modern historical, scientific, and anthropological discoveries, while maintaining a high degree of confidence in the Bible as the revelation of God. Thus, he adapted much of his interpretation to modern categories of thought, while at the same time employing traditional modes of theological interpretation such as typology, miracles, and the analogy of faith. His exegesis served to underwrite all of his major theological treatises.
Writing and Preaching Sermons
Authors: Minkema Kenneth P.
Published: February 2021

Much can be learned of how Jonathan Edwards composed and delivered his sermons by examining the large collection of physical manuscript booklets that he left behind. Taking a material and cultural history approach, this chapter guides the reader through Edwards’s process of writing, preaching, and re-purposing his sermons and discourses, from selecting and cutting the paper, to constructing booklets, to storing them. Along the way, we discover that Edwards incorporated a diverse range of other documents and ephemera from his own life and that of his family, congregation, and acquaintance, all of which point to the connectedness of sermons to a wide network of relationships. An effort is then made to get a sense of what Edwards’s preaching style was—what was his manner of delivery, how engaged he was with his audiences. Some surprising things emerge that give a new impression of Edwards the preacher.
Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts
Authors: Marsden George
Published: February 2021

This chapter sketches some of the webs of interrelated contexts that helped shape Edwards’s life and work. It surveys some of the background contexts growing out of the Reformation, Puritanism in England, and related political developments including the seventeenth-century political revolutions. Then it turns to the background of seventeenth-century Puritan New England including ecclesiastical and political developments that shaped the world Edwards was born into. Finally it looks at the major social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s world during his years in eighteenth-century New England. That includes relations to Indians both in warfare and in missions, British wars with Roman Catholic powers, colonial politics and local colonial government, hierarchical social assumptions, slavery, church controversies, especially regarding the sacraments, and international and colonial pietism and awakenings.
Education
Authors: Potgieter Esmari
Published: February 2021

Edwards focused much of his pastoral energies on children, youth, and ministry students. This chapter seeks to trace and build on the research (mainly presented in dissertations and in Minkema’s biographical introductions) that deals with ‘Edwards as educator’. For Edwards, education’s primary aim was to serve the salvific knowledge of God, which then had to shape the learner’s whole life. In order to achieve this aim, education had to take place within a close, triangular relationship between Christ, the teacher, and the learner. Emphasis was placed on learning with understanding and on the individual responsibility to learn. Edwards’s educational methods revolved around questioning and discussion. Although his educational ideas were not wholly original, his educational impact, as mediated by his New Light followers, was significant. The chapter ends with a tentative evaluation of his educational legacy in light of his revivalism.
Ministry to the Bound and Enslaved
Authors: Saillant John
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyses slavery and missions together for the first time in Edwardsean scholarship. From 1731 to 1758 Edwards not only owned slaves but also advocated missions among Native Americans. He helped found the Stockbridge mission then assumed its pulpit. Immersed in a missionary network, he wrote David Brainerd’s biography and launched Gideon Hawley’s lifetime of mission labour. Many Indians were enslaved after King Philip’s War; many fell into bondage or servitude in the mid-eighteenth century. Native Americans in Edwards’s time feared enslavement. The Atlantic slave system swelled in the mid-eighteenth century. Slaveholder, yet opponent of the slave trade, Edwards developed typological arguments that criticized English settlers for their depredations against Native Americans. In this, Edwards honed a theological instrument later wielded by abolitionists. Edwardsean typology undermined biblical proslavery arguments, clearing a path for modern abolitionism as opposition to enslavement in all times and places.
Australia
Authors: Piggin Stuart
Published: February 2021

Because evangelicalism has been arguably the strongest expression of Christianity in Australia, Edwards, as one of its principal founders, has been a seminal presence. The explicit reception of his writings, however, was not extensive in the nineteenth century and was most evident among Presbyterian clergy. In the twentieth century he was central to the ‘marriage mysticism’ of the Reformed theologians attached to the New Creation Teaching Ministry headed by the Rev. Geoff Bingham, an Edwards aficionado. At the end of the twentieth century, Edwards was increasingly cited by both supporters and opponents of the Charismatic movement. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, he has been the subject of increasingly sophisticated academic inquiry. His spirituality and ecclesiology have been studied with a view to benefitting especially evangelical churches, while his trinitarian theology has been quarried by those, not necessarily evangelicals, who have been captivated by Edwards’s thinking on creation and design.
Africa
Authors: Neele Adriaan C.
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s attention to Africa cannot go unnoticed, as articulated in his A History of the Work of Redemption. Less attention, however, has been given to the reception of Edwards’s works in Africa. This absence in Edwardsean research is remarkable, as many of his works have been reprinted, translated, and published from the eighteenth century onwards, particularly by those who had a vested interest in missionary movements and societies labouring throughout Africa. In fact, the reception of Edwards’s thought in Africa is primarily through the work of nineteenth-century missionaries and missionary societies—willing or unwilling participants of the colonial European expansion in Africa. Several of his works translated into Arabic, Dutch, English, French, and German found their way from Cairo to Cape Town. This chapter, then, is a preliminary overview from North Africa to Southern Africa of the distribution, use, and appropriation of some of Edwards’s works throughout the continent.
Edwards in the Context of International Revivals and Missions
Authors: Kling David W.
Published: February 2021

Edwards’s international influence in revivals and missions is entirely dependent on the reception of his writings. In the context of the early stages of a transatlantic evangelical awakening, Edwards’s efforts to advance the gospel were both immediate and delayed: immediate insofar as his writings, particularly the Faithful Narrative, inspired Scottish Presbyterian and German and Dutch Pietist evangelical contemporaries to promote revival; delayed, insofar as his impact on foreign missions was not felt until the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. Edwards’s most important contributions to international missions are derived from his conception of cosmic redemption (An Humble Attempt, A History of the Work of Redemption), his distinction between moral and natural ability (Freedom of the Will), and his presentation of an archetypical missionary model (Life of Brainerd).
Ontology
Authors: Wainwright William J.
Published: February 2021

The chapter argues that Jonathan Edwards’s concept of God was largely traditional and that arguments to the contrary which privilege his discussions of a so-called social Trinity are mistaken. It also takes issue with the currently popular view that Edwards was a panentheist. There is a clear sense in which God includes the world but—with one unique exception—the world does not include God. Just as the coming into being of Raphael’s Dresden Madonna is a literal part of his painting it, so God’s ‘acts’ of creation or emanation are properly regarded as parts of him, and what he does (that is, what he emanates) is literally part of that action. But what God creates or emanates is the history of redemption, and some parts of that history are more central or immediately salient than others. The material world, for example, is essentially nothing more than a platform on which the drama of redemption is enacted. The central or most immediately salient, on the other hand, are the lives of the saints, and it is only the latter whose lives can be said to include God. For because the saints necessarily include the Holy Spirit, they necessarily include God. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Edwards’s views on the ontological status of mathematical, logical, metaphysical, and morally necessary truths. The chapter argues that they are neither created by God nor exist independently of him but are instead aspects or expressions of his goodness.
The Natural Sciences and Philosophy of Nature
Authors: Zakai Avihu
Published: February 2021

Jonathan Edwards’s philosophy of nature demands our attention precisely because he embraced some features of the new scientific modes of thought and reasoning which developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly called the ‘scientific revolution.’ Yet he rejected at the same time its mechanical, experimental philosophy, the predominant scientific doctrine of his time, according to which all natural phenomena can be explained and understood by the mere mechanics of matter and motion. When placed within the proper ideological, theological, and scientific context, Edwards’s writings on natural philosophy shed light not only on his specific reaction to contemporary scientific culture but also on the broader issue of the relationship between science and religion in the early modern period, thus constituting an important chapter in the history of ideas.
Universities, Futures, and Temporal Ambiguity
Authors: Facer Keri , Wei Ian P.
Published: February 2021

This chapter uncovers the multilayered history and development of the university as an institution of the future: from the stewardship of medieval college, to the principles of experimentation and discovery guiding the post-enlightenment university, to the traditions of critique and reflexivity in the contemporary lecture hall. The chapter explores the latent and historical strategies for stewarding, critiquing, and making the future that existed prior to the emergence of futures studies itself. It highlights the critical and politically laden relationship between university and society. It examines how the boundaries drawn between academy and society, and boundaries between different areas of expertise, are often associated specifically with different conceptions of the university’s relationship to ‘the future’. Facer and Wei conclude by raising thought-provoking questions about those who are included and excluded from such futures-making practices and by reflecting upon the ethical and social responsibilities of academics working within future-oriented disciplines in the university
Apocalyptic, World-Repair, Divination
Authors: Woodhead Linda
Published: February 2021

Eschewing the idea that futures-thinking is a new enterprise, this chapter scans the past to retrieve the most pervasive and perdurable ways of relating to the future. Three modes are recovered: apocalyptic, world-repair (or ‘originalism’), and divination (or ‘fortune-telling’). These are delineated with reference to their differing cosmological, ethical, and temporal horizons. The enterprise is needed because apocalyptic is well-known but misunderstood; divination is stigmatized; ‘world-repair’ is ignored as a valid mode of relating to the future—but all three remain influential below the surface. The chapter concludes by considering the continuing relevance—and dangers—of these pervasive modes in how we approach the future.
The Scarcity of Social Futures in the Digital Era
Authors: Appadurai Arjun
Published: February 2021

This essay explores the paradox that collective, socially imagined visions of the future seem both abundant and scarce. Their abundance is based on the variety of images of possibility, hope, and the good life that emerge from the social and cultural diversity of our world. Yet, imagining the collective future is highly constrained by the limitations imposed by fear, censorship, and commercial and political propaganda. The chapter explores the conditions of possibility of this paradox. It argues that the scarcity of social futures in the digital era is a result of a process of Schumpeterian destruction, in which what is at stake is human creativity, curiosity, and the social relations of the non-virtual world.
Future and Prophecies in the World Vision of the Islamic State Organization
Authors: Adraoui Mohamed-Ali
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the Islamic State’s conceptualization of history and the future in relation this movement’s understanding of eschatology and the ‘End of Times’. Drawing on a veritable stream of jihadist literature, this chapter sheds light on the organization’s theorization of history, and the ways in which the Islamic State’s consistent jihadist millenarianism echoes an incessant dialectic between the past and the future to the detriment of a depreciated and sacrificed present. Adraoui demonstrates the way in which the Islamic State’s fundamentalist (mis-)interpretation of Islamic prophetic discourse merges terrestrial and celestial time, which is used to justify and exacerbate the use of extreme violence in pursuit of the organization’s aggressive political aims.
Discounting the Future
Authors: Doganova Liliana
Published: February 2021

This chapter analyses the political, environmental, and human implications of acts of discounting. Discounting is an economic instrument used by companies and policymakers to make the future commensurate with the present. This chapter argues that discounting is a political technology: it embeds debatable assumptions about value and the future, and it produces tangible effects in an expanding range of empirical domains. Drawing on examples from the history of discounting (capital budgeting, forest management, environmental regulation, and pharmaceutical research and development), the chapter discusses four of its political qualities. First, discounting equips collective decisions about the allocation of resources; second, it shapes the characteristics of future entities; third, it is an instrument for governing behaviour that guides decision-making in a myriad of places and instances; and fourth, it problematizes the very separation of the present and the future.
Beyond Computation
Authors: Williams R. John
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the institutional evolution of ‘scenario planning’ from the inception of the management technique in the mid-1960s. It examines the effect of scenario planning on changing visions of the future from a singular entity to a matrix of multiple possibilities. Emerging as a countermodel to the predictive power of the computer, scenario planning incorporated a number of new age and countercultural spiritualities that seemed to support the pluralized futurity it advocated. The chapter pays attention to the metaphysical assumptions of the technique, charting its origins in the RAND Corporation during the 1960s to its expansion into corporate management in Shell Oil during the 1970s and 1980s.
The Cybernetic Prediction
Authors: Rindzevičiūtė Eglė
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the often overlooked area of cybernetic prediction, a form of prediction conceptualized by the ‘father’ of cybernetics, the US mathematician Norbert Wiener, during the 1940s–1960s. Although critical interest in the cultural and political histories of cybernetics is growing, the notion of scientific prediction, which is central to cybernetic control, is insufficiently examined. This chapter argues that this form of prediction is not a mere technical cog in the epistemology of the future, but a complex concept. It demonstrates that Wiener’s epistemology of cybernetic prediction emphasizes the role of uncertainty and does not replace materiality with information. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the useful lessons offered by Wiener’s concept of cybernetic prediction for future-oriented practices within the broader fields of contemporary science, governance, and politics.
Making an Almanac
Authors: Benqué David
Published: February 2021

This chapter employs critical design practice to examine a specific form in the history of prediction—almanacs—and ultimately interrogates the nature of current forms of algorithmic prediction. The chapter revolves around the concept of monism—the idea that the same universal laws govern both natural and social worlds—and focuses on the role monism plays in predictions within almanac publications. It draws on empirical evidence from the Monistic Almanac—an ongoing practice-based research project which revisits the almanac as a site for experiments across the blurry boundary between data science and astrology—in order to conceptualize almanacs as precursors to the current regime of algorithmic prediction. The chapter experiments with computational astrologies and reflects upon the diagrammatic operations of data science. Benqué argues that divination opens up opportunities for critical design practice to question the authority of current notions of predictions.
Future by Design
Authors: Garsten Christina , Sörbom Adrienne
Published: February 2021

This chapter critiques the anticipatory practices of contemporary organizations, such as think tanks and management consultancies, which offer methods and forecasts about possible and desirable futures. These organizations, the chapter argues, contribute to creating a sense of urgency with respect to the future, capitalizing on the perceived need among decision makers to grasp contemporary events, and provide tools and content by which the future can be designed. It argues that future forecast scenarios assist in the creation of a particular type of authority: one geared to the contemporary global situation and to an increasingly complex system of global governance. The chapter interrogates this particular type of authority to argue it is not singular and dominant, but instead comprises the varying interests of many different actors and is underscored by rational process, which offers the possibility of a wider shared understanding
Voices Prophesying Everything
Authors: Paskins Mat
Published: February 2021

This chapter intervenes in critical debates about the recording and documenting of histories of the future by critiquing, and offering an alternative approach to, current practices. It argues that many histories of the future rely on an extremely selective range of empirical sources which secure particular versions of, and narratives about, the future. Instead, this chapter identifies and examines the multifarious form of the periodical as a vital source material for reconstructing the past. Juxtaposing numerous techniques of representing the future, the periodical enables different ways of imagining, predicting, and resisting possible futures to collide against and compete with each other in a variety of rapidly shifting contexts. Reading the diversity of modes for presenting futures in periodicals can help us to consider how different representations of the future, with a wide range of temporalities, are woven into one another within ordinary public discourse.
Ignorance is Bliss
Authors: Graf Rüdiger
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the challenges of writing contemporary history in light of our own ignorance of the future. Surveying a sample of recent German and English historiographical studies, it analyses how historians commonly deal with the unknown future, showing that they either define end points of their stories in the most recent past or extrapolate what they consider to be present trends into the future. While these histories of the present are mostly written under the assumption of a unified horizon of expectation and a linear conception of time, the chapter argues that they fail to do justice to the pluralization of the future that occurred over the course of the twentieth century and, above all, since the 1970s. The chapter defines and distinguishes four basic modes to generate the future—expectation, planning, risk, and conservation—and suggests that they are a source of methodological innovation for the practice of contemporary historiography.
Italian Futurism and the Explosive ‘Now’
Authors: Wittman Laura
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines the development and changing artistic and socio-political implications of a particular temporal modality—‘the present as history’—within a variety of Futurist texts. It draws on the work of Frederic Jameson to argue that the Italian Futurists sought to radically disrupt a particular representation of the present in their calls to destroy the past and attempts to endow futurity with the urgency of fully embodied agency. Wittman argues that the Futurists reject a specific, historicist, bourgeois understanding of history and seek to inaugurate a new sense of time, an explosive ‘now’. Comparing early and later texts by Marinetti and other Futurists, and identifying their debts to anarchist thought, the chapter demonstrates that their strategy of breaking into the present can only counter totalitarian appropriations if it remains anchored in embodied practices.
Futures Honed
Authors: Adam Barbara
Published: February 2021

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.
Futures Studies
Authors: Gidley Jennifer M.
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines and critiques the changing socio-political implications that accompany the shift from the concept of a singular future to the pluralization of futures. From the 1960s onwards, the emergence of multiple futures enabled larger sections of society to envision and create ‘alternative futures’ to the status quo. In this chapter Gidley brings to bear the democratizing effect of multiple possible futures upon the evolution of theory and practice across academic disciplines. In particular, she illuminates how the theory and practice of futures studies has paralleled developments in the evolution of science and the social sciences, to incorporate critical futures, cultural futures, participatory futures, and integral futures. She concludes with reflections about how the field of futures studies will continue to evolve so that it can diversely represent the future conceptualizations and actions of scholars, practitioners, and researchers globally.
Niebuhr’s Background: Family, Church, and Society
Authors: Gaston K. Healan
Published: February 2021

This chapter explores the first four decades of Reinhold Niebuhr’s life, a period that offers many clues as to why his work has remained relevant up to the present day. Whereas many scholars tend to divide Niebuhr’s development into stages—a Social Gospel phase, a Marxist or Christian socialist phase, and a final period of liberal realism—this chapter identifies several lines of continuity from Niebuhr’s early life onwards that help to explain the distinctive contours and continued appeal of his best-known work, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). It focuses especially on three themes that carried through from the 1920s to the 1950s: the centrality of power and group conflict; the explanatory insufficiency of religious liberalism and the social sciences; and the capacity of religion to provide genuine knowledge about human nature.
Abraham Heschel
Authors: Heschel Susannah
Published: February 2021

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.
Martin Luther King Jr
Authors: Paris Peter J.
Published: February 2021

This chapter argues that Martin Luther King Jr was formed theologically and morally by his familial and ecclesiastical environments that were integrally connected. King’s life in that restrictive context readied him for his academic venture as a graduate student in the halls of Protestant theological liberalism at Crozer Theological Seminary and for four years as a PhD student at the Boston University School of Religion. Though King and Reinhold Niebuhr were a full generation apart in age, raised in radically different contexts, and never met in person, both would become world-renowned prophetic theological leaders. The progressive reputation of each made it inevitable that they would respect each other from a distance. King expressed gratitude for the insight he received from Niebuhr’s understanding of power relations and especially how those with power never voluntarily yield it except under pressure from a counteractive force. The chapter offers a reason for the primacy of the racial struggle for King and its tangential status for Niebuhr which may also account for Niebuhr’s more patient disposition towards social change as compared to King’s strong sense of urgency.
Ecclesiology
Authors: True David
Published: February 2021

This essay argues that Reinhold Niebuhr had a rich and theologically informed ecclesiology. The argument begins by briefly considering criticisms of Niebuhr’s ecclesiology before turning to a close reading of his writings on the American church. These writings are practical in nature and brief, which perhaps explains why they have received relatively little attention. In them, it becomes clear that Niebuhr embraced several doctrines associated with the Reformation churches, including a high view of the sacraments and the persistence of sin. For Niebuhr, grace and sin are central to the church’s identity as a communion of grace. Grace, he claims, has profound implications for the church in the United States. In a culture that emphasises merit, grace should give the church a critical task. Niebuhr’s vision of the church, then, is a sect-church, at once sacramental and critical. The essay concludes by sketching how Niebuhr’s ecclesiology relates to and informs contemporary American churches.
The 1930s: Economic Crisis and the ‘End of an Era’
Authors: Sabella Jeremy
Published: February 2021

From the Great Depression to the launch of the Second World War, the 1930s spanned an extraordinarily tumultuous period in world history. Niebuhr’s work reflects the rapid and startling changes of the era. His major books of the decade—Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reflections on the End of an Era, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, and Beyond Tragedy—contrast starkly in tone and method. Underlying these differences, however, is a set of realist sensibilities regarding human nature and social structures that became more developed and refined with each successive work. This chapter traces his journey from little-known seminary professor to one of the towering theological and ethical figures of the twentieth century as he navigated a period of profound economic crisis and dizzying political transformation.
Feminism
Authors: Hinson-Hasty Elizabeth
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines three feminist responses to Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought and contemporary Christian Realism—conflict, integration, and conversation. The chapter emphasizes the need for future conversation between feminists, realists, and ethicists across a wide variety of fields with people living in the most vulnerable and precarious economic circumstances in the US and around the world. More attention and exploration of Christian concepts of sin and redemption relevant within the contemporary context are worthy of attention. Fostering more intentional conversation across established disciplinary boundaries and with the world’s most vulnerable people will chart a new course in Christian ethics and nurture a more authentic American moral conscience in light of the greatest moral and theological problems of the twenty-first century.
Democracy
Authors: Gregory Eric
Published: February 2021

This chapter examines Reinhold Niebuhr’s anti-utopian defence of democracy, conceived primarily as a political arrangement marked by balance of power, rule by the governed, and a liberal constitutional order. Niebuhr’s democracy, however, is both a procedural form of government and a substantial ethical commitment. His essayistic style traversed disciplines in search of a pragmatic public philosophy that might navigate between hope and despair given inevitable conflict in democratic life. Pregnant with broader claims of morality and theology, his dialectical method crystallizes deep patterns of thought in what came to be known as his Christian Realism. The chapter places these views in historical context and notes their critical reception, highlighting debts to Augustinian, Marxist, Calvinist, and Kantian traditions. But the focus is normative and contemporary. Renewed questions about the uncertain prospects of democracy and its challenges suggest an opportunity to assess what is living and what is dead in Niebuhr’s influential account.