This volume explores how Pagans negotiate local and global tensions as they craft their identities, both as members of local communities and as cosmopolitan “citizens of the world.” Based on cutting edge international case studies from Pagan communities in the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Malta, it considers how modern Pagans negotiate tensions between the particular and universal, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and world citizenship. The burgeoning of modern Paganisms in recent decades has proceeded alongside growing globalization and human mobility, ubiquitous Internet use, a mounting environmental crisis, the re-valuing of indigenous religions, and new political configurations. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism have both influenced the weaving of unique local Paganisms in diverse contexts. Pagans articulate a strong attachment to local or indigenous traditions and landscapes, constructing paths that reflect local socio-cultural, political, and historical realities. However, they draw on the Internet and the global circulation of people and universal ideas. This collection considers how they confound these binaries in fascinating, complex ways as members of local communities and global networks.

Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

Since ancient times, Jews have had a long and tangled relationship to cosmopolitanism. Torn between a longstanding commitment to other Jews and the pressure to integrate into various host societies, many Jews have sought a third, seemingly neutral option, that of becoming citizens of the world: cosmopolitans. Few regions witnessed such intense debates on these questions as the lands of East Central Europe as they entered the modern era. From Berlin to Moscow and from Vilna to Bucharest, the Jews of East Central Europe were repeatedly torn between people, nation and the world. While many Jews and individuals of Jewish descent embraced cosmopolitan ideologies and movements across the span of the nineteenth century, such appeals to transcend the nation became increasingly suspect with the rise of integral nationalism. In Germany, Poland, Russia and other lands, Jews and other supporters of cosmopolitan movements were marginalized during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although such sentiments reached their peak during the Second World War, anti-cosmopolitan propaganda continued throughout the Cold War when it often became an integral part of anti-Jewish campaigns in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania. Even after the end of the Cold War, the connection between Jews and cosmopolitanism continues to befuddle ideologues, cultural leaders and politicians in Europe, North America and Israel. The fourteen chapters amassed in this volume address these and other questions including: What lies at the roots of the longstanding connection between Jews and cosmopolitanism? How has this relationship changed over time? What can different cultural, economic and political developments teach us about the ongoing attraction and tension between Jews and cosmopolitanism? And, what can these test cases tell us about the future of Jews and cosmopolitanism in the twenty-first century? This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Rodnoverie was one of the first new religious movements to emerge following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its development providing an important lens through which to view changes in post-Soviet religious and political life. Rodnovers view social and political issues as inseparably linked to their religiosity but do not reflect the liberal values dominant among Western Pagans. Indeed, among the conservative and nationalist movements often associated with Rodnoverie in Russia, traditional anti-Western and anti-Semitic rhetoric has recently been overshadowed by anti-Islam and anti-migrant tendencies. Providing a fascinating overview of the history, organisations, adherents, beliefs and practices of Rodnoverie this book presents several different narratives; as a revival of the native Russian or Slavic religion, as a nature religion and as an alternative to modern values and lifestyles. Drawing upon primary sources, documents and books this analysis is supplemented with extensive fieldwork carried out among Rodnoverie communities in Russia and will be of interest to scholars of post-Soviet society, new religious movements and contemporary Paganism in general.

Mainstream philosophy of religion has persistently failed to engage seriously or critically with animist beliefs and practices. The field that is now called "philosophy of religion" could quite easily be renamed "philosophy of theism" with few lecturers on the subject having to change their lecture notes. It is the aim of this volume to rectify that failure and to present animism as a live option among the plethora of religious worldviews. The volume addresses four major questions: 1. What is this thing called "animism"? 2. Are there any arguments for or against animist belief and practice? 3. What is the relationship between animism, naturalism, and the sciences? And 4. Should we take animism seriously? Animism and Philosophy of Religion is intended to be the first authoritative scholarly volume on the issue of animism and its place in the philosophy of religion. Ambitiously, it aims to act as the cornerstone volume for future work on the subject and as a key text for courses engaging with the subject.

What does religion mean to modern Ireland and what is its recent social and political history? The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland provides in-depth analysis of the relationships between religion, society, politics, and everyday life on the island of Ireland from 1800 to the twenty-first century. Taking a chronological and all-island approach, it explores the complex and changing role of religion both before and after partition. The handbook's thirty-two chapters address long-standing historical and political debates about religion, identity, and politics, including religion's contributions to division and violence. They also offer perspectives on how religion interacts with education, the media, law, gender and sexuality, science, literature, and memory. Whilst providing insight into how everyday religious practices have intersected with the institutional structures of Catholicism and Protestantism, the book also examines the island's increasing religious diversity, including the rise of those with 'no religion'. Written by leading scholars in the field and emerging researchers with new perspectives, this is an authoritative and up-to-date volume that offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the enduring significance of religion on the island.

The most comprehensive study available of neo-pagan religious movements in North America and Europe. Modern Paganism in World Cultures collects the work of specialists in religion, folklore, and related fields to provide a comprehensive treatment of the movement to reestablish pre-Christian religions. Detailed accounts of the belief systems and rituals of each religion, along with analysis of the cultural, social, and political factors fueling the return to ancestral religious practice, make this a rich, singular resource. Scandinavian Asatru, Latvian Dievturi, American Wicca—long-dormant religions are taking on new life as people seek connection with their heritage and look for more satisfying approaches to the pressures of postmodernism. The Neopagan movement is a small but growing influence in Western culture. This book provides a map to these resurgent religions and an examination of the origins of the Neopagan movement.