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This chapter focuses on the unity of experience in Native American religious traditions. Native American traditions stress a unity of experience. Where such traditions are still alive and spiritually viable, the dimension and expression of the sacred is present in all of life's necessary activities. When the elements of time, place, language, art, and the metaphysics of nature come together, however, as they do in ritual activities, the experience of the sacred is intensified. The three cumulative possibilities that must be accomplished by spiritually effective rites: purification, expansion, and identity are mentioned, as are initiation rites, and humor in Native American rites.

This introductory chapter sets the study in the broader context of changes in religion’s place in modern society, especially the shift from ascribed to achieved religious identity. It briefly reviews the Second Vatican Council as a response to societal modernization and the emergence of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) from it. It brings the concept of initiation back into the social scientific study of religion, suggesting van Gennep’s ideal type as a benchmark against which to compare the contemporary RCIA. This allows exploration of the various ways in which tradition is transformed when it is recovered and brought into modern society. The chapter concludes with orienting questions, chapter overviews, and a review of the study’s data and methods.

This chapter provides historical context for and an overview of the contemporary Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) as it is practiced in the United States today. The RCIA is a direct result of the Second Vatican Council. Like other developments in the Catholic Church following Vatican II, the liturgical changes implemented were revolutionary and truly transformed Catholicism. In restoring the catechumenate for adults, theologians looked to the ancient church for models of initiation. The normative RCIA process is composed of four distinct periods (evangelization and precatechumenate, the catechumenate, purification and enlightenment, and mystagogy) and three ritual transitions that move individuals from one period to the next. The central ritual transition is the reception of the sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil.

This chapter reviews the most significant general conclusions to be drawn about initiation from studying the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) as a rite of passage in the Catholic Church. Insights are gained from looking at the initiation process as both tradition and modernity, objective and subjective, individual and collective, universal and local, and as an end and a beginning.

This chapter focuses not on a period of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) but a ritual transition—the reception of the sacraments of initiation at the Easter Vigil. This incorporation of new Catholics into the body of the church should mark the culmination of the RCIA as a rite of passage, according to van Gennep’s model. But do initiation rituals do what they say they do? From an objective perspective, receiving the sacraments of initiation is a significant threshold for the individual becoming Catholic, after which the individual has a new status: full membership in the church. From a subjective perspective, in some cases the initiation sacraments inspire a feeling of family, home, and community, reflective of incorporation. In other cases, people receive the sacraments but remain unattached. Thus, understanding both the objective and subjective dimensions is necessary to a full understanding of incorporation.

This chapter shows how secrecy can provide order that regulates practice and gives a clear course of action by focusing on Urahōmon's basic teachings and initiation rites. It first presents an ura genealogy of Urahōmon before discussing the organization's omote and ura scriptures. It then explains how to become a shinjingyōja and goes on consider the significance of the Urahōmon rite called ichinen kimyō. It also examines the ways in which secrecy within Urahōmon provides a hierarchy by expressing which practices are most important, thus taking on structural power that regulates to a large degree what can be done when, and with whom.

How do the individuals who become Catholic change over the course of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), and does the initiation process itself explain that change? This chapter focuses on two outcomes in particular: first, how individuals’ understandings of Catholicism change over the course of the RCIA process; second, how individuals’ religious practices change from the start of the RCIA process to after its conclusion. Growth in religious understanding and practices are key indicators of formation as an apprenticeship in the faith and incorporation in the church body. In assessing this growth and its relationship to the initiation process itself, this chapter connects changes at the individual level to aspects of the RCIA process at the parish level. These analyses show that the RCIA process often does make a difference, both in individuals’ understandings of and involvement in the Catholic tradition.

This chapter deals with an important component of the traditional Nubian ritual system, but one which has lapsed into relative insignificance in modem times. It begins by describing the circumcision rites for Egyptian Nubian boys as they were practiced in some parts of Nubia (e.g., Diwan and Abu Hor) as late as 1933, and excision rituals for girls as they are still frequently performed. Nubian circumcision and excision ceremonies cannot simply be categorized as “rites of passage” or as “initiation rites.” They embody a complex constellation of interrelated beliefs, values, and principles of social structure—all of which must be examined in order to comprehend their form and existence. Furthermore, though the rituals had important effects on the social awareness and identity formation of children, they had no obvious relationship to gaps or failures in the socialization process.

How do individuals in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) learn to be Catholic? Like many rites of passage, the RCIA’s periods and ritual transitions are designed to lead people gradually into skillful church membership. In the period of purification and enlightenment, emphasis shifts from instruction (learning about Catholicism) to formation (learning to be Catholic). Formation requires an experiential base of understanding and mentors to give shape to it. This chapter finds that formation takes place unevenly. There are times when significant experiences are generated in liturgical rites, but no effort is made to give shape to them. And there are moments when mentors attempt to shape understandings but without any experiential base to form. But sometimes the RCIA process does bring together individual experience and the Catholic tradition in a formational way. When this happens, mentors help initiate their apprentices into Catholicism as a way of living.

This chapter examines the use of a particular artefact, the red tail feather of the African grey parrot. This feather adorns the heads of priests and priestesses as a marker of full initiation into the rites of the particular deities they serve. The chapter analyses its imagery, comparing it to that of other feathers which feature in the ideas and practices of these shrines, and examines how individuals establish different, and sometimes opposing, significances in relation to it. This has implications for other artefacts and also for the more customary objects of Benin art history such as, for example, the plaques and other leaded brasses.

What do parish leaders of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) teach during inquiry and the catechumenate about what Catholicism is? Like educational curricula generally, RCIA curricula can be “read” for the beliefs, values, and understandings they explicitly espouse or implicitly convey. This chapter distinguishes between explicit and hidden curricula. The explicit curriculum is the substantive content taught, seen most clearly in the syllabus of topics to be covered in the course of study. The hidden curriculum teaches not content but more general orientations, especially orientations to authority, as Paolo Freire argues. The hidden curriculum is examined through the pedagogy employed—how instruction is organized and content delivered. Although there are some interesting similarities across parishes in visions of Catholicism in the explicit curriculum, there are also important differences between parishes in the hidden curriculum. This chapter ties these pedagogical differences to social class differences between parishes.

This epilogue highlights some of the implications of the book's findings for our understanding of Shin Buddhism and secrecy in religion. It does this by clarifying the questions that the book has answered in part and by raising questions that remain unanswered. First, it considers the things that unite and divide Shin Buddhists, from the reading of writings by Shinran and Rennyo as scripture to the emphasis on lay religious life, the centrality of Amida and devotion to him, and the shinjin. The discussion then turns to how different social contexts lead to different consequences of secrecy, what powers secrecy has, and how esotericism and social secrecy relate to one another. The Gosho and the initiation rites in Urahōmon are cited as good examples of how esoteric and social secrecy can have a symbiotic relationship.

Of the innumerable religious options available in America today, why do some people choose Roman Catholicism? This chapter focuses on what motivates people to seek to become Catholic and enter the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Most individuals find their way to the Catholic Church through mundane mechanisms like family and coworkers. They are products of their circumstances, not religious seekers or even consumers shopping for faith. Beyond the mechanisms of recruitment, this chapter accounts for individuals’ motivations for change. It explains the decision to become Catholic not as a rational choice by individuals seeking to maximize their religious utility or to conserve their household religious capital, but as a moral action by individuals seeking to align their actions with broader moral worldviews and belief systems. This chapter draws on Christian Smith’s book Moral, Believing Animals in developing this alternative to rational choice theories of conversion.

In Greek legend, the Amazons were considered to be better, faster, and smarter than men. Amazons were the prototype of female masculinity, but their historicity has been controversial. Archaeological evidence of women buried with weapons among ancient Scythians, Sauromatians, and Thracians suggests that there is a kernel of truth in the Amazon legends, but that the ancient Greeks subsumed women warriors from these various ethnicities into one single ethnic group: the Amazons. Once the imaginary Amazons had been created out of the raw material of history, they took on a life of their own in ancient Greek culture. Although Amazons are often thought of as an “other,” they played a central role in Greek religion. A thorough investigation of the Amazons problematizes the theory of the “other” through which the myth of the Amazons has been largely understood. The Amazons were an “Orientalized” fabrication of historical warrior women.