The Piedmont of South Carolina and Georgia is a complex mosaic of exotic terranes of uncertain provenance. Farther south and east, these terranes form the basement beneath several kilometers of Cretaceous and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks, commonly referred to as the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The distribution and geologic history of this hidden crystalline basement can be inferred only on the basis of limited exposures at the margins of the Coastal Plain onlap, aeromagnetic lineaments that define basement trends in the subsurface, and core data from wells that penetrate basement. During the past 40 years, basement cores aggregating more than 6 miles (10,000 m) have been recovered from 57 deep wells at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site. These cores provide the only known samples of basement terranes that lie southeast of the Fall Line in central South Carolina. Cores from the 57 deep wells, along with structural trends defined by aeromagnetic lineaments, allow us to define four distinct units within the basement beneath the Coastal Plain: (1) the Crackerneck Metavolcanic Complex (greenstones and felsic

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Recent political events around the world have raised the specter of an impending collapse of democratic institutions. Contemporary worries about the decline of liberal democracy harken back to the tumult of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany during the rise of National Socialism, and each reflected on what the rise of totalitarianism meant for the aspirations of modern politics. Engaging the realities of totalitarian terror, they avoided despairing rejections of modern society. Beginning with Barth in the wake of the First World War, following Bonhoeffer through the 1930s and 1940s in Nazi Germany, and concluding with Barth’s postwar reflections in the 1950s, this study explores how these figures reflected on modern society during this turbulent time and how their work is relevant to the current crisis of modern democracy

The tumult of the twentieth century had a great impact on the role of religion in Chinese society. Antipathy toward religion reached its height in China during the Cultural Revolution, one of the few times in history when religion was almost completely wiped out in a single country. Religion in China has experienced a resurgence since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period in 1978. With the renewal of religious practice, new proposals have been put forward for the role of religious ideas in public life. In addition to the endurance of Marxist and liberal conceptions of the place of religion in society, new voices have emerged, arguing for return to Confucianism as the source of moral vitality in public life, or advancing Christian public theology as a moral resource for individuals adrift and alienated by the rapid changes of a modernizing economy. These realities have reshaped debates about the protection of religious freedom in China. This article introduces these new social and discursive realities and sets the stage for the articles that follow.

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