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Ultimately, I identify Buddhism's co‐opting and absorption of local spirit‐religions as a crucial component of Buddhist expansion both within and outside of India. The case of Buddhist expansion into Burma (Myanmar) is particularly revealing. Despite significant differences between the forms of spirit‐religion practiced in Burma and India the Buddhists utilized a similar process of interacting with popular beliefs in both locations. The relationship between the Buddhist community and the local gods (nats) played a crucial role in Buddhism's widespread acceptance during the Pagan era.

Stochastic simulations of nonlinear dynamic econometric models have been used in various ways in the past. This chapter discusses how stochastic simulations can be exploited to develop appropriate system-specification tests for nonlinear systems. The approach is through auxiliary regressions of stochastic simulation errors to develop asymptotically valid significance tests of the predictive performance of the model. The first section discusses Adrian Pagan's critique of the use of simulations in testing nonlinear models for misspecification. The related issue of the informational content of multi-period-ahead predictions is also analyzed in this section. The stochastic simulations that it uses to form the prediction-based tests and their basic asymptotic properties are reviewed in the second section. The last section then develops the auxiliary regressions leading to our prediction-based tests.

This chapter builds upon what Paul Gilroy identifies as an inherent “double-consciousness” within modernity and exposes the performativity inherent in that experience, particularly within the racial and biological “purity” that was so violently affirmed in Francoist Spain and the Jim Crow South. Framing this chapter with African-American writer Richard Wright’s experience in what he describes as Franco’s “pagan” Spain, I examine how Spain and the South provide specific examples where racial indeterminacy compels the subject to embrace performativity as a means of shirking the expectations of “race” and “biology” thrust upon them by those perceived as “pure.”

This chapter focuses on the tensions and ambivalences between the different religious, interpersonal, and social dynamics of Pagan adults and children. These interactions between Pagan adults and children and between Pagan children and other institutions are influenced by specific understandings of the role and nature of the category of the “child.” Pagan adults and children interact with many institutions—scouting organizations, public schools, and other religious traditions—based on specific understandings of what it means to be a “Pagan child” or a “Pagan adult.” The chapter also talks about Pagan parents' methods to include children in public and private religious rituals and Pagan children's improvisations of their own rituals based on their early religious experiences. These examples suggest that understandings of a ritual can be expanded to include informal, ordinary experiences within the family as well as formal ceremonial practices.

This chapter problematises common assumptions about East/West and Islam/West divisions relating to religion, society and the state. It examines the concrete positions and functions of religion and religious institutions in public life in the historical practices and political thinking of Byzantine, medieval and early modern European, Abbasid and Ottoman societies. It devotes a special study to the historical realities of Muslim jurisprudence. This chapter proposes to treat secularism as a complex and objective political, social and cultural dynamic allied to global processes of modernisation, rather than a checklist of stable features which can be judged exist or to be absent in any given society. It proposes that the common idea that some societies are by nature receptive to secularism while others are not, is irrelevant to the issues that arise in concrete studies of secularism, and that secularism is never complete or unalloyed.

This chapter looks at Pagan childhood as an idealized realm that is constructed, maintained, and sometimes exploited by Pagan adults. Pagans' appreciation for childhood as a protected temporal and ideological category that emerges from Romantic and New Age ideals of purity, magic, and innocence reflects adult Pagans' desires. The chapter questions whether these ideals also reflect Pagan children's experiences. The romanticized images of childhood that are built and maintained by Pagan adults often lead to an overvaluation of “childlike” or “innocent” qualities in adults. Pagan understandings of the role and nature of the idealized concept of the “child” influence the spiritual imaginations and religious worlds of both Pagan adults and Pagan children. Contemporary Paganism seems to encourage a childlike immaturity in adults and, in some ways, an overly precocious maturity in children.

This chapter delves into some of the debates surrounding the inclusion of children in Pagan rituals and the appropriate level of religious instruction for younger generations. Some Pagan parents respond to the religion's tendency toward the exclusion of children by developing innovative ways to include children in religious ritual and daily practice. The chapter claims that rituals involving Pagan children can challenge scholars and practitioners to rethink understandings of what constitutes religious ritual. Rituals such as blessings and coming-of-age rites are intended to welcome infants and teenagers into Paganism, yet, they are still contested within the religion. The importance of religious choice for Pagan children is a core value within the religion and is one of the few principles that receives nearly unanimous support from adult Pagans.

This chapter discusses Pagan life-cycle rituals and the ambivalence they elicit by considering the formal inclusion of children into contemporary Paganism through adult-led rituals such as Wiccanings and coming-of-age rites. As Pagan adults conduct these rituals, they simultaneously reject the compulsory transmission of religious belief or practice. This means that Pagan children are welcomed into their parents' religion but are neither expected nor particularly encouraged to accept and practice these traditions themselves. Contemporary Paganism prioritizes religious choice, tolerance, and independence over familial or cultural homogeneity, potentially complicating both the growth of the religion and religious dynamics within families and communities. In the process of constructing, and performing these life-stage rituals, Pagan adults express deep ambivalence about childhood, adulthood, religious choice, and the fundamental values of their religious worlds.

In the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Julian attempted to undo all the religious change wrought by the Christians. Julian was the first emperor after Constantine not to institute pro-Christian policies, and he ruled at a time when Christianity’s position in the empire was sill uncertain. Julian attempted to bring the empire back to its traditional religious practices, including animal sacrifice. Julian’s anti-Christian and pro-sacrifice policies and writings provide a unique window into the ways in which Christian positions on sacrifice had impacted the empire by the fourth century. Julian is aware of the ways in which Christians have used positions on sacrifice in their theological models, and he uses this knowledge to attack Christian religious and historical claims. Ultimately, Julian’s early death marked the final triumph of Christian positions on sacrifice.

The results of analyses described in Chapter 10 are here brought to bear on how Maya Christianity has been interpreted and on how conversion among the Maya may have been facilitated. Local vs. global perspectives are considered, as are imagery and interpretation, the Maya cosmos and Christian thought, landscape, and the critical links between images and sacred space. Commonalities between Mayas and Spaniards are explored, such as the custom of leaving offerings and the veneration of ancestors, real or fictive (saints).

John Howard Lawson loved trains. Perhaps his fondness for trains was generated by his fondness for Hollywood. It was in the pivotal year of 1928 that Lawson was employed by MGM “as one of the first dramatists imported from New York to meet the need of dialogue.” Sister Carrie defeated Lawson. The Flesh and the Devil was typical of the challenges presented by the transition to sound. The Pagan was a sensation globally. Dynamite was adapted from Lawson's sense of the Processional. The Lawsons would bounce between New York and Los Angeles and this trampoline-like odyssey and instability would eventuate in Lawson conclusively deciding to make a commitment—not only, finally, to his spouse but, in a life-transforming maneuver, to the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist Party.

Amin explores the development of Sufism in this chapter. He ties it to popular religious practices and the traces of ancient pagan religions in various geographical locations of the Muslim Empire. He explores how theologians and jurists reacted to the development of Sufi concepts and rituals. He also questions several of these rituals, tying them to the historical, political and sectarian contexts at the time of their emergence.

Following on from the previous chapter, this chapter addresses the status of awliya’, or saints and holy men, and other icons venerated by the general populace for different reasons. The chapter discusses the need for a tangible, rather than an abstract, form of spirituality and takes a critical stance towards the over-veneration of such icons almost to the point of sanctification, tying it to remnants of pagan religions as well as historical customs and traditions kept alive by the general populace.

This chapter analyzes another role that boundaries play in children's religious lives, by considering the complex intersection of Pagan parents' teachings about enchantment with the children's own interpretations of their religious experiences. Research of this sort has the potential to increase understanding of contemporary Pagan practice and to enhance the study of this new religion. Beyond providing data regarding the practices of adult new religious practitioners, however, child-centered ethnographic research can offer insight into the ways in which the magical and supernatural are not just understood, but also integrated and manipulated in daily Pagan life. Pagan parents offer their children a world filled with magical presences and supernatural events, and children use the raw materials of this magical world—stories, songs, rituals, costumes—to improvise and construct the religious worlds of their childhoods.

This introductory chapter states the book's aim to examine the interactions between contemporary Pagan adults and children as they establish, inhabit, and negotiate understandings of childhood, adulthood, and the religious imagination. Although contemporary North American Pagan adults and children frequently emerge from a predominantly middle-class environment, Pagan adults' understandings of the religious and social worlds of childhood, relationships between parents and children, and memories of their own religious childhoods depart from those of mainstream Americans. The book indicates that contemporary American Pagans draw on rich, diverse, mythologized understandings of their religion's history to construct a theoretical understanding of childhood as a realm of wonder, fantasy, and religious wisdom that adults frequently attempt to re-inhabit. In many ways, Pagan adults displace Pagan children from the realm of childhood.

This chapter analyzes the many ways Pagan adults present themselves as “childlike” in an attempt to both usurp and invert traditional understandings of power, responsibility, privilege, and spirituality. Adult Pagans also frequently suggest that children may be unable to participate appropriately in religious ritual. The chapter questions whether the religion's emphasis on childlike wonder encourages a disingenuous rejection of adulthood among Pagan adults, and probes into how these adults position themselves as eternal children in the process of raising children of their own. A fundamental tension in the study of Pagan families involves dissonant messages from adults to children regarding explicit and implicit moral codes, as well as dissonance between these adults' ideals and behaviors.

This concluding chapter argues that the study of Pagan parenting and childhood illuminates important features of American parenting and childhood as well as religious communities and imaginations in the twenty-first century. French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger suggests that religion can be understood not only as a chain of memory, but also as a process of undoing certain kinds of religious, historical, and personal memory. As American parents reformulate conceptions of idealized childhood, they pave the way for experiences that recall Romantic ideals of childhood innocence and wonder. At the same time, they emphasize the mature wisdom and spiritual gravity of these expectations of children. Pagans are not representative of all Americans, but both their specificity and their similarity can illuminate aspects of the American religious imagination.