A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox, Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition. Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits—the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States—show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity” in America today.

This title features new translations of primary documents of a crucial period in the development of attitudes to witchcraft. In 1901, a rich collection of extracts from documents relating to witch beliefs and witch trials in the Middle Ages - "Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung in Mittelalter" - was published. Most of the original documents are in Latin, with some in medieval German and French, and it has been left largely untranslated, making the material inaccessible, and neglected. This new translation of the key documents will enable students and scholars to look afresh at this crucial period in the development of attitudes towards witchcraft. Through the translated extracts we can see the beliefs and activities which had been formally condemned by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, but which had not yet become subject to widespread eradicating pogroms, start to be allied with heresy and with changing conceptions of demonic activity. The extensive introductory essay gives the reader the historical, theological, intellectual and social background and contexts of the translated documents. The translations themselves will all have introductory notes. This volume will contribute significantly to our understanding of the witchcraft phenomenon in the Middle Ages.

Witches and Warlocks of New York is a collection of legends and historical accounts about witches and warlocks from the Empire State. This will be the second in a series (the first being Massachusetts publishing September 1, 2021). New York has a surprisingly rich history of witches and witchcraft. These stories are known locally in the towns where they occurred but have never been collected into one book before. Included are a history and origins of witchcraft in New York State and historical tales of "witches" across the state including Hulda and the thirteen Witches of the Catskills.

This book examines Sami shamanism in Norway as a uniquely distinctive local manifestation of a global new religious phenomenon. It takes the diversity and hybridity within shamanic practices seriously through case studies from a Norwegian setting and highlights the ethnic dimension of these currents, through a particular focus on Sami versions of shamanism. The book's thesis is that the construction of a Sami shamanistic movement makes sense from the perspective of the broader ethno-political search for a Sami identity, with respect to connections to indigenous peoples worldwide and trans-historically. It also makes sense in economic and marketing terms. Based on more than ten years of ethnographic research, the book paints a picture of contemporary shamanism in Norway in its cultural context, relating it both to the local mainstream cultures in which it is situated and to global networks. By this, the book provides the basis for a study revealing the development of inventiveness, nuances and polyphony that occur when a global religion of shamanism is merged in a Norwegian setting, colored by its own political and cultural circumstances.

The Jewel of Annual Astrology is an encyclopaedic treatise on Tajika or Sanskritized Perso-Arabic astrology, dealing particularly with the casting and interpretation of anniversary horoscopes. Authored in 1649 CE by Balabhadra Daivajna, court astrologer to Shah Shuja' - governor of Bengal and second son of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan - it casts light on the historical development of the Tajika school by extensive quotations from earlier works spanning five centuries. With this first-ever scholarly edition and translation of a Tajika text, Martin Gansten makes a significant contribution not only to the study of an important but little known knowledge tradition, but also to the intellectual historiography of Asia and the transmission of horoscopic astrology in the medieval and early modern periods.

The Problem of Disenchantment offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the intellectual history of science, religion, and "the occult" in the early 20th century. By developing a new approach to Max Weber's famous idea of a "disenchantment of the world", and drawing on an impressively diverse set of sources, Egil Asprem opens up a broad field of inquiry that connects the histories of science, religion, philosophy, and Western esotericism. Parapsychology, occultism, and the modern natural sciences are usually viewed as distinct cultural phenomena with highly variable intellectual credentials. In spite of this view, Asprem demonstrates that all three have met with similar intellectual problems related to the intelligibility of nature, the relation of facts to values, and the dynamic of immanence and transcendence, and solved them in comparable terms.

This volume presents results from new and ongoing research efforts into the role of nonreligion in education, politics, law and society from a variety of different countries. Featuring data from a wide range of quantitative and qualitative studies, the book exposes the relational dynamics of religion and nonreligion. Firstly, it highlights the extent to which nonreligion is defined and understood by legal and institutional actors on the basis of religions, and often replicates the organisation of society and majority religions. At the same time, it displays how essential it is to approach nonreligion on its own, by freeing oneself from the frameworks from which religion is thought. The book addresses pressing questions such as: How can nonreligion be defined, and how can the "nones" be grasped and taken into account in studies on religion? How does the sociocultural and religious backdrop of different countries affect the regulation and representation of nonreligion in law and policymaking? Where and how do nonreligious individuals and collectives fit into institutions in contemporary societies? How does nonreligion affect notions of citizenship and national belonging? Despite growing scholarly interest in the increasing number of people without religion, the role of nonreligion in legal and institutional settings is still largely unexplored. This volume helps fill the gap, and will be of interest to students, researchers, policymakers and others seeking deeper understanding of the changing role of nonreligion in modern societies.

What do people believe about death and the afterlife? How do they negotiate the relationship between science and religion? How do they understand apparently paranormal events? What do they make of sensations of awe, wonder or exceptional moments of sudden enlightenment? The volunteer mass observers responded to such questions with a freshness, openness and honesty which compels attention. Using this rich material, Mass Observers Making Meaning captures the extraordinarily diverse landscape of belief and disbelief to be found in Britain in the late 20th-century, at a time when Christianity was in steep decline, alternative spiritualities were flourishing and atheism was growing. Divided as they were about the ultimate nature of reality, the mass observers were united in their readiness to puzzle about life’s larger questions. Listening empathetically to their accounts, James Hinton – himself a convinced atheist – seeks to bring divergent ways of finding meaning in human life into dialogue with one another, and argues that we can move beyond the cacophony of conflicting beliefs to an understanding of our common need and ability to seek meaning in our lives.