The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Toward the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, German writers began to favor a new metaphor for the afterlife: “das Jenseits” (“the Beyond”). At first glance, the emergence of such a term may appear to have little bearing on our understanding of the history of religious thought. However, as the late historian Reinhart Koselleck maintained, the study of semantic changes can betray tectonic shifts in the matrix of ideas that underpin the worlds of politics, learning, and religion. Drawing on Koselleck's method of conceptual history, the following essay takes the popularization of “the Beyond” as a point of departure for investigating secularization and secularism as two linked, yet distinct, sources of pressure on the fault lines of nineteenth-century German religious thought.

Tracking the invasive history of the green alga Codium fragile ssp. tomentosoides

The spread of nonindigenous species into new habitats is having a drastic effect on natural ecosystems and represents an increasing threat to global biodiversity. In the marine environment, where data on the movement of invasive species is scarce, the spread of alien seaweeds represents a particular problem. We have employed a combination of plastid microsatellite markers and DNA sequence data from three regions of the plastid genome to trace the invasive history of the green alga Codium fragile ssp. tomentosoides. Extremely low levels of genetic variation were detected, with only four haplotypes present in the species’ native range in Japan and only two of these found in introduced populations. These invasive populations displayed a high level of geographical structuring of haplotypes, with one haplotype localized in the Mediterranean and the other found in Northwest Atlantic, northern European and South Pacific populations. Consequently, we postulate that there have been at least two separate introductions of C. fragile ssp. tomentosoides from its native range in the North Pacific.