While various scholars studying Asian American religious communities have called for greater analysis of racial dynamics, there has been little methodological discussion of how such analysis should proceed. In this paper I propose a framework for analyzing race in these communities that includes ecological analysis and institutional analysis. Ecological analysis begins with awareness of national-level cultural, political, and structural factors affecting Asian American racial experiences and then moves to examining how these factors manifest themselves at the local level where the religious community is situated. Institutional analysis involves examining how the racial ecology plays out in the life of the religious community as ecological factors interact with religious doctrine and praxis, including racial ideologies from a larger religious subculture or tradition. I argue that a religious community’s construction of race is subject to contestation, contradiction, and rearticulation in response to the dynamics of the community’s life.

This paper addresses the changing roles of women in mainstream U.S. religious organizations. Throughout the history of European settlement in North America, women have been instrumental in forming and maintaining the voluntary religious organizations that are the hallmark of the U.S. religious system. Often women’s organizational work was behind the scenes, and sometimes it involved separate women’s domains. It has been both invisible and essential, and it has ironically provided many of the tools necessary for those same women to act powerfully in other institutional spheres. The changes of the last thirty years have fundamentally altered those equations. Women are no less entail, but they are no longer invisible. The gendered division of labor within mainstream religious organizations is still in the process of being renegotiated.

Studies suggest that the historic Black Church serves as a vanguard in the Black community due to its priestly and prophetic roles. However, the relationship between Black Church social activism and community involvement is seldom tested when sexual politics are concerned. This study examines the relationship between Black Church involvement in social and racial justice issues and support for women in the pastorate using Faith Factor 2000 national data for 1,863 Black churches across seven denominations and bivariate and logistic regression analyses. Findings suggest that involvement in social activism does not necessarily correlate positively with support for women as pastors. Although frequent sermonic focus on Black Liberation and Womanist Theology and clergy involvement in protest efforts engender such support, sermonic focus on general issues of racial justice actually undermine support for women in the pastorate. These findings provide important implications for efforts toward increased gender equity in the Black Church tradition.

Research in the sociology of gender has generally either ignored religion or portrayed it as a source of patriarchal oppression. At the same time, sociological scholarship on religion that analyzes gender has tended to privilege the experiences of religious women while overlooking religious men. This study distills key theoretical insights from gender scholarship and applies those insights to the sociological study of religious men. An analysis of ethnographic data from the Promise Keepers demonstrates that (1) there are diverse means of defining Christian manhood within evangelicalism; (2) evangelical men bargain with patriarchy through artful, contradictory, and sometimes subversive gender negotiations; and (3) a holistic rendering of evangelical masculinities is achieved when the intersection between gender and other forms of cultural difference (e.g., race, class) is taken into account. The study concludes by calling for a more thoroughgoing analysis of religious masculinities in other faith traditions.

New Religious Movements with Asian roots have been studied extensively in the West, but have received little attention in their home environments. The literature on NRMs in the West depicts them as led by a charismatic leader, and responding to the crisis of modernity. However, this perspective does not capture NRMs fully in developing countries. My study of the followers of the controversial Guru Osho Rajneesh in Kathmandu, Nepal, shows that the movement is a complex response to both tradition and modernity and thereby explains its growth. I argue that the promoters of the Rajneesh movement used this complexity strategically to recruit new members and further the movement goals. I also explore the ways in which the charismas of the charismatic leader Osho Rajneesh, who founded the movement in the early 1970s, are understood differently in Nepal than in the West.

This paper sheds light on current U.S. political trends by examining the theological and social perspectives of over 400 Evangelical, Mainline and New Thought congregants. It unpacks responses to the question, "Does your faith influence your political or social views?" and offers support for the use of mixed methodological approaches when dealing with complex and sometimes inflammatory topics like religion and politics. The quantitative survey data reveals some unpredictable results, while the qualitative interviews disclose underlying and often unarticulated realities. This work considers post-election questions regarding the continued influence of the Evangelical and conservative political right and the seeming impotence of the Mainline left to mobilize opposition. In addition, it points to the far-reaching messages being disseminated by the New Thought movement through its intentionally a-political philosophy. The paper ultimately calls for reflexive socio-religious analysis of the political landscape and thoughtful theological and sociological responses to predictable future challenges.

Labyrinth walking has entered into the discourse of lived religion during the past decade as both a local practice, but also as an object religious pilgrimage and tourism. This paper will explore data gathered at a workshop held by Veriditas, a large international labyrinth organization based in San Francisco. Participant observation and interviews reveal a number of ways of framing the labyrinth experience. For some it is part of their spiritual seeking, for others a chance encounter not likely to be repeated. Some participants view the labyrinth as an important part of their Christian experience; others see it as separate from their "normal" religious practices. From tourism to pilgrimage, this paper examines the ways in which participants make sense of the labyrinth as a path to spiritual and religious connection.

This paper provides a close examination of a table of statistics cited in Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis that appears to reveal striking differences in educational ‘preference’ of Catholics and Protestants. Such scrutiny appears justified on a number of grounds, especially in light of the importance that Weber attaches to these statistics in the articulation of his thesis. Not only are the statistics compromised by at least two computational or typographical errors, but they are subject also to the confusion engendered by scholars who, while engaged in the concealment or ostensible correction of these errors by often dubious means, have published changed and conflicting versions of Weber’s statistics. With a view to the two recently published new English translations of the Weber thesis, this study will seek resolution of the uncertainties surrounding both the correct content of the statistics in question along with the significance they are to be granted in the context of Weber’s theoretical argument.

Sociological literature concerning the growth of membership in evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant denominations and the decline of membership in mainline Protestant denominations has been a hallmark of research for almost a quarter of a century. Although some attention was paid to exceptions, most research conclusions point to the continued patterns. In most of the research concerned with membership growth, little was said about growth or decline in Roman Catholic membership. Data from the Glenmary Research Center allow for comparison over a ten year "census" period for metropolitan areas in two southern and southwestern states. OLS regression analyses yield some unanticipated findings. Some growth for mainline Protestant congregations is indicated, although the pattern of mainline Protestant membership decline remains. Roman Catholic parish growth is far greater than almost all Mainline Protestant and Conservative/Evangelical congregational growth. Some of this is due from external immigration-based growth while some is due to internal in-migration to these states.

This paper examines apocalyptic messages related to contemporary religious apparition claims. It is argued that these messages constitute a device that deals with the question of belief in the apparition claims. The messages provide a rationale for the apparitions by framing their occurrence within a "Grand Christian Narrative." In turn, this simultaneously trivializes the apparitions and makes belief in them a prerequisite for world salvation. Apocalyptic messages are thus not so much about the state of the world as they are about the apparition claims themselves. This raises important issues about the social function of religious morality.

Currently, most research on Canada's more recent immigrants still ignores religion almost entirely, and that which does not focuses primarily on immigrant religious institutions and on the religious expression of the first, adult generation. Almost all extant research on immigrant youth not only ignores religion, but concentrates on the teen and post-teen first generation. The research reported in this paper examines the religious expression and involvement of second generation immigrant youth, aged 18-26, those born in Canada of immigrant parents or who were less than 10 years old on arrival, and of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim families in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. 300 in-depth interviews are being conducted, with both the religiously involved and uninvolved, men and women, those who have changed childhood religious affiliation and those who have not. Since the data gathering is not yet complete, the results reported are preliminary. The framework of analysis looks for continuities and discontinuities in religious orientation and involvement in comparison with the first generation and with trends in other parts of the world.

The study of religious coping has developed into an industry at the intersection of the sociologies of religion and medicine. The 1998 GSS included a number of items embodying the phenomenon. Using factor analysis we identified one main religious coping factor, developed a scale, and proceeded to employ it to address two questions: (1) What categories of people use religious coping? (2) Does religious coping result in less unhappiness or negative affect? Using the 1998 GSS data, we find (1) that the religious coping scale represents part of the cultural discourse of fundamentalist Protestant religion in America and that it is not connected with the prospect of facing problems. We also found (2) that religious coping does not reduce unhappiness or negative affect.

Global religious human rights advocacy has only recently expanded to the level of organization and interest that other human rights advocacy efforts have seen for decades, and religious human rights are the least codified at the global level. This paper explores the growth of the global human rights regime by analyzing global human rights organizations from the Union of International Organizations dataset. It establishes the growth of distinct but intersecting organizational fields for different bundles of human rights. The late blooming of the religious human rights field is explained with reference to the distinctive tensions wrought by universalizing and particularizing forms of religious advocacy in a world culture steeped in cultural principles privileging universalism. The growth of the religious human rights field, as a late bloomer, is also conditioned by isomorphic organizational processes at work in the global field of human rights advocacy.

New Religions Studies (NRS) is an emerging interdisciplinary subfield in the study of religion. The large cohort of new religious movements that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s drew both scholarly and public attention. The emergence of this cohort of new religious groups coincided with the growth of the social sciences. The result was the simultaneous existence of new religious movements and social scientists with the theoretical and methodological tools to study them. Nonetheless, religions studies scholars faced a number of methodological and ethical issues for which they were relatively unprepared. This paper examines a number of these methodological issues (dealing with the controversiality of new groups, the politicized relationship of researcher-group relationships, building theoretical insight across case studies, the balance between participation and observation in ethnographic research) and ethical issues (speaking for/against groups in public or legal disputes, accepting group funding of research projects, participation in group sponsored activities) as one step in building the NRS subfield.

About 300,000 worshipers in over 2,000 congregations participated in the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (www.USCongregations.org) conducted by the Research Services office of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in April 2001. Congregations were selected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago using hyper-network sampling to be representative of congregations across the country. All worshipers in each participating congregation completed a survey in worship, providing extensive data about individuals actively involved in religious life in America. In addition, a small random sample of the overall sample (n=1,106) completed a survey on social and political beliefs (e.g., gun control, abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty). Worshipers’ beliefs are compared to those of the American public (where comparisons are possible), and the impact of faith group and age on beliefs is examined.

How do separated and divorced Catholics who report feeling conflicted manage their role conflict? In this paper I examine various strategies employed by those individuals who attempt to manage the potentially contradictory identities of being separated or divorced and Catholic. I discuss the main findings from my August 2003 Internet survey of 300 separated and divorced Catholics. The online survey methodology makes it easier and more effective to access these marginalized individuals than traditional mail survey methods. In my paper I show which strategies are associated with success in managing role conflict. Success in role conflict resolution is defined through a combination of emotional and religious adjustment. I then examine success demographically, by relationship status, type of support received and strategy of role conflict resolution. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings for the Catholic Church in the light of its authority crisis.

Based on the observations and understandings of the history of harsh political repression and sometimes brutal elimination on religion during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), China scholars have assumed a unidirectional relationship between state and church. The assumption has been that as the party state dominates society, the church has two choices: to cooperate, or to resist. It ignores the possibility of a more interactive, dynamic relationship between state and church. Based on ethnographic data collected in Wenzhou city in coastal southeast China, I argue that the local church does not simply conform to the demands of the state or resist the state, but culturally engages with state power over time. This study emphasizes the meaning an individual believer gives to his or her own practice of faith, whether within or without the confines of the party state and shows how Chinese Christians are governed officially and non-officially in local society.

Traditional theories of church-state relations come mostly from Europe and the United States. It is assumed that the Christian faith and churches are part of the mainstream culture and the government and churches share certain values and ideological views. Outside Europe and the United States, another paradigm of church-state relations is derived from countries with socialist/communist governments. This paradigm makes the assumption that communist/socialist governments automatically seek to oppress and control the Christian churches. However, church-state relations are more complex in Asian Societies due to their broad diversity of ethnic groups, languages, cultures and religions. The main problem lies in the relationship and differences between religion and church. I propose to use the conceptual framework of state-society relations to study church-state relations in the Asian countries. I use the theory of "institutional channeling" to show how such framework can provide useful insights to understand the complex church-state relations in Hong Kong.

Previous research has found that the charismatic movement, characterized by miracles, spiritual gifts, speaking in tongues, ecstatic worship style, personal relationship with the divine, etc., has affected Christianity in several ways: for example, this movement is positively associated with evangelism and church growth, and charismatic clergy are more satisfied with their ministry. This research extends current knowledge by examining whether the charismatic experiences make people more religious and happier. Data from the General Social Survey are used to test these hypotheses. After controlling for some basic demographic variables, the results of multivariate analysis indicate that people who participate in the charismatic movement are indeed more religious; however, they are not happier than those who are not involved in the charismatic movement. The results suggest that ecstatic and supernatural experience can help people become more religious, but it has no significant impact on people’s happiness.

During the Jubilee of the year 2000 a qualitative research group based in Rome 3 University has interviewed 96 pilgrims coming from different countries and speaking 8 languages: Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, German, and French. To analyze the data collected specific software has been used: Nvivo, which is structured to implement the Grounded Theory approach. The results confirm in part the findings of quantitative research made by questionnaire interviews of 1,023 people. But other perspectives are presented in terms of knowledge concerning the religious behaviour and belief. In particular the pilgrims do not seem particularly orthodox in their practice and world vision. Prayer has a key role in the religious journey. But many doctrinal aspects aren't understood by people interviewed. In any case Rome has an important weight in terms of artistic and cultural attractions. But the religious profile of pilgrims is still relevant to motivate the participation to the sacred trip toward Rome. Rather than focusing on the process and the role of integration of the jubilee between centre and periphery within the Catholic church we like to consider and to analyze the jubilee as a metaphor of our globalization era considering it as a process between "communitas" and structure, and as a liminal situation from within the church into the analysis and understanding of contemporary society. We are facing rapid changes not only at the technological level but in the mental framework of people through the mix of cultures, and we realize that the social structures built at the end of last century and the beginning of this century are unable to cope with these transformations. In this framework the pilgrimage offers a perspective which not only links micro and macro aspects of society but enlightens the stages of transition, the processual elements and transmigrations from one culture to another, and from one social form to another, so that we need to reconceptualize the new configuration of contemporary society.

Viewing the faith-based initiative (FBI) from a social policy perspective allows one to see its evolution as well as its potential merit. This paper will discuss the FBI as an evolutionary stage in the American Lockean dislike of "big government" and taxation – empirically translated into new federalism, devolution, and now the FBI. My key question is "who else will care for the need and indigent in America?" It is my contention that involving the faith-based community in social service provision can strengthen the frontline of social service providers. I will focus on their contribution in the areas of contract competition, concentration on a specific set of services, use of their own resources, geographic availability and proximity, as well as their theological mandate to assist, evidence that suggests no proselytization attempts occur, and most important, the lack of any other local actor willing to double in helping the needy while doing its primary raison d’être.

The paper uses evidence from the GSS, a 2004 survey of university students and existing literature to explore whether religious identification, beliefs and practices reduce, reinforce or have little influence on racism directed against African Americans. Among white GSS respondents Jews and those claiming no religion were less likely than Catholics or Protestants to give answers unfavorable to blacks on reasons for income differences between blacks and whites or on current discrimination in jobs and housing against blacks. For whites some religious beliefs showed small correlations with negative racial attitudes; belief in the literal truth of the Bible had a stronger correlation with such attitudes. Church attendance and prayer showed small, curvilinear associations with these negative attitudes. For African Americans these relationships often differed sharply from those found for whites. The study at universities in Philadelphia allows the use additional independent and dependent variables.

Since the landmark Notre Dame Study on Parish Life in the 1980s, there have been numerous studies of Catholic parishes. This paper summarizes what these studies tell us about the structural, political, cultural, and human resources dimensions of parish life. We note both continuities and changes in each area. Our analysis concludes with suggestions for future on Catholic parishes.

In this paper, first we will try to review current theories and point out their shortcomings in explaining the dynamics of Islamist movements in the Middle East. After challenging the current theories, we shall offer a conceptual tool: state constructionism embedded in cultural idioms. After explaining our theoretical approach emphasizing the important roles of states, we will examine the secularizing state-formation in the case of Turkey and its main roles in the emergence of Islamist movements in Turkey. This paper will try to address the importance of cultural idioms not only in state-formation by emphasizing its secularizing character in Turkey but also in the emergence of Islamist movements. By examining the Turkish case in terms of secularizing state-formation and Islamist movements in Turkey, we aim to contribute not only to the literature of Islamist movements but also state-formation in the third world.

The American community for decades has used language borrowed from the religious vernacular to honor and memorialize the wartime activities and postwar status of its veterans. But the status of veteran has changed, becoming more privatized and individualized instead of the "band of brothers" motif of the era known as "the greatest generation." Religion also experienced a shift from communal to privatized spirituality in the same period. Using qualitative data from Operations Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, I discuss how the role of religiosity in the military likewise shifted and what that means for the operationalized structure of religion, namely the military chaplaincy.

Many reports on religiousness and health are based on small, convenience samples, with limited validity and generalizability of their findings. Studies of religiousness and health-related variables require large, population-based cross-sectional or, preferably, longitudinal studies, which are often prohibitively expensive. Inadequately known among social science researchers, the national health surveys of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) offer large, high-quality data sets to the public at no or nominal cost and hence offer important opportunities for research in the area of religion and health, religion and reproductive behavior, sociology of religion and psychology of religion. This report provides an overview of the data sets and an annotated bibliography of prior research using these data, which is intended to suggest how the data of NCHS may be further exploited by researchers of religiousness and health.

Science is often perceived as incompatible with religion and spirituality. This study examines academic scientists in the natural and social sciences and asks how they understand the relationship of religion and spirituality to topics ranging from developing a research agenda to ethical decisions involving human subjects and interactions with students. Using data from a national survey, I specifically compare faculty in the natural science disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology as well as the social science disciplines of sociology, psychology, political science and economics at eighteen elite research universities. Findings reveal distinct frameworks for the ways in which faculty in these disciplines view religion and spirituality as well as how they make ethical decisions related to their research. They also have broader implications for sociological theories about how elites shape public understandings of the relationship between religion and science.

This paper examines emergent adaptive processes in old age and broader processes of social integration and innovation by exploring the idea that faith moves with people over lifetimes and across cultures. The empirical analysis is based on an ongoing qualitative study that features purposive interviews with older adults from non-western religious traditions. Descriptions of faith practice reflect communal as well as familial links, aspects of social capital. Yet the accounts also highlight elements of "successful aging; " that is, they reflect positive adjustments made to growing old, changes that could only have been dimly imagined, if at all, a few decades earlier. Faith tenets and faith practices are packed for moves and visits with family members living in the U.S., but they are unpacked based on the contextual social ties among person, family, and community in the "new" culture and the individual’s sense of self-identity in late life.

To explore intradenominational racial inequality, I conduct a unique historical study that compares a black campus congregation with two white campus congregations within the Episcopal Church in north Florida during the first half of the twentieth century. Previously unexcavated archival data show that the development of the Episcopal Church on campus differed in regard to the organization, goals, and distribution of jobs and resources in the black and white congregations. My research questions and analysis are framed theoretically as a problem of church distributional processes. I argue that the Episcopal Church’s political and economic distributional processes, sustained by an ideology of racial paternalism, mirror local and regional institutional practices, and thereby maintain racial stratification between the chapels at the congregational level. Paradoxically, however, African-American deacons and priests were used to racially integrate the Episcopal Church at the level of denomination.

This paper addresses the impact of increasing diversity in the United States on the Catholic Church’s ministry. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, national parishes were established to serve non-English speaking European immigrants through clergy from their native homeland. The Church must now address the needs of parish communities in metropolitan areas that are ethnically, culturally and socio- economically diverse and who lack clergy from their native homeland to serve them. The study centers on the City of Yonkers, fourth largest city in New York State and adjacent to New York City, with a population of 200,000 that has 17 parishes. Presenters will share preliminary findings of their research. Results of interviews with pastors and parishioners show how some pastors have succeeded in responding creatively to the needs of diverse groups while others face problems resulting from limited resources and training. Discussion will look toward answers for a new model.

Critical theory of religion until now has remained an exegesis on a theoretical level. In an attempt operationalize the critical theory of religion, we will go back to some of the insights on religion provided by Marx, Weber and Freud and test them as hypotheses. These premises are that religion is a response to suffering and that this suffering can be of an economic or a psychological nature. We use General Social Survey data to examine the effects of individual economic dilemmas and psychological trauma on the various aspects of religiosity while controlling for sociodemographic variables. The availability of questions that tap psychological trauma in the GSS varies by year. As a result, we include the most recent data available for each research question. Due to variation in the measurement of the religiosity variables, separate models will be estimated using multiple regression and logistic regression where appropriate.

This paper will analyze the content and the significance of pilgrimage for the actors of several well-known Catholic pilgrimage sites in France (Notre-Dame-de- Lourdes) and in Quebec (Oratoire St-Joseph). The objective of this analysis will be to demonstrate that there are very few traditional elements in the new vision of pilgrimage, but there are rather a lot of New Age interpretations concerning the meaning of the pilgrimage itself. Most participants view the pilgrimage as a personal quest for authenticity, following a path of autotransformation of the self.

The growing Muslim presence in Europe and North America, and the rising trend within several European societies to assimilate their Muslim inhabitants through laws which among others, force women to give up their Muslim attire, limit the number of Muslim clerics and regulate their practice, close Islamic schools, and ban Islamic burial rituals, have made Muslim scholars fear that such an assimilation -if it succeeds- would lead to the rise of an "invisible Islam", an Islam limited to the individual sphere, and therefore does not carry any social or political project to its new environment. In order to derail assimilation and enhance active integration of Muslims into the Western society, Muslim scholars are currently debating the necessity for a "jurisprudence of Muslim minorities" that would connect Western Muslims to their religious heritage, yet addresses the exigencies of their contemporary Western circumstances. This paper explains how does this debate redefine the contemporary Western society, how does it view the minority status of Western Muslims, and how does it approach Islamic law in order to make it applicable to the Western reality.

R. Stephen Warner in his landmark article in the American Journal of Sociology contended that the master narrative in the old paradigm is linear secularization while in the new paradigm the master narrative is revival and routinization. Frank Lechner commented that Warner mischaracterized the old paradigm and therefore has misdiagnosed its faults. This paper will reexamine the old paradigm to see whether Warner’s contention is true. It will limit itself to the original set of secularization theorists of the old paradigm originally identified by Oliver Tschannen and Karel Dobbelaere. Representatives of the old paradigm that will be considered include Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah, Niklas Luhmann, Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, David Martin, and Richard Fenn. In reexamining the old paradigm, the primary question I will focus on is whether their theories of secularization contained in the old paradigm were linear or whether they followed other patterns.

There are Jews in the South? This paper examines the intersection of rhetoric by national Jewish organizations in the United States with the social experience of also being "Southern" and trying to define and "be Jewish" to document how rhetoric combined with social experience creates a unique sense of social identity that is distinctively "Jewishly Southern" first, and American second. National trends indicate a deepening fear in the American Jewish community that the group may cease to exist, and this fear is becoming a reality for some communities in the American South. Thus, drawing on case studies in two Southern states, this paper utilizes data from questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups, as well as a content analysis of mass mailings to Southern Jewish constituents by synagogues, community centers, and local Federations to address the dynamics behind the formation of Southern Jewish identity bent on a triad of experience.

According to Susan VanBaalen, Director of the Federal Prison Chaplaincy Program, most women in prison have never seen a "free" Pagan, one who is not and who has never been incarcerated. Yet, Pagan Spirituality, in particular Wicca, is a growing phenomenon in women’s prisons in the United States. This paper is an examination of that phenomenon, of its practice and growth, of the reactions of the State and Federal governments to prisoners performing Witchcraft, and the unique power dynamics inherent in Pagan prison practice. It is based on interviews with Pagan prison chaplains who minister to women, court documents, and the author’s field notes from inside a medium security federal penitentiary where Pagan women have created "sacred space" and perform rituals invoking the Goddess.

In the contribution a sociological rational choice theory on conversion and affiliation is constructed. Conversion and affiliation are seen as transgressions of a specific (universal) norm by rational actors. The actors operate within a socio-cultural context, which to a large extent consists of intermediate groups with norms and values. The actors' personal networks are perceived as intermediate groups as well. Specific intermediate groupings possess among other things the norm `thou shalt not trade thy intermediate group and its norms and values for another one'. More often than not conversion and affiliation do not happen overnight, but they are the, sometimes unintended, outcome of the actors' persistent efforts to achieve physical well-being and social approval. The theory is not restricted to religious conversion but pertains to the political (defection) and other social spheres, e.g. paradigm switch in science, as well.

Latin America is familiar with "missionaries" from abroad coming to peddle healing, salvation, and transformation for "lost" and "backward" souls. This proposal outlines similarities between religious and development "missions" and offers a broad analytic framework to trace the ways that "mission" configurations and political embeddedness shift across geographic sites and strategic interfaces. The site of inquiry is consistently "local", but always set against a backdrop of multi-site linkages, actors’ narrative histories, and networked "capital" flows. In sum, the project’s approach challenges tendencies of religious missionaries and development policymakers to gloss over the politics of their multi-site interventions, to overestimate "divine" or "scientific" merit, and to ignore myriad ways that actors contest, collaborate, and co-opt "missions" in different places to different ends.

Although most military personnel are Christian, there are symbolically significant presences of religious minorities in the armed forces. One of these, Wicca (also known as Paganism or Neo-paganism), poses special problems for military chaplains. Chaplains are required to facilitate for all religious groups, including Wiccans, but many would rather not do it because of personal fear or prejudice against them. Other chaplains, who do want to help Wiccans with their religious needs, have trouble finding out what exactly those needs are. This paper discusses the presence of Wicca in the military, which has drawn the attention of major media, been discussed in Congress, and provoked protests outside military bases. It describes the different attitudes chaplains and Wiccans have towards each other. The extent to which Wicca can be accommodated in the military setting is explained in terms of institutional constraints and the nature of Wicca itself.

A new Canon Law was introduced in the Church of Sweden 2000. The bishop and diocese do the oversight over parishes. A tool for this is a document, the parish instruction, the nature of which is not clear. Documents regarding the proposal of the instructions were examined. Altogether 38 diocesan administrators (in all dioceses) were interviewed about their understanding of parish instructions. Results indicate that the instructions originally were considered basis for oversight. Immediately after the Canon Law was issued the rhetoric about the instructions changed: They were now considered as local documents for goals and objectives. Oversight was toned down and the role of dioceses was to be advisors to the parishes. The results are explained with the relation orientation in the church and the notion of oversight in the society at whole.

While conducting feminist ethnographic research in Dakar, Senegal looking at the relationship between Islam and family planning, I was struck by Muslim midwives’ roles as health and religious counselors. This paper will draw from two sets of interviews: 1) nine women in one Senegalese household and 2) three community midwives. Using the words and experiences of health care providers and Senegalese women, I will explore how women’s family planning decisions are guided by both Islam and need. From health care, to pregnancy, to religion, the midwife’s influence on Senegalese women is significant. In addition to providing health counseling, the midwives spoke of advising Muslim women in matters of religion; specifically, Islam’s position on family planning. I will argue that women work from a practical model (i.e. do I need birth control or not?) with authority resting in a combination of body, religion and experience.

A greater proportion of Protestant evangelicals in young adulthood are currently divorced than Protestant liberals in young adulthood. Also, a greater proportion of liberals than evangelicals have never been married. Moreover, Protestant evangelicals remain at a socioeconomic disadvantage to liberals despite advances in education and in occupation levels in recent decades. Nearly three times as many liberal young adults have at least 16 years of schooling than young evangelicals. Despite the emphasis on sexual abstinence, marital fidelity and family values by evangelicals, it appears that many young adult evangelicals, given the changes in the postindustrial economy, may not be in the position economically to marry and to sustain those marriages. That appears to have resulted in many divorces. This paper utilizes GSS data from the past two decades to review trends in marriage and divorce among evangelicals and liberals.

This paper seeks to determine if the historic linkages between race and religion persist in the "New South." Southern religion-like all social institutions in the South-is intimately tied to issues of race and ethnicity, particularly the divide that exists between African Americans and Caucasians. In the 1950s and 60s, many White churches in the South used religion and the Bible to justify segregationist policies. By contrast, Black people in the 1950s and 60s used religious organizations to mobilize for civil rights and oppose racism. However, since the civil rights struggle, the South has changed dramatically. Many sociologists of Southern life assert that the various manifestations of late modernity are changing the traditional character and culture of the South. In this paper, we investigate whether the legacy of the historic linkage between religion and perceptions of racism still exist in the minds of contemporary Southerners-both Black and White.

Hate crimes have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention during the past decade. In this study, we augment existing scholarship by exploring the extent to which church burnings that occurred throughout the South in recent years are a type of hate crime. We do so by analyzing church arsons with reference to common antecedents of hate crime, while also introducing the concepts of religious ecology and local hate culture. Analyses are undertaken to examine global predictors of church arsons that operate throughout the South as well as spatially variable predictors observed only for particular geographical areas within this study region. Both hypothesized and counterintuitive findings surface, thereby underscoring the need for more sophisticated theories that exhibit sensitivity to sub-regional variations in church arsons and the factors that influence them.

This paper explores the creation of religious intimacy with nature. To begin this examination I look at two programs: Opening the Book of Nature, an evangelical Christian backpacking program and Adamah, a Jewish program for organic agriculture and sustainable living. Although both programs are significantly different in religion and activities, they are similar in seeing themselves as overcoming what modernity has divided – humans, nature and the sacred. Likewise, by providing an experiential encounter of the sacred in nature, both programs hope to foster a desire to protect creation. For this presentation, I will focus on the way ritual, prayer, text, tradition and talk are mobilized to create this connection with the more-than-human world.

This paper will explore what faith-based services in Japan contribute to civic life where religion loses its traditional function of providing a religiously based moral order of the society and people do not expect religion to play a major role in cultural integration or moral order. At a time of globally enhanced interest in religion’s social responsibilities, there are some religious organizations in Japan which have been concerned with social activism for the improvement of society. This paper will also examine the social response to them.

This paper analyzes a process that has received little attention: the employment of popular and scientific genetic discourse by religious organizations and movements in their efforts to legitimate world-view and practice. I argue that creative use of genetic discourse in organizational repertoires serves as a powerful tool of religious re-enchantment and that religious organizations approach and present genetic discourse through media mechanisms in three distinct ways: metaphorical, argumentative, and theoretical engagement. I employ a comparative qualitative analysis of controversial new religious movements and the U.S. evangelical subculture, paying particular attention to the Intelligent Design Movement in the later case. My analysis offers an important framework for thinking about how contemporary medical scientific advancements do not necessarily function as a secularizing force, but as a source of symbolic power and faith that religions draw from in constructing and defending worldview.

A century after Max Weber’s pioneering publication of the "Protestant Ethic" essays, there is still interest in the relationship between religion and the economy. This paper discusses recent scholarship on the Weber thesis: For the United States, following James Henretta’s lead for colonial America, Anne Knowles’s unwitting confirmation of the existence of the "Protestant ethic" and its transformation into the modern capitalist spirit in the nineteenth-century American Midwest; and for Britain, Jere Cohen’s frontal assault on Weber’s core arguments, as well as Margaret Jacob and Matthew Kadane’s defense of those very same arguments. These studies evince the power of tradition in economic matters. Henretta shows that economic mentalité was influenced by communal affiliation and family networks, and while the Protestant ethic bestowed innerworldly asceticism on its carriers, it appears not to have destroyed traditionalism by itself. The persistence of traditionalist limitations to profit making is still evident in Knowles’s Welsh Calvinist capitalists and to an even stronger extent in Leeds at the time of Joseph Ryder. Yet there is no need to carry this argument to the extreme, as Cohen, who sees Puritans as inflexible traditionalists, does. Whatever limitations to business Calvinist religious concerns engendered, the same concerns also provided a strong incentive for methodical and steadfast accumulation.

The constituent member groups of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment--the NCC Eco-Justice Working Group, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and the Evangelical Environmental Network--found one topic upon which they could all agree to focus: Global Warming. Doctrinal or organizational differences seriously limited a sustained action campaign on other possible topics. The prospect of global warming, they all agreed, demanded a religious response, for a religious response could turn a contested (the contestation is greatly exaggerated for political reasons) scientific theory into a moral, justice issue, especially in the face of U.S. political denial and apathy about global climate change. This paper details the ten-year history and scope of the various campaigns led by members of this group, sets this effort in the broader U.S. religious context and explores the successes and failures of these attempts.

Sociological analysis of the development of religions has generally endorsed Weber's theory that religions typically move from a cult of a charismatic leader to the `routinization of charisma' and `institutionalization'. Weber's account of the development of religions is unduly simplistic. Not only do institutional structures fail to follow charismatic leadership sequentially, but Weber's model fails adequately to acknowledge the different varieties of religious leadership, which cause different effects in the organization's development. This paper seeks to understand Weber's notion of charisma, in what social context charismatic leadership frequently emerges, and charismatic authority structure. Furthermore, I apply Weber's ideal types to Muslim leadership, both prophets, mystics, and ascribed leaders, and argue that through the routinization of charisma, many Muslim leaders assume multiple ideal types and forms of charismatic leadership simultaneously, and that the depersonalization of charisma is not cyclical, as Weber argues, rather concurrent and complex.

What drives the work of Washington offices? The scant existing literature discusses the importance of institutional policy and laity. However, these studies are limited to six mainline Protestant offices or dated evidence. Utilizing interviews with directors, organizational materials, and websites of 15 Washington offices, this paper examines those factors guiding the political work of these organizations during the 108th Congress (2003-2004). Results demonstrate that most offices consider their faith in addition to policies passed by the religious institution to which they are tied. However, different aspects of their faith are called upon across theological camps (liberals vs. conservatives) and faith families (Protestants, Catholics, and Jews). Beyond these two universal considerations, only liberals express concern about the larger political climate. Finally, few Washington offices consider their laity, which is particularly problematic for groups tied to religious traditions characterized by an episcopal and presbyterian polity.

Prior research on religion and civic engagement has focused primarily on North American and Western European nations. Protestantism, often contrasted with Catholicism, is credited for its role in promoting secular voluntary action through its non-hierarchical organizational structure and emphasis on individual actions. Asian countries, if included in previous comparative research, are often lumped into the "other" category in the statistical analyses. They are discussed as the "anomaly" that does not fit into the existing models on civic engagement, but they receive little attention on their own. The purpose of this study is to explore how religions – both traditional Asian religions and Western religions (primarily Protestantism and Catholicism) – shape the civic cultures in Asian nations. Using data from the 2000-2001 World Values Survey, I investigate how various dimensions of religiosity – participatory, devotional, affiliative, and theological – affect voluntary association membership in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Four months of fieldwork in South India including interviews, focus groups and extended observation of women's groups reveals how Christian women both accept and challenge the power structures within their churches and broader social contexts. This paper examines accounts and activities of three groupings of women: Catholic sisters, lay Catholic women and women theologians, both Protestant and Catholic. These women, despite institutional constraints, exercise religious agency through three distinct kinds of strategies: social activism, philanthropy, and action scholarship. The findings outline how Christian women's religious agency can be an impetus for social and ecclesial change in Southern India.

The label "Plain People" displays a wide range of groups belonging to the conservative branch of Anabaptism: from the Old Order Amish and Hutterites to the Conservative Mennonites. Amidst those groups, which have developed into religious sub-cultures in an ideal of separation from the world, Sixth Street Mennonite Church depicts a surprising reality. For what reasons have those Plain people chosen to come and live in the suburbs of Philadelphia? How do they combine their belonging to Plain identity and their adaptation to a urban life style? Do they differ from other Plain groups and why? After a brief overview of the diversity among Plain groups, we will try to figure out whether Sixth Street should be considered a church or mission. Finally, we will reflect on the particularities of this "Plain witnessing"

Comic strips influence the thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses and convey a point of view on human life, attitudes, and actions. Their sheer appeal and mass distribution means that they are a social force in themselves, because they influence people’s understanding and attitudes, educate the masses, but also potentially serve as vehicles for propaganda. This study assesses how mainstream syndicated comic strips portray religion. Each comic strip published in the Los Angeles Times from January to December 2004 was assessed for its religious content. I calculate the frequency of various religious themes (religious figures, symbols, and other religious references) represented pictorially or contained in the dialogue of the comic strip, assess which comic strips are particularly religious and which ones are religiously diverse in content, note the most cited religious theme(s) of each strip, and, finally, examine the manner in which the comic strips depict God.

Migration scholars have increasingly noted the connections that migrants maintain across national boundaries, but they have often missed the role of religious organizations and practices in forging these ties. Religion scholars have noted the pervasiveness of pluralism, heightened by migrants, while failing to recognize that this diversity is partially a function of processes operating outside our borders. Understanding the lives of migrants, no less than understanding the nature of U.S. culture, requires attention to these transnational religious stories and practices, as well as the networks and institutions that carry them.

Just as the 1996 welfare policy reforms took effect, the evangelical-based "Adopt-

a-Family" project paired church volunteer groups with former welfare-receiving families in a Midwestern city. Close observations of this project, part of a larger study of religious groups responding to welfare reform, challenge the notion that local faith-based compassion can fill in where government shrinks and generate new social supports. Without proselytizing, the mostly white, middle-class volunteers said they offered warm relationships and practical help to the mostly African-American families. Practicing "Christ-like care," the volunteers tried relating to family members as infinitely valuable individuals without regard to families’ social backgrounds. After seven frustrating months, volunteers decided they needed to pair up closely with social workers who could give them limited, predictable volunteer slots in a larger plan. The case teaches policy makers and sociologists much about the limits of volunteering and the meaning of "faith- based" to ordinary evangelicals.

Evangelicals in the United States have made significant strides within the world of higher education over the last thirty years. Data gathered from 150 elite informants who identify with the evangelical movement suggest that many business executives and philanthropic foundations are creating new opportunities for achievement and recognition among evangelical students and scholars, especially among selective institutions. Given the intellectual history within American evangelicalism, these developments point to wider implications for other groups that originate in the social periphery but move to more mainstream positions within a given social field. Results suggest that four key elements have accompanied the legitimation of evangelical scholarship: intentional patronage, coordinated efforts, cohesive networks, and selective rewards.

Since 1967, when Lynn White published an article that traced the historical roots of our current ecological crisis to the ‘dominion’ attitude of Judeo-Christian faith, scholars have begun to pay attention to the impact of religious worldviews on people’s ecological consciousness, and some sociological research has been done on the relationship between Christian faith and attitudes towards the environment. Nevertheless, the relationship between non-Christian faiths and environmental attitudes has not yet been sufficiently studied. This study uses the data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey to examine the impact of religion, specifically Buddhism and Christianity, on environmental concern in Taiwan. The findings indicate that Buddhists are significantly more likely to take action to protect the environment. To better understand the reasons behind this phenomenon, the Buddhist worldview and recent environmental campaigns launched by some Taiwanese Buddhist organizations are explored.

Traditionally, proponents for the Religious Economy Theory believe that in a highly regulated religious market, the monopoly religion prohibits the emergence or growth of new sects, including imported religions. Through examining the Chinese religions during the Victorian period in the United States (1840s-1890s), this paper, however, argues that: (1) Chinese religion, in contrast to Christianity, encountered a process of aggravated regulation rather than deregulation; (2) the intended suppression backed by racism from the monopoly Protestantism contributed to the initial rise and growth of the Chinese religious organizations in the United States.

Seekers who have committed themselves to a religious ideology often assert that they have definitive spiritual answers to problems of the human condition. Longing for consolation in the face of aging, loss, frailty and the many uncertainties of life, individuals may be attracted to and take comfort from totalistic religious systems that promise the faithful rewards on many levels. Stark and Bainbridge have argued that humans act by faith when they accept present compensators as proxies for future rewards. But what happens when the committed believer experiences doubt in the course of his/her spiritual journey? A number of scholars have explored the problem of doubt. I suggest that devotion to a charismatic leader may be distinctly demanding and may increase the probability of doubt in the believer’s mind. How do long-time cult loyalists cope with doubt? Equally interesting are the descriptions cult apostates give when describing the ways they resolve their feelings of doubt. Using a theoretical perspective about the role of faith in spiritual commitment, I analyze respondents’ explanations of doubt and faith from qualitative data gathered at Wave 3 in the Urban Communes Dataset. The focus of my paper will be the ways loyalists and apostates from three different NRM groups describe instances of doubt in their spiritual journeys and the resolutions they have formulated in response to spiritual uncertainty.

By exploring the role of organizational structure in affecting the vitality of Yiguan Dao, a once-suppressed sect on Taiwan, this article explores the transition of a suppressed religion in Taiwan. When Yiguan Dao was suppressed, it developed an organizational structure which was helpful to avoid persecution, sustain the sectarians’ morale, and promote innovations. After the sect gained its legal status in 1987 and operated in a deregulated religious market, however, the structure not only became a roadblock to the implementation of innovations but also induced religious schisms. As a result, the sect tries to restructure itself. Through case study, this article proposes that institutional factors always play important roles in sustaining religious vitality, both in a free market and in a repressive environment.

Active members of congregations who participate in a variety of church- sponsored ministries, educational and social events, sometimes termed "joiners", are generally also more likely than "the Sunday-morning onlys" to be involved in social services and justice causes sponsored by groups outside their congregations. This general trend was found in a regionally distributed 2002 national study of over 2,000 pew members in one mainline Protestant denomination. However, there were also individual and regional differences among active members in the degree to which they were involved outside their congregations in helping the needy in their communities or working to change secular laws and policies. Those who are heavily involved in outreach to the needy are not necessarily also going to be lobbying for changing secular laws and policies (which some consider way outside the purview of the church) particularly if they are more theologically conservative and especially if they reside in the South.

The effects of individual psychic experiences, reading/reflection, and discussions of beliefs with those of different religious traditions, on women’s undertaking new directions in their personal lives, work and ministries will be explored in this paper. The primary data will be drawn from depth interviews conducted in 2005 from a sample of the graduates of the Women’s Leadership Institute (WLI) who answered a 2004 mailed survey. WLI is one year certificate program, designed as a learning community that supports a feminist perspective and participants’ spiritually-based resolve to make desired changes in their lives, workplaces, and communities. Survey results indicate that the rise in proportion of those enrolled from faith traditions other than only liberal Christian have made this program particularly valuable.

As a key democratic value, political tolerance serves as an important force in creating and sustaining the democratic process. The dynamics fostering tolerance have not been explored in a sufficiently broad range of countries to move beyond the notion of national exceptionalism. This research examines the social forces underlying the expression of political tolerance in fourteen countries, testing whether individual-level theories of tolerance resonate across general publics of different contexts. While mean levels of tolerance do differ across national contexts, some similarities do emerge with regard to the influences on political tolerance. The roles of religious denomination and religiosity are highlighted in particular as demonstrative of how context plays a role in establishing and supporting tolerant publics.

This project seeks to connect "genderless" rational choice theories of religious strictness to feminist critiques of patriarchal religion. Using data from the National Congregations Study (Chaves 1998), I examine the relationship between religious rules and the gender composition of leadership inside congregations. The NCS includes nine questions on whether or not the congregation has religious rules or norms relating to the following: diet, dancing, drinking, smoking, tithing, joining other organizations, dating, cohabitation of unmarried adults, and homosexual activity. In addition, the NCS data set includes information on the gender of the senior clergy person, gender composition of the membership, and gender composition of members filling leadership positions inside the congregation. I use these data to examine the relationship between the gender composition of leadership and authority positions inside congregations and level of strictness as measured by the number of rules reported.

This project situates the study of lived religion in the context of Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and a company that has single-handedly redefined the retail industry in the United States along with its means of global production. My overarching interest is the peculiar fusion of evangelicalism and consumerism in Wal-Mart stores, with a focus on emotional discipline, transformation and empowerment, as well as power and resistance among Wal-Mart employees. To this end, I draw upon data from 30 interviews with female Wal-Mart employees to describe both overtly religious behaviors among Wal-Mart employees as well as the significance of the company's rituals and myths in their religious lives.

The recent re-election of President Bush evoked both hope and fear: hope that religious conservatives would be able to legislate their moral agenda, and fear that religious conservatives would be able to legislate their moral agenda. In this atmosphere, it may be valuable to examine previous attempts to accomplish moral agendas through the agency of the state. This paper will examine 15th-century Florence, 16th-century Geneva, 17th-century England, and the United States in the 1920s. It will look at the social conditions leading to the institution of moral agendas, the effects of these, and the inevitable reactions to them.

The Secular Revolution (2003), edited by Christian Smith analyzes the triumph of secularization in American education and other professional fields using a human agency and conflict model. Religion was defeated as a dominant influence in much of higher education and other fields. However, the promotion of secularization and the movement of irreligion or secularism associated with it have been carried primarily by intellectual elite, who have been divided both among themselves and with the public over religion. While secularism has triumphed on one level in reducing the public institutional influence of religion, religion has continued and, in the United States, even gained influence in the public at large. The paper analyzes this anomaly on the basis of the divisions within the elite and between the elite and the public at large. Implications for scholars, especially those who work in the social sciences, are considered.

In this paper, examine the impact of religious observance on college achievement using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen (NLSF), which surveyed a representative sample of 3,900 college students at 30 of America’s most selective colleges and universities. I test whether students who attended religious schools prior to college and those who classify themselves as religiously observant perform better on three measures of college achievement: GPA, self-reported satisfaction with their college experience, and the probably of leaving college prior to graduation. I find that, when controlling for the student’s socio-economic background and high school grades and SAT scores, having attended a religious school has no impact on any of the three measures of college achievement. Several measures of self-reported religious observance do not improve students’ GPAs, but do improve their satisfaction with their college experience and decrease students’ likelihood of leaving college.

This paper builds on a longitudinal research project of bishops in the worldwide Anglican Communion that I began in 1988. Here, I compare the social tension over women’s ordination and consecration to the episcopate with that over the ordination and consecration of a gay bishop, as well as tension over full sacramental access for openly gay and lesbian Anglicans, and I explore relationships between these concerns. Additionally, with the cultural balance of power shifting within the Anglican Communion, due to globalization and empowerment of bishops from poor countries in Africa and elsewhere, new liaisons and networks have formed. The paper holds implications for multinational religious organizations and others that are experiencing tension over social policy where liberal Western interpretations of feminism, sexual orientation, and social equality conflict with increasingly powerful conservative voices internationally.

Religious globalization started with the vision of the Student Volunteer Movements in the 19th Century, which claims: "to evangelize the whole world in this generation". However, the Christian vision could not be fully realized but was somehow transformed when the Christian gospel was brought to the Far East. In this paper, the present researcher will use Christian higher education in East Asia as a case of study. He will attempt to illustrate how the Christian vision was changed and renewed and how a new form of Christian higher education was evolved, and to draw our scholars’ attention to the vivid interplay between the global vision and the local concerns in this case of Christian higher education in East Asia.

The U.S. Congregational Life Survey (www.UScongregations.org) allows for a test of the correlation between degree of domestic integration and religious participation. Domestic integration is formed by social and familial connections, including conjugal, parental, and friendship ties. Thes ties not only contribute to the moral integration of individuals but also control and mobilize their energies. Therefore, we hypothesize that the intensity of such ties substantially contributes to levels of religious participation. Previous research focused more on the effect of each domestic and social tie separately, while our study measures the effect of multiple ties. Our analysis reveals that those who have relatively more domestic connections, regardless of type, also have higher degrees of religious participation.

Iannaccone is clear that the strict church hypothesis has extensions far beyond its impact on church growth. Largely by eliminating free riders, strict churches are able to increase their overall levels of participation and improve the quality of their religious products for the rest of their adherents. Using the 2004 week-to-week attendance data for over fifty churches across the liberal-conservative spectrum in a Midwestern city, I examine the impact of strictness on overall levels of church attendance and on the variation of church attendance from week-to-week within the same church. If the strict church hypothesis is true, we can expect that a larger percentage of church members will attend on the average weekend in strict churches, and they will also experience less week-to-week attendance fluctuation than their moderate and liberal counterparts.

This paper takes a fresh look at the often-conflicting approaches to church health and growth. Iannaccone’s univariate "strictness" variable as well as other indices of conservatism are analyzed alongside traditional and emerging ideas about church "quality." Measurements of common-sense marketing (discussed in relationship to evangelism) trump other independent variables (demographics included), although health, when manipulated as an independent variable, also seems to strongly predict growth. What factors seem to influence particular churches’ successful "marketing turns"? How is it that savvy, "worldly" marketing and conservative beliefs (reflected, for example, in "Red State" analyses), apparently make for cozy bedfellows? Although no magic formula for church success (growth and/or health) exists, this paper continues a tradition of linking religious zeal with communication innovation. The data set used was collected by Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religious Research (2001), one of the largest cross-denominational initiatives to date. Over 14,000 cases are represented.

Pilgrimage has traditionally been associated with transformation. Using participant-observer data from four pilgrimages in the U.K. and Ireland, I argue that this transformation arises out of changes in role and routine that alter both self-concept and cognition in general. Pilgrimage seems to redirect and expand attention and thus influence subsequent perception and memory. In addition, the pilgrimage narrative becomes a powerful metaphor that can lead to the restructuring of personal narratives and scripts. I hypothesized initially that these transformations would differ between men and women because of culturally grounded divergences in gendered self-concept. Follow-up interviews with 27 fellow pilgrims suggest that the greatest challenge for many pilgrims is integrating the changed self back into the life left behind. While the general pattern of transformation through the journey and struggle on return seems similar for women and men, there are some unique challenges for women in maintaining the newly transformed self.

Racial/ ethnic identity and religious identity have been important concepts for analysis in Asian American research. However, little research has examined the different experiences of ethnic/ racial and religious discrimination. Here I examine ethnic and religious discrimination experiences from an interview sample of college-aged second generation Asian Americans in four public universities (N =88) and a survey sample at these same institutions (N = 325). Respondents were identified across a broad spectrum of ethnic (Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) and religious (Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, Protestant) backgrounds. Findings suggest that ethnic/ racial discrimination is more often experienced for young Asian Americans, but religious discrimination is also common (though comparatively less frequent). Second, explanations of those experiences were portrayed in individual-level encounters, as opposed to structural conditions. Finally, the discriminating actors varied in composition along racial lines (typically white and African American) but fairly uniform along religious lines (co-ethnic Protestant).

A growing literature demonstrates the multifaceted role of religion in facilitating, and sometimes inhibiting, the civic incorporation of immigrants into American society. However, less is known about the processes among Arab Americans, an ethnic population that has become increasingly marginalized from democratic participation since 9/11 and is comprised equally of Christians and Muslims. This study combines national survey data with ethnographic case studies to examine how religious identity shapes Christian ahd Muslim Arab American engagement in American politics. The results find that both Muslims and Christians have high levels of interest in civic affairs and share a strong sense of American identity. Further, attachment to American identity co-exists with strong ties to ethnic and religious identity. However, while Christian Arab Americans are able to use their religious identity to distance themselves from 9/11 and bridge to the American mainstream, Muslim Arab Americans are unable to maintain such boundaries due to their religious and ethnic out-group statuses. The on-going war in Iraq, turmoil in the Middle East, and global terrorism will likely further disenfranchise Muslim Americans, both socio-culturally and politically.

Data on the 2004 presidential election suggest that born-again voters heavily favored Bush. To understand the link between religious beliefs and political views, I evaluate data from the 2000 General Social Survey. In this paper, I investigate the impact that conservative religious beliefs have both on attitudes about economic inequality as well as political attitudes about such inequality. Religious beliefs do not play a large role in attitudes towards inequality, although the analysis suggests that under certain conditions, conservative beliefs will predict more conservative political views towards inequality. Education has a stronger interaction with religious beliefs than income variables in predicting attitudes about inequality. Finally, the paper also finds that different models that should be used in evaluating attitudes about economic inequality and attitudes towards the political remedies: different demographic and religious variables are important in predicting these two different sets of attitudes.

Putting faith into the classroom is commonly perceived as a way of watering down the curriculum. But at most of the 20 religious colleges and universities I visited while researching God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America, questions of faith seem to add to the academic rigor. Not only does faith seem to be a way of making students more purposeful and generally hard-working during their college careers, but it helps them see the relevance of their studies in their day-to-day lives. Using data I gathered from these colleges, I will compare the ways that different faith traditions do (or do not) integrate faith and learning in the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences. I will also discuss the trend toward postmodern approaches in teaching at some religious colleges and the tension this creates with their missions, as well as the push against postmodernism in more vocationally oriented programs, like religious law and business schools.

While studies indicate that many perpetrators of domestic violence experienced abuse in their childhood home, researchers find that religious homes are equally touched by such intimate violence. By analyzing recent interview and questionnaire data with conservative Protestant women, this paper will reflect on past research from a batterer intervention program, shedding light on both the childhood experiences of abusers and reflections on parenting through the eyes of religious women. With a focus on issues related to discipline within the Christian home, issues of religious family practices, physical punishment and parental regret will be examined.

Since 1996 and the original enactment of the faith-based initiative through Charitable Choice, states have not been required to implement any part of the faith-based initiative beyond ensuring nondiscrimination in funding decisions. However, many states are going far beyond this minimum requirement and have been implementing the initiative in various ways through the passage of laws, executive orders, and informal administrative decisions that may potentially alter how religious groups and the state interact in the social service arena. Since 1996 states have passed over 160 laws and seventy executive orders. Additionally, thirty states have created special state positions, faith-based liaisons, to help bring the religious community into the social service arena. To study what the potential consequences of these decisions may be, I conducted interviews with the state faith-based liaisons, as well as collected data and created a complete historical record on how the faith-based initiative has been implemented through laws and executive orders.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, religious approaches to knowledge were pushed to the margins as American higher education underwent what Christian Smith calls the "secular revolution." At the turn of the new millennium, religion is making a comeback on the American campus both as an object of study and as a way of knowing. Like the secularization of higher education, this resurgence of religious scholarship can be described as a social movement with an identifiable set of leaders, organizations, networks, and cultural frameworks. This paper maps contemporary efforts to reconnect religion and knowledge in specific disciplines, in the interdisciplinary field of moral and civic education, and in an emerging network of religiously-attuned scholars, research centers, journals, and philanthropists.

This paper focuses on the social construction of a liminal, "sacred" space at the former World Trade Centre site following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York City. Ground Zero has become a key destination for visitors to New York in a dual process of commemoration and collective meaning-making that shares features with visitations to more traditional pilgrimage shrines. With reference to Bellah, Turner, Smith, and Eade and Sallnow, I argue that within an emergent civil religious discourse, Ground Zero has become a "sacred" yet contested space where visitor motivations are complex. Ground Zero is an emergent phenomenon; visually, its images are constantly shifting, its meanings and symbols are malleable. In short, this paper seeks to problematize the distinction between religious pilgrimage and modern tourism through a methodological critique and an ethnographic study.

In spite of estimates suggesting a dead heat from repeated samples of prospective American voters, George W. Bush won reelection by a substantial gap in popular voting. Why did so many surveys suggest that the race was closer, or even that John Kerry would prevail? Where did these voters come from, and why were they not interviewed in prospective research? The answers to these questions are best sought by investigating evidence on survey non-response — a tough arena for survey researchers. Fortunately, we do have access to information on the cooperativeness of respondents. Using data from the cumulative GSS, I examine patterns and trends in the influence of religious factors on respondent cooperativeness. While prior research has focused on how "religious" respondents are "nicer," my findings show that biblical inerrantists are significantly less nice than other respondents. Further, using ordinal logistic regression models, I present trends and temporal patterns in the effects of inerrancy on cooperativeness that suggest increasing non-response by fundamentalist Christians.

Previous examinations of the connection between religion and knowledge have focused on educational attainment processes, and have used varied indicators of both religious factors and educational attainment. Predictably, the findings from these studies are mixed. First, a few studies claim to find a positive effect of "religion" on educational attainment using mostly indicators of secondary educational attainment or achievement and of religious participation. Studies linking religious beliefs to educational attainment are less equivocal, and those adhering to fundamentalist beliefs in Christian sacred texts have been shown to have lower levels of educational preparation and lower levels of educational attainment over the life course. While these studies help illuminate the relationship between religious commitments and human knowledge acquisition, their measures are only indirect — focusing solely on educational achievement and attainment. In this paper, I assess the impact of religious affiliations, participation, and, most importantly, fundamentalist beliefs in Christian sacred texts on an empirical measure of verbal cognitive sophistication. Using data from the cumulative General Social Surveys (GSS), I find that even controlling for a host of factors, fundamentalist Christian beliefs and sectarian affiliations have a profound negative impact on cognitive sophistication.

Research is needed on faith-based and community-based programs which use public funds, to address methodological issues inherent in the study of these programs. Further understanding about the role, capacity, and efficacy of such programs is being called for, as these programs are likely to be on-going partners in the social welfare mix which characterizes U.S. welfare provision. This article describes four methodological concerns in evaluating community, faith-based programs, and presents examples of challenges which were encountered during a federally-funded 10-month long intensive case study of a community based and faith based program for at risk youth which utilized mixed methods. Suggestions for how these challenges were and can be addressed in mixed methods research are presented.

Religion has become one of the primary media of conflict in Venezuela during the tumultuous six years of Hugo Chávez’s government. On the one hand, the Catholic Church has become the government’s most legitimate and effective opponent in a context in which the traditional political parties have been largely discredited. On the other hand, the Chávez government has repeatedly reached out to Evangelicals, incorporating them into the government at several levels and symbolically including them whenever possible, as a way of reducing the social and political strength of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, both Catholics and Evangelicals are internally divided over their religion’s involvement in the current political crisis. This paper looks to document the complex history of this political conjuncture in order to make generalizations regarding religion and politics in the developing world during the post-neoliberal era.

This paper will focus on the interrelationships between religion and ethnic identity among Irish Americans in Savannah, Georgia. Religion is one factor that potentially shapes ethnic identity, although the scholarly literature suggests that religion has a relatively weak influence on ethnic identity. Ethnicity is one factor that potentially shapes religion’s institutional and ideational form and content. The link between religion and ethnicity is variable depending on a variety of situational factors. For example, our research found that historically in Savannah if one was Catholic they were considered Irish even if they were not Irish and if they were Irish they were considered Catholic even if they were not Catholic. Data gathered through interviews and a self-administered mail survey will provide some tentative answers regarding the relationship between religion and ethnic identity among Irish Americans in Savannah. Members of the Irish American community and members of Irish organizations participated in this study to determine how they experience their Irishness and how that sense of Irishness is constructed and shared with others.

This paper examines the role of religion in the work lives of mothers on welfare or transitioning from welfare to work. Using data from the General Social Survey and from forty-five in-depth interviews with low-income mothers in the Boston area, I argue that very poor women primarily rely upon individual religiosity rather than organized religion in connecting faith and work. Previous research on higher income workers shows that the primary role of faith with regard to work is to imbue work with a greater sense of purpose and meaning. I find that the primary role of faith with regard to work for poor mothers is to aid in surviving the low-wage service sector workplace. I analyze poor mothers' religious conceptions of economic justice in the workplace. I conclude by discussing implications for faith-based job-training programs. Although religious resources such as prayer may enable poor mothers to better withstand their job stresses and to perform their jobs more effectively, faith-based job training programs cannot ignore structural issues.

In this paper I shall discuss two controversies over the classification of Confucianism as a religion. The first takes place among British missionaries in the 1860s-1870s; the other takes place among Chinese academics in 2001-2004. Although the two controversies are more than one hundred years apart, they do share certain striking similarities. By drawing upon the most recent literature on the study of controversy in the sociology of science, this paper examines and compares the various institutional and political factors involved in the settlement of these two controversies.

This paper will report on annual events surrounding the observance of the death of Charles I of England ("Blessed Charles, King and Martyr"), principally in metropolitan London on or about the 30^th of January. On the one hand, the paper will describe the events and their participants, in both contemporary observance and in historical development; On the other, I suggest that being "undiscovered" as yet as a "tourist" event, these Caroline observances may provide an opportunity to study pilgrimage activities as they occur prior to "discovery" by the tourist industry. In light of this I argue that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of like observances around the world that permit the study of pilgrimage that might collectively enable us to break through the apparent grid-lock of the pilgrimage-tourism debate, and see how pilgrimage decisions and actions develop in an arena free from tourist use (and potential "corruption").

This paper focuses on the impact of religion on the perception of Israeli Jews regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The religious-nonreligious divide is perhaps the most volatile source of internal conflict among Israeli Jews. While there is perennial conflict over the relationship between religion and state, the most salient issue in recent times relates to the willingness to give up biblical lands for peace. There are even Rabbinical calls for religious soldiers to refuse orders that entail abandonment of lands occupied since 1967. We report on a project that involved about thirty 4-6 peer group member conversations conducted among religious and non-religious Jews in Israel, mostly middle class, ages between 25 and 60. Discourse analysis is used to examine the frames that characterize the manner in which the two groups view the peace initiatives, the willingness to see Palestinians as a viable partner for peace, and the willingness to forego occupied territories. The results raise questions regarding the challenge of the Jewish state to survive as a united society, because of the conflict wrought by religious dissent.

Mel Gibson’s movie, "The Passion of the Christ," was impressively successful. What does the popularity of this movie tell us about American culture? Three sets of data were used to understand the political and religious meaning of this film. First, a random sample of "Middletown" residents, who were asked if they had seen the movie, revealed the political and religious characteristics of the movie’s audience in some detail. Second, articles about the movie (including reviews) in mass-circulating journals were read; the journals were selected as representing either politically conservative or liberal viewpoints; a thematic analysis revealed the significance of the movie for the writers of these articles. Third, a similar analysis was done of popular religious journals. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of this movie’s success for understanding American politics.

Suit was brought by the Mozert plaintiffs over a denied request for exemption of their children from reading assignments based on a popular textbook series they saw as a threat to their fundamentalist faith. The series would weaken the inculcative role of the church and family they feared by filling young minds with subversive ideas. Transmitting these ideas, argued the defendants, constitutes a core socializing function of the state. I discuss misuses of the indoctrination concept in Mozert, their impact on the verdicts, and proposals for bringing to the concept a new coherence.

Over the past four years, President Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative has drastically changed the regulatory framework for virtually all federally funded social welfare programs. Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence would have prohibited many of these regulatory changes, but in the years since, the Court has moved that law from one focused on the separation of church and state to one focused on equality between the religious and the secular. To focus only on the movement toward equality – both as a matter of Establishment Clause law, and as the main rhetorical principle of the Faith-Based Initiative – is, however, to miss the most interesting part of the story. Despite the Court’s shift away from Separationism, its Establishment Clause law continues to accord religion a special constitutional status: as a general rule, government may fund virtually anything except religious activity, whether the activity is a traditional worship service or substance abuse counseling conducted with explicitly religious content. Yet it is precisely this sort of religious social service program that the President and his administration seem to stress as having the greatest potential to transform lives. This tension between legal norms and policy goals (and, perhaps, religious commitments) merits close attention.

How does theology influence social action? Traditional litmus tests such as the authority of Scripture have limited predictive power, calling for further exploration of theological questions having more direct salience for individuals' social activism. Drawing on a survey of two congregations where involvement in social ministry is an expected norm of church membership, this paper explores the relationship between beliefs about ministry and participation in organized and informal service activities. It further investigates how this relationship is affected by measures of church involvement and belonging. This analysis is compared with the "two-party system" of mission orientation (Martin Marty’s term) which describes a schism between a this-worldly emphasis on social concerns and other-worldly focus on evangelism. These observations about the connections between beliefs, attendance, and belonging are correlated with three main elements of social capital: norms, networks, and bonding. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of mission orientation for social capital.

While few dispute the contributions of religious organizations to America's social safety net, the faith-based initiative has provoked polarizing opinions on the relationship between faith and social services. President George W. Bush has asserted, "We must welcome faith in order to make America a better place." In contrast, Rep. Nancy Pelosi has cautioned, "When the remedy is the religion, that's where we need to be very careful." The rhetoric of this debate reflects a fundamental divide over the public role of religion. This paper analyzes articles from an on-line archive on the faith-based initiative (www.religionandsocialpolicy.org) for definitions of acceptable religiosity in the context of service provision. This analysis is complemented by case studies of three congregations that developed nuanced norms to guide their collaboration with government. This exploration will illuminate the complexities of navigating the shifting boundaries between church and state.

The following study analyzes the relationship between religious involvement and obligations toward one's family. It begins by examining whether or not family obligations are influenced by both genes "and" social environments, and then examines whether religious involvement mediates or suppresses either of these two influences on family obligations. We using data gathered in 1995-1996--the Twins Sample of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS). Results show that when respondents report high levels of religious involvement, genetic influences on family obligations are negligible, and that family level socialization is the primary predictor of feelings of obligation towards one's family. When respondents report low levels of religious involvement, however, genetic influences are more important, and socialization via the family has a minimal effect. Several implications and promising directions for future research are discussed.

Scholars have been seeking to explain the survival of a small yet significant number of multiracial/multiethnic religious organizations in the United States despite the high costs for their members remaining in this kind of organization. However, most of these studies were conducted in congregations of Christian traditions. This study is to add our knowledge about multiracial/multiethnic religious congregations by examining the racial/ethnic, gender and class relations in a Muslim community. By conducting ethnographic research in a racially/ethnically diverse Muslim community in a middle-sized city in the Midwest area, the author examines the complex interrelationship within the community and explains how the community works to promote racial/ethnic integration despite the difficulties of balancing costs and benefits for its members.

Many Americans have seen the election of Christians such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as a threat to democracy. However, Protestant Christianity, starting with Martin Luther, has actually encouraged the democratic process. In fact, the more extreme the religious orientation, it seems, the more democratic. This paper will explore the historical development of democracy as an (un)intended consequence of religious extremism. It will focus on such aspects as political and religious freedoms, self-determination and the like as outgrowths of radical religion.

Most discussions of the status and future of religion in post-industrial societies either involve a strictly macrosociological approach or combine macrosociological analyses with limited microsociological work. In both cases, the hypotheses advanced concern the growth or decline of specific patterns on the level of entire societies. Useful as these approaches are, this paper argues that insufficient attention to microsociological perspectives – or at least to diversity within macrosociological perspectives – renders such hypotheses applicable not to any society as a whole but rather to that society’s culturally dominant groups. Given the importance of individualism and identities (however fragmented) in such societies, it is highly probable that a system of mutual influence exists between identity factors (such as gender, race and ethnicity, class, sexuality, religious heritage, and so on) and patterns of religiosity; the paper explores some of the ways in which recognition of this interaction might alter existing perspectives on contemporary religion.

This paper describes exploratory research about how atheists and atheism are portrayed in mass media. My project relates to larger discussions about cultural production within the sociology of culture. I am interested in whether there are positive as well as negative portrayals of atheism in one specific type of media, cartoons. Who produces the cartoons? Does the content of the cartoons match the producers’ beliefs? My aim is to find out if atheists are producing positive portrayals of their beliefs and to uncover whether most of the portrayals are negative in tone and not produced by atheists. I use a content analysis of the cartoons and lists of famous atheists produced by atheist organizations to address these questions; I relate the findings back to previous research on public opinion about atheism.

In this paper, I explore the long-term impact of Christian mission on contemporary education rates both historically and statistically. Christian Missionaries were central to the expansion of formal education in nonwestern societies. They invested in education to facilitate conversions. Initially few people saw the value of Western formal education, but demand exploded when mission school graduates prospered. Missionary education also expanded the supply of education both directly and by spurring other religious groups and the government to invest in education. Missionary education provided trained teachers, textbooks, and other resources that made the expansion of non-missionary education easier. Moreover, governments and other religious groups mobilized to provide education with the Christian evangelistic content. Thus societies with an earlier initiation of Protestant missionary activity and greater religious competition generally ended up with higher contemporary education rates.

Women of different generations vary in their level of church participation and civic involvement. These patterns are revealed in a description of female worshipers across a national random sample of U.S. congregations. When compared with all women, female worshipers are more highly educated, more likely to vote, and more likely to volunteer in community organizations. Analysis of factors related to participation patterns by gender, age, and marital status are also explored controlling for denomination and church size. Further, gender participation patterns (e.g., gender ratio in the church) influenced other characteristics that are related to congregational vitality: numerical growth, leadership development, and care of young people.

Religious pluralism has increased in the United States since the 1960s. However, the real challenge of religious pluralism in the United States today is not de-Christianization of the nation, but de-Europeanization of Christianity. The American public holds a distorted perception of Asian Americans’ religions. The Pluralism Project at Harvard University has reinforced the distorted stereotype of Asian Americans holding exotic religions. In this paper we will show that most of Asian American religious believers are Christian and their religious identification has important political implications.

The relationship between belonging and believing is examined longitudinally through the mechanism of charting the rise or the decline of doubt in the existence of a supreme being. Looking at the populations of sixty communes varying greatly in initial levels of doubt, changing levels of doubt are tracked over a 25 year period from youth (mean age = 25) to middle age (mean age = 50). The null hypothesis that level of doubt tends to converge at a fairly low level as a function of aging, regardless of initial doubt level, is not confirmed. However, this convergence is found for certain subsets of this population.

During the late 19th century and early 20th century, even though the Protestant missionaries were not very successful in converting Chinese people, they succeeded greatly in spurring education. They promoted and spread mass education for women, initiated women's college education, and trained thousands of Chinese women for modern industrial jobs. How was a "foreign" educational system planted in China, survive, get accepted, and finally become Chinese? How did these institutions overcome the cultural, moral, and political barriers and influence the process of China's modernization? Using the religious market theory and historical statistics, this study intends to understand how the modern Chinese educational system was formed and transformed by Christian missionaries, and how the demand for mission education was created, marketed, and supplied in a competitive religious market. The relationship between religious institutions and the educational system are explored.