This essay argues that understanding religion and the history of religion in the United States can help scholars, students, and the American public be more aware of the dynamics around war and wiser in the conclusions they reach about experiences of war and their relationship to American society. Put differently, when those who study war and society in America keep religion out of their stories, they remove from consideration not only some of the nation’s most influential institutions and voices, but also many of the ideas, stories, and symbols that help women and men find meaning and purpose in the uncertainty, the suffering, and the loss that go along with war.

A case study of a patient diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder demonstrates the entanglements of phenomenology of spirituality and psychopathology, and the implications of failing to properly understand the importance of these entanglements when planning treatment. The concepts of entanglement, pragmatic atheism, spirituality and religion are introduced. Spirituality and religion are both complex and contested concepts which elude simple definition, but a person-centred holistic model of psychiatry requires giving attention to the whole person, ‘body, mind and spirit’. The biopsychosocial model does not explicitly address spirituality, but spirituality is entangled with the biological, psychological and social aspects of the matrix. The chapter discusses the secular context within which psychiatry is generally seen to be practised (at least in the Western world), the perceived tension between science and religion that it often evokes, the nature of psychiatry as concerned with the study and treatment of mental illnesses, and the way in which these illnesses affect our self-understanding and identity as human beings.

Psychiatrists have responded nationally and internationally to the growing scientific evidence on spirituality and psychiatry and to concerns about bad professional practice, by developing good practice guidelines/policies and by way of continuing professional development initiatives (special interest groups, conferences, etc.). Professional boundaries have historically been understood as keeping psychiatry, as a secular concern, separate from patients’ spiritual and religious concerns. However, as earlier chapters demonstrated, this is unrealistic in light of the entanglements of spirituality and psychiatry, and unlikely to be helpful for many patients. It does not address the importance of religion to patients worldwide or the transition in Western countries from a secular to a post-secular age. The Jungian concept of temenos is taken up as a way of understanding boundaries as protecting safe therapeutic spaces for psychological and spiritual transformation. Boundaries in clinical practice are thus created not to keep the psychological and spiritual domains separate but to protect a safe psychological and spiritual space within which positive therapeutic change may occur.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Greek and Roman religion was increasingly characterised as ritualistic and collective, with little role for belief, while belief itself was increasingly associated with Christianity. By the 1990s, the dominant view in classical studies aligned closely with functionalist traditions in the wider study of religion, linking Greek and Roman religion with social cohesion and identity, and rejecting belief as an irrelevance. Since then, fresh arguments have emerged, some drawing on the cognitive science of religion, which reject the association of belief with Christianity and argue that a culturally neutral, purely propositional sense of believing is both possible and necessary. However, work in anthropology and early modern history, particularly on the emergence of ‘propositional religion’ during the Reformation, suggests that the concept of belief continues to carry complex cultural baggage. Despite recent developments, the debate over how best to represent the religious experience of the Greeks and Romans remains open.

This chapter is about the dominant intellectual framework of International Relations (IR) scholarship on religion, as illustrated by the tensions between multiculturalism and genealogy within the secularism debate. It shows how the critique of liberal secularism fundamentally restructured the knowledge basis for religion in IR and opened up space to engage with religion in new ways. The chapter continues to show how that space became filled with a particular kind of scholarship seeking to rehabilitate the concept and argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this scholarship has narrowed rather than broadened the scope of available perspectives, epistemes, and ontologies of religion. It is necessary to explore this legacy in order to understand the foundational problems currently embedded within IR scholarship on religion as well as enable an assessment of the damage done to IR theorizing and the lost potential of current scholarship on religion in other disciplines. This connects to the main argument as it forecasts the inherent issues and costs entailed in efforts to recognize and engage with religion in IR more broadly.

While there were some aspects of Nuer ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ that Messianics in Gambella proudly endorsed and celebrated as biblically authentic, others were rejected as ‘pagan’ or satanic. In this chapter, I turn to the relationship between Messianic Judaism and ‘Nuer customary law’, to explain these dynamics. The chapter traces the process through which the spiritual significance of cattle declined, under the influence of the secular state, and instead, under born-again Christian doctrines, the individual human (body and soul) emerged as the prime means of communicating with God. Cattle in its desacralised form, however, was still used by Messianics for bridewealth payments, and they insisted that their marriage practices were not only the most loyal to Nuer ‘tradition’ but also biblically authentic. The chapter offers new insights on the endurance of pre-Christian practices among African born-again Christians, showing how old ‘customs’ may be deemed relevant and meaningful even under a radically new regime of spiritual mediation.

Staging the cultural consequences of a new metropolitan modernity, the 1920s were shaped around two massive fields of experience: on the one hand, the passage from utopian expectancies of the immediate postwar period (1918–1923) to peacetime socio-cultural normalizing (1923–1929); on the other hand, the new urban sensibility, with all of its exuberance and anxieties. Darkly shadowing each was the long-lasting trauma of the Great War: the pall of the war-dead and the war-disabled; the management of human catastrophe and personal loss. Each also produced extraordinary creativity across the arts and intellectual life. Across Europe, the brashness of big-city life underscored the urban–rural divides, creating a new topography of the imagination. Resulting debates pitted the religious against the secular, the traditional against the modern. This chapter maps the European variations in organized religion; in churchgoing and vernacular faith-related practices; and in the growing separation of belief and belonging. In notably spectacular form, Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s exemplified each of these themes.

The Epilogue tells the story of how a 2024 proposal to amend the Iraqi family law (Personal Status Law (PSL)) came to pass in early 2025 and outlines the objections to it in the context of this book’s main thesis about how and why state consolidation matters. The Epilogue highlights the main objections to the amendment, coming from Iraqi critics, which are focused on the social justice implications of introducing a legal structure wherein an authority is granted decision-making power over an aspect of public life that is parallel to, and outside of, the state’s authority. Critics see this as a canonization of state fragmentation and the underlying ethno-sectarian power-sharing arrangement on which it rests. The epilogue illustrates through this political and legal contestation the connections that run through sites of state fragmentation, attempts to consolidate a political order, historical legacies of state consolidation, and social justice. What the PSL story suggests is that who decides on public life is consequential to the political possibilities of justice.

It has been a remarkable journey for India from the nation’s independence in 1947 to now. Economic performance has been mixed, with growth remaining sluggish during the first three decades, and picking up only after the mid-1990s. On the political front, with free media, secularism and a vibrant democracy, India was an outlier in the developing world; it resembled some of the most advanced economies in the world. This chapter is a study of this unusual growth path, over the last seventy years, with a focus on how the economy and politics impacted each other. It is argued that, while early political choices may have slowed growth during the early decades, they played a vital role in India rising to be among the world’s fastest-growing nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The controversial nature of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s polemical writing has had theeffect of sidelining his earlier literary criticism, in particular his engagement withseveral French Catholic writers. A more nuanced exploration of his work as a wholedisplays a complex intersection of secularism and religious feeling. O’Brien, thepublic intellectual determined to fly by the nets of political and religious doctrine,nevertheless produces work saturated with religious language, forms, and structuresof feeling. His writing demonstrates a tension between his secularism and hisrepeated return to the language of suffering, sacrifice, heresy, and schism. O’Brien’sfamily history, with its traumatic relationship to events during the violent formation ofthe Irish state, is a helpful lens through which to view this emotional substratumwithin his writings.  His later writings emphasise the forces in his life that resistedcategorization, and thus offer a kind of apophatic vision, a dark enlightenment.

In this final chapter, we will summarize the Old Testament and explore its lasting contributions to world history, society in general, and the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Specifically, we will explore four particular aspects of the Old Testament and examine how each functions to create a cohesive and living whole.

This overview in turn will remind us that the Old Testament’s central message communicates, in a host of ways, what it perceives as Israel’s life in covenant relationship with God, obeying God’s Torah, and living morally and ethically in right relationship with other human beings. Within this overarching concern of the Old Testament, we have already observed the continual thread of a monotheistic worldview in process. The development toward the Old Testament’s conviction of the singularity of God is indeed among the most enduring contributions to human history.

Similarly, the Old Testament’s contribution to civil society cannot be underestimated. Thus, in conclusion, we will explore three core values in particular that are rooted, not in secularization as often is assumed, but in the rich and enduring legacy of the Old Testament.

This chapter asks whether there is anything we might productively characterize as an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations. I use the example of the Essential Religious Practices (ERP) Doctrine as a window into this analysis. The ERP Doctrine offers the best-case argument for the existence of an Inter-Asian approach to religion–state relations because, after its initial articulation by the Indian Supreme Court, it has been widely influential within South and Southeast Asia. I use two of the contexts where ERP analysis has been influential – Malaysia and Sri Lanka – to show how there has indeed been significant conceptual migration within Asia with regard to religious freedom jurisprudence. The ERP Doctrine’s travels are clearly reflected in the flow of jurisprudential ideas and via robust campus-court exchanges. At the same time, differences in the theoretical networks and sociopolitical contexts within which the ERP Doctrine has traveled prevent it from constituting a homogenous and hermetically sealed Inter-Asian approach.