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This article report on an attempt to investigate, by questionnaires given to college and high-school students, the hypothesis that the emergence of a "post-modern mind," is being witnessed characterized by world-outlook, different from those held in previous stages of Western society and more particularly. The article intends to investigate whether the religious attitudes suggested as characteristic of the "post-modern mind" do in fact exist. According to a hypothesis, the development of Western society has gone through various stages and that these are associated with distinctive "minds". These "minds" depend, basically, on differing ways of approaching or defining reality. They then pattern the institutional and cultural forms of a given stage of development. The hypothesis also holds, that people in mid-twentieth century are witnessing a change similar in import to the change around 1650, namely, the emergence of a new "mind", radically different in approach from the "modern mind" and already viewing the "obvious" notion of reality previously held as something antiquated and alien.

Homophobia in the black community has been largely attributed to the Black Church's conservative views concerning sexual orientation. Prior research demonstrates that black congregations are generally nonaffirming of nonheterosexuality; however, few studies have investigated black congregants' responses to their churches' climates regarding sexuality. Using in‐depth interviews, this paper examines the extent to which black Christians are content with their congregations' nonaffirming climates. Findings indicate that although some black parishioners are content with or indifferent to their churches' climates, most respondents advocate for a change in how their congregations address sexual orientation, specifically calling for open conversations about sexuality. Furthermore, an examination of the language respondents used to evaluate congregational climates suggests discussions of sexuality in churches that humanize and encourage empathy for nonheterosexual identities may help facilitate such conversations. These results challenge assumptions of ideological homogeneity within religious organizations and could inform strategies to promote nonheterosexual inclusion in congregations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights that the Scientific Study of Religion has opened up to new areas of research, to new groups of researchers and new frames. The articles published in the society's journal, "Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion" have moved away from papers on the Protestant Mainline. Looking at twenty-eight issues, beginning with volume 5 and ending with volume 35, the journal published ninety-six articles that could be categorized as focusing on a particular religious group. Of those, sixteen articles were about the Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. Only one of those was published after 1981. The study of religion was somewhat ghettoized in the discipline. A renewed interest in religion among sociologists was facilitated by the advent of new cultural approaches in sociology. Sociologist Clifford Geertz's work, for example, not only proposed a frame for seeing religion as a cultural system, but perhaps more importantly, Geertz revealed how the analysis of popular expressive forms could be as significant and revealing as the study of high culture or official dogmas. New studies appeared examining faith healing and devotional practices, conversion and individual's search for meaning in a changing society.

This paper argues that the belief in and reverence for superhuman beings cannot be understood as the chief distinguishing characteristic of religious phenomena. The consideration of Buddhism has always been central to the discussion of what religion is, and this paper focuses on the limitations of the human-superhuman dichotomy as it might be used to apply to Buddhist traditions. The argument makes three points: a) There are important sects of Buddhism that do not rely on reverence for superhuman beings, and the concept "superhuman" is difficult (if not impossible) to use in cross-cultural studies because of cultural variations in what it means to be human; b) the insistence that "philosophies" should be systematically distinguished from "religions" is arbitrary and culturally biased; and c) Buddhist doctrines that assert that reality is ultimately "nondual" provide the conceptual context for understanding superhuman beings in Mahayana, and this conceptuality is not consonant with superhuman definitions of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the peculiarly fluctuating Western relationship of religious and political powers, continuously in conflict with each other, the Russian religious structures consistently follow the more common pattern of monistic unity and are characterized by total subordination to the political system. The contrasting structural characteristics warrant a conceptual dichotomy in which dependency and independency of the religious structures occupy opposing ends of a typological scale. Challenging the fashionable view, which leads to the neglect of the cultural context of societal actions, this paper emphasizes the crucial impact of the cultural context in which a particular church*state relationship occurs. The early and unstable Western dualism exploded eventually into various, more or less imperfect pluralistic solutions; while in the foreseeable Russian future any dualistic or pluralistic diffusion of power is highly improbable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the switching of religious preferences among Protestants in the seventies The NORC General Social Surveys data indicate: (a) little support for Stark and Glock's switching model, and (b) considerable diversity in switching such as shifts of the upwardly mobile to status churches, of others to conservative and fringe groups, and sizable proportions away from religious identification. An alternative model utilizing a mainline -- fringe distinction is proposed for describing these trends, and for illuminating the cultural meanings associated with religious preference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain concepts in the theory of art might be applicable to the psychology of religion, particularly when one realizes that in ontogenesis the individual tends to be introduced at once to art and religion. This paper describes first the reciprocal reinforcement between art and religion in childhood and subsequent cultural experience. It goes on to suggest that significant understanding of religion can be gained from a systematic application of the art-theoretical constructs of craft, imagination, and illusion. The dubious status of satisfaction (or pleasure and pain experiences) in art and religion is surveyed, leading to the proposal that the numinous satisfaction of religion has a unique, irreducible quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the past three decades, the theory of religious economy has been established, applied, debated, developed, and rejected. It has proven to be as divisive as any "general theory" of religion should be, and yet its core tenets continue to engage and unite scholars around the world. In response to broader shifts within the sociology of religion, this article reframes religious economy by advancing a spatial approach to its theorization. A spatial approach can help develop new perspectives on the regulation of religion, and the resistant agency of religious groups. With a focus on the "secular monopoly" of Singapore, it demonstrates how the restricted supply of land for religious purposes increases competition between religious groups. To overcome restrictions, religious groups pursue strategies of spatial and organizational boundary crossing. This has led to the closer regulation of space, and highlights the recursive interplay between the regulation and praxis of religion in Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recent years have seen growing interest in the judicialization of religious freedom (JRF). In this article, I identify two distinct meanings of JRF, which are often conflated but which need to be kept separate. I then argue for a stronger institutionalist approach to JRF. An institutionalist approach focuses our attention on both the rules internal to courts, and the relationship of courts to administrative agencies, legislatures, and other governing bodies. I argue that there is room to strengthen our analyses of JRF by paying greater attention to these institutional dynamics. I demonstrate this by highlighting two overlooked features of courts—interpretive rules and access rules—that are particularly important for governing JRF; and by developing a framework that relates the courts to other institutional venues and political actors. In so doing, I identify a number of promising directions for future research into the causes and consequences of JRF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to sociological theorizations of religion as heritage through analyzing the politics of religious heritage in Spain since its transition to democracy during the late 1970s. Our analysis is organized around three historical sequences of critical importance for understanding the political and legal significance of discourses that frame religion as cultural heritage in Spain: (1) negotiations that took place during Spain's democratic transition between 1977 and 1980; (2) discussions that surfaced in the context of the state's decision to recognize Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism in 1992; and (3) more recent debates regarding the incorporation of religious minorities in the context of increasing religious diversity, especially concerning places of worship. We show how framing 'religion' using the language of cultural heritage has provided religious actors with a means of defending the connection between religion and national identity-and of protecting the privileges of majoritarian religious institutions without violating core tenets of secularism or pluralism. This scenario has created space for certain religious minorities to claim a place within Spain's evolving socioreligious landscape by invoking alternative heritages from Spain's multicultural past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on charitable giving has identified a significant relationship between political conservatism and greater financial giving to charitable causes. Yet that research has not adequately explored the important role of religion in that relationship, nor differences in financial giving targets (i.e., religious congregations, noncongregational religious organizations, and nonreligious organizations). Support for competing theories concerning political ideology, religious practice, and charitable financial giving is assessed using data from the Panel Study on American Ethnicity and Religion (PS-ARE). For both religious and nonreligious giving, the effect of political ideology is completely mediated by participation in religious and civic practices. These findings support recent arguments on 'practice theory' in cultural sociology and suggest that it is less the effect of ideology than of active participation in religious, political, and community organizations that explains Americans' financial giving to religious and nonreligious organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article by Peter Beyer and Anthony Gill that focuses on two streams of intellectual engagement with religion and culture. Notions of religion and religious freedom; Limitation of the extremes of consent and excess; Struggles over the definition of consent and of excess; Identification of individual inadequacies as the root of lack of access to equality; Benefits to disadvantaged groups by characterizing the expansion of equality as judicial activism; Textual analysis of case law that proves the existence of religious hegemony.

Survey research shows important links between religion and tolerance in the United States. Yet it is not known to what extent its findings have broader, cross-national relevance. This article compares religious influences on political tolerance in the United States and Poland. Despite the marked political and cultural differences between their national contexts, data from the NORC GSS and Polish GSS reveal similar patterns of religious influences. Both in the United States and Poland, intolerance appears to be linked primarily to theocratic beliefs, that is, to a political correlate of religiosity rather than to its essential components, such as religious commitment and participation that have weak direct effects only on tolerance of atheists, and weak indirect effects on other dimensions of tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychology of religion always having to orient itself toward a more general psychology and its object being very diverse, the branch of human science called hermeneutical psychology is suggested as the most appropriate and viable to study religiosity. After emphasizing that the subdiscipline's object is a culturally constituted phenomenon to be understood by psychology in a historical perspective, special attention is given to the historical variant of cultural psychology. Three subvariants and their relation to the psychology of religion are pointed out Psychohistory is presented both as an example of an older inclination within the psychology of religion to take the historical-cultural embeddedness of religious phenomena into account, and as an advanced possibility for conducting interdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While empirical studies of religion's involvement in political life abound, there remains a great deal of fuzziness about the concepts that beet capture it. Two often-used approaches are "religion as culture" and "religion as ideology." In some perspectives culture and ideology are treated as mutually exclusive modes of religion-political phenomena; in other perspectives the two concepts are conflated. This article argues for an analytic distinction between culture and ideology that still preserves their interactive and often complementary natures. Examples from empirical studies of religion in politics demonstrate the different ways in which religion acts as a political resource, and the usefulness of the proposed analytic distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on the role of women in preserving crypto-Jewish culture in twentieth-century American society. The study of crypto-Judaism refers to a hidden form of religious practice that originated in Spain with the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity beginning in the fourteenth century. Today what remains of this culture can be found in both Latin America and the southwestern United States. Using ethnographic methodology, this work examines the ways in which ritual and secrecy have been maintained by Latina descendants of crypto-Jewish families living in the American Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the economics of the rational choice approach to the study of religion using the debate over secularization as a point of reference. Recent developments in the study of religion offer a provocative case in point. Both stimulation and consternation roil in the wake of several recent works that share a new and more economistic paradigm. The economists' strategy is well calculated for achieving maximum rigor under constrained conditions. By taking on the world in their terms, they exert far greater control than, say, sociologists who stubbornly persist in taking on the world in its terms with all of its variance and vicissitudes at play. But if the economists have won the short-term race to professional respect, the long-run contest remains in some doubt. While sociologists suffer from the paucity of tightly drawn theories, economists can become the captives of the very models they produce. There is a sense in which the field now hangs in the balance between the two contending movements of rational choice theory, on the one hand, and new culture theory, on the other. This is not the place for a thorough assessment of that struggle. However, one crucial clarification involves the separation of the terms "rational" and "choice" respectively.

The article argues in favor of rational choice as a powerful paradigm for the scientific study of religion. Rational choice theory has entered the study of religion, and with it come concerns about its nature and value. So far, a single application of rational choice, the "religious markets" alternative to secularization theory, has attracted the most attention, applause, and condemnation. But some have questioned the entire approach, and more critiques are on the way. Questions are only natural given the tendency to view religion as "less rational" than other aspects of culture, a sacred realm "set apart" from the profane, a realm walled off from the "calculation of utility. This essay defends the rational choice approach to the study of religion. It seeks to complement, but not reiterate, an earlier review of specific models and applications. The arguments are frankly utilitarian, promoting rational choice as an approach that has borne considerable fruit in the social sciences, an approach well suited to the task of building and testing formal models of human behavior, and above all an approach whose implications for religious behavior have yet to receive sufficient attention. The combined actions of religious consumers and religious producers form a religious market that, like other markets, tends toward a steady-state equilibrium. As in other markets, the consumers' freedom to choose constrains the producers of religion. A "seller" cannot long survive without the steady support of "buyers."

In this study, 190 female trainee teachers from Bar-Ilan University in Israel completed the Hebrew version of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Katz religiosity scale. The data suggest four conclusions: a) religiosity is associated with neither neuroticism nor emotional stability; b) religiosity is associated with neither introversion nor extraversion; c) religiosity has a positive relationship with tendermindedness, and a negative relationship with tougbmindedness and psychoticism and d) there is a positive relationship between religiosity and lie scale scores. These Israeli findings are consistent with the developing consensus regarding the relationship between personality and religion in predominantly Christian cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intrinsic, extrinsic, and quest religious orientations were used here to predict the desire to read belief-supporting and belief-opposing religious articles among a sample of Christian fundamentalists. As expected, both the intrinsic and quest orientations predicted the desire to read the belief-supportive articles. Only quest predicted the willingness to read the belief opposing articles; however, two recent versions of the quest scale were significantly better than two earlier scales. It is argued that these findings offer more direct support for the construct validity of intrinsic and quest religiosity than do their many social and personal correlates which have been documented through the years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed that culture crises promote the growth of cult movements. Culture crises are characterized by dislocations in the communicational and orientational institutions of society, i.e., in those institutions that normally create and standardize symbols. Many of the ideological and organizational characteristics typically associated with cult movements can be interpreted as response to culture crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our galloping 20th Century Revolutions of Science and Technoculture have deep roots in the Protestant Reformations and the Revolutions in Science and Philosophy of the 16th and 17th Centuries. These decisive recastings of the relations of conscience--moral, religious, scientific--and character need to be seen in wider frames than those adopted by Max Weber in his renowned "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1904-05). To do justice to these developments, we have to go beyond Weber in the spirit of his last essays before his death in 1920. New stress has to be given to the role of the revolutions of organized systems of "rationales" both of action and thought within the processes Weber described under the heading of "Rationalizations." The breakthroughs to the modern world and the propulsive developments now in progress have less to do with the "spirit of capitalism" and the "profit motive" in their narrow senses than to the runaway effects of the dynamic fusions of the by-products, not always hoped for, of two complex movements: The Protestant Reformation (and its bearings in respect of the newer orientations toward self, society, and the city of this world) and, The Scientific Revolution (and its consequences in the way of a development of an Universal symbolic mathematical science and technology). These fusions occurred at great heats toward the close of the 19th Century in Europe and the United States and are now at "the exponential growth point." Both of these movements began as fundamental critiques of the medieval integrated institution of "Conscience-Casuistry-and the Cure of Souls." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judaism is no stranger to cities. It has known them all, endured them all, survived them all, cities scarcely larger than villages and cities with teeming millions, cities spawned by flood plains and cities built on trade and commerce, cities of administration and cities of industry, cities of priests and cities of kings, cites of guilds and cities of finance. Indeed, if one traces the history of cities from their earliest origin in the ancient near East till present day, he will find few cities that did not at some time or other sustain a viable form of Judaism. No religion has functioned in so many cities, in so many parts of the world, in so many cultural and civilizational complexes and over so vast a stretch of time. And the powerful appeal of Judaism today to Jews living in cities of every size and type surely indicates that neither the megalopolis nor suburbia find Judaism without some relevance. What is there about Judaism that has given it this power to function so adequately in cities of all kinds? The question becomes especially pertinent in view of both the tact that Jews have been predominantly dwellers in cities only since the eighth century or so and that the primal source of Judaism, the Pentateuch, is oriented towards the seminomad, the peasant and the priest and not towards the artisan, craftsman, shopkeeper, or merchant.

The article focuses on regional differences in the way mainstream churches responded to the cultural upheaval. The first disestablishment occurred at the time of the nation's founding when it became understood that no Protestant church would be singled out for state recognition. The second disestablishment occurred during the years between the two world wars. The third disestablishment is the change in the church-culture relationship whereby persons are seen to be free to choose not only which religion will be theirs but also whether to choose any at all. Large increases in individualism took place both structurally, by diminishing local social relationships, and culturally, by alternative moral expectations in the family/sexual sphere.