Although people may – as some psychologists argue -- be born with a tendency to become believers, specific religious traditions are cultural products that must be acquired through learning and socialization. In addition, religious beliefs and behaviors take on different meanings at different ages. This chapter starts with a discussion of religious socialization and the developmental psychology of religion. The chapter includes a detailed section on religious socialization in summer camps. Next, we examine the large body of research on the psychology of prayer. Psychologists of religion argue that even if prayer involves some matters beyond the reach of science, important aspects of the prayer experience can be addressed using good scientific practice. T. M. Luhrmann’s important work is considered in some detail; she argues that, ultimately, through prayer, religious believers start to experience part of their own minds as the presence of God. The chapter concludes with two comprehensive sections on: (1) religious and mystical experiences and (2) identity and religion. For some people, religious identity is closely tied to ethnic, racial, national, professional, and familial identities; indeed, religious identity may be derived from these other identities.

This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.