ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies six frames that promote and/or resist Continuing bonds (CBs). It describes two frames–the dangerous dead, and ancestors–that go way back before the world religions. Ancestors possess agency, the power to affect social life on earth, but in monotheism only the one true God has supernatural power. The chapter considers the monotheistic world religions–Judaism, Islam, and especially Christianity–before looking at a religion with a distinctive take on CBs, namely Buddhism. It also considers two more recent frames–secular memory, and romantic love. If a cultural milieu in which romantic love challenges the modernist/Protestant ban on relationships between the living and the dead re-introduces ancestor veneration, there are marked differences between traditional and contemporary ancestral interactions. Memory cultures internalize the attachment within the remembering individual or group–even if, as in Protestantism, the deceased continues as an external spiritual entity.
