Chapter 8 contrasts ancient, more personal forms of domination (through kings, shepherds, masters) with more impersonal, digitally enabled forms of modern domination that organize work, life, and death on a planetary scale. Confronting the mass loss of wildlife and the industrial confinement of animals – and the possibility that humans may soon share that fate – this conclusion calls for collective action to cultivate more genuinely social forms of relation, knowledge, and spirituality that affirm the intrinsic worth of all beings rather than reducing life to utility.

Islam addresses social issues extensively because it acknowledges that individuals are profoundly influenced by their societies. Individuals and societies are interdependent, requiring mutual cooperation due to differing abilities, shared goals and collective challenges. Islam emphasizes community building by deepening innate human desires for social interaction, giving them philosophical significance, sanctifying them as religious obligations and setting ethical guidelines to strengthen community bonds.

Islam views society as composed of individuals engaged in exchange and reciprocity, driven by natural human disparities and collective aspirations. It sanctifies these interactions by considering communal responsibilities as spiritual duties, reflected in concepts such as piety, trust and cooperation. Islamic teachings underscore equality among people, highlighting differences only in specialized talents, which facilitate mutual service and cohesion.

Islam consecrates relationships through cultural, faith-based, ethical and jurisprudential dimensions, promoting familial respect, neighborly duties and social justice through practices like prayer, fasting, almsgiving (zakat) and pilgrimage (hajj). These rituals reinforce social solidarity and mutual responsibility. Islam also addresses societal development dynamically, encouraging continuous interaction with both divine revelation (Qur’an) and the universe, fostering adaptive and evolving communities aligned with spiritual and moral values.

In this lecture at the American University of Beirut in 1966, Musa Sadr explores Islam’s impact on Lebanese culture, emphasizing Lebanon’s rich historical and cultural heritage influenced by Islam. The lecture highlights contributions of Lebanese religious scholars in disseminating Islamic teachings and literature, and the need to engage with Islamic terminology and historical narratives to understand Islamic principles.

Sadr addresses the interplay of Western and Eastern interpretations of Islam in Lebanon, advocating for thorough examination and appreciation of cultural contexts to comprehend religious concepts. The lecture further considers the authenticity of Islam, its unique spirituality and its focus on social welfare and development. It also presents core Islamic concepts such as tawhid (unity of God), the role of angels and Satan, the importance of prophets and the belief in Judgment Day and resurrection. Sadr also emphasizes Islam’s intervention in practical and social life, seeking to create a society better suited to faith and morality.

This chapter examines two forms of emotionlessness and asks how it is that emotionlessness can be a name for two very opposed valence-laden situations. The best-known emotionless context is sometimes expressed by the term ‘emotional numbness’. It refers to a multi-faceted mental disturbance, often quite difficult to identify unequivocally with a specific pathology; a less well-known emotionless context is referred to as a form of ‘emotional detachment’. It has been experienced along centuries by nuns, monks, and spiritual teachers as a practice of inner liberation. Shedding light on these different situations of emotionlessness, the chapter discusses what a non-emotional life tells us about human beings, if emotions are truly at the heart of human beings.

This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

This introduction to The New Believers begins by identifying a broader problem with the contemporary novel: that it often ends with bleak defeat or uncertain irresolution. Instead, I identify a new grouping of contemporary writers – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Junot Díaz, and George Saunders – who turn to spiritual beliefs, powers, and presences to offer new hope and possibilities for the contemporary novel, ones that might empower specific progressive causes. I show how this grouping is distinct from other forms of the contemporary, including writers who are hostile to religion, indifferent to it, or committed to it, and I show how the New Believers avoid the problem of oppressive totality by assessing the value of spiritual ideas by their impact on the immanent and the worldly, specifically how spiritual ideas alleviate and prevent material, bodily, and ecological suffering. This new grouping shows that the contemporary novel takes spirituality much more seriously than our critical categories have allowed.

The conclusion to The New Believers identifies how the varieties of spiritual realism newly imagined by each writer reshape our critical understanding of ontology, subjectivity, collectivity, and teleology. Because they commit to spiritual beliefs, in their public comments and in their fiction, the New Believers change the basic understanding of reality (ontology) from a materialist absence of intrinsic meaning to a world filled with spiritual meaning. Our sense of self (subjectivity) changes from completely self-created to one that is still free but responsive to forces of care and compassion, which in turn make better communities (collectivity) possible. The spiritual realism of these writers ultimately reshapes our understanding of death and the purpose of the universe (teleology) by pointing to spiritual persistence and the hope for something beyond our own material demise and the deaths of those we love, which empowers the contemporary novel in more hopeful and affirmative directions.

This chapter departs from many typical readings of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which treat that novel’s spiritual and numinous presences, practices, and powers as fantastical or magical rather than real and efficacious. Drawing on Díaz’s own statements, I show how the novel insists on the reality of supernatural forces and on how practices of prayer and the intervention of powerful spiritual forces, such as the Mongoose, can lead to resilience and survival amid the uncertainties and traumas of Caribbean dictatorship and migration to America. Díaz’s sense of cosmic vision in the novel, an insistence that there is spiritual purpose and power at work in the cosmos, shows how syncretic religious formations in the Caribbean can empower a radical hope in the face of the seemingly traumatic and impossible.

This chapter identifies in George Saunders’s earlier critiques of neoliberalism in his short stories and his critique of a conservative American version of Christian hell in his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a common project with a spiritual alternative in the Buddhist order of compassion. I offer a brief history of the Christian theology of hell and American neoliberalism to show how they share a common idea of a punitive, individualistic sense of natural order, one with a common origin point in the theology of Augustine on the divine will. First tracing the public spiritual commitments expressed by Saunders across a wide range of his interviews, I then show how his sense of the potential of literature to empower a spirituality of compassion informs Lincoln in the Bardo’s rejection of the Christian hell and the novel’s alternative vision of a world where compassion is the order of the universe.

This chapter draws on Margaret Atwood’s interviews and archives to show how she is concerned to explore in her late fiction and poetry the idea of the soul as “the better story” about human and nonhuman animal life. I show how Atwood critiques not only Christian Nationalism but also, in Oryx and Crake, a materialist understanding of life. As a response to each of these extremes, Atwood turns to the soul, particularly in The Testaments and in Dearly, showing how that idea and the experienced presence of the souls of the dead can motivate endurance and hope in the face of oppressive formations of Christianity and a materialist sense of nothingness after death. Drawing on Atwood’s drafts of The Testaments, I trace how the novel became more spiritually serious as it developed and how the spiritual poetry of Dearly works together with scenes of spiritual support in Atwood’s novel.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in China (Eastern traditions), beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.