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Visions of a Christian society in the South Pacific varied within Protestantism, as well as between Protestants and Roman Catholics. Some settlers argued for a secular society, as distinct from one without religious tests or an established church. Primary education was the main area of disagreement, with secular systems established in most colonies by the 1870s, leaving Roman Catholics and Lutherans to finance their own schools. Pressures for political and religious cooperation were strong, leading to Methodist and Presbyterian unions and federation of the Australian colonies. Land wars in New Zealand and New Caledonia left a bitter legacy.

This chapter sketches state-reformist initiatives in the late Ottoman empire, considered as systemic transformations in a global context of modern state forms with associated forms of social engineering and state intervention in culture and law-making. It proposes that the consequence of these changes and transformations were secularising, intended as well as unintended. The chapter discusses the beginnings of educational and cognitive transformation, the rise of a new class and type of senior bureaucrats, the emergence of a modern intelligentsia, the appearance and spread of new forms of dress. Also discussed are counter-vailing, conservative reactions, both by religious institutions, resistant to reform and the attrition of authority, and conservative milieu more broadly. The issue of women’s education, dress and public visibility emerges as a site of contestation.

Marie Corelli was Hall Caine's jealous rival as best-seller for several decades. Like him, she had an extraordinarily high opinion of herself and believed she had created a literature to last along with Shakespeare, whom she idolised. Because of Shakespeare she chose to reside in Stratford-on-Avon where she equally attracted worshippers and sight-seers. Corelli's overwrought style and unbounded imagination drew countless readers as well as critical derision: she maintained a long-running feud against reviewers whom she felt envied her genius. She affected to despise publicity while courting it. Her novels involved the summoning up of fantasy worlds of pseudo- science combined with spiritualism. They were also replete with denunciations of what she considered contemporary vices: the hypocrisies of aristocratic society, toadying to royalty, women marrying for money and title, New Women, the sexual double standard, gossip, secular education, corrupt critics, and so forth. She herself held many of the ugly prejudices of her day, including anti-Semitism. A popular lecturer, she was an outspoken anti-suffragist while at the same time a notably independent woman.

Modern Enlightenment based constitutionalism accords secularism a privileged position: by remaining secular, the public sphere should warrant neutrality among religions and among the latter and non-religious ideologies in order to provide an optimal setting for the realization of freedom of religion as well as of freedom from religion. In recent decades, however, this institutional secularism has come under intense attack from a number of different quarters intent on dislodging it from its constitutional pedestal. These attacks have targeted secularism’s claim to neutrality from religious as well as non-religious perspectives. This Chapter explores the case for “ideological” secularism as one of many conceptions of the good competing against others in a post-secular constitutional polity. Adopting a pluralist perspective, the chapter concludes that under current circumstances ideological secularism is easier to defend than institutional secularism.

This chapter identifies various trends and developments which threatened Prague's traditional culture during the last decades of the eighteenth century. It analyses the unique responses of Prague's rabbinate to the Haskalah, the increasing centralization of the Habsburg state, and Sabbatianism. It also points out the importance of the state in the transformation of Prague's traditional Jewish society, particularly its embrace of German culture and cites Joseph II's systematic policy of Germanization that reshaped several of the central community institutions. The chapter highlights state-imposed secular education that forced the rabbinic authorities to modify the curriculum offered to Prague's Jewish youth. It discusses the traditional rabbinic assertion of the primacy of Torah, which precluded the study of extra-talmudic subjects.

Building on the previous chapter, this chapter argues that religious innovation among student activists has also been enabled by the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998. Unlike life during authoritarianism, democracy meant that religious identity is no longer subject to the same degree of microscopic governmental surveillance. People are able to try on different religious identities as they join various ideological groups at once, or move between them, and pursue different strategies to deal with the enlargement of secular liberal ideals in this context. The flurry of religious improvisation produces the counter-intuitive patterns of Islamists emerging from secular schools and liberal Muslims from madrasas.

This chapter mainly addresses the ascetic authority. Special emphasis is placed on the importance of the desert—a symbol of total withdrawal and rejection of the world—as a training ground for those who aspire to ascetic authority. The complex nature of episcopal leadership as a combination of pragmatic, spiritual, and ascetic authority provides an explanation for the frequent rejection of ordination by monks. A discussion on the ambivalent monastic attitude toward ecclesiastical office is then given. The desert has played an important role in the New Testament. It is explained that the specific tripartite scheme of secular education, monasticism, and ministry is most commonly applied in the laudatory description of bishops, modeled on the biblical exemplar of Moses. The hagiographical and theological literature of late antiquity that has been the basis of the investigation until now establishes the ideal of the priesthood.

This chapter traces the response to an educational endeavour initiated by the philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch for the Jews of Galicia. It shows how the Polish press expressed a good deal of suspicion towards the proposed gift, despite the goal of productivization that was favoured by so many social reformers and the fact that some of the schools envisioned would serve both non-Jewish and Jewish students. It also illustrates the important place of education in social and political debates of the time. The chapter refers to Orthodox Jews that were wary of the advancement of secular Jewish education, which they saw as endangering traditional religious teaching, and Poles that were afraid of Hirsch's foundation on engaging in a large-scale process of buying land belonging to Poles. It analyzes Bolesław Prus's attitude to the issue of vocational education for Jews to understand his critical reception of Hirsch's initiative.

This chapter examines the actions of nuns who belonged to the Sōtō Zen sect in Japan to elucidate their interpretation of Buddhist teachings, especially those of Zen Master Dōgen. More specifically, it considers the many different ways in which Sōtō nuns sought for equal treatment, such as combining monastic discipline and training with secular education. To this end, the chapter traces the three generations of Sōtō monastics who have been responsible for freeing nuns from systematically undue restrictions: the four pioneering nuns who founded Nagoya's official training monastery for nuns in 1904, Kojima Kendō, and Aoyama Shundō. These women manifest strength of character, creative ingenuity, and a profound commitment to monastic life based on the ideals of Buddhism.

This chapter subverts the traditional image of Galician Jewry around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far from being ignorant and uneducated, this chapter reveals a significant number of secularly educated Galician Jewish academics and doctors. It shows that, in spite of the resistance to secular education among Galician Jews, there were many within the community who wished to allow their children to profit from the new opportunities open to them. The chapter goes on to explore how the Hebrew, German, and Polish cultural influences all managed to persist throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century, although Yiddish remained identified with the uneducated. Nevertheless, it is revealed that, over time, the balance between these three factors began to shift.

This chapter of Frieden’s memoir carries forward the story of the author’s education, but it also reveals a great deal about the development of his psyche. Here Frieden describes his attempts to continue his preparation for the rabbinate, about his first significant interactions with the opposite sex, about his troubles with the military draft, and about his first encounter with the idea of marriage. This chapter also contains a number of Frieden’s by now familiar explanatory asides. Frieden expounds upon the way Hasidic masters developed their information networks, for example, and upon the way Jews circumvented the Russian empire’s laws prohibiting their involvement in agricultural lease-holding.