Shell game

One thing that might have disrupted the east-west teleology of "Acts of Faith" is a map like this one. Not just because it includes no boundaries of modern nation states, defamiliarizing already, but because of the way the land, decoupled from the convention of putting north at the top, seems unmoored. It's more like a world growing from the shell of a turtle! It also makes the spread of European settlement and nation-building seem haphazard and contingent - perhaps just the pull of gravity downward - and not final.