In the aftermath of the war, a new form of commemoration and memorialization took place, centered around the adoption of fatherless children as a substitute to the loss of a son. French orphans were part of a process merging remembrance and humanitarian action. In vast cemeteries across France, the sacrifice of American soldiers was honored on special occasions, with the sponsored orphans and school children placing wreaths of flowers on their tombs. In parallel, the FCFS launched another campaign of sponsorships to reduce infant mortality. With its local branches across the United States, the FCFS capitalized on its ability to reach out to local communities and thus staved off the indifference that can set in after a crisis has seemed to pass. With its other communication strategies still in place, the FCFS saw continued success, testament to its deep popularity across the United States. Between the end of 1918 and 1921, the response of the United States was such that the number of sponsored orphans increased from 80,000 to 300,000.

A spiritually enveloping, time-consuming, and value-creating set of activities, Aztecs centered their religion on powerful spiritual beings. Ceremony and time were fundamental parts of everyday life. From the smallest household to the largest city, rituals of offering to the gods took place every day as Aztecs sought water, food, the survival of human life, and balance in what they perceived to be a chaotic spiritual and material world. In their dynamic universe, deities and their human embodiments and priests and priestesses manifested great power. Ceremonies conducted for those beings, the offerings presented to them, and exchanged or distributed provide examples of the power and energy that offerings, including living humans, provided. Time-keeping focused on the notion of progressive ages, the idea of cyclical time, and two calendar systems. Their calendars used two ways of keeping track of days and months for ceremonies, agriculture, and war. Aztecs drew blood for human and plant fertility, purification, and to nourish and repay their debt to the creator deities. Yet the greatest offering human beings could give was to provide human lives, offering hearts and blood, though they did not do so in the numbers often suggested.

Beginning with Columbus’s visits to the island, Spain established political authority in Jamaica from 1509 onwards, sending out various governors appointed by the Spanish Crown. Jamaica became a Spanish royal colony in 1534. The Spanish treated the Tainos harshly, forcing them into submission under the repartimiento de Indias labour system and removing their lands under an encomienda labour regime. The Taino were also affected by a range of diseases through contact with the Spanish intruders. By 1600 there were very few Taino left living in Jamaica.

Spanish settlement in Jamaica never escalated. The population of Jamaica amounted to no more than 1,600 in the first half of the seventeenth century. Consequently, most of the island remained uncultivated. Spanish settlers supported their daily lives by growing crops and tending livestock, and they introduced numerous new foodstuffs to Jamaica, including sweet potatoes, cassava bread and cane sugar. Institutions of the Roman Catholic Church were introduced to Jamaica by Spanish settlers. The Spanish period in the island ended abruptly through an English military takeover. Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655 invaded, captured and consolidated Jamaica in English hands. The English then colonised the island as its major possession in the western Caribbean.

The Taino migrated to Jamaica from South America in broad waves between AD 600 and 900. They organised communities throughout Jamaica, preferring defendable hilltop settlements. Practising communal living under the leadership of caciques, the Taino forged a rich culture in which they excelled at woodcarving, pottery and making stone implements. Surviving rock art in caves testifies to their artistic skills. They undertook daily food gathering, picking fruits and seeds, fishing and planting root crops in conucos. Many crops they cultivated, including cassava, have had a lasting impact on the Jamaican diet.

The Taino believed in numerous deities and the afterlife and maintaining contact with the spirit world through possession of artefacts known as zemis and ritual cohoba ceremonies. As they left no written records and their language is extinct, knowledge of Taino culture in Jamaica is confined to knowledge of their settlements, artisan skills, rock art and religious practices. A revival of interest in the Tainos’ foundational role in Jamaican history has recently occurred. In May 2019 the Institute of Jamaica celebrated Taino Day with a series of talks and activities. In the following month a Taino cacique was installed in Jamaica for the first time in half a millennium.

This chapter traces the consequences of the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness for questions of bodily worship and ceremonial conformity. For the Laudians, the reverence and fear necessarily evoked by the divine presence in the church had to take an outward physical form. God had to be worshipped by the body as well as the soul, and indeed uniform, orderly bodily worship both practised by oneself and witnessed being practised by others was deemed to have specific edifying spiritual effects. The result was an elevated view of the significance of forms of worship, and certain key ceremonies previously regarded as merely ‘indifferent’ were conceded to have religious significance and spiritual potency.

This chapter discusses a series of high-profile cases in which significant disputes arose involving the application of ecclesiastical law. It begins with Parliament’s debates on its role and authority in this area as it attempted more than once to frame legislation for clergy discipline and the discussions in Convocation. It considers the Gompertz case, raising questions about the role of the bishop; the contrasting churchmanships of Evangelicals and Tractarians; and the controversy about biblical interpretation prompted by the publication of Essays and Reviews. The case of James Shore tested the law on the effect of a clergyman’s finding his opinions had changed to such an extent that he was no longer a member of the Church of England, while still effectively retaining his Anglican priesthood. The chapter also covers the cases of William Bennett and the ‘real presence’, and George Denison’s lengthy dispute with the Bishop of Exeter on the effect of baptism. It ends with the case of Alexander Mackonochie and controversy over the regulation of public worship.

This chapter asks where and how Rome (and, by extension, polemics self-consciously characterized as reactions against Rome) figures in efforts to determine what the living owe to the dead, and what the dead can do for the living. Latin occupies a controlling position within this inquiry; so, too, do texts that cast the world of the living as the home of the dead; so, finally, do Reformation-era debates about the soteriological stakes of praying for the dead. These topics span a period of time in which Rome is the gravitational centre of a sequence of massive upheavals in vernacular piety and attendant debates about the relationship between the living and the dead. The chapter argues that interpreting these debates as facets of the fact of Rome alerts us to the role that the human voice plays in probing the limits of mortality and the nature of the human as such.

Webb considers that religious experience typically occurs in the setting of a religion as a social institution, and that the subjects of such an experience typically participate in rituals and ceremonies with other people who share some of their beliefs and convictions. He proposes that this social-embedding of religious experiences is significant with regard to their being understood and evaluated, including in connection with their contribution to the meaning of human life.