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Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the church's importance stems from its "span of ambiguity," the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration, It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section reprints an essay from the book A Sociological View of Sovereignty, by John R. Commons. Coercion, when it has been transferred from private to public control, takes on the attributes of order and right, thus becoming sovereignty. The institution which is thus differentiated out from the primitive blending of all institutions is the state. It becomes the supreme institution, because it is looked upon as the property custodian of the decisive social relation, coercion. In thus emerging from the social mass the state has set off other institutions, based each upon its own peculiar persuasive sanction. The family, originally a coercive institution, becomes the custodian of sexual and filial affection. The church becomes the voluntary association of believers in common worship, based on the sanctions of belief in moral perfection and consciousness of guilt. Industrial property is transformed from slavery and serfdom into free contract and mutual interest. These are the three original institutions from which the state has been differentiated. There are also certain derived and secondary institutions which have sprung up with the free conditions that followed the differentiation of the four original institutions.

Within the sociology of religion, the recent interest in non-church religion, also known as civil religion and invisible religion, requires an intentional definitional strategy. The minimal requirements of a definition are that: (1) it correspond positively to standard definitions in the field; and (2) it be sufficiently flexible as to apply to emergent religious phenomena in complex societies. A comparative analysis of extant definitions is provided in tabular form. A definition is proposed and explicated. Simply stated, the approach here proposed defines religion as "cosmicized ethos." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Richard A. Schermerhorn. Dick Schermerhorn first taught sociology in 1940 at Baldwin Wallace College, a small undergraduate college outside Cleveland. But unlike most neophyte teachers of sociology, Dick Schermerhorn was then 37 years old, had had no formal or informal training or experience in sociology, was an ordained minister, had pastored a church. Dick's teaching career spanned forty years, 1932-1972, during which time he held regular appointments in five colleges and universities, taught courses in five disciplines other than sociology (philosophy, religion, psychology, anthropology, and history), and in at least ten distinctly different subfields of sociology. Schermerhorn's teaching was in many and diverse subfields of sociology and in other social sciences. Across the years of Schermerhorn's career, sociology and other disciplines have moved farther along the path of professionalization.

These data show something of the attitudinal structure regarding the inclusive church on the part of ministeriaI and lay delegates to the 1960 Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference of The Methodist Church. The range in mean inclusiveness score was from 2.13 for Item 3 to 3.34 for Item 6. There was considerable variation regarding inclusive practices with the eligibility of Negroes for membership in the local ministerial association and admission of Negroes to services of worship in local churches being much more acceptable than Negro membership in the churches. The highly significant differences between clerical and lay delegates in attitudes toward the inclusive church, doubtless, result in considerable tensions in practice. They, also, raise questions about the role of the clergy in the education of the laity as well as the socializational value of church membership in contrast to the common sense internalization of the regional cultural stereotype in the field of racial attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]