This chapter looks at popular culture through the lens of lived religion, with a particular focus on the late antique countryside. After an initial discussion exploring the dimensions of ‘lived religion’, it is then explored through two extended case studies. The first looks at ritual practices associated with the midsummer feast of John the Baptist, including ritual bathing. The second case study looks at ritual activities aimed at mitigating the effects of hail, a persistent threat to agriculture and viticulture in the region. These rituals, and the responses from church and secular elites and authorities alike, are examined in their social and economic context. A range of different types of evidence is considered, from charms through to imperial legislation, as well as ecclesiastical texts of various kinds.

This chapter reframes the early Arian controversy in the context of the legacy of the Great Persecution and contemporary conflicts on visuality, divinity, and image. Arius’ controversial apophatic theology and his definition of the changeability of the Son reflect traditional anti-idolatry themes. These may be linked to values of lived religion in Alexandria, especially as illustrated by martyrs and ascetics in the uncertain new reign of imperial tolerance under Licinius. Placing Arius’ description of the Son into the context of Porphyry’s discussions on religious images, as cited by both Athanasius and Eusebius, suggests that he was defending broader cultural values and practices of monotheism against alleged materialism in Alexander’s definition of eternal generation and image.

This chapter aims to provide a survey of the recent and emerging conversations between theology (and more specifically moral theology or Christian ethics) and social anthropology (and more specifically the anthropology of morality). These conversations are presented as starting from two sides, as being a matter of theology attending to anthropology, and of anthropology engaging with theology. Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life is taken as providing an indication of the nature and promise of the first conversation for enriching theology’s social intelligence and its self-understanding (illustrated in particular by a discussion the Alder Hey scandal and of reproductive surrogacy), and Robbins’s Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life is taken as indicating the potential for the second, namely that beyond religious life providing material for ethnography, theological ideas and concepts may contribute to anthropological theory, even in relation to such central categories as the gift. The chapter closes with a consideration of some future directions which these conversations may take.

“Pindar Mythologus and Theologus,” offers a methodological introduction to the central themes and approaches of the monograph. After articulating the case for recognizing theology in the victory odes and reviewing earlier approaches to immortality in the epinician corpus, it offers an orientation to the methodologies of lived religion, approaches to Pindar’s epinician myths, and an evaluation of contemporary conceptions of mortality and immortality with an emphasis on hero cult. As a contrast to the subsequent case studies of figures who blur the boundary between mortality and immortality, an analysis of Pelops in Olympian 1 establishes an example of exalted mortality in Pindar. An overview of the following case studies rounds off the chapter.

Highlighting that in practice the boundaries between religious traditions are not as sharply demarcated as depicted in the media and academic literature, many of the Lagosians whom I interviewed described themselves as ‘religious shoppers’ who had changed their religious allegiances or shifted between them. Chapter 1 analyses religious shopping against the backdrop of entrenched depictions of Lagos as an ‘apocalyptic megacity’. Itsmain argument is that in order to fully understand how religion is practised in a multi-faith setting such as Lagos, we must tackle the compartmentalization of the study of religion by taking religious pluralism – as manifested in the practice of religious shopping – as our starting point. This entails that we approach religion first and foremost as lived practice and experimental mixing.

The introduction raises the issue of lived Islam’s irreducible diversity. In asking how the anthropology of Islam can descriptively and analytically tackle this diversity, I consider how Muslims themselves conceive, negotiate, and live it. Accordingly, I understand lived Islam as a nexus of people’s religious conceptions, practices, and imaginaries, which they constantly engage with, debate, and (re)make as they live their religion. The introduction first discusses people’s varied conceptions and uses of Islamic prayer beads as an empirical example of lived Islam’s diversity. Then I introduce zongos as Islamic lifeworlds and present their main Islamic groups. Discussing the literature, I locate my book within the anthropology of Islam and introduce the theoretical concept of Islamic lifeworlds. I then discuss the methodology of my empirical research and ethnographic writing, highlighting the biases and limits of my approach, before ending with an outline of the book. The introduction argues that lived Islam is marked by an irreducible diversity that is inherent in and informed by the discursive tradition that people constantly relate to, engage with, and take part in as they live their religion.

The conclusion offers a general summary and some reflections on the book. I argue that the diversity of lived Islam in the zongos is informed by and informs the lifeworld of these wards as the people of the zongos relate to and live with one another as Muslims. In the process, they engage with and (re)make their religion in open but not ungrounded processes as they ground their divergent Islamic conceptions, practices, and imaginaries in the discursive tradition of their religion and thus participate in and perpetuate it. As a lived and living tradition, Islam is inextricably bound up with how people live it.

Puritans kept records of disciplinary practices, recording the censures, sins, admonitions, and confessions of members who strayed. By analyzing types of sins, punishments, and the language of confessions, this book reveals how Puritans altered the expression and practice of their faith, creating a “gendered Puritanism.” Examining more than fifteen congregations for the first three generations, this book shows how ordinary laymen shaped the gender conventions of Puritanism, challenging the ideas of ministers and reifying more traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. Through the gendering of Puritanism, laymen contributed to the modern ideology of separate spheres, reifying public spaces for men and relegating women to the private space of personal piety. Chapter 1 explains the founding of the Dorchester congregation and the establishment of their covenants and disciplinary practices. Chapter 2 explores how laity charged men and women with different types of sins. Chapter 3 analyzes the language of confessions and the varied expectations for men and women. Chapters 4 and 5 explore the censures of John Underhill and Anne Hibbens, to illustrate the gendering of Puritanism.