The English Province of the Society of Jesus was responsible for the Catholic mission to the English North American colonies. The first missionaries were sent to Maryland (established 1634) at the invitation of the proprietor, the Catholic Lord Baltimore Cecil Calvert (1605/6–75), where they maintained a presence for the entire colonial period. Maryland served as their headquarters for a mission that encompassed the territory between New York and Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. In all, more than 150 priests and brothers were sent to labor in the colonies between 1634 and 1776. The Jesuits financed the mission with the support of the English Province, the profits generated by the plantations and properties they owned in Maryland and Pennsylvania, bequests they received from the laity, and two endowed funds. They operated independently of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda Fide, the Vatican agency created in 1622 to oversee missions, which expressed little interest in the activities of these missionaries. When the Jesuits were suppressed as a religious order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, the missionaries in the American colonies submitted to the authority of the vicar apostolic of the London district and continued on in their labors as secular (diocesan) priests.

Orthodox Christians sometimes refer to their faith as the best-kept secret in America. Globally, Orthodox Christians number between 210 and 225 million, making Orthodoxy the world's second largest Christian denomination. In North America the Orthodox churches claim upward of 4 million adherents, of whom perhaps only 1.2 to 2 million are active supporting members. Nevertheless, even in regions where Orthodox Christians are relatively numerous, their history, beliefs, and practices remain largely unknown. Occasional feature articles in local newspapers may call attention to the pageantry of Orthodox Holy Week, which often falls some weeks after Western Christians have celebrated it, or to customs associated with Christmas, which for many Orthodox Christians falls thirteen days after the Western observance. But generally these token acknowledgments simply reinforce the impression that Orthodoxy is exotic, foreign, so closely linked to alien cultures – Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Syrian – as to be non-American, if not altogether un-American.

Orthodoxy in America is perceived as exotic. It also is perceived as fragmented. Despite efforts toward greater unity over the past half century, it is divided into over a dozen jurisdictions, which have been established not only along ethnic lines but also, in several cases, along factional lines within a given ethnic group. For example, Manhattan is home to a Greek Orthodox cathedral, a Serbian Orthodox cathedral, a Ukrainian Orthodox cathedral, and no fewer than three cathedrals that could be classed as Russian.

Ingredients for the metaphysical religiosity that pervaded American culture in the nineteenth century and afterward came from a variety of sources. They had been in place in early America from the seventeenth century in the confluence of European esotericism, European – and especially English – country magic, Native American ceremonial belief and practice, and African American worldviews and ritual behavior. In the contact and encounter between different peoples and cultures, ideas and enactments combined and blended without much attention paid to the process. People did what worked and did not stop to label precisely or count ideological costs. Thus across the panoply of cultures that met in the British North Atlantic colonies – and similarly in the other huge tracts of territory that would later become part of the United States – webs of interrelated assumptions and practices could be identified. Broadly labeled magical, these included such domains as astrology, treasure hunting, water witching, healing lore, love conjuration, divination of signs and omens, malediction making, and the like.

While at first glance the list seems anomalous and the invocation of magic dismissive in religious terms, closer scrutiny reveals that, at least for high culture aficionados, a sophisticated work of world construction underlay these and similar beliefs and practices. Magic existed as a form of religion, and the religion that magic expressed was and is metaphysical.

In eighteenth-century Britain, rational religion was much in vogue, and every year saw works of no great originality rolling off the presses. They embraced a wide spectrum of theological opinion. The majority considered that both theistic belief in general and belief in the Christian revelation in particular were founded on solid reasoning, even though the revelation itself was subject to significantly different interpretations among Athanasians, Arians, Arminians, and others. Some, while sharing the view that reason was the only possible foundation, set stringent limits to what was believable, but they normally conceded enough of the initial principles of theism to make it difficult for critics to pin on to them any firmly sustainable charge of atheism. Hume’s subversive Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, written in the 1750s but published only posthumously in 1779, challenged this culture of reason and has had a lasting influence on subsequent debate; but it was not through this work, whose literary form presents a frequently ambiguous message, that he had his main impact at the time. His sceptical philosophy, particularly in more accessible writings such as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), challenged what had hitherto seemed to be basic certainties across a wide front. The implications for religious certainties were clear enough, even without the provocation of his gentle irony, but they could not easily be answered without addressing a whole philosophy.

The problem of personal identity in the form in which it is so widely discussed today had its origin in the late seventeenth century, in John Locke's chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ which he added to the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694). That chapter contains the most detailed and original contemporary treatment of the problem, challenging traditional views about both personality and identity. It was, indeed, revolutionary, and some aspects of it are still much discussed by philosophers. Locke was not, however, the only seventeenth-century philosopher to consider the topic seriously and at length. Problems of personal identity and of identity in general were widely debated long before the seventeenth century, in relation not only to metaphysics, or what is now called ‘philosophy of mind’, but also to moral, legal, and, especially, theological questions. The problem of identity and individuation in general – that is, the problem of what constitutes the identity of any object – is discussed in Chapter 9 of the present book. That problem is the historical as well as the systematic basis for the question of what constitutes the identity of persons. But there have been various responses to this latter question, depending not only on views of identity but also on which concept of person is applied. Indeed, from the notion of person adopted by some philosophers a genuine problem about the identity of persons might not even arise.

By 1550, most Europeans believed that the Protestant Reformation would engulf the entire continent. By 1600, this was no longer a self-evident truth. The Roman Catholic Church had rallied its forces and held off the Protestant advances in Western and Central Europe and regained lost ground in the East. The Oratory of Divine Love, papal reform, the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, and the various coercive devices associated with the Index of Prohibited Books and the Roman Inquisition all contributed to Catholic renewal by the end of the sixteenth century.

By 1600, confessional loyalties had begun to harden among the various strands of the Protestant Reformation. Moreover, recent Reformation historians believe that they had detected not one Protestant reformation, but four: Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, and Radical. The fifth reformation of the sixteenth century is, of course, the Catholic Reformation. This essay will deal with the Protestant reformations that originated on the continent – Lutheran, Calvinist, and Radical – and their identity on the eve of the colonization of North America.

Almost all immigrants to North America in the early seventeenth century had a religious allegiance, and most were serious about their religious commitment. Those who came after them in the next century may have been less committed, but the first generation of newcomers to the American wilderness from the European continent were mostly firm believers whose religious experience reflected one of the three great Protestant traditions: Lutheran, Reformed, or Anabaptist.

Yorùbá verbal art is one of Africa’s most remarkable fields of creativity, both in its variety and its extent. Oral traditions, some of them of great antiquity, continue to flourish and evolve; written literature constitutes one of the largest, longest-established, and liveliest traditions in Africa; there are also numerous new popular genres on the interface between written and oral modes. Supported by a public of about 30 million Yoruba-speakers, mostly in south western Nigeria, Yoruba literature plays a central role in many dimensions of ordinary life, ranging from lessons in school to life cycle ceremonies such as naming, marriage, and burial; from contact with ancestors to commentary on the contemporary national situation. Yoruba literary culture is also one of the few in Africa to be supported by an extensive, long-standing, and sophisticated local critical scholarship in the same language as the literature itself.

Oral genres

Oral genres constitute a vast field of expression with much intertextuality and cross-genre borrowing. Terminology for genres varies. Some genres are widely recognized, their key features agreed upon. But there is also much local specificity and much contextual variation in the use of terms even within a single locality.

Philosophers certainly worried about the problems of mind and soul – what differentiates humans from dogs, dogs from trees, and trees from stones – long before 1600. But in this essay I shall try to emphasise the seventeenth-century contribution to the question – in particular, the way in which the new mechanical philosophy suggested both new problems and. new solutions to old problems connected with life and thought. Following some historical background, we shall discuss various views concerning the soul and the existence and nature of the incorporeal substance that most seventeenth-century thinkers posited. The essay will end with a brief discussion of some of the reactions to the mainstream accounts of mind and soul.

BACKGROUND

It is impossible to give an adequate view of the historical setting of seventeenth-century accounts of mind and soul in a few pages. But a brief sketch can at least serve to indicate something of the background against which seventeenth-century philosophers worked in formulating their conceptions of soul, mind, and the like.

The history of the concept of the soul in the years that immediately preceded the seventeenth century is extremely complex. In addition to the Aristotelianism that continued to dominate the schools, there were significantly different traditions of thought on the question, including Platonic, Hermetic, and Paracelsian views, not to mention the views within the medical tradition; the full history of the question, integrating all these perspectives, has yet to be written. Elements of these traditions will find their way into the accounts of seventeenth-century figures provided later in this chapter.

World War II profoundly transformed American society and the relationship of the United States with the world. The demands of total war led to an unprecedented mobilization of American society that had a profound influence upon religious life. Religious ideals played a prominent part in the ideological struggle against the forces of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Even before America's entrance into the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed freedom of religion and conscience as one of the essential Four Freedoms that the United States sought to promote in a new world order that emerged after the defeat of Nazi Germany. He sought to enlist the support of religious leaders in the fight against Fascism, especially in the heated debates in 1940 and 1941 over mobilization and providing aid to Great Britain and later the Soviet Union. America's clergy and theologians were divided over whether the United States should enter the war, and their divisions mirrored those of the wider public. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the vast majority of religious leaders and believers supported the war.

Religion served as an important influence on Franklin Roosevelt, who was an Episcopalian, and his speeches throughout his presidency echoed appeals to the Christian values of social justice and charity as well as stressed the need for interfaith tolerance.

The history of American religions does not begin on the North American continent. On the contrary, it is a complex tale of the transplantation, interaction, and transformation of diverse imported religious traditions that hailed from a host of geographical locations on the Asian, European, and African continents alongside new religious movements that arose in the context of the Americas. This complexity creates a challenge for all who wish to understand the religious world in the United States, which is an astonishingly diverse, complex, and powerful reality in the opening decades of the twenty-fi rst century. What follows is an anticipation of some of the insights that authors of the essays in this fi rst volume of The Cambridge History of Religions in America provide regarding the early history of American religions.

Native American religions, for example, scattered across the full expanse of the American continent, functioned centrally for their adherents many centuries prior to European exploration and colonization in the New World. Native Americans came from elsewhere too, namely, from Asia. The continuities between Native American and Asian religious traditions were evident in the spiritualities manifest in tribal rituals at sacred sites as well as in the organization of daily life. The role of the shaman also was central in transformative rites, accessing diverse spiritual powers for both individuals and tribes.

In the Iroquoian religion, which existed for more than fi ve thousand years in the Northeast Woodlands, the tradition of ceremonial dance was a means of achieving diverse ends, from healing, to success in the hunt, to victory in war. Spirits and spiritual forces were evident in soul travel and in dreams. Mississippian religious traditions, present in the Midwest and Southeast after 1000 c.e., involved a complex cosmology in which there were diverse deities, including Earth Mother , a female life-giving force. Mississippian shamans gained access to power by fasting and visions.

Born in the colonial experience, the ideology of religious plurality was a consistent part of American life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nurtured by societal battles that emphasized diversity including slavery, immigration, and the role of alternative religions, the pluralist ideology drew increasing momentum from the first interfaith gathering on American soil – the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. As the first public interfaith conversation in the United States, the parliament not only gave voice to Asian religions but also held a mirror to American Christians, for the first time countering expressions of exclusivism that had been part of the Protestant missionary and evangelical traditions. This challenge to the homogeneous view of religious America was followed in the first quarter of the twentieth century by other voices who questioned the vision of the United States as a melting pot following the rapid growth of immigrant communities.

The presence of Asian immigrants in the United States began with the discovery of gold in Sutter's Creek in California in 1849 and with the rapid expansion of the railroads in the second half of the nineteenth century. The railroads and mines hired large numbers of Chinese who were exploited as a cheap source of labor. In California and the Northwest, Asian Indians came to work in the lumber industry following their early presence in Vancouver.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Determinism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that whatever happens in the world is brought about by causes other than itself. In this sense, all the major philosophers of the seventeenth century – with the possible exception of Male-branche – were determinists. But these same philosophers also believed in human freedom. It follows that each of them (again, perhaps excepting Malebranche) was a compatibilist with respect to freedom and determination: each held that being free is logically compatible with being causally determined. Yet their specific teachings on this subject are very different from one another. For they had very different views on the nature and scope of human freedom, and different conceptions of causation.

This chapter concentrates on the teachings of these major figures: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, and Leibniz. There were, of course, other seventeenth-century thinkers who concerned themselves with freedom and determinism – this was one of the most frequently debated issues of the age. And some of these others, in opposition to the philosophers, were incompatibilists. They held that an action logically cannot both be causally determined and be free, in any proper sense of ‘free’. An incompatibilist has two options: adhere to determination and deny that anything or anyone is free (this is hard determinism) or admit free actions and claim that these are undetermined, and thereby reject the doctrine of determinism (this is libertarianism). We know of no seventeenth-century thinker who took the hard determinist position, but quite a few were libertarians.

A Narragansett woman beseeches the spirits of her ancestors to protect her newborn son. A Puritan carpenter prays to his God to help him avoid the temptation of sin after a long day of work. An Anglican couple in Virginia celebrates the baptism of their daughter within their humble home. African slaves in South Carolina solemnize the funeral of one of their companions by praying that her soul will return to Africa.

These imagined scenes illustrate the range of piety and religious practices in colonial North America, yet none of them takes place within a church. For the ordinary men and women of this period, the church represented only one landmark in a religious geography marked by numerous sites of engagement with the supernatural world. Yet this was not a changeless religious landscape. Over time many groups in colonial North America became increasingly influenced by Christianity.

This judgment draws on changes within the field of American religious history. At one time, many understood colonial America as synonymous with New England and Puritanism. More recently, historians of religion in early America have employed a broader geographical focus and have included laypeople as significant actors, drawing American Indians, Africans, and others into the narratives. This essay's analysis of the religious practices of ordinary men and women reflects this expanded scholarly agenda. Even among the groups examined here, however, the coverage is not encyclopedic.