Abolition: Militant northern movement in general effort to end slavery; became prominent in the antislavery movement after 1824, insisting on an immediate and uncompromising demise for slavery.
Activism: Public and expressive religious behavior that was characteristic of public Protestantism; a style of religious busyness different, for example, from a contemplative style.
Ahistoricism: A characteristic of public Protestantism in a self-conscious separation from the words and deeds of an establishment past. Protestant churches in America, for instance, declared that their roots were in a biblical time outside the ordinary run of history.
Alchemy: The ancestor of modern chemistry, alchemy was an occult system that attempted to change less valuable metals into more significant metals like gold. The secret process of creating gold became an external symbol for internal change and the saving force that could bring the alchemist liberation from the world.
Americanist heresy: The attitudes condemned by Pope Leo XIII in 1899 including a prioritization of the natural over the supernatural, the willingness to adapt to the theories and methods of modern popular culture, and a tendency toward individualism in religion as opposed to a reliance on the Catholic church for salvation.
Anabaptists: Calvinists of the sixteenth-century Radical Reformation who taught the necessity of adult (believers') baptism or re-baptism (as opponents said). Also, general name for diverse parties in the Radical Reformation.
Antimission Baptists: Baptists who believed in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination that made missionary work unnecessary.
Anxious bench: A practice, begun by Charles Grandison Finney, of reserving a pew in the front for sinners who had not yet experienced conversion and who could thereby be given special attention during the service.
Armageddon: In Revelation 16:16, the place where world rulers will gather for the final battle at the end of the world; shorthand for one in a series of end-time events outlined by Christian fundamentalist theology.
Arminianism: A Dutch Protestant movement (named for reformer Jacobus Arminius, 1560-1609) that taught human freedom and embraced the doctrine of a general atonement by Jesus for all human beings.
'Asanas: In classical Indian yoga, prescribed physical postures held for periods of time during the practice of hatha yoga.
Ashkenazim: Jews of Germanic descent, who follow a combination of Palestinian and Babylonian traditions, mixed with Northern European culture.
Astrology: An occult religious system originating in ancient Mesopotamia that involved observing the heavens and relating the lives of human beings to the stars. Astrology came to America in the seventeenth century from England.
Atman: For Hindus adhering to a monistic philosophy, the Atman is the individual lifeforce or soul, a spark of sacred power within the individual that is identical to Brahman, the fundamental reality in the universe.
Aura: Bands of colored light believed to emanate from every human being. Auras were said to be read by mediums communicating with the spirit world and were thought to record the life history of a person, enabling a spiritualist medium to make predictions.
Autocephalous Church: Meaning literally "self-headed," this term refers to the self-governing churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, the four most honored of which were the patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
Automatic writing: Communication believed to come from a spirit to the material world through the hand of a medium, who would write the spirit's message down.
Babism: A religion of Persia founded in 1844 by a Shiite Muslim, Siyyid Ali Muhammad, later called the Bab ("gate"). Babism incorporated elements of Islam and the earlier Persian religion, Zoroastrianism. Followers of the Bab would eventually be found in the Baha'i religion.
Baha'i: A nineteenth-century new religion that arose from the Shiite Islam of Persia, venerating Baha'u'llah as the last and greatest of the prophets and seeing the new religion as the completion of Islam and all previous religions.
Baptist Christianity: A radical Puritan movement that rejected infant baptism, subscribing instead to a belief that a mature and committed believer was the only appropriate recipient of baptism.
Bar/Bat Mitzvah: A ceremony that introduces a thirteen-year-old boy (Bar) or girl (Bat) to full membership in the Jewish community, responsible for carrying on the traditions and values of Judaism. Literally, "Son (or Daughter) of the Commandments."
Beat Zen: An American form of Zen Buddhism, that emerged in San Francisco in the 1950s, drawing upon the teachings of Rinzai Zen as interpreted by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki and upon other elements. Championed by a group of artists and writers including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.
Bhakti: The Indian word for devotion, bhakti refers to a Hindu religious path that stresses the importance of personal feeling, specifically love, expressed in the worship of at least one of India's many Gods and Goddesses.
Billet reading: A kind of spirit communication popular in the nineteenth century and thereafter that allegedly allowed a spirit to answer questions submitted on small pieces of paper through a medium.
Bodhisattva: A figure in Mahayana Buddhism who, on the verge of experiencing nirvana, postpones the time indefinitely out of compassion for fellow human beings in order to serve them.
Brahman: A vast, impersonal force that in Hindu philosophy constitutes the fundamental reality in the universe; Brahman is the underpinning concept for a monistic religious system that teaches that the world is one reality.
Branch Davidians: A Christian Adventist group whose community in Waco, Texas, became the target of a United States government siege in 1993 that ended in its demise. Led last by David Koresh until his death in 1993.
Buddha: Literally the "enlightened" or "awakened" one; the term refers to the founder of Buddhism Siddhartha Gautama (563?-483? B.C.E.). In Mahayana Buddhism, Buddhahood became a quality that others, too, could possess.
Buddhism: A religion originating in South Asia based on the teachings of its founder Siddhartha Gautama (563?-483? B.C.E.) or the Buddha ("enlightened" one). By meditating on the Four Noble Truths and following the Noble Eightfold Path an individual hoped to be released from suffering, thought by Buddhists to be linked to worldly attachments.
Buddhist Churches of America: After 1944 the North American Buddhist Mission, an offspring of the Pure Land Buddhism of Japan, became the Buddhist Churches of America.
Camp meetings: Gatherings of hundreds or thousands of people to participate in outdoor revival meetings held over the period of several days. Often presided over by preachers from more than one denomination, including Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian. Grew in prominence in the early nineteenth century in Kentucky and Ohio.
Chakras: In Hindu and Buddhist Tantric thought, energy centers linking the human body to subtle or energy bodies; the practitioner of kriya yoga tries to integrate and balance the chakras by awakening kundalini energy thought to lie at the base of the spine.
Charismatic movement: A movement that began in the 1960s bringing tongues speaking and other pentecostal phenomena to the Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches.
Chiropractic: An American healing art and technique of physical manipulation begun in 1895 by D. D. Palmer. By manipulating a person's spine, a practitioner was believed to be freeing the patient from an obstruction that blocked the free movement of energy, with which health was associated.
Christian Coalition: Conservative Protestant lobbying group founded by Pat Robertson after his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1988; grew to be the major conservative religiopolitical group of the mid and late nineties.
Christian Scientists: Sectarian group, founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), that taught that disease and death were appearances resulting from erroneous thought in "mortal mind" and sought to restore a message of healing from scripture and early Christian practice.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Official name for the Mormons.
Church: An inclusive religious community into which a person is born, as opposed to a sect.
Circuit rider: Nineteenth-century itinerant preacher, particularly a Methodist frontier minister, who rode a "circuit" regularly visiting mission churches along the route.
Civil Religion: Religious nationalism; a religious system in America that has existed alongside the churches, with a creed, an ethic, and a set of rituals and other identifiable symbols related to the political state; a major component of the nation's "one religion."
Code: The rules, including moral and ethical systems as well as customs, by which people live: the ethos.
Colonization movement: A movement that by 1817 sought to relocate emancipated slaves and free blacks to a territory reserved for them in Africa.
Communalism: The pursuit of a perfect society, often demonstrated through living in closed communities strictly bounded by rules that challenged two fundamental principles of social independence -- private property and sexual exclusivity in the family.
Commune: A closed group in which all members aimed to live together in harmony, challenging two fundamental principles of social independence--private property and sexual exclusivity in the family.
Community: A group bounded by shared creed, code, and cultus. A community can encompass people drawn together by common history, language, and customs, or by living under a more formal institution, such as a church, denomination, or sect.
Complex marriage: A practice of the Oneida Perfectionists that allowed members of the group to be "husbands" and "wives" to every other member. Exclusive relationships between any two members of the community were not accepted. See Male Continence.
Congregationalism: A Protestant form of church government that insisted on the autonomy of each individual congregation; the name of a major American denomination descended from Puritanism that embraced the congregational governmental principle.
Conjure: Religious practice among African slaves in America that used natural substances, for the most part, and ritual actions to alter relationships, change physical states, and/or transform material conditions in other ways; sometimes called root work or hoodoo.
Conservative Judaism: A branch of Judaism that attempts to keep a distinctive ethnic identity at the same time as it adapts to the changing environment of the modern world; one of the three major branches of Judaism.
Coven: In witchcraft, a term used to describe a group who come together ritually for magic or psychic purposes.
Covenant: In New England Puritanism, the doctrine of the pact, or agreement, between God and his people, the people being, in this case, the Puritans. The covenant entailed virtue and righteousness on the part of the people and protection from God in return. This relationship was used as a model for civil government.
Creed: A set of religious beliefs; an explanation concerning the meaning (meanings) of human life.
Cultural Religion: The general religion of American culture, with ordinary and extraordinary aspects, and characterized by themes of millennialism in various modes; a major component of the nation's "one religion."
Cultus: A ritual that enacts or expresses the values and insights of a creed and code.
Cumberland Presbytery: A sectarian movement in Appalachia that appeared in 1810. After completely splitting with the parent Presbyterian church, its leaders followed a modified Calvinism that emphasized lay preaching.
Cunning folk: A term used by English countryfolk and by the American colonists to refer to magical practitioners who could use witchcraft to aid and assist others.
Declension: Theories about the decline of the church. Especially prevalent in Puritan communities and among preachers during the period of the American Revolution.
Deism: A belief system that was closely associated with the Enlightenment and natural religion. The word literally translates as "goddism." The deists posited belief in a creator God, a moral law, and an afterlife of future reward or punishment. The deist creed emphasized a good and moral life, and it looked to nature and its laws as source of revelation and guidance.
Denomination: A group, especially within Protestant Christianity -- for example Episcopalian, Quaker, Lutheran, and the like -- formed by people who share more or less similar ideas and sentiments concerning Christian belief and worship.
Denominationalism: The structure of religion in America, in which there is no officially sanctioned church. In Protestant denominationalism, each denomination has its particular individual characteristics, but all see themselves as part of the larger Christian church.
Dispensationalism: A belief promoted especially among the nineteenth-century Plymouth Brethren that history is divided into "dispensations" in which God changes his relationship to humans. The belief is coupled with a faith in the imminence of the rapture and the millennium as the final dispensation; dispensationalism became basic to twentieth-century fundamentalist teaching.
Divination: The interpretation of signs according to occult knowledge. Divination may be practiced through trance and/or spirit possession, through the use of special tools like shells or bones, or through naturally occurring events such as the flight of birds or the movement of heavenly bodies.
Divine Liturgy: Part of the "correct" worship of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Divine Liturgy, like the Mass of Roman Catholicism, recalls the Last Supper of Jesus and his death on the cross.
Driving: Appalachian preaching technique characterized by rhythmic chanting, pacing, and rocking back and forth, practiced by Baptist farmer-preachers, and considered a success if the congregation swayed, moaned, wailed, and shouted in response.
Dualism: The Hindu religious system that, in contrast to monism, argues for the distinctiveness of spirit and matter, of God and individual souls. Any general philosophical positing of two (as opposed to one) principle as the basic substance of reality.
Dunkers: Also called Brethren. A Baptist sect that arose in 1708 out of the Pietist movement in Germany. Dunker practice of baptism involved triple immersion and foot washing.
Easter Sunday: The day celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. In the Catholic tradition, it is observed with a long vigil ending in a midnight Mass. This is considered the holiest day of the year and emphasizes images of death and rebirth.
Eastern Orthodoxy: Eastern branch of Christianity that took on a separate existence as a result of a formal break in 1054 between Eastern and Western (Roman Catholic) churches in Europe. An emphasis on the community, a veneration of icons, a leaning towards inner contemplation and mysticism are all defining elements of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Ecofeminism: A form of environmental activism that posits the earth as Gaia, a living (female) being undergoing a time of purification because of human environmental abuse. This movement began in the late 1980s.
Ecumenism: The effort of Christians of many denominations to work together across denominational boundaries and eventually to form a single church.
Encounter group: A nontraditional psychological therapy group in which individuals explore conflicts within themselves, or more commonly, the relationships within the group, so that members of the group learn to express positive and negative feelings freely; part of humanistic psychology and promoted by the human-potential movement.
Enlightenment: An eighteenth-century European cultural movement that exalted the role of human reason. With the American Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 a kind of civil religion was born that borrowed from the ideas of the Enlightenment and made use of the language of reason and nature.
Eucharist: Literally, "thanksgiving." Also known as the Mass. The Catholic rite re-enacting the Last Supper of Jesus. Bread and wine are believed to be transformed through the words and actions of the priest into the body and blood of Christ and then are shared with the congregation.
Evangelicalism: Movement within American Protestant Christianity that has stressed the personal experience of the grace of God in conversion or "new birth" and emphasized mission work to help promote conversion.
Evolution: The theory, advanced by Charles Darwin, that existing animal and plant species are modifications of earlier ones, developed over time through a process of natural selection according to the law of survival of the fittest.
Extraordinary religion: Religion that encompasses experiences, whether natural or supernatural, outside of the sphere of ordinary life and community. It is manifest in specific experiences that can be described and separated from the experiences of everyday life.
Faith healing: Healing believed to be performed by God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit, usually through the ministrations of a preacher, minister, or other faith healer.
Fifth Seal: One of the so-called "seven-seals" of the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian New Testament. Branch Davidians, in their final days, believed that the prophecies of the Fifth Seal were unfolding.
Fire Baptism: The doctrine, taught especially by Benjamin Hardin Irwin, of a third blessing, a baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire, subsequent to conversion and sanctification. Understood as a baptism of burning love.
"Fireside": A meeting in which followers of the Baha'i faith gather together to discuss the principles of their religion with non-Baha'is.
Foot washing: In Baptist congregations, especially in Appalachia, the ritualistic washing of the feet of members of the congregation in imitation of the actions of the biblical Jesus at the Last Supper (John 13:3-14).
Fundamentalism: A Protestant movement that grew up in response to issues of liberalism and modernity, based on an ideal of a return to the inherited gospel and a rejection of worldly things; militantly antimodern Protestant evangelicalism with a concern for the revival of America.
Fundamentals: The beliefs put forth as fundamental in a series of pamphlets published from 1909 to 1914 as The Fundamentals. The list included the inerrancy of the scriptures, the divinity of Jesus, his birth from a virgin, his death on the cross in substitution for the sins of all human beings, and his bodily resurrection and imminent second coming. Publication of the pamphlets helped to coalesce the fundamentalist movement.
Gaiwiio: The Old Way of Handsome Lake. A nineteenth-century religion based on three visions of a Seneca Indian named Handsome Lake. His preaching stressed the imminent destruction of the present world, the reality of sin, and the need for salvation. Later additions to this religion include a social gospel that prescribes temperance, peace, and economic and domestic rules, as well as ritual instructions for a longhouse church.
General Baptists: Baptists who believed that Jesus's sacrifice represented an atonement for all human beings, not just the elect.
Gestalt psychology: A form of therapeutic technique promoted by Frederick S. ("Fritz") Perls (1894-1970), in which a person, aided by members of a working group, dramatized inner conflicts by playing the parts ordinarily taken by different inner voices. Form of humanistic psychology promoted by the human-potential movement.
Ghost Dance: A millennial religion founded by the Paiute prophet Wovoka in the late nineteenth century. He predicted that the earth and whites would be destroyed by flood and that the Indians should perform the ceremony of their ancient round dance so that the flood would wash under them. In the wake of the flood, the earth and the Indian people would be renewed.
Gilded Age: Taken from the title of a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, the term refers to the period after the Civil War, so called because beneath the glittering surface of society there was a sense of spiritual malaise.
Gnosticism: A religious teaching and practice of the second century C.E. that grew up on the fringes of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. A Gnostic was considered someone with secret knowledge who after discovering that knowledge, which was not the rational kind gained from books or logical arguments, could start the journey leading to a reunion with his or her divine counterpart within the Godhead.
Good Friday: The day commemorating the death of Jesus.
Gospel of Wealth: A Protestant movement of the Gilded Age that affirmed the freedom to prosper, with prosperity seen as a sign of divine blessing.
Guru: A Hindu religious teacher or head of a sect or order; the teaching traditionally is oral.
Halfway Covenant: A compromise reached by a Puritan church synod in 1662 under which children and infant grandchildren of the saints (i.e., converted Puritans) could be baptized and given the status of halfway members of the church. The compromise was reached when adult children of the saints leading upright lives failed to have experiences of conversion.
Hallah: A braided loaf of bread traditionally made for the Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath).
Hanukkah: A Jewish festival commemorating an incident traditionally ascribed to the time of the struggle between the Maccabees and Antiochus IV. This was the miracle of the oil lamps in the Temple of Jerusalem that were said to remain lit for eight days, even though there was only fuel enough for one.
Hard Shell Baptists: Another name for Antimission, Primitive, Regular, or Old School Baptists.
Hasidism: An eighteenth-century Eastern European popular Jewish mystical movement, centering on the teaching of the Baal Shem Tov.
Hatha yoga: In classical Indian yoga, practice consisting of physical postures and breath control intended to release tensions held in the body that are thought to be obstacles to spiritual peace and union of the self.
Havdalah: Literally, separating. The Sabbath ritual of the dousing of a candle flame symbolizing the separation of the sacred from the profane, the Sabbath from the rest of the week. This ritual signals the end of the Sabbath day.
Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization: An example of East-West combinativeness in the United States, the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization or 3HO, founded in 1969 by Harbhajan Singh or Yogi Bhajan (b. 1929), has combined forms of Indian yoga with the Sikh religion and Tantric elements, as well as American patriotism and millennialism.
Heaven's Gate: Combinative and gnosticizing metaphysical group with UFO links, whose members, because of their beliefs, ended their lives near San Diego in 1997.
Henotheism: A religion that worships only one God, but allows that other communities have other deities.
Hermeticism: A religious philosophy that developed at the end of the Hellenistic era based on a series of writings that brought together Gnosticism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, astrology, and other religious philosophies from ancient Greece. The writings, collected in what today are called the Corpus Hermeticum and the Ascelpius, were originally and incorrectly attributed to an ancient Egyptian priest, Hermes Trismegistus.
Hesychasm: From the Greek word for "quiet," refers to a form of mysticism in the Eastern Orthodox church that stressed the need for inner tranquility to await what was seen as the transforming light of God.
Heyoka: Oglala clowns or contraries who did everything backwards and contradicted rules and customs. They assumed their role because of a sense of visionary power from a Thunder Being.
Higher criticism: A scholarly method of biblical criticism, emanating from nineteenth-century Germany, that emphasized the sources and context of the texts and the role of editors or redactors in producing texts.
Higher law: A basic premise of the public Protestant creed; belief in an absolute and fundamental unwritten law under which, it was held, a God of nature had given unalienable rights to individuals.
"Higher-life" movement: A movement inspired by the book of William E. Boardman, The Higher Christian Life (1859), which blended Wesleyan and Keswick (Reformed) holiness teaching on sanctification, emphasizing the gradual sanctification of the individual through Christian service over the course of a lifetime after a conversion experience.
Hinduism: An all-encompassing term for the religious experience and expression of most of the Indian people. Hinduism ranges from a philosophic understanding of the nature of the universe and humanity to popular devotion to one or another of the Gods in many small sects and spiritual practice groups.
Holiness: Churches founded on commitment to the doctrine of entire sanctification understood as a "second blessing" and the work of the Holy Spirit subsequent to conversion. Much of the holiness movement had Methodist roots because of John Wesley's teaching of perfectionism.
Holy Week: The week during which the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus are commemorated. The week includes Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.
Homeopathy: A natural health system founded by the German Samuel Hahnemann before 1810, claiming that the proper remedy to use for a sickness was one that, in a health person, produced the same symptoms as the disease and also that infinitesimal doses of the remedies possessed greater strength and should be employed.
Hoodoo: Another name for conjure, especially in the American South.
Hopi: A Pueblo (village) Indian group of the American Southwest, specifically what is now Arizona. The Hopi have an ancient agricultural history, culminating in the cliff dwellings and terraced villages of 900-1300 CE. Their language is Shoshonean.
Humanistic psychology: Form of psychology associated with the human-potential movement; combines mystical and meditative material, especially from Asian traditions, with psychotherapeutic techniques for emotional growth and consciousness expansion.
Hydropathy: Another name for water cure.
Icon: An image in religious art that aims to depict the saints, Mary, Jesus, or the Godhead; believed by Eastern Orthodoxy to be a meeting point of the sacred world and this one.
Iconoclasts: Eighth- and ninth-century Eastern Christian groups who were, literally, "image smashers." Suspicious of any religious art that tried to depict the saints, Mary, Jesus, or the Godhead.
Iconodules: Eighth- and ninth-century Eastern Christian groups who venerated icons--religious art with figural representations of holy figures--and struggled against iconoclasts to preserve images.
Imam: Literally the word refers to the person who stands before or in front, the leader of prayer in the mosque; in Shiism the word imam refers to the spiritual guide, the person who carries the prophetic light and is a living lawgiver.
Immanence: The concept of the presence of God in the world.
Incarnation: Christian doctrine of the birth of God the Son, as a human being, with a human nature, in Jesus of Nazareth.
Innate (chiropractic): A universal energy that practitioners of chiropractic believe to travel down the spinal column and generate good health. Innate, which was contrasted with "Educated," was identified with Intelligence and God by D. D. Palmer, the founder, in 1895, of chiropractic.
International Society for the Promotion of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON): A group founded in 1965 by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977) and based on the teachings of a sixteenth-century dualistic Hindu devotional sect. Members of this sect hail its founder, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, as an incarnation of Krishna, and devotion centers on Krishna, supreme personal God for his followers.
Invisible institution: The phrase used to designate the form of Protestant Christianity practiced in the antebellum American South by black slaves outside of the official Christianity controlled by white overseers and masters.
Itinerancy: Moving from place to place. Generally associated with itinerant ministers who traveled around a region preaching at revival meetings and serving churches without a resident minister, as among the Methodist circuit riders.
Jeremiad: A Puritan sermon of woe that set a tone of guilt and need for repentance and action; the name is derived from the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, known for his "Lamentations."
Jnana: In Hinduism, the religious way of knowledge that is understood as a cultivation of inner states of mind, insight into the basic meaning of life, and the realization of the universal being of Brahman. A Hindu realizes this knowledge through various techniques of physical and mental control.
Jodo Shinshu: The branch of Pure Land Buddhism that came to the United States with Japanese immigrants in the late nineteenth century; became the preferred Buddhism of Japanese Americans.
Justification: Technical theological term in Christianity for acceptability before God. In evangelical versions of American Christianity, justification came to be equated with the moment of conversion, in a version of the Reformation teaching of justification by grace through faith.
Kabbalah: An occult Jewish religious system in southern France and Spain that flourished in the twelfth century and continued thereafter. Kabbalists claimed that the Torah was an earthly garment that hid secret meanings and spiritual beauty.
Kachinas: A Hopi word with three meanings: first, the name of spiritual beings who were the inner, invisible forms of outer, visible phenomena such as plants, minerals and animals; second, the word refers to the male dancers who impersonated or embodied the Kachinas during the Kachina ceremonies; third, the name of the dolls given to children during the ceremonies to teach them about the Kachina spirits.
Karma: The law of action; refers to a Hindu religious path, the way of action, which teaches that each person must live according to the law of his or her caste without regard to results or satisfaction gained, and in so doing reap the appropriate effect.
Keswick theology: The teaching, named for an English town in which annual conferences were held from 1875, that sanctification meant empowerment of the individual by the Holy Spirit for Christian service and mission.
Kiddush: A Jewish prayer of sanctification recited over the Sabbath meal.
Koan: A riddle or verbal puzzle on which practitioners of Rinzai Zen Buddhism meditated to break out of ordinary consciousness and reach enlightenment.
Kriya yoga: A form of yoga taught by Paramahansa Yogananda in the self-realization fellowship, that placed emphasis on awakening a kundalini energy thought to lie at the base of the spine. The process of directing this energy up to the head would bring energy to the seven chakras or energy centers in the body.
Kundalini: Energy thought to lie at the base of the spine. Practitioners of kriya yoga, a nonclassical form of yoga practice taught by Paramahansa Yogananda, believed they could direct this energy upwards towards the head and charge the seven chakras, or energy centers, in the body.
Landmark Baptist movement: A nineteenth-century Baptist movement that rejected the teachings and ministers of all non-Baptist churches in an effort to restore the purity of the church, relying on the New Testament as a blueprint for church organization.
Latitudinarians: In the Church of England, people giving wide latitude to matters of dogma, church organization, and rubrics of worship. The Latitudinarians influenced the development of the Anglican tradition in Virginia.
"Liberal Christians": The predecessors to Unitarianism, active in Revolutionary War times, especially in and around Boston.
Liberal Protestantism: A form of American Protestantism in the later nineteenth century that grew out of and complemented religious pluralism. It is associated with ideas like divine immanence, the inherent goodness of human nature, the humanity of Jesus, the importance of experience in religion, and the significance of the social gospel.
Liberation theology: Form of theology that began in Latin America in the 1960s among Roman Catholics, employing Marxist categories blended with Christian teaching to address problems of extreme poverty by understanding the theological task as the unmasking of the causes of poverty and the condemnation of the causes of oppression.
Liturgy: In Catholicism and Christian traditions generally, the prescribed cycle of worship throughout the year, including the structure of the services, the texts for study, and the hymns to be sung.
Lotus Sutra of the Mystical Law: A Buddhist holy book that explained the fundamental laws of nature and was the central text and focus of meditation for the Nichiren Buddhist movement.
Lwa: The vodun spirits in Haiti of African origin, often also identified with Catholic saints.
Magic: A practice, used for both positive and negative purposes, often associated with witchcraft and involving rituals that tried to contact the powers of nature; manipulation of material reality through symbolic, ritualistic means for the objects and the ends of the practitioner.
Mahatma: As taught by Madame Helena Blavatsky and later theosophists, a member of a select brotherhood of individuals in the Himalaya Mountains who had evolved to degrees of spiritual perfection beyond those normally reached by others and who worked on behalf of human (and divine) good.
Mahayana: A major school of Buddhism that became the Buddhism of China and Japan; it was the larger of the two major Buddhist schools (the other being Theravada) and stressed the community and the ideal of the compassionate and self-sacrificing bodhisattva.
Mahdi: An imam from the house of cAli who will reappear at the end of time after a long period of occultation. The Mahdi, according to Shiites, will inaugurate the final victory of justice and deliver the dead to resurrection.
Maitreya Buddha: In virtually all Buddhist schools, the Buddha of the final age who will appear as a world teacher to initiate a new stage in the human evolutionary cycle; the belief was also promoted in America by theosophists.
Male continence: A system of birth control through male self-control of ejaculation; practiced by Oneida Perfectionists to support their practice of complex marriage and to regulate births.
Manifest destiny: A term used after 1845 to describe beliefs about the political mission of America to expand across the continent.
Mantra: A sacred sound on which practitioners of yoga may focus; used as an aid to meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Matrilineal: Rights of inheritance and identity passed through the mother's line.
Matrilocal: Living after marriage in the mother's village/band.
Medium: An officiant in rituals who claimed that he or she could communicate with spirits. Nineteenth-century spiritualist mediums, among other practices, engaged in automatic writing and appeared on public stages as trance speakers.
Megillah: A scroll containing Jewish scripture.
Mennonites: A sectarian group who in the sixteenth century grew out of the Protestant Radical Reformation.
Menorah: Candelabrum, used at Hanukkah, that holds eight candles.
Mesmerism: Healing practice, often called animal magnetism, based on the teachings of Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815) regarding mysterious "tides" that moved between planetary and animal bodies and could be unblocked to heal the ill. It was the antecedent of later hypnotism.
Metaphysics: American religious tradition that thought of God in impersonal terms and stressed the power of mind to change the world. Expressed since the nineteenth century in spiritualism, theosophy, New Thought, and, most recently, the New Age movement.
Millennialism: The belief in the imminent end of this world and the birth of a new one. The term is associated with the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Christian New Testament, in which Satan is chained up for a thousand years, or a millennium, as part of the end-time scenario.
Millennium: A period of one thousand years; in Christianity, the thousand-year reign of Christ as prophesied in the biblical Book of Revelation.
Mind cure: A nineteenth-century name for Christian Science and New Thought healing.
Mission mind: The name for nineteenth-century and later determination among Protestant evangelicals to bring others into the church, either through mission societies or through revivals that would reach those who had not yet experienced conversion.
Missionary Baptists: Those Baptists who believed in the importance of evangelizing.
Modernism: The most pronounced expression of Christian liberalism, aiming to realize the gospel in the modern world and thus to break down the barrier between religion and the rest of life.
Monism: The Hindu philosophy of oneness that teaches that the world is one reality and that the appearance of separation, caused by the existence of matter, is an illusion; any general philosophical positing of one principle as basic to all reality.
Monotheism: A religion that recognizes only one God for all people. Judaism and religions that came out of the Jewish tradition are monotheistic.
Moral Majority: A conservative Protestant religiopolitical organization founded by Jerry Falwell in 1979, which, like other organizations of the New Christian Right, advocated and lobbied for traditional values such as a commitment to a strong family and prescribed gender roles.
Moralism: A characteristic of public Protestantism; strongly articulated emphasis on morality stemming from a wish to simplify life and characterized by an overriding concern for the rules of behavior and action.
Moravians: German Pietists from a Lutheran background; with roots in the fifteenth-century Hussite movement, Moravians achieved their modern identity after a 1722 revival.
Mormons: A sectarian group founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. He announced messages from the angel Moroni about written testimony to the spiritual history of early America and presented to followers his "gold Bible," the Book of Mormon, which he said he had found in the earth, following Moroni's instruction.
Mosque: Islamic house of worship.
Mother Ann's Work: Period of ritual intensity during the mid-nineteenth century in which the Shakers maintained contact with their founder Ann Lee (1736-1784) through mediums who claimed they could communicate with spirits.
Mutual criticism: Regular and ritualized mutual and public criticism practiced by the Oneida Perfectionists for an individual who had requested it or for a member who was causing serious problems in the community.
Mysticism: Term with a variety of meanings regarding a type of religious experience; in the context of the text, belief in the possibility of an experience of total union between the divine and the human or of strong and intense, immediate, and metanormal religious experience.
Nation of Islam: A movement in the United States that began in 1930 under Wallace D. Fard and later Elijah Muhammad and emphasized the importance of black identity and resistance to white oppression. Although begun as a strictly separatist group, it has split into two broad groups, one continuing to advocate extremist black separatism and one that desires to be included in the larger Muslim community of the world.
Natural law ethic: Reliance, in Roman Catholicism, on a law thought to be implicit in nature; i.e., in the growth and development of every creature, as a source of moral guidance for human life.
Nature Religion: Form of religion in which the natural world is held to be sacred and is often considered a sign of the world of spirit.
Neopaganism: Contemporary term used to describe magical or occult groups with an orientation, mostly, to pre-Christian nature religions; an alternative term for witchcraft.
Neoplatonism: A philosophical descendant, from the third century C.E., of the teachings of the Greek philosopher Plato, which refashioned Platonism to make it a Hellenistic religious system. The ultimate "Idea" in the Neoplatonic system was the One with which the Neoplatonists sought mystical union.
Neoplatonism: A third-century C.E. philosophical school that taught, among other things, that the ultimate idea was the One and from it, through a process of emanation, came the many of the material world. Neoplatonists promoted a mystical path of ascent of the soul back to the One.
New School Presbyterians: Activist and Americanized (more liberal) wing of the Presbyterian church in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century; Presbyterians who supported an affiliation with Congregationalism and promoted toleration and cooperation.
New Theology: A Protestant movement in later-nineteenth-century America that emphasized evangelical liberalism, centering emotionally on an individual relationship with Jesus and leading confidently toward an acceptance of the world.
New Thought: A movement that developed in New England in the 1880s and 1890s, based in part upon the earlier teaching and healing practice of Phineas P. Quimby (1802-1866), who believed that one's health or prosperity depended on inward belief, which controlled material manifestations.
Nichiren Buddhism: A branch of Buddhism formed by a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, Nichiren, who preached the centrality of a particular holy book called the Lotus Sutra of the Mystical Law. Nichiren Buddhism was reborn in twentieth-century Japan as the Soka Gakkai organization and eventually came to the United States as a missionary movement.
Nirvana: The moment of enlightenment for Buddhists in which unconditioned reality is experienced.
Nishi Hongwanji: A movement within Jodo Shinshu, a sect of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism that gave rise to Buddhism first in Hawaii, and then in California during the late nineteenth century.
Nonconformists: Dissenters from the Church of England who refused to conform to its teaching, polity, or discipline from the seventeenth century. Part of the Puritan movement that resulted in Separatist and non-Separatist wings and issued in various generic congregational and presbyterian forms of church government.
Nonintellectualism: An offshoot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century reductionism in public Protestantism that discouraged abstract theological reflection without practical application.
Non-Separatists: Puritans who did not want to leave the Church of England because they believed it should be purified from within.
North American Buddhist Mission: From 1899 to 1944, organized form of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism in America.
Occultism: A form of metaphysical religion that in the West in elite form crystallized around a secret body of knowledge and magical practice passed on by small, select groups, and in popular form was traditionally handed down as a practical form of control of material reality.
Oglala: A group of Sioux belonging to the Teton division, who originated in Minnesota and moved to the Plains. In the nineteenth century they lived on the prairies between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and were known as great buffalo hunters. Their language is Lakota.
Old School Baptists: Also known as Antimission Baptists, Primitive, Regular, and Hard Shell Baptists, Old School Baptists were mostly concentrated in the mountains of Appalachia; based on strict predestinarian teaching that precluded missionary work.
Old School Presbyterians: Conservative and Calvinist-oriented wing of the Presbyterian church; Presbyterians who objected to an affiliation with the Congregationalists, concerned over disciplinary matters and the allocation of money to missions.
Oneida Perfectionists: A nineteenth-century communal group, who established communities in Putney, Vermont, and then Oneida, New York. The Perfectionists believed that Christian communism would end the traditional "work-system" and the "marriage-system" that were both hindrances to freedom and equality, practicing material sharing and complex marriage.
Ordinary religion: The kind of religion, in distinction from extraordinary religion, that is found in the regular expression of cultural norms. Ordinary religion exists within the roles and boundaries that reinforce the main values of a society.
Orisha: A term used to refer to the spirits of Cuban Santeria. Originally a Yoruba word.
Orthodox Judaism: A Jewish movement, consisting largely of Jews of Eastern European descent, that self-consciously sought to retain the religious observances of the past and hold onto all 613 commandments of the Torah; one of the three major branches of Judaism.
Osteopathy: An American healing art and technique of physical manipulation begun by Andrew Taylor Still in the 1880s based on theoretical foundations that joined animal magnetism and bonesetting. Influential in the development of chiropractic, but later grew to become a part of the medical mainstream.
Paraliturgical devotions: Personal avenues of worship that supplement the official liturgy and sacraments, especially in Catholicism. These devotions may include veneration of the saints and Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Parapsychology: Form of psychology concerned with study of reported paranormal phenomena, such as clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis.
Particular (Calvinist) Baptists: Baptists who believed in a doctrine of a limited atonement by Jesus for only the elect, or chosen.
Passover/Pesach: The Jewish holiday that celebrates and memorializes the Exodus from Egypt. Originally, a feast of the end of winter and the sowing of the first seed, it marks the beginning of the lunar year in the spring.
Patrilineal: Rights of inheritance and identity passed through the fathers line.
Patrilocal: Living after marriage in the man's household or village/band.
Pawaokaya bird: In Hopi cosmology, the bird that was created by the chiefs of the people of the world below, which found an opening into this world.
Peace Mission Movement: Begun by Father Divine in 1932, a movement that included aspects of the holiness, pentecostal, and mind-cure traditions as well as African-American Christianity, teaching that health and plenty follow from true identification with the Spirit of God.
Peak Experience: A personal state named and as described by Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), considered similar to the mystical experiences recorded in the literature of different religious traditions; part of humanistic psychology and promoted by the human-potential movement.
Pentecost/Shavuot/Weeks: A Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah. In the Christian tradition Pentecost is celebrated as a commemoration of the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles after they were convinced that Jesus had risen and then ascended into heaven.
Pentecostalism: Churches related to the holiness movement that seek the experience of grace through the baptism of the Holy Spirit manifested in the Spirit's gifts of speaking in tongues, prayer, prophecy, and healing, among others.
Perfectionism: The doctrine of Christian perfection that came through the experience of sanctification by the Holy Spirit, which brought with it freedom from sin, either immediately or gradually; taught especially by John Wesley and the Methodists.
Peyotism: A twentieth-century Native American religion. It is pan-Indian, including members of many different Indian cultures. The practice centers on the use of the vision-inducing peyote plant, but incorporates Christian elements as well.
Pilgrims: A group of Puritans who believed in separation from the Church of England, which was regarded as corrupt, and who fled persecution, first to Holland and then to New England.
Plan of Union (1801): An agreement under which Presbyterians and Congregationalists cooperated in home missionary efforts on the frontier with shared pulpits, clergy, and even dual memberships in the congregations.
Platonism: Philosophical position that followed the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's theory of ideas, seeing the real world as the world of ideas and the material world as comprised of copies of ideas and, thus, inferior.
Pluralism: The condition in which many religions are present and legal, as in the United States.
Polygamy: The practice by a man of having more than one wife; part of early Mormon practice.
Polytheism: A religion that includes worship of more than one God.
Postmillennialism: Belief, prominent in the nineteenth century and later, that Jesus will return after the commencement of the millennium. Inspired active work by Christians to help inaugurate the new age.
Pranayama: In classical Indian yoga, control of breathing cultivated by practitioners of hatha yoga.
Predestination: The Calvinist teaching that claimed that individuals were elected by God to be saved or damned.
Premillennialism: The belief, ascendant in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, that Jesus will return before the millennium to inaugurate it; associated with fundamentalism and with a pessimism regarding the present age.
Presbyterianism: A Protestant denominational form governed through the authority of a presbytery, a ruling body made up of ministers and elders representing a group of local congregations; general name for the Protestant denominational tradition that embraces the presbyterian form of governance.
Priesthood of all believers: A Reformation doctrine that departed from the medieval sacramental understanding of the priest to emphasize that each individual acts as his or her own intercessor before God, offering worship to God.
Primacy of the Pope: Veneration of the pope in Rome as the sole head on earth of the church. In 1054 the pope excommunicated the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, a move stemming from the argument over papal primacy.
Primitivism: Name for the impulse in Protestant Christianity to restore the primitive, or New Testament, church; another name for restorationism.
Princeton theology: Theology emanating from a series of late nineteenth-century theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary, including Charles Hodge. Based on the Baconianism of the era, it saw the Bible as a scientific book of facts, promoting both literalism and arguments of inerrancy.
Promise Keepers: Protestant evangelical movement, begun by Bill McCartney in 1990, which has promoted all-male revivals and commitment to a series of seven promises that reaffirm traditionalist ethics and gender roles.
Psychometry: A practice that involved a medium who tries to get in touch with vibrations of a physical object so that she or he can learn about people who have touched it in the past. Psychometry was one of many practices associated with mental mediumship and part of spiritualist development in the nineteenth century.
Public Protestantism: Protestantism as the dominant and public religion of the United States, with a major formative role in shaping cultural belief and behavior; a major component of the nation's "one religion."
Pure Land Buddhism: A form of Mahayana Buddhism that teaches faith in a being called Amida Buddha, who after achieving Buddhahood established the Western Kingdom or the Pure Land. Believers who trust in and are devoted to Amida are said to be able to enter the Pure Land after death and to experience enlightenment. In its Jodo Shinshu branch, the preferred Buddhism of Japanese Americans.
Purim: A Jewish celebration of a story from the Book of Esther. Often Purim is celebrated with a carnival or a play.
Puritanism: The Calvinist movement that grew from the conviction that Queen Elizabeth's reforms did not go far enough. The name comes from the Puritan goal of purifying the church.
Qur'an: The primary sacred text for Muslims, said to have been revealed to the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.
Rabbi: Literally, "teacher"; one qualified to expound on Jewish law (Torah); trained and ordained for professional religious and congregational leadership.
Rapture: Belief among premillennialist fundamentalist Christians in a "catching up" into the heavens of the saved at Christ's second coming; one of a series of end-time events outlined by Christian fundamentalist theology.
Rastafarianism: Jamaican religion from the 1920s, combining political and salvific goals. Rastafarians identify Ethiopia as the promised land and regard the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie (1892-1975), as the incarnate God. They also anticipate the overthrow of white world domination by people of African descent.
Reconstructionism: An offshoot of Conservative Judaism, founded in 1935 by Mordecai Kaplan. The movement tried to re-establish a unified Jewish identity that encompassed not just overtly religious matters but all aspects of community life.
Reductionism: Characteristic of public Protestantism, a reducing or paring away of religion to its barest essentials, with emphasis on clear and simple ideas and forms of ritual life.
Reform Judaism: A movement in Judaism brought to the United States by German immigrants. This movement began as a response to the desegregation of European Jewish communities after the Enlightenment. Ideas of the Enlightenment led to a reform of ritual practice and to theological innovation; one of the three major branches of Judaism.
Regional religion: A religion that rises out of, is shaped by, and is a function of the interaction between the geographical location of people and their past and present history.
Regular Baptists: A name for General Baptists during the Great Revival of the nineteenth century. Regular Baptists at this time taught the Calvinist belief in the predestination of the elect and the damned instead of the earlier General Baptist belief that salvation was possible for all.
Reiki: A Japanese and American method of palm healing, thought to occur through the transmission of universal "life-force" energy; popular among New Age Americans.
Reincarnation: South Asian doctrine of rebirth of an individual in a new body or form after death. Promoted in the United States by the Theosophical Society and other metaphysical believers. Widespread belief today in the New Age movement.
Renaissance: A movement of cultural rebirth that began in northern Italy in the fourteenth century and spread throughout Europe over the next two centuries. Part of this rebirth involved a revival of interest in the occult tradition.
Restorationism: Also called primitivism, the movement within Protestant Christianity to restore the church of New Testament times, with the conviction that reforming the church on the model endorsed by the mainstream Protestant Reformation was not enough.
Revivalism: The technique of mass evangelism characterized by sweeping awakenings, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present. Revivalism employed preaching to effect individual conversion experiences.
Ring shout: A West-African-derived form of worship practiced by black Christian slaves in the American South, wherein the leader lined out the verses of a song while the others moved in a circle. Still other members of the congregation participated by singing, clapping, and tapping their feet.
Rinpoche: A Tibetan Buddhist master.
Rinzai Zen: A branch of Japanese Zen Buddhism that taught that enlightenment was a sudden event that could be triggered by meditation on a koan, a verbal puzzle, or by any kind of circumstance that would jolt a person out of ordinary consciousness.
Romanticism: A nineteenth-century cultural movement that succeeded the Enlightenment, viewing nature not as mechanical but as organic, free, and spontaneous. For humans, understanding was seen to come from emotion or intuition as opposed to reason.
Rosh Hashanah: The Jewish New Year, the day that marks the beginning of the Days of Awe, or the High Holy Days.
Sacrament: A sacred sign; a person, place, object, or action regarded as manifesting the presence of a sacred reality. understood as the place or occasion where a divine or transcendent world is experienced as breaking into the human world.
Sacramental: An object used devotionally, as by Catholics, as a means with which they hope to encounter the grace of God.
Sanctification: The second manifestation of grace that a Christian may be thought to experience. Associated with forms of Methodism and the holiness tradition, this experience is said to cleanse the individual of a deepseated sinfulness.
Santeria: An African-influenced religion in Cuba that combines aspects of the Yoruban religion and worldview with Catholic practice, symbols, and saints.
Santero/a: A practitioner of Santeria who is considered a priest or priestess and performs rituals in the community, often with a goal of healing or of ensuring right relationships between people and the orisha.
Scientology: A scientific-technological spiritual practice group that formed around L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), who used an electrical device called the E-meter, meant to help people become "Clear". Once the consciousness was thought liberated, it was believed that it could control matter, energy, space, and time.
Séance: A ritual ceremony, prominent during the nineteenth-century spiritualist movement and thereafter, in which a medium, often a woman, would act as the agent for communication with the spiritual world for a group assembled for the occasion.
Sect: A voluntary and exclusive, conversional religious society; as distinct from a church, which is characterized by separation from the world, intense commitment, and radical life-style.
Seder: The ceremonial meal eaten at the Jewish holiday of Passover.
Self-Realization Fellowship: A yogic movement, founded in 1935 in America by Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), emphasizing Kriya yoga; it initiated a series of Vedantic yogic teachings that in popularized form were absorbed into American culture.
Separation of church and state: A term for the specification of religious liberty or religious disestablishment based on the United States Constitution in which Congress was prohibited from making any law either establishing a religion or prohibiting its free exercise.
Separatists: Another name for the Pilgrims -- Puritans who thought that the only route to purity was complete separation form the Church of England.
Sephardim: Jews of Spain. Their culture comes from the Babylonian tradition but incorporated Moorish influences during the period of Muslim dominance of Spain.
Seventh-day Adventists: A premillennial Protestant sect founded in 1860 by some of the former Millerites after the second Advent predicted in 1844 did not occur. Adventists keep the Sabbath Day on the seventh day, or Saturday, as the Jews do. The cofounder and early prophet of the movement, Ellen G. White, instituted reforms in nutrition, hygiene and dress, and had visions in which the righteousness of the Adventists was confirmed.
Shakers: A communal group that began in eighteenth-century England, and in America was led by Ann Lee. The group held distinctive beliefs about celibacy, the confession of sin, the existence of God as a Father-Mother deity, and Ann Lee as Christ's Second Appearing. A few Shakers survive today.
Shaman: A religious figure who combines the attributes of sacred healers, mystics, and magicians. Known in many cultures for ability to fly through the air, to create and regulate fire and heat, to talk to the animals, and to perform magical healing.
Shamanic journeying: Mental journeying through the controlled use of imagination by a shamanic practitioner and aided by the use of drum, rattle, and/or hallucinogenic plants.
Sheikh: The spiritual master for Sufi disciples. Often the founder/leader of a religious order.
Shema: The summary of the Jews' announced covenant with their God. From Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21, and Numbers 15:37-41. The shema articulates the primary belief that there is only one God. It is recited morning and evening by pious Jews.
Shiites: Originally the followers of the family of cAli, the son-in-law and cousin of the prophet Muhammad. cAli was the first in a line of sacred figures called imams who, for Shiites, came to replace the caliphs of Sunni Islam. The Shiites form the largest group of Muslims in modern-day Iran.
Sikhism: A movement of northern India, led by Nanak (1469-1539), which tried to reconcile Muslim and Hindu teachings.
Sipapu: In Hopi culture, the hole in the kiva, or ceremonial room, that is thought to open to the world below, from which human beings originated. The sipapu is opened during initiation rites and at the end of the year so that the dead can leave the womb of the earth to participate.
Social Gospel: A post-Civil War Protestant movement that taught that the Kingdom of God could only be brought about, on earth, through human effort, largely through the process of social reform.
Society of Friends: The official name of the Quakers. An offshoot of the Puritan movement committed to a doctrine of the Inner Light and humanitarian 'benevolence' toward all peoples with positive work as service to them.
Sojourners: Christian community founded in 1971 aiming to live a life of radical discipleship and combining conservative evangelical Protestant beliefs with liberal political views and social activism; based in Washington, D.C., where the group has been located since 1975.
Soto Zen: A branch of Japanese Zen Buddhism that, unlike Rinzai Zen, taught that enlightenment was a gradual process. Practice centered on quiet meditation with the goal of emptying the mind of all thought.
Spectral evidence: Testimony of alleged instances of the practice of witchcraft by its victims through their recital of visionary experiences, physical phenomena, or ill luck that befell them as a result of what they believed to be the malicious acts of an individual witch; literally, "ghostly" evidence. A major factor in the Salem witchcraft episode of 1692.
Spiritualism: A nineteenth-century and continuing movement based on the belief in and practice of communication with the spirits of the dead through the help of human mediums, many of whom were women. Spiritualism spread in the United States especially after 1848 with the religious excitement generated by the claims of the Fox sisters to spirit communication.
Spirituals: Biblically oriented communal songs of a deeply emotional character that developed among slaves in the American South, blending African and Protestant musical forms.
Sufis: The mystics of Islam, formed into religious communities, or orders. The word Sufi derives from the Arabic root suf or "wool," most likely referring to the simple woolen garments worn by early Sufi ascetics.
Sun Dance: One of the seven major Oglala rituals, it is celebrated in early summer, after the buffalo "harvest." The ritual lasts four days, culminating in a dance in which the participants are bound to a sacred pole.
Sunna: Customs that supplement the teachings of the Qur'an, the sacred text for Muslims. The sunna are believed to allow Muslims to access Islam as it was practiced by the prophet Muhammad and the early followers of Islam.
Sunnis: The largest community of Muslims, Sunni Muslims claim to follow the sunna of the original Muslim community; they honor the early history of Islam and its first leaders called the four Rightly Guided Caliphs.
Sutra: Buddhist, or sometimes Vedic, scripture or holy writing.
Swami: In Hinduism, a title of respect for the guru or religious teacher.
Sweat lodge: One of the seven major Oglala rituals, in which the participants construct the lodge according to specific ritual practice, place the stones in specific relationships to each other and to the cardinal directions, and assume specific roles for the course of the ritual.
Swedenborgianism: A movement and church that began in the eighteenth century based on the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722), who taught a correspondence between the natural and spiritual worlds, the natural world having been created in the image of a higher spiritual realm. His ideas of divine influx and the materiality of the spirit realm became part of the spiritualist movement that flourished in the nineteenth century.
Synagogue: Originally a Greek word describing a gathering place for worship, the term is now applied to Jewish places of worship specifically.
Tabernacles/Sukkot/Booths: The Jewish festival celebrating the end of all agricultural work for the year and commemorating the wandering of the Jews in the desert before they entered Canaan.
Talmud: The compilation of writings and commentaries that elaborates or amplifies Jewish law.
Taoism: A Chinese philosophy and religion of nature; a traditional part of Chinese culture, aiming to liberate people from worldly concerns and attachments.
Teetotaler: Person who practices total abstinence from alcohol, usually, in the United States, after taking a pledge.
Temperance: Movement to curb the consumption of alcohol in America, eventually after 1825 insisting on total abstinence.
Temple work: A Mormon phrase designating sacred practice, or ritual activity, in the temple, not open to outsiders.
Theocracy: Literally, a government by God or, more specifically, a church-state aggregation in which government is in the hands of religious leaders and/or their delegates; characteristic of Massachusetts Bay Puritanism in the seventeenth century.
Theosophical Society: A group founded by Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott in New York in 1875. It grew partially out of the spiritualist movement and in its mature form had the threefold intent of questing for occult knowledge, of forming a universal "brotherhood" of all people, and of promoting the study of comparative religions.
Theosophy: General movement associated, in America, with the Theosophical Society; system of metaphysical beliefs similar to those taught by the society.
Theravada: A major school of Buddhist interpretation established by the third century B.C.E. that became the Buddhism of Southeast Asia. Theravada sees itself as the most ancient and traditional Buddhist school, insisting on the historicity of the Buddha and his exemplary significance.
Tongues speaking: Inspired or ecstatic speech, considered to be a sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit in the pentecostal churches. The tradition comes from the story of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-20).
Torah: The Jewish Bible. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
Total depravity: The Calvinist belief in the inability of humans on their own to say or do anything that could merit them salvation. A position held by Calvinists that supported the doctrine of redemption through grace.
Transcendence: The conception of God as distant or separate from humans (in Calvinist theology for example).
Transcendental Meditation: Neo-Hindu movement led by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (b. 1911?), who taught a form of knowledge and meditation practice based on the teachings of the Indian spiritual books, the Upanishads, as interpreted by the Vedanta school of Shankara (788-820).
Transcendentalism: A New England movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who taught that by studying nature people could uncover the secrets of their inner selves and a corresponding knowledge of the divine. Grew especially in liberal Unitarian circles from 1836.
Transpersonal psychology: Form of psychology that aims to study religious states of mind and to incorporate traditional spiritual disciplines as part of the research methodology.
Tribulation: Name for a period of suffering, trial, and catastrophe on earth; one of a series of end-time events outlined by Christian fundamentalist theology.
Trickster: A powerful and pervasive figure in Native American lore, the Trickster is a being of creative power who had helped to put the present world in order. Yet the trickster embodies disorder as well and serves as a reminder that the boundaries of community are essential but fragile. Tricksters are often associated with animals such as Coyote, Hare, and Raven.
Trusteeism: Name for a movement among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American lay Catholics to incorporate forms of congregational governance, allowed by United States laws, that conferred corporate ownership of church property on the lay trustees of a congregation.
Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists: Antimission Baptists who emerged during the nineteenth-century Great Revival, primarily in Appalachia, and who taught a doctrine that a seed of good or of evil was planted in each human being from the beginning.
UFO groups: Spiritual practice groups that form around people who claim to have been contacted by beings in unidentified flying objects from outer space.
Umma: The Arabic word referring to the community of those who follow Allah (the God). This community formed the basis of a new social organization for the Arabian peninsula, which until the time of Muhammad was based on clan kinships.
Uniate Christians: Eastern Christians who remained outside the Orthodox umbrella but, organized in different national churches and practicing distinctive rites, were and are linked in communion with the Roman pontiff.
Unitarianism: The movement in America that resulted from the liberalizing of some Congregationalist churches and eventuated by 1825 in a collection of churches in the American Unitarian Association. Characteristic doctrines include belief in the moral nature of humanity that is the foundation of virtue and in the unity of God, with Jesus more than human but less than divine.
United Baptists: Groups in Appalachia with antimission sentiments; formed from a merger of different groups of Separate and Regular Baptists in 1787 (Virginia) and 1801 (Kentucky).
United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing: Official name for the Shakers.
Universalists: An American Protestant Christian denomination who believed in universal salvation through the sacrifice and grace of Jesus. Founded by an English Methodist, John Murray, in the 1770s.
Vajrayana: A third large school of Buddhism (after Theravada and Mahayana), which from the third or fourth century C.E. became the Buddhism, most notably, of Tibet. This form of Buddhism employed heavily symbolic means in ritualized meditation practices that sought to integrate the passions and emotions in its goal of mystical union.
Vedanta Society: A group founded in 1896 in New York, based on the monistic Indian religious philosophy of Vedanta as taught by Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), which brought the message of South Asia to Americans who were religious seekers.
Vestry: In Anglican and Episcopalian Christianity, the church members responsible for the material affairs of the church.
Visible saints: A Puritan phrase denoting members of the church, who were people believed to be assured of salvation.
Vision quest: An Oglala ritual performed in order to enable an individual to gain power through a vision in which it was hoped that guardian spirits would reveal their relationship to the seeker and bestow the knowledge/power he (or sometimes she) desired.
Voluntaryism: American freedom to choose religious beliefs, associations, and behaviors without coercion; likewise, the consequent value placed on an individual choice and activity to promote denominational well-being financially, managerially, and socially; characteristic of public Protestantism.
Voodoo: A version of the transformed West African religion, vodun, practiced in Haiti, as it flourished in New Orleans. A mixture of African and Catholic rituals and symbols, with an emphasis on healing and divination.
Wakan: Oglala word meaning "holy." Believed to be that dimension of reality that caused transformation; could be an attribute of the elements or of particularly important animals, like the buffalo.
Wakantanka: The culmination of the Oglala wakan. Wakantanka has sometimes been equated with the Jewish and Christian God. Oglala prayers are addressed to Wakantanka, but the word can also be understood as an adjective, like "holy" or "sacred."
Water cure: Also known as hydropathy. A physical therapy, popular after 1840, by which a patient underwent a variety of healing baths, showers, and compresses, hot and cold, in the belief that water could work the cure sought; a form of alternative healing.
Westminster Confession: A formal statement of faith that had been approved by the British Parliament in 1648; the most influential of English-speaking Presbyterian confessions of faith.
Witchcraft: Religious belief and behavior, based on a pre-Christian religion of nature and congenial forms, that flourished in American from the seventeenth century to the present. Part of the metaphysical tradition in its occult form.
Yakub's history: The sacred story of origins of the Nation of Islam, describing the superiority of black people and a demonic plot that had created a bleached-out white race over the course of centuries.
Yoga: Literally "union," yoga in Hindu teaching refers to the doctrine and practice that tries to bring about the unification of a person's inner being. Yoga was brought to the United States by Paramahansa Yogananda in the 1920s.
Yom Kippur: In Judaism, the Day of Atonement. The culmination of the Days of Awe that begin on Rosh Hashanah. It is a day of fasting and penance and the holiest day of the Jewish year.
Zazen: The traditional sitting meditation practice of Zen Buddhism.
Zen Buddhism: A form of Buddhism that originated in China in the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. as Ch'an Buddhism and was imported to Japan in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Flourished as a combination of Mahayana religious philosophy and Theravada meditation techniques.
Zoroastrianism: A pre-Islamic and dualistic Persian religion that
taught that, after a universal war between good and evil, a prophet would
come to usher in a new age of final justice. Most Zoroastrians today live
in India.
Thank you to Erica Hurwitz and Margaret Leeming for compiling the glossary.