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This chapter offers crucial historical context and shows just how freighted the category of religion can be for Native peoples. Religion, or its absence, served as a key instrument in the legalization of the dispossession of North America, first through the legal Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which continues to inform federal Indian law, and second through the criminalization of traditional religions under the federal Indian Bureau's Civilization Regulations from 1883 to 1934. As devastating as the regulations and their assemblage of civilization with a thinly veiled Protestant Christianity were, affected Native people strategically engaged religious freedom discourse to protect those threatened practices that they increasingly argued were their “religions” and protected under religious liberty. Even as the government and missionary sought to curb Native religious practices thought to retard civilization, Euro-Americans began in earnest to fantasize about a Native spirituality that they could collect, admire, and inhabit. But while this awakened Euro-American appreciation for Native cultures served to help lift the formal confines of the Civilization Regulations in the 1930s, it has continued to beset Native efforts to protect collective traditions.

This chapter examines some aspects of the philosophical attitude of the Stoics, early as well as later, vis- à-vis traditional religion. It first addresses some preliminary issues, such as the epistemological basis of Stoic philosophical theology (section 2), and the Stoic view or views of the development of human civilization (sections 3 and 4). In the course of this discussion, the chapter mainly deals with the Stoic attitude towards myth. Whereas some aspects of this attitude — in particular the Stoic practice of etymologization and allegorizing readings — have been given considerable attention in recent scholarly literature, this does not apply to the subject of sections 5 and 6, where the Stoics' attitude towards various aspects of traditional cult is considered. Conclusions are drawn in section 7.

Chapter 2 discusses the arguments on the opposing views of the secularists in terms of modern society and traditional religion regarding religion's involvement in the public realm. Secularists’ notable views on the involvement of religion in modern democracy is examined here. The chapter states that religion, in essence, is undemocratic and repressive. It also disucsses the idea that religious beliefs are irrational, and thus have no place in the organization of society; religious values are, at best, peripheral to environmentalism, which should be shaped by science not faith; an involvement in politics is bad for religion; and religion has become increasingly irrelevant to modern life. Religious environmentalism is one part of a global movement that seeks to integrate the most creative, humane, and hopeful parts of both secular society and religious tradition.

Tradition, secularization and fundamentalism—all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation, they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. The discussion around the mutually implicated meanings of the “secular” and “fundamentalism” bring to the foreground more than ever, and in a way unprecedented in the pre-modern context, the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have always emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern when Tradition as living discernment is not fundamentalism? And what does it mean to think as a Tradition and live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the “secular”?

This chapter deals with two interrelated issues related to supernatural activity. It first describes and places in perspective the appearance of certain narratives that illustrate two different categories of supernatural experiences, namely ghost stories and narratives of spirit possession. Next, it tries to understand the role some aspects of traditional spirit religion and ritual play in the context of postterror Sri Lanka. This chapter also puts in context how certain aspects in the construction of the self vary between “normal” and altered states of consciousness, and how such variations are directly connected to the victims' perceptions of revenge and justice.

Journalism played a significant role in the secularization of American public life by spreading ideas adapted from institutional spheres of knowledge production to the general public. This chapter focuses on two areas of journalism history: changes in the presentation of traditional religion in the press; and efforts to establish the “profession” of journalism between 1870 and 1930. During this period, traditional religion was presented as being too sectarian and lacking in modern understanding, and modern science was emphasized as the authoritative voice for modern life. Journalism professionalizers framed professional journalism in religious terms, arguing that “factual” knowledge was the key to solving social problems and that journalism alone was in the position to provide such knowledge to the mass of society. This placed journalism in an indispensable role between primary knowledge producers and the rest of society, in which capacity it fulfilled the role of the moral educator of modern society.

This essay describes the active resistance to both Christian and Islamic efforts in sub-Saharan Africa to exclude the indigenous religious traditions of Africa from legal protection. African traditional or indigenous religions are often not acknowledged as “religions” due to a lack of centralized structure and leadership. Hackett explores the legal prejudice African religious practitioners encounter both locally and internationally.

Tim Hartman examines African traditional religions (ATRs) more broadly, comparing three major themes in their theological anthropology with the theology of Karl Barth: creation, disobedience/sin, and destiny/salvation. Drawing especially from the work of Kofi Asare Opoku and Jacob Olupona, Hartman argues that Barth and ATRs share similar understandings of God as creator who is wholly other than creation, but who is close to creation, and a disruption of that original closeness because of human disobedience. However, because of their different interpretations of human disobedience, Barth and ATRs differ significantly in understanding salvation or the resolution of the disruption caused by that disobedience. In his concluding reflections, Hartman suggests a further convergence worth exploring: in contrast to some other Western theologians, both Barth and ATRs describe all humanity as one whole, not divided into groups.

This chapter discusses the major manifestations of African traditional religion in the New World. It outlines significant general principles and practices carried to the Western Hemisphere by captive Africans from two regions, which inform West and Central West African religious practices as well as the major New World African religious manifestations establishing where Hoodoo fits in vis-à-vis the other New World syncretic religious forms. It considers the practice of spirit possession by a deity, spirit, or ancestor as part of West and Central West African religious tradition, and how it came to be observed in sacred contexts among African Americans in the United States in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the place of spiritual forces in herbal and naturopathic healing within the context of African traditional religion. Finally, it looks at the role of divination in the diagnosis of physical or mental illness in both traditional African society and in old plantation Hoodoo.

This chapter explores the movement and recoalescing of eight essential elements into the African Religion Complex (ARC), thus enabling the Hoodoo religion to emerge briefly: counterclockwise sacred circle dancing; spirit possession; the principle of sacrifice; ritual water immersion; divination; ancestor reverence; belief in spiritual cause of malady; and herbal and naturopathic medicine. Something resembling Hoodoo developed among the first generation of culturally diverse Africans born in the North American colonies. Enslaved Africans manifest a range of responses to contact with both slavery and Christian worship. But whenever they worshipped, these children of Africa expressed spiritual emotion in bodily patterns inherited from African traditional religion. The primary African components from which Hoodoo would be constituted were drawn from a range of different African ethnic cultures that stretched from the area now known as Senegal down the West African coast to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This chapter focuses on the place traditional religion held in the lives of certain men of the fourth-century elite, not only Libanius but also his friends and acquaintances. In doing so the chapter turns to the rare instances of orthopraxis (standardized rituals and cult acts, including prayer) that occur in Libanius's work. A general sense of his everyday religious practice is missing; most of the time he appears only as an observer in religious contexts. Libanius's epistolary reveals two distinct groups of pagans: those who supported paganism with some energy and those more moderate pagans (herein referred to as “gray pagans”) for whom paganism was a way of life rather than a cause to sustain.

This chapter discusses the connection between spirituality and the inner self. Interest in the inner self was renewed during the late 1980s and 1990s, as part of Americans' quest for spirituality. This chapter begins with two examples of how the inner self has helped people find their spirituality. It then studies the changing nature of the self, which also reviews the contrast between dwelling and seeking. It also addresses two contrasting beliefs that focusing on the self could prevent a person from being guided by a religious community, or could help a person develop deeper spirituality. The chapter also tries to determine if the spirituality of the inner self is the same as traditional religion.

This chapter addresses the argument that local sensorium affects the experience of health and illness. It tries to approach the Anlo traditional religion as a system of the body and as a set of techniques for sensory manipulation. The chapter also aims to show that definitions of personhood and engagement with other intentional persons are important to health and well-being, and are thus directly tied to or based in a cultural group's sensorium. It then examines how Anlo-speaking individuals place themselves in relation to their family, society, community, the gods, and the cosmos.

This chapter shows that spirituality, understood as the pursuit of spiritual virtues, is not a recent cultural innovation but an important element within traditional religion. This claim is supported by an examination of the role of compassion and paradox in Mahayana Buddhism; ecstatic devotion to God in Sufism; humility in the teachings of the Catholic Saint Thomas a Kempis; and joy in everyday life in Hasidic Judaism. In each case religious tradition stresses aspects of spirituality that are compatible with today's “spiritual but not religious” perspectives, and which often form the basis for many of today's spiritual teachers. In each case the spiritual power of the traditional teaching can be detached from a particular framework of religious belief about God or revelation.

This chapter examines the role of the Protocols as part of an ominous new phenomenon: secular “political religions.” The Protocols is a remarkable case study in the way that, under the secular pressures of modernity's skepticism, scientific rigor, and drive to separate church and state, religious beliefs reemerged in a new and different idiom. The Protocols appeared in the middle of the “1900 moment” (1880–1910), when “the general worldview was affected by the fall in influence of the great religions” and when that collapse of traditional religion created a devastating psychological void. In this sense, the Protocols as a mythical narrative participated in the “re-enchantment” of the world—acting not as a regression from modernity but as a response to it.

Using Hadda Sahib's as a focus, this chapter examines traditional religious authority in Afghanistan. The story that introduces this chapter is typical of the stories heard and representative of the analytical problem faced here. Here is a dramatic instance of the Mulla's power and influence, an influence that extends beyond this world to the magical realm of Koh-i Qaf itself. It substantiates an argument that miracles are above all else a discursive vehicle by means of which a certain kind of ethos and worldview are made real and apparent.