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This paper attempts to show that the myth of the primal horde is of use in that: (1) It helps to account for behavior that is observable at formal meetings, (2) sheds some light on the earlier socialization process and (3) can give some insight into the operation of wider social groupings. This obviously is a formidable task, beyond the scope of any one paper. The author discusses the university seminar of the formal kind where there is a chairman and sometimes a vote of thanks. He hope to show that the myth of the primal horde not merely explains what goes on but can even be said to describe to some extent behavior at such meetings. There is also an attempt to show how the ideas first used in the context of the university seminar can be applied to formal settings that are apparently very different namely those of the military parade and the religious service. Formal behavior, according to the view expressed here, owes its significance to the triumph it celebrates. It must therefore be essentially unstable for where the triumph is too complete there will the need for defensive morality be dissipated.

This article presents and tests a model that extends our understanding of optimal marketing-mix decision rules for nonprofit organizations (such as churches) that receive donation income, do not charge flexed prices for their services, and rely heavily on volunteer time as a resource for their operations. Such organizations are likely to employ an objective function of output maximization rather than profit maximization. This change in objective function leads to greater promotional spending than would be true of for-profit organizations. The paper also highlights the complexities for optimization raised by the role of paid and volunteer staff in promotional activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over two decades the growth of the so-called conservative churches has been a popular and hotly debated topic among social scientists studying religion. Despite the considerable attention, however, there is little agreement on the numerical significance of the growth, the sources of the growth , or the reasons for the growth. Throughout the debate, however, one general pattern has remained largely unabated. Most recently, North America has witnessed the rapid growth of a new set of thriving sects and independent churches. Researchers estimate the membership of larger metropolitan independent churches to be over 2 million in the United States. Many new evangelical movements have also arisen. This paper focuses on the sources of growth of three of these movements, the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Calvary Chapel, and Hope Chapel. Although the relative size of these movements remains somewhat small, it is difficult to dispute the fact that they have had a significant impact on the religious landscape. In southern California, where each of these movements originated, it is not the least bit difficult to find an evangelical Christian who is attending a Vineyard or Calvary or Hope.

Transformations within religious institutions and traditions often occur via conflict and internal social movements. Yet previous research on such phenomena has missed some important sociological insights because it has not incorporated methodological and theoretical resources from other sociological literatures dealing with social movements and organizational change and conflict. This paper presents a comprehensive critical review of extant research on intradenominational conflict and identifies and describes five shortcomings in this literature. As a corrective, we suggest that analysts focus on organizations and conflict events as units of analysis, pay more attention to ideal factors in conflict, examine relationships between internal and external variables, and compare conflicts across organizations and across time. These alternative methodological recommendations are related to three new theoretical directions in other sociological subfields: resource mobilization theory's focus on intermediate levels of social life, the "new institutionalist" emphasis on how organizational actors respond to their environments, and the recent work on the interplay of "schema? and "resources" in social structure. Such new directions address questions that were not accessible via earlier approaches. They also begin to build important bridges between the sociology of religion and other sociological subfields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper published in this journal, Chaves (1989) found that the relative stability in Protestant church attendance in the United States results from the offsetting effects of secularization and revival. The secularization occurs across birth-cohorts, as successive cohorts are less inclined to attend church than were their forebears. The revival is a within-cohort phenomenon: Within birth-cohorts, attendance has increased over time. However, Chaves did not estimate the magnitude of the offsetting effects. For 1972-1989, cohort and period variation accounts for less than 1% of the variation in Protestant church attendance. Apparently cohort membership, has little effect on church attendance, recent popular and scholarly accounts notwithstanding. Moreover, offsetting within- and across-cohort trends could reflect life cycle effects rather than counteracting period "revival" and cohort "secularization" effects. We suggest - consistent with Hout and Greeley (1987) and Greeley (1989) - that the life cycle interpretation is more plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a typology of organized religion that grows out of the conceptions of the Ultimate espoused by Christian religious bodies and relates to these conceptions the patterns of social organization of these bodies. The attempt is to discover a typology that adequately accommodates the theological and confessional character of religious bodies, on one hand, and their social structures and behavioral patterns, on the other. The paper offers three major types: Familial, Democratic, and Dominical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on previous articles related to church-sect that appeared in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. This comment has argued that neither sufficient caution nor the full weight of scientific discipline has been exercised commonly enough in sociology with respect to church-sect typologizing. It has assumed that if the basic conceptualization is faulty as the author believes it is then empirical research of the sort represented in social scientist Erich Goode's paper, and in the work of those whom he criticizes, cannot produce sound knowledge about religious behavior or about movements or organizations in which such behavior is embedded. Nor will it do to permit the impression to get around that, as a result of having "weathered" searching criticism, the basic conceptualization stands, tried and tested confirmed for lack of disproof. This seems clearly not to be the case. There are a number of signs to suggest that the cutting edge of theory and research on new religious movements particularly but also on "formal" religious structures has moved on beyond the limitations of older and looser conceptualizations. Other concepts for describing new or young religious movements and various kinds of religious organizations have come into use or are being proposed.

Previous research on religious institutions and political participation finds that churches can increase participation among their members through the development of civic skills and the distinct political histories of religious traditions. This paper examines the various ways religious institutions promote the political participation of their members. We utilize the 1990 Citizen Participation Study to test seven hypotheses about the connections between religious institutions and political participation. We find, contrary to previous work, that church-gained civic skills and religious tradition do not directly affect political participation among those currently active in religious institutions. Rather, churches bring their parishioners more effectively into the political process through the recruitment of members to politics and when members come to see their church activity as having political consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a tentative theory of congregational Organization; one that is grounded in data about the common organizational features of contemporary churches and synagogues and the practical problems they encounter in their work. Religion is an important factor in accounting for both the similarities and differences between congregations but other factors also contribute to organizational issues which arise, It is suggested that congregations are `special case' voluntary associations in which the actions of members are limited in ways which would not normally apply in secular associations. In addition to having associational features, congregations also have special organizational characteristics with respect to the role of ministers of religion and their `ultimate goals'. The challenge for clergy, lay staff and lay members can be seen as one of operating the basic voluntary association model in a way that also takes into account the two special characteristics of congregational organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many of the studies of Korean Christian churches in the United States mention the presence of cell groups within the churches, little scholarly research exists on the structure and functions of the cell group ministry. Based on data from a large Korean Christian Church in Houston, Texas, the structure of the cell group ministry is described in ethnographic detail. Four major functions that the cell groups pro- vide for both Korean immigrant newcomers and established Korean residents are described, with emphasis upon the mutual benefits that exist between cell groups and Korean entrepreneurs. The paper concludes with the delineation of organizational problems that may also result from a strong cell ministry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research is just beginning to appear about the effects of Soviet repression on the churches and religious beliefs of the countries which constituted the former Soviet Union. Data from an opinion survey conducted in 17 countries of Western and Eastern Europe in 1991 allow some preliminary observations of a baseline nature about church membership and religious values in these countries. In this paper I compare church membership and religious belief across age categories among Western and Eastern Germans, Hungarians, and Poles. The data show variant patterns of religious affiliation and belief among each of the churches of Central Europe. State repression of churches has substantially affected church membership in Eastern Germany. There is some evidence of a secularization effect among Hungarian Protestants. Polish church membership has been less negatively affected by the years of communism. Mean levels of religious belief for each of these countries show further evidence of these country-specific patterns. Further research is needed to uncover the longer lasting trends in religious affiliation and belief in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious participation is far lower in most western European nations than in the United States. Most European social scientists believe this is a demand-aide phenomenon in that Europeans no longer find religion plausible. But, recently some American social scientists have defined it as a supply-side phenomenon - that lax and inefficient state-supported European churches suppress participation. A crucial experiment would assess these competing claims by selecting a random sample of Europeans and transporting them to America. Does their religious behavior (and that of their children) became "Americanized" as they are exposed to a vigorous supply-side? In this paper I approximate such an experiment by com- paring the religiousness of first-, second-, and third-generation German Americans with their German "cousins." The results very strongly support the supply-side explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of church growth have fallen prey to numerous statistical pitfalls. Flawed methods and inadequate data have reduced the predictive power of past research while systematically biasing its results. The biases work to overstate the importance of the demographic context in which a church exists and under- state the importance of the church's own institutional characteristics, such as organizational strictness. This paper uses theory, simulations, and data reanalysis to explore the empirical difficulties confronting church growth research and to reassess the role of strictness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discusses rational choice approaches to the study of individual religious behavior and their limitations. Rational choice approaches are increasingly popular among social scientists interested in religious life. To date, proponents of rational choice models have contributed to our understanding of religious behavior on at least three analytical levels. At the ecological level, researchers have linked variations in religious market structure and market regulation with variations in rates of religious affiliation and practice across aerial units. At the institutional level, rational choice partisans have developed innovative approaches to the analysis of denominational growth patterns, with particular attention to the perennial question of why membership in relatively conservative religious groups appears to be growing at the expense of more liberal groups. At the individual level, rational choice theory has been used to explain variations in religious behavior, ranging from patterns of affiliation and religious mobility to various expressions of commitment, such as attendance, other forms of participation, and financial contributions to religious institutions. Most of the observations in this paper focus on rational choice analyses of individual religious behavior. Nevertheless, some rational choice models of religious behavior may unduly extract individual decision-making and behavior from its social and cultural context.

This paper examines a battery of questions on personal religiosity that were included for the first time in the 1988 General Social Survey. Combined into a composite measure, the questions predict privatized religion in American society. Privatized religion ("Sheilaism") was found to vary inversely with institutional religious loyalty. Men, whites, young Americans, liberal Protestants, Nones, and people living in the Pacific states and in New England are apparently the most privatized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American civil religion has been the subject of recent scholarly interest among American sociologists of religion, leading to a sociological debate. This paper examines the sociological literature concerning American civil religion in an attempt to order the literature into a coherent, comprehensive, and logical set of definitions and assumptions open to empirical investigation. Four basic propositions adapted from the work of John A. Coleman are framed to address the crucial questions most often asked by contemporary sociologists of American civil religion: (a) American civil religion is the religious symbol system which relates the citizen's role and American society's place in space, time, and history to the conditions of ultimate existence and meaning; (b) American civil religion is structurally differentiated from both the political community and the religious community; (c) American civil religion performs specialized religious functions performed neither by church nor state; and (d) the differentiation of American civil religion follows the general direction of cultural evolution. Review of the American civil religion literature reveals sufficient logical and empirical support for these propositions to recommend that they be used to guide further scientific inquiry.
This paper has attempted to trace the intellectual development of the concept, "American civil religion," and to organize theory and research about it into a set of testable propositions. A survey of the literature reveals that the current state of knowledge is primarily theoretical.
Probably the best-known sociological treatments of American civil religion (Robert Bellah, 1967, 1975), has stimulated the greatest amount of empirical research, but the best empirical test of the American civil religion propositions may not come from traditional modes of civil religion research. Symbolic studies, individual belief studies, and content analyses have typically been limited to a single... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the basic axioms and some initial definitions from which we are constructing a general theory of religion. Here we carry the deductive process only to the point where three testable and non-trivial propositions about religious commitment are obtained. These propositions explain and clarify the available empirical literature. In subsequent papers we shall deduce and test other results from this theoretical system This paper is the pivotal work in a series of papers, published and forthcoming, which present a new exchange paradigm for analyzing and explaining religious phenomena and which subject it to a variety of empirical tests. Eventually, the entire theory will appear in a book, expressed in the most detailed and complete manner, illustrated and supported by the empirical studies. Our object here is to present the basic set of axioms, key definitions, and the first of literally hundreds of propositions we have derived about religion and its social context. We only carry the deductive process to the point where some non-trivial, testable, and perhaps counter-intuitive propositions about religious commitment have been obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a report on the membership mobility (1942 through 1951) in the Mennonite Church, a sect originating in Switzerland and now a body of about 70,000 baptized members in the United States and Canada. The study is based upon reports from pastors of 135 churches and on questionnaires completed by converts and ex-members. Eighty per cent of the church membership comes from the offspring of the group. Urban churches gain more converts but also lose more members than churches in rural areas. The findings suggest that converts come from the lower educational level, from the low-income class, and from farm occupations. Most of the converts have had a previous religious affiliation; a large proportion come from other Mennonite groups more ‘strict’ in practice. Members who leave the sect tend to join larger well-known denominations, most of them more ‘liberal’ than the Mennonite Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the origins of the southern Black's conversion to Catholicism and discusses the significance that this change of church affiliation may have for the traditional Negro Church. The change is viewed as emerging from the breakdown of the Negro Church's importance as an over-arching, multifunctional institution serving the social, political and economic needs, as well as the religious needs, of the Black communities. Because of the centrality of the Negro Church to Negro life in the South, the change of Blacks from their traditional forms of religious expression is seen as a special case of the general phenomenon of church-change. Change from communal forms of religious expression to church affiliations premised on individual initiative and responsibility emerges as a dominant pattern in this instance of church-change. [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]

Since under pillarization religious organizations served as vehicles for social conflict, individual commitment used to be high; as pillarization declines, so must individual adherence. The author welcomes their retreat to old-paradigm reasoning, but their move raises several issues, even apart from the attempt to immunize their theory. First, the new proposal calls into question the very role of competition. After depillarization, the current religious market can plausibly be viewed as much more open and competitive than it was previously. the conflict argument makes good sense with respect to caste-like societies, but it does not follow from the theory. Third, the shift to conflict leads to a contradiction, at least in the application of the theory. The continued decline of the Dutch Catholic Church is due to its laxity; however, as my 1989 article already indicated, a counterrevolution quickly followed the liberalization of the 1960s, and the current posture of the church hierarchy is clearly as strict as that of Rome.

This article presents information related to religious institutions, meetings and communications. The Religious Education Association has published a research supplement to its journal "Religious Education," titled "Review of Recent Research Bearing on Religious and Character Formation." This supplement, dated July-August, 1962, can be secured from The Religious Education Association, 545 West 111th Street, New York 25, at a cost of $3. It is edited by Stuart W. Cook and contains ten essays, each a significant survey and analysis of recent research, with extensive references to other work being done. The annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion is to be held October 26-27, at the Inter-church Center, Riverside Drive, New York. Attention has been called to a study by Charles H. Foster, "A Question on Religion," published as paper numbered sixty-six in The Inter-University case Program, University of Alabama Press. This study is addressed to the issue of whether a question concerning religious affiliation should be included in the U.S. Census.

This study of 168 Protestant and Catholic churches in northern California describes how control over church work was distributed among clergy and lay people, and examines the effects of church organizational characteristics on work arrangements. Surprisingly high levels of shared control over church work were found, indicating that lay participation - even in work traditionally associated with the clergy role - is a common feature of modern churches. Church environment, operationalized as polity, affected work arrangements: Churches embedded in more centralized decision-making environments reported more tasks under clergy control and fewer under lay control. The results also suggest that, with respect to work arrangements in churches, similarity to the institutional environment is not driven by regulatory forces but rather by normative or mimetic forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a study which identified age-period-cohort models for the U.S. National Opinion Research Center church attendance data from the period 1972 through 1986. This paper focuses on the third dimension of secularization, religious involvement, operationalizing this variable as regular attendance at religious services. Such an operationalization does not, of course, exhaust the possibilities of religious involvement. A complete analysis of secularization as decline in religious involvement would include an examination of trends in all five modes of religious involvement. Stability is the most striking feature of church attendance rates observed over the last 50 years. In 1939, 41% of United States adults said they had attended church in the last seven days; in 1984 the figure was 40%. The low point during this period was 37% in 1940; the high point was 49% in both 1955 and 1958. The figures bespeak a fairly stable level of regular church attendance, which has been commonly interpreted as evidence against the existence of secularization as a decline in individual religious involvement.

This article examines the religious denominations in the U.S. The writer's own special concern is to develop complementary models which allow us to see how the modern American churchform, the religious denomination, is both like other organizations and yet in many ways unique. Characterizing denominations as "federative," "coalitional," and "loosely coupled" is not enough. Many writers since the 1960s have begun to challenge the dominance of the rational, Weberian model with its emphases upon rationality and hierarchy. While sociologist Max Weber himself juxtaposed the bureaucratic model to a preindustrial, patrimonial-feudal structure, later proponents of bureaucracy did not sufficiently articulate or emphasize the polar contrast implicit in Weber's thinking. This article has two basic purposes, to round out and elaborate on sociologist William G. Ouchi's typology of organizations, trying to remain on the mid-range level of generality of Weber's ideal type of bureaucracy, and to apply this fourfold typology to an analysis of selected aspects of major, American mainline denominations. The paper first presents and compares the basic characteristics of bureaucracies, clans, markets, and missions, distills their key elements, and finally applies the typology to a selected set of American denominations. It is the writer's general contention that each typeform contains strengths as well as weaknesses.

In Centralia, Pennsylvania, a twenty-four-year-old underground coal mine fire has slowly destroyed the physical community, leaving in its wake much community conflict and suffering. And yet, unlike in most cases of natural disasters, local religious institutions and community residents failed to assign religious meaning to the problems associated with the fire.
The paper argues that the failure of local religion to respond effectively is related to the chronic technical nature of the disaster agent. Unlike a tornado or hurricane, the mine fire struck slowly, lasted a long time, was caused by human beings, and required sophisticated technical apparatus to detect and abate In addition, the patterns of victimization associated with the chronic technical disaster are different from those resulting from immediate impact natural disasters. These differences resulted in the acceptance of a technical not moral or religious, definition of the problem Implications of this for religion's response to other chronic technical disaster situations are discussed
As Centralians board up their homes and prepare to move, few would deny that something terrible has happened to their town. Their way of life is gone, their homes are being destroyed. And, yet, only a handful of residents interpreted this crisis within the local context of religious meaning. It is not that attributing a religious meaning to the mine fire would have insulated residents from the ecological effects of the blaze so much as it would have encouraged a common understanding of and promoted a collective response to, their predicament. For a majority of residents, however, the environmental disaster that plagued Centralia was interpreted and acted towards in a manner that excluded the relevance of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current proliferation of legal conflicts over "church autonomy" reflects the incompatibility of two contemporary tendencies 1) the functional diversification of constitutionally protected religious organizations, and 2) the expanding regulatory mandate of the state to enforce public accountability of organizations for harmful or fraudulent practices This paper examines several cases involving the financial practices of deviant movements, including the conviction of Sun Myung Moon for tax evasion and the intervention of the California Attorney General in the finances of the Worldwide Church of God These cases have elicited widespread concern among mainline church leaders, who appear to interpret them as boundary-defining engagements whose outcomes will yield rules applicable to the legal status of churches in general These cases illustrate the difficulties faced by churches in attempting to legitimate diversified structures of economic rationality in terms of (individual) freedom of religious conscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents an important web of reciprocal causal interrelationships between family structure and religious institutions and values. Religious beliefs had significant effects on family life in the past and are important factors in family structure and relationships today. Over the last two centuries family and household structure has been modified substantially, and the timing and pace of those family trends were influenced by religion and the changing place of religion in the social structure. At the same time family change has led to substantial modification in the teachings and policies of the churches, and the ways in which the churches responded to family change have had ramifications for the moral authority of the churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the major principles that are needed to guide the separation of church and the state in the U.S. It is stated that the suggested principles were offered not as candidates for legislation, nor in the case of those applying to institutions and individuals, even as limitations of the moral rights of citizens. However, the main purpose of the principles is to formulate ideals appropriate to a free and democratic society such as, standards that contribute to the health and strength of such a society even if citizens may be within their moral and legal rights in adopting alternative ideals that permit a lesser separation. The paper also offers an explanation of each of the main principles and defended each one of them.

The article discusses the separation of church and state in the U.S. It is stated that the issue of separation of church and state has great moral, legal, and political importance, and the subject currently holds special interest. Moreover, the author discusses the separation of church and state from a conceptual and moral standpoint and builds a framework that clears up certain moral, legal and political questions about religion and civil life. The paper also discusses several aspects of the separation including the content of the separation doctrine, normative grounds for separation of church and state, applications of the institutional doctrine, separation of church and state as a doctrine of conscience and the religion and morality in a free and democratic society.

An examination of the religious affiliations of members of Congress and of the American people showed that, in a religious sense, Congress is only partially representative of Americans. Liberal Protestants, Jews, and Mormons are over-represented in Congress, while conservative Protestants and people with no religious affiliation are under-represented. The religious affiliation of a member of Congress influences that person's party and policy preferences. However, if the composition of Congress were changed to be more religiously representative, congressional policy would change only slightly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious geography of America is characterized by an east-west split Metropolitan church membership rates in the Mountain and Pacific states are substantially lower than in the rest of the country. Thus paper accounts for this difference by developing two opposing models of community structure. The linear development model predicts that urbanization and population density are negatively associated with metropolitan church membership rates. The systemic model predicts that population instability and migration are more important determinants of community religious commitment Analysis shows that migration variables are more important in predicting church commitment Further, when regional rates are adjusted for migration, the regional differences in church membership are greatly reduced.
The research reported here can be read in two ways. Most generally, it provides support for the Berry-Kasarda-Janowitz systemic model of community attachment. Urbanization per se with its implied attendant disorganization does not seem to have much of an effect upon one dimension of community attachment. Rather, variables reflecting population stability work quite well in this regard. Solidarity and not anomie or disorganization is the key to understanding social behavior in the urban area.
More narrowly these results can be read as an extension and replication of Roof's basic model of localism and traditional religious commitment. Roof's contribution has been to view the problem of religious commitment as one of community attachment. The fact that the systemic model of attachment (which is used implicitly by Roof) predicts aggregate church membership rather well adds strength to Roof's case.
Finally, the results show that sociological models can be useful in explaining certain types of regional cultural variation in the United States. This statement may seem obvious but it is relatively rare that well-specified models are applied to regional problems of this... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author uses a modified version of Erikson's six-stage (numinous, judicial, dramatic, formal, ideal and nomatic) ontogeny of ritualization to discuss the problems of individual freedom and community control. A case study of Johann Driedger is used to highlight the struggle for individual freedom within a rural conservative Old Colony Mennonite community The leaders of this ethno-religious community sought to control their members in numinous rural villages by judicious means Some members, like Driedger, tested the boundaries of the Gemeinshaft, by introducing new initiatives and industry. The church, however, judiciously discouraged such renovations by excommunication and the ban The ritual process got stuck at the judicious stage two Driedger experimented with new initiative (stage 3) and industry (stage 4), but in the end was forced to retreat He died before his vision of a new ideology (stage 5) took hold, he did not experience the certification of a new nomatic religious community (stage 6).
In this paper we wish to expand Capps' (1979) discussion of Erikson in two ways. Capps (1979) diagrammed only four of the six ritualization stages which Erikson (1977) proposed; we would like to use all the stages to complete what Erikson (1977: 114) thought of as a cycle.[1] In his discussion of the excommunication of Ann Hibbens, Capps (1979) applied mostly the one judicial type of ritual; we would like to use all six (numinous, judicial, dramatic, formal, ideal and nomatic), in our discussion of the life course of one individual living within a conservative religious community.
We have presented evidence that the Old Colony Mennonite Church tried to keep its members in a rural isolated numinous stage where the church leaders could control life in a judicious way. The church resisted individual initiative and industry, and the process of development got stuck at the judicious (second) stage. Legalism often resulted. Members either had to conform, or... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Geertz (1973) and Turner (1969) suggest, ritual not only reflects the social order but can serve innovative and transformative ends as well. In a field study of a Reform synagogue, two liturgical rituals were identified which together reveal or express culture-wide tensions. One ritual reflects the dominance of modern values, in conformity with the institution's commitment to modernity, the other is an expression of "counter-modern" efforts. In rejecting some of the main features of the first ritual, the second ritual reflects changing values as it contests the dominant institutional order and projects alternative religious possibilities for its participants. Thus ritual in this setting emerges as both social mirror and agent of socio-cultural change. In this paper I examine ritual patterns demonstrating the innovative as well as the conserving aspects of ritual. The setting is a single religious institution, a Reform synagogue, where I spent one year (1978) engaged in participant-observation. Two liturgical rituals are discussed which express culture-wide tensions. One ritual reflects the dominance of modern values, in conformity with the institution's commitments to modernity; the other is an expression of "counter-modern" (Berger, Berger, & Kellner, 1974: 189) efforts. In rejecting some of the main features of the first ritual, the second ritual reflects changing values as it contests the dominant institutional order and projects alternative religious possibilities for its participants. Ritual emerges in this study, therefore, as both social mirror and agent of socio-cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the distribution of influence in determining policies and actions in eighty-five Roman Catholic dioceses Based on the responses of over three thousand diocesan priests, the influence structures were centralized both in the actual and ideal situation for all dioceses In a comparison with union locals, Leagues of Women Voters, and stations of a delivery company, the religious organizations were found to be the most centralized and to have the least amount of total influence operating within the system The nature of the professionalism of the Roman Catholic diocesan priesthood and the impact of innovative reforms stemming from the Second Vatican Council are discussed in the light of these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do rates of return to human capital differ across religious groups? Several recently proposed hypotheses suggest that they do. Returns to schooling, job market experience, and a university degree are estimated for various religious groups using the 1971 Canadian Census. The returns to Jews from schooling and experience arc substantially higher than to other religious groups. In contrast, however, the 'credential effect' of a degree is zero for Jews and sizable for other groups. The returns to Protestants from schooling, experience, and a degree exceed those to Catholics. These differential pay-offs imply sizable differences in discounted lifetime earnings (human wealth). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research to date has provided some evidence on factors important to the determination of religious giving as well as to cross denominational differences in religious giving patterns For example, regression based models of religious giving, typically utilizing data on congregations and congregational contributions, lend considerable support to the observation that Catholics contribute less in amount and as a share of income than do Protestants A number of possible explanations for this difference can be offered Two often cited reasons are (1) a lower estimated marginal propensity to give out of income for Catholics than for Protestants and (2) the more formalized structure of the giving process found in Protestant denominations Here data on religious giving by individuals of different denominations is used to estimate a single equation econometric model using (a) the least squares and (b) the Tobit techniques The least squares results corroborate past findings regarding differences in the religious giving of Catholics and Protestants Unlike past results, however, the Tobit results reported suggest that though income is a statistically significant factor in the religious giving for both groups and the marginal impacts are actually higher for Catholics than for Protestants [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the religious gospels of justice. Long centuries have passed since individualists and socialists began their search for an Elysium in which humankind might settle down, live in peace, and enjoy an abundance of the good things of earth. So far, their efforts have failed signally to impress the tenants of lands east, west, north, and south, that they might aid in the adventure and plan a future for themselves and their heirs that would be less toilsome than the system which they now endure. The nineteenth century was not alone in producing men who really believed that most of the troubles which beset their fellows were economically unnecessary. As long ago as the days of Pindar, the Greek poet, there was an idea abroad that there had been a time when men knew a pleasant existence. The exploitation of territories rich in diamonds and gold, tin and tungsten, rubber and fuel, were El Dorados for the concessionaires who, without mercy, slaughtered thousands of natives and enslaved the survivors. Rich ores and underpaid native labor were the magnets that drew governments into the nets of concessionaires and brought to the peoples of the earth world wars.

The article discusses various dimensions of religion. Members of different class strata, have different styles of religious expression: various dimensions of religion appeal quite differently to those variously placed in the class structure. Religion, then, cannot he seen to be of a single piece. It must be conceived of as containing a number of different facets, some of which can be thought of as being almost contradictory to others. This raises a host of questions. To begin with: How do two of these dimensions of religious expression, formal religious activity, such as church attendance, and religious feeling or involvement, relate to one another? Since each relates to a third variable, social class, in the opposite manner, yet both are aspects of religious sociation, the question might legitimately be raised as to how they themselves correlate. The article discusses, by introducing formal non church participation: How does it relate to social class? It further discusses whether it relate in the same direction and to the same degree as church participation.

The article presents a study of creditor's practices in the financing of religious institutions. The paper evaluates religious organizations' debt from the point of views of lenders who have found or may find such investments suitable for their needs. The article seeks to answer whether legal organizations and the management of religious institutions influence their credit standings. Do these institutions trade on equity and what standards do lenders use in developing loans for religious organizations?

The article presents the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) held from October 21-24, 1971 at the Bismarch Hotel, Chicago. Suggestions for the 1971 program rested on the premise that researchers have arrived at a critical juncture point in the development of what they have been calling the scientific study of religion. Not only in the SSSR and in the several disciplines represented in it but more generally in the universities and in society radical challenges, quite different in many cases from those presented in the past are being leveled against concepts and modes of thinking about "religion." The meeting would help set fundamental issues clearly and focus attention on tasks that have to be done if we are to make further headway in the several disciplines concerned directly with the scientific study of religion, religious behavior, religious institutions, etc.

The article presents information on several books related to politics, industrialization and sociology. The book "A Soviet View of the American Past," is an annotated translation of the section on American history appearing in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The brochure "The Church and the Rural Development Program," outlines the opportunities open to pastors of rural churches to improve conditions in their communities through cooperation in the Rural Development program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture. The church has concern for the wise use of the earth's resources and believes that proper conservation of natural and human resources are basic to the fulfillment of Christian stewardship. The book "British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery, 1850-1950," by Charlotte Erickson is an attempt to provide an empirical basis for generalizations about British industrial leadership during the century in which her role in world manufacturing was transformed from that of quasi-monopolist to one of competitor with many other countries.

We test whether social networks at the origin, measured by religious affiliation, affect out-migration. The basic idea is that a social capital loss is attached to the decision to outmigrate, and said loss increases migration costs because benefits received from the local network at the origin disappear. To test this hypothesis, we estimated conditional and mixed logit models for the decision to out-migrate. The results supported the hypothesis: members from religious organizations with strong intra-community and weak intercommunity ties tended to out-migrate less than others. This result was highly significant and robust to model specification and estimation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global processes present a challenge for scholarly work on religion, necessitating new concepts, theoretical and analytical models, intellectual sensitivity, and imagination. This calls for focusing on (1) cross-border interpenetration of religious organizations, beliefs, and practices; (2) variations in the potential for religious beliefs and institutions to be transported; and (3) the use of multiple frames of reference to examine the dispersion of religious cultures and communities. A presidential panel presents the need for generating new research questions, improving measurement tools, and updating methodological techniques so that social scientists of religion accurately and authentically portray the nature and expression of religion in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenge to the journal Zygon as suggested here is to respond to three different reference groups: public intellectuals, academia, and religious communities. An extended discussion follows of what I term the situation of irony in which religion-and-science finds itself. I argue that this situation of irony actually constitutes the domain in which our greatest contributions can be offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In secularized countries, where the authority of religious institutions has declined, church ministers face pressures that may precipitate burnout and threaten ministry satisfaction. This study examined the relationship of ministry orientation to burnout and ministry satisfaction in a large sample of Australian clergy. The sample comprised 2,132 church leaders surveyed as part of the 2001 National Church Life Survey in Australia. They completed brief, alternative measures of ministry orientation, burnout, and ministry satisfaction. Data were analysed by means of confirmatory factor analysis, a multiple indicator multiple cause model, and structural equation modelling. Results supported the validity of three-factor models of ministry orientation and burnout as applied to clergy, with burnout mediating the relationship between an internal orientation to ministry and satisfaction in ministry. The independence of personal accomplishment from satisfaction in ministry was also established. The usefulness of ministry orientation as predictive of ministry outcomes in the context of secularization is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of theorists in the sociology of religion hold that denominations in the United States have remained vital by decentralizing power, and shifting control from central hierarchies to individual congregations: a strategy dubbed “de facto congregationalism.” However, changes in the polity of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS, or Mormon, Church) contravene this trend. Unlike most denominations, Mormonism—a vital faith by all accounts—has centralized its authority and standardized its programs in recent decades. This article investigates whether the logic of de facto congregationalism applies to Mormonism. From a case study of missionary outreach in an LDS congregation, I investigate how mandates from the church's central headquarters are interpreted and implemented at the grassroots level. My findings show that the church's centralized polity may hinder the functioning of Mormon congregations outside traditional strongholds in Utah and the Intermountain West—a finding consistent with the logic of de facto congregationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of public funding for charitable church activity has increased dramatically in recent years. A key dispute over this increase is whether congregations’ propensity to provide charitable services depends upon the local community’s racial composition. Using three congregation-level data sets, this article investigates how race affects charitable church activity. Each data set indicates that all-white congregations become less charitably active as the share of black residents in the community grows. This response is found only for charitable activities and not for other activities. Additionally, all-white congregations favorably disposed toward receiving government funding respond no differently to black residents than do not-all-white congregations. ( JEL H41, J15, Z12) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how companies are managing their relationships with dissident stakeholder groups and vice versa. The history of shareholder activism, focusing on religious institutions, is briefly outlined. Examples of successful corporate-activist relationships are presented. Discussions on how religious shareholder activists have improved their ability to manage relationships with corporate managers (and vice versa) is provided. Finally, the author takes a look at the possible future of shareholder activism.

This essay addresses four questions by comparing the management capacities and challenges of congregations, faith-based organizations, and secular organizations that provide human services: (1) What role, if any, do congregations and faith-based organizations currently play in the social service delivery system? (2) Are congregations interested in changing their role in the social service delivery system? (3) Compared to faith-based and secular organizations, do congregations have the capacity to adapt to new roles in the social service delivery system? Finally, (4) compared to faith-based and secular organizations, do congregations have similar service capacities and management challenges? The findings indicate that although more than half of congregations already provide some type of health or human services, they provide a narrower range of services, consider these services a lower priority, and seem to encounter more extensive management challenges than faith-based and secular organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]