Made of recycled clothes, slaughtered animals, and felled trees, Bibles in Renaissance England were filled with visible traces of ecological matter, remainders that remind one that words on a page are thought fused with—and inflected by—matter. This essay places Henry Vaughan's poem “The Book” in a broader conversation about the poetics of paper: the rhetorical effects of the varied colors and qualities of paper used in the production of the vernacular Bibles that transformed reading practices in Renaissance England. Historical writers and readers, who were directly involved in a flax-to-rags-to-paper economy, recognized and commented on the natural resources from which cheap, widely distributed Bibles and other texts were made. Further, this essay models a reading strategy that attends to the natural history of books, to both the function and the form of the organic matter used to mediate human ideas.

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

Introduced at the start of The Prioress's Tale but then dropped as an overt topic, usury nevertheless informs that anti-Semitic text. This essay situates Chaucer's narrative in the complex and contradictory history of medieval lending as a theory and a practice. I stress the architectural ironies of usury in the tale and in medieval English history. The tale demonizes Jewish usurers by associating them with the most abject of built environments, the latrine, and celebrates Christians through their links to the exalted space of the church. But, in a move that reflects the flow of capital throughout Christian society, the tale ultimately undermines the opposition of church and pit. Analyzed not as fixed entities but as contingent, fluid spaces joined through the usurious infrastructure of the tale, the minster and the privy suggest a materialist critique of efforts to conceive of a purely religious space.

Lyric poetry's investment in structural delimitation has been read as a commitment to the exclusion of otherness and more specifically of other people. But delimitation need not be synonymous with exclusivity. Giorgio Agamben suggests that lyric closure and the satisfaction it affords may be a model for achieving peace with the other—a model of how we might find, in or with another, not merely alterity but contentment. Wallace Stevens offers examples of how such contentment might be realized between text and reader, as an effect of the bounded aural intensity of lyric language. Agamben's poetics and Stevens's poems complicate our assumptions about the sociality of lyric structure. In addition, they offer a provocative alternative to the Levinasian models that influence much of our current thinking about ethics.

Adorno's Minima Moralia was part of a publishing boom in the genre of advice literature in postwar West Germany. The combination of economic resurgence and attempted cultural restoration resulted in a widespread wish to master forming models of social intercourse; this craving for guidance accounts for the volume's commercial success. But while Adorno participates in the culture of counseling, he couples practical suggestions with repeated announcements of the demise of the self-determining subject, the projected recipient of advice. He addresses problems that appear in the individual's frame of attention but consistently disputes that this is a meaningful scene of action in the age of total administration. Minima Moralia both inhabits and violates the conventions of advice literature in order to dramatize the experience of the discrepancy between societal logic and the individual's resources.

Between the credit crunch and the greek debt crisis, the cohead of emea global finance kindly found time to walk me through the fixed-income trading floor of Barclays Capital. I noted no vestige of bull pen or bear pit in what seemed a high-end call center, but mainly I listened. At one point, in relation to derivatives trading, my guide spoke of “real money,” “less real money,” and “barely real money.” Perhaps prompted by the economic historian Robert Brenner's assurance that “the real economy” retains links to manufacture (1), I asked what made money real. The ensuing rebuke, graciously delivered, continues to give pause: “You sound like my father.” He had a point: given that I am a child of Britain's long postwar recovery through manufacture (there was no economic miracle here), might not my allegiance to a labor theory of value in matters literary be no more than an archaic, conditioned response? Karl Marx and Frederick Engels define language as “practical consciousness” made from “agitated layers of air” (51) and acting on a reality whose elements it renders inseparable from its processes. Their definition, in its subsumption of the intellectual in the laborious, might have been made for the academic son of a printer.

In a lead 1990 article for the atlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article for Foreign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

On a recent trip to nicosia, cyprus, i grabbed a city map from my hotel. The venetian walls of the old city formed a perfect circle on the map. But the northern part of Nicosia was blank—not a road named or landmark identified, not even the airport or the Venetian column that marks the center of the circular city—except for the notation “Area under Turkish occupation since 1974.” Of course, Turkey is a secular nation, but the divide between Turkish and European Cyprus is also a divide between majority-Muslim and majority-Christian populations. A member of the European Union since 2004, Cyprus is, like the rest of Europe, haunted by a spectral Islam that it has difficulty acknowledging, let alone assimilating into a broader cosmopolitan identity.

The normative understanding of “the clash of religions” assumes external conflict: we think, for example, of christianity's historical struggle with Islam; of the clash between Hinduism and Islam in the partition of the Indian subcontinent; or, in the field of empire, of the imperial contest over the souls and bodies of colonial subjects, in which material rationales for control and expropriation appear as theological motivations, rendering religious conversion virtually interchangeable with cultural conquest. Viewed in this light, the notion of a clash of religions bypasses conflicts internal to individual religions, which are equally if not more important in shaping the content of religious thought. Internal conflicts often play out as debates over the meanings of key concepts in the religions.

Toward the end of his opening lecture in the hermeneutics of the subject (17–19), Michel Foucault draws a distinction between ancient and modern modes of philosophizing. He bases the distinction on differing conceptions of determining the grounds of the true and the false and the subject's access to them. The distinction and shift are well-trodden ground, as we'll see, even if Foucault marks them in characteristically provocative ways. I will argue, though, that with the advent of the World Wide Web the distinction is incomplete, not least in regard to the religious implications of the three modes and their underlying theological considerations. The World Wide Web, in short, signals the emergence of a new way of being and thinking to rival the ancient and the modern, even as it draws on elements of both.

Social scientists and political philosophers who assumed that modernity would become progressively secular may have got it wrong. Current history shows us that modern societies, including states, do not inevitably grow more secular. Nor are organized religions inevitably confined to narrower and narrower domains as modernity proceeds. In fact, the current period makes legible the variability of the spaces (institutional, ideational, tactical) of organized religions over time and their expansion into domains once off-limits to religion, domains as diverse as the liberal state, global finance, and cosmopolitanism. Indeed, new types of globality and cosmopolitanism are becoming visible in, and arising from, organized religions. They can coexist with regressive forces in those religions, signaling the complexity of the religions' organizational architecture.

In October 2006, the Harvard University task force on general education issued a preliminary report describing and justifying a new program of general education for Harvard College. Contending that “[g]eneral education is the public face of liberal education,” the task force enumerated what a person liberally educated in the twenty-first-century United States should know—or, perhaps better, know how to think about in reasoned and nuanced ways (Preliminary Report 3). The report called for seven semester-long courses in “five broad areas of inquiry and experience”: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change, The Ethical Life, The United States and the World, Reason and Faith, and Science and Technology. In addition, the task force suggested that students be required to take three semester-long courses that “develop critical skills”: writing and oral communication, foreign language, and analytic reasoning (6). Not surprisingly, “Reason and Faith” generated some of the most heated discussion—and it was the first suggested requirement dropped by the task force, replaced in December 2006 by a new category, “What It Means to Be a Human Being.” By the time of the final report, this too was gone, replaced by “Culture and Belief,” an area of inquiry that may include the study of religion but is broader in scope than what was initially proposed (Report of the Task Force 11–12).

Is the resurgence of religion in our millennial moment a case of zombies or of vampires? are we dealing, that is, with an atavistic army of stumbling, mumbling idiots, or are we encountering a phenomenon with teeth: vital, adaptive, crazy-beautiful, and ready to take some revamped general education courses at Harvard? I think we can conclude from these essays that we are dealing with vampires. In other words, like today's teenage vampires, the reanimated religions on the contemporary world stage are not anomalous, exceptional, or archaic. Instead, globalization, by draining functionality and glamour from the nation-state, has summoned organized religions and postreligions to take on ever-more-powerful political roles. Hence the brazen entry of an array of latter-day saints into the sempiternal sunlight cast by the restless streaming of information, capital, and populations across planetary time zones, from jihadist organizers and evangelical Alaskans to Harry Potter activists and irate Apple users.

Some people say love is incomprehensible, that language cannot capture it. Some people never stop talking, thinking, writing, speculating, and theorizing about it. Maybe our unending discourse about love arises in the tension that stretches it between ineffability and expression.

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize–winning novel the road (2006) addresses the cliché that at the moment of death the endangered individual experiences a “life review” during which his life “flashes before his eyes.” McCarthy's protagonist intuits that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death” (18). Thus, in the view of McCarthy's unnamed hero, during a crisis one must focus on survival, escape, sustenance, or the successful execution of a plan. However, once all possibilities of survival are exhausted, the dying person will experience either an intense acceleration of cognition due to panic or a slackening of interest due to the acceptance of death. In either of these two scenarios, Henri Bergson posits, all the memories of the individual's lifetime will rush into consciousness. The following essay by Georges Poulet analyzes the development of Bergson's thought on this issue, supplementing Bergson's notions with examples from literature, history, and philosophy.