Chapter 8 explores specifically anti-religious propaganda, arguing that initially this was relatively unfocused. The Great Leap Forward saw an attempt to propagate atheism through peasant philosophy teams and a mass campaign to get workers, peasants, and soldiers to write poems and songs discrediting belief in supernatural agency. The chapter explores the CCP’s appropriation of traditional cultural forms to erode popular belief in the agency of non-visible entities, focusing on long-form storytelling, revolutionary opera, and use of cinema for the same end. It briefly explores the onset of the Mao cult and the turn to small groups as a way of undermining folk religion, concentrating on a discussion among women in industry and a discussion in a village, again largely involving women, and suggests how taken-for-granted knowledge had become a terrain for different views.

This chapter sets the scene for the book. It introduces the Dominican order, the context of its foundation in the thirteenth century, and its relationship to other liturgical traditions. Like many other new religious orders, the Dominican order underwent a period of liturgical revision in the decades following its foundation. Three ‘exemplar’ manuscripts survive that record the final authoritative version of the Dominican liturgy; this book uses the exemplars as a lens through which the Dominican liturgy can be examined. The chapter sets out the two key themes that shape the remainder of the book, namely the making of the Dominican liturgy in terms of the material production of Dominican liturgical books, and in terms of the creation of the Dominican liturgy and chant recorded in the exemplars. The chapter closes with an outline of the book’s chapters and appendices.

The introduction fits the religious identities and entanglements of imperial and royal officials into recent work in critical fields of inquiry in the study of late antiquity. It sets the approaches and arguments of the book in the context of previous work on the conversion of the senatorial aristocracy, the religious identities of pagans and Christians, the development of asceticism and episcopal authority, the prevalence (or otherwise) of religious intolerance and violence, patterns of imperial churchgoing, and forms of Christian observance within the household. It also contextualises and justifies the chronology of the book and the specific definition of the ‘state’ and ‘officials’ used within it.

This chapter examines the core convictions of the New Spirituality, the worldview of individuals often referred to as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). The SBNR would maintain they are nonreligious, although they tend to believe in the divine or our inner divinity and that we have an inborn capacity to know the divine or the deeper spiritual realities of the cosmos.

Chapter 6 is the first of four chapters to consider one element of the Dominican liturgy, focussing here on the thirteenth-century development of the calendar of saints’ feasts. This chapter draws on the sanctoral cycles from books for the mass and office that survive from the earliest years of the Dominican order and from the initial revision of the Dominican liturgy by a commission of four friars. It compares these with the sanctoral cycle of Humbert of Romans’ final revision of the liturgy, as recorded in three exemplars: Rome, Santa Sabina, XIV L 1; London, British Library, Add. 23935; and Salamanca, San Esteban, SAL.–CL.01. Five distinct stages are identified, including a previously unknown period of unofficial revision prior to the commission of the four friars. Various trends are identified regarding the types of feasts that were added to, removed from, promoted and/or relegated in the Dominican calendar over the course of the revision. The final portion of the chapter examines how certain tell-tale corrections to Santa Sabina XIV L 1 coincide with points at which changes were made to the saints celebrated by the Dominicans.

Vigorous debate about the advantages and disadvantages of using the term ‘belief’ regarding ancient states of mind and cognition has had a profound effect on the field of ancient history (and others, such as anthropology) in recent decades. This chapter considers which of these are still relevant and which are mutual misunderstandings, and which issues have, in effect, been resolved indirectly (such as injunctions to use different words for greater clarity). The opportunities offered by cognitive science of religion (and some limits) are set in a broader context of the study of religion. Behind many of these debates (and misunderstandings), it is argued, secular hegemony intrinsically seeks to ‘contain’ religion (taken pragmatically to be the assertion of the actual existence of divinities). This insoluble tension exerts an unceasing influence on our formulation of questions and answers in history. Recently, we have seen a fruitful greater sympathy for religion and ‘believers’ develop, while an appropriate secular distance from empathy is still maintained, notwithstanding the fact that empathy may contribute to an openness to greater sympathy and understanding: the tension does, and will, persist.

This chapter presents an examination of central commitments found in some Buddhist traditions. The aim is to identify a Buddhist worldview that differs from the others considered in this study and thus constitutes a genuine alternative to them.

This chapter surveys the wide range of definitions of belief in recent scholarship and explores the potential of the cognitive science of religion for generating new approaches. It rejects the assumption that it is possible to talk about the presence or absence of ‘belief’ in Greek religion in a monolithic way, such that the Greeks either believed wholly in their gods or they did not, and challenges the related assumption that beliefs combine to form stable, internally consistent systems. It draws on a range of concepts from cognitive science to explore how contradictions between beliefs and between beliefs and experience might be managed and argues for a dynamic, contextual and plural understanding of Greek religious belief.