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This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ways in which the lives of male monastic saints circulating in late medieval England (and the cults of male saints more widely) were underpinned by certain ideas and ideals of masculinity and the functions which these performed. It argues for the significance of male saints serving as devotional models for the lay audience of these texts (both men and women). The two main sources are William Caxton's Golden Legend (published in 1483) and his Vitas Patrum (published after his death by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495). It therefore seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which piety was used to assess masculinity, but also the extent to which piety as a social identity (both public and private in nature) was informed by notions of manliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though non-emergency private baptism became a debated issue in seventeenth-century England, the practice, as has been commonly believed, did not become a trend all over the country. By taking a close look at several seventeenth-century baptismal registers of churches in and outside London, this article shows that non-emergency private baptism was the choice taken mostly by well-to-do families living in London. As a contrast, rural parishes still adhered strictly to the Prayer Book, by administering private baptism only in emergency. Therefore, this article maintains that non-emergency private baptism was more of an exception than the common practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political arithmetic, generally understood as an early form of political economy, was originally designed by Sir William Petty in the 1670s less as a method of quantitative analysis than as a program of government through the direct manipulation of demographic processes. In the context of the English colonization of Ireland, its goal was “the transmutation of Irish into English”; under the Catholic James II it briefly became a program for the catholicization of the three Stuart kingdoms. Both projects undermined the national and religious categories associated with traditional exclusionist policy and fostered a radical inclusionism. Only after 1688 did Petty's successors decisively rearticulate political arithmetic as a putatively apolitical analytical tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this guest editorial the author offers his opinions on the outcome of the Brexit referendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]