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The chapter discusses the use of the comparative method by Northern Ireland's political partisans and academics. It shows how analogies with other conflicts have been used by partisans to further their political agendas. These analogies are tied to important international norms, and their use by Northern Ireland's politicians are an attempt to influence international opinion, as well as cement group solidarity. The second part of the chapter summarizes how Northern Ireland has been analysed by academics employing important comparative political theories, including consociationalism and integrationism.

The chapter offers a comparative evaluation of Northern Ireland's Agreement and the one reached in South Africa, and underlines the differences between them. It argues that the analogy between Northern Ireland and South Africa should be read in different ways than it is by nationalist and unionist integrationists, and by social transformationists. It explains that the Northern Ireland conflict has important exogenous dimensions that are missing in South Africa, This is illustrated by two central points: (i) while South Africans reached agreement because of endogenous factors, cooperation by the British and Irish governments was essential to the attainment of agreement in Northern Ireland; (ii) while South Africa's settlement required new political institutions internal to the country, a vital part of Northern Ireland's agreement involved the construction of trans-border political institutions linking Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland.

Because of their descriptive cast, narrative theologies are oriented to considering the future as the most significant tense; they thus recoup the ancient Christian millennarian tradition, as it surfaces in, for instance, Joachim of Fiore. This focus on futurity indicates that the basic motivation in narrative theologies is the quest for scientific predictability. A philosophical theology which gives metaphysical status to the way in which scientific hypotheses are epistemically verified (in the future) is bound to say, with Hegel, that the truth of a proposition is what it becomes, just as the ‘truth’ of a story is its outcome. Rather than making God the epistemic outcome of human acts of knowledge or story-telling, this chapter proposes that God is a much livelier and energetic thing, love. The two foremost analogies of this dramatic love are tragedy and comedy. The book's thesis thus achieves the aim of narrative theologies to be true to the ‘God of the Gospel’ rather than the gods of our culture.

This chapter explores the same basic Kantian presuppositional links with respect to causation. It begins by unpacking the basics of Kant's metaphysics of causation, with special reference to the three Analogies of Experience and the Third Antinomy of Pure Reason. It then analyzes the problem of free will and works out a new version of Kant's theory of freedom, called the Embodied Agency Theory. Some of the intimate Kantian links between freedom and nature are explored, and a biological interpretation of the Embodied Agency Theory is developed. It is argued that for Kant, the irreversibility of time — ‘Time's Arrow’ — entails a necessary connection between naturally mechanized causation and the possibility of human practical causation.

Chapter 3 addresses the question of how theology in dialogue with science authentically expresses insights concerning the ineffable mystery of God and suffering. Because neither science nor theology can speak uncritically as if a one‐to‐one correspondence existed between the meaning of their words and the realities to which they refer, nor can they speak instrumentally as if their words were simply useful fictions, each discipline must speak in terms of a critical or skeptical realism. In so doing, each employs certain concepts, analogies, metaphors, or models to signify something akin to the entity to which its words refer. This approach to scientific and theological language leads to the methodology of inference‐to‐the‐best‐explanation. This methodology aims not at certainty but at intelligibility, not at finality but at fecundity, not at immutability but at emergence with regard to its metaphors and models.

Proposes an interpretative framework for the comparison of democratic transitions. It argues that the complex dynamics, shifting agendas, and multiple interactions that characterize all such processes can be integrated and brought into focus by the construction of an analogy with theatre and drama. Every democratic transition obeys the logic of a public dramatic performance. The chapter also revisits the origins of democracy to confirm the robustness of this analogy with drama.

Returns to the general question of what sort of science public management is or can be and how cultural theory can contribute to that science. If public management is (as suggested earlier) dominated by rhetorical forms of argument, cultural theory can help take one step further than conventional analyses of rhetoric by differentiating rhetorical ‘families’—this theme is explored in this chapter, which looks at what a cultural‐theory framework can add to the analysis of public management as an arena for rhetoric, and aims to do three things. First, it briefly expands on a now familiar argument (noted in the first chapter)—that shifts in what counts as received ideas in public management work through a process of fashion and persuasion, not through proofs couched in strict deductive logic, controlled experiments, or even systematic analysis of all available cases. Second, and more ambitiously, it aims to bring together the analysis of rhetoric in public management with the four ways of doing public management that were explored in Part II, to show how each of those approaches can have its own rhetoric, in the sense of foreshortened proofs, analogies, and parables; the aim is to put a cultural‐theory perspective to work in a different way, to identify multiple rhetorics of public management. Third, it briefly develops the suggestion made in Chapters 1 and 2 that shifts (change) in received ideas about how to organize typically occur in a reactive way, through rejection of existing arrangements with their known faults, rather than through a positive process of reasoning from a blank slate.

It is concluded that the presence of a range of analogies in structure between the two planes of phonology and syntax reflects both the human perception of similarities between the substances grammaticalized by linguistic representation and the implementation of the same mental apparatus in the construction of linguistic structure. These analogies are limited by discrepancies between the two planes, in the complexity of their categorization and the structures they project, determined on the one hand by the need, in the syntax, to represent complex conceptual scenes, and, on the other, by the constraints imposed on categorial, derivational, and structural elaboration allowed by the limited domain grammaticalized by phonology, a domain intimately associated with physical implementation. These differences between the planes also affect and reflect their relationship to the lexicon, where they are related by the asymmetrical relation of exponence.

The chapter serves both as a brief biography of Balthasar and a protracted bibliography of his work. The consideration of Balthasar's monumental opus (The Glory of the Lord, Theo‐drama, and Theo‐logic) provides a critical “system” in which to read texts and begins to illustrate Balthasar's unique contribution to current discussions about the intersection between theology, history, philosophy, and narrative art. The chapter demonstrates that not only is Balthasar one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, but also his work has practical contributions to make to discourses in critical theory. Like critical theory, Balthasar's work is theological, literary, anthropological, philosophical, psychological, political, and historical, which are critical theory's main components. In the spirit of the ressourcement theology that shaped him, Balthasar is primarily interested in renewing attention to older sources in order to critique the idealistic excesses of modernity. In this sense, Balthasar reveals a postmodern temperament: he too is concerned with issues of language and difference, with aporia, with plurality, with surplus, and with horizons of meaning, to name a few. The difference between Balthasar and the majority of critical theorists resides in ontological and theological orientation: it is therefore a difference of imagination and of grammar. The chapter elaborates on these and other dynamic relationships.

It is typical to approach Karl Barth's ethics by identifying one dimension—for example, the relation of dogmatics and ethics, of gospel and law, or of divine and human action, or the nature and practice of moral reasoning—as the key to the whole. This overview focuses instead on the centrality of God's covenant with humanity to Barth's theology, arguing that ethics is grounded in election and sanctification: the determination of humanity as God's covenant partner and the summons to humanity to exist as God's covenant partner. This determination and summons are actualized in the movement in which God resolves on the good from eternity, fulfills it in time in Jesus Christ, and summons, empowers, and directs us to confirm it in each moment of our lives. But how is ethics possible if, as Barth stresses, it is Jesus Christ who fulfills the good in our place? The structure of Barth's ethics is supplied by his distinctive notions of responsibility and gratitude, in which human action is established not as gradual approximation to the divine goodness but as a thankful response to grace. All of this amounts to a vision of the moral life as a human analogy to God's grace, and this vision contrasts with the bourgeois vision of the moral life as an expression of human capability.

For Barth, God is not only the ground or source of the good but also accomplishes the good in our place. God's grace is expressed not only in God's response to our sinful rejection of the good but also, and even more fundamentally, in the events in which God both resolves on the good and brings it about. As such, grace interrupts our striving for the good, yet it also demands to be expressed in our action. But how can our action express grace without betraying it? This, for Barth, is the problem of ethics, and this chapter examines the major stages in the development of his moral theology to show how they formulate and attempt to resolve this problem.

If Jesus Christ has accomplished the good in our place and summons us to confirm it in our own conduct, it is clear that there is a place for human action in Barth's moral theology. But if the good is already accomplished, what significance can human action possibly have? This chapter examines the meaning, reality, and limitations of human action in Barth's moral theology in light of the central notion of Christ's accomplishment of the good in our place. His fundamental claim is that God's grace does not nullify human action or deprive it of significance but rather establishes it by empowering it to be, in its very creaturely nature, an analogy of grace.