The 1950s religious boom was organized around the male-breadwinner lifestyle in the burgeoning postwar suburbs. But since the 1950s, family life has been fundamentally reconfigured in the United ...States. How do religion and family fit together today?
This book examines how religious congregations in America have responded to changes in family structure, and how families participate in local religious life. Based on a study of congregations and community residents in upstate New York, sociologist Penny Edgell argues that while some religious groups may be nostalgic for the Ozzie and Harriet days, others are changing, knowing that fewer and fewer families fit this traditional pattern. In order to keep members with nontraditional family arrangements within the congregation, these innovators have sought to emphasize individual freedom and personal spirituality and actively to welcome single adults and those from nontraditional families.
Edgell shows that mothers and fathers seek involvement in congregations for different reasons. Men tend to think of congregations as social support structures, and to get involved as a means of participating in the lives of their children. Women, by contrast, are more often motivated by the quest for religious experience, and can adapt more readily to pluralist ideas about family structure. This, Edgell concludes, may explain the attraction of men to more conservative congregations, and women to nontraditional religious groups.
Using the latest European Social Survey (ESS) data, the authors of the study examined the current religious composition of Serbia, and compared the empirical data obtained in Serbia with the ones ...acquired in other religiously homogeneous European societies. In the first part of the study, the data obtained in the ESS research in 2018 were observed in light of the historical continuum of religion development in Serbia since the First World War. In the second part of the study, the authors applied Grace Davie’s model and a comparative model to compare Serbia with nine religiously homogeneous societies where the ESS research had also been conducted in 2018. This structure of the paper accomplishes a double objective and scientific contribution. On the one hand, an insight into the current state of religiosity in Serbia is obtained, and on the other hand, a theoretical framework previously used for Western-European societies is applied to Orthodox countries (including Serbia). The authors suggest the following main hypotheses: the stabilisation of religious composition is currently underway; there is a discrepancy between religious and denominational declaration and religious practices; and the theoretical framework defined by Davie can be applied in the case of Serbia.
Reconstructing semantic and functional contexts of using categories of orthodoxy and heresy in selected sociological concepts allows to build and include their theoretical poten-tial in the field of ...general pedagogy and pedagogy of religion. The pedagogy of religion in Poland is usually reserved for pedagogical-theological thinking within the Christian tradition. This type of approach resonates strongly with the classical theories of religious studies situating itself in the current of the so-called revalorization of religion. It does not, however, seem to exhaust the spectrum of possibilities offered to the pedagogy of religion by contemporary critical religious studies, which no longer link the problems of religion so closely with the problems of theology. On the contrary, they detach the phenomenon of religion from theology, secularize it, which results in an extraordinary diversity of theories of religion, often linking them with such “non-religious” subjects as ecologies, ideologies, sports or urban movements. In this paper, starting from the presentation of selected findings from my own research on the categories of orthodoxy and heresy, I am outlining the thus--far underestimated theoretical potential of critical religious studies for teh development of pedagogy of religion in Poland.
IDENTITY, DENOMINATION, AND NATIONALITY Kozma, Zsolt
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Theologia reformata transylvaniensis,
12/2020, Volume:
65, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Identity pins down accurately who individuals are in relation to God, society, and themselves. God’s statement about Himself (His self-identity) in the Bible “I am who I am” can guide us to find our ...own “I am who I am”, definitely taking into account the analogia relationis rather than the analogia entis. The constant dominant of our human identity as God’s identity as well is that we stay humans despite all circumstances, but its features (“our qualities”) are variable. We are only interested in two of the many identity features: our denomination and our Hungarian ethnicity, which are “only” features, but as such they have been decisive. In the 20th century, we, as Reformed Protestants and Hungarians, got under the burden of the political and ecclesiastical consequences of the two world wars. Our faith required that the church and the Hungarians did not lose their identity features from the perspective of the communities and individuals. During the interwar period (1920–1944) and during the totalitarian regime (1945–1989), we, Transylvanian Reformed Protestants, had one single duty to fulfil: clarify our relationship vis-à-vis the political authority in such a way as to remain disciples and a disciple church without which we are not the ones who we must be. In his prayer, Jesus does not ask the Father to take all of his followers out of this world (meaning society) but rather to defend them from evil (John 17:15). How can we fulfil it? Our yes/no answer is the issue of gratitude towards God and penitence before Him.
Nationalism remains to be one of the most compelling issues of communities. It raises questions not only for humanities but for theology as well. Thus, we approach it from the perspective of Reformed ...theology with the aim of trying to find such a point of reference by which Christian thinking is able to provide orientation in understanding this problem. The article first visits such basic definitions as state, nation, or people and attempts to define them. By providing inputs to this clarification from a theological point of view, the article investigates how the Christian doctrine of providence with its emphasis on the vertical dimension of human life can help us to avoid the absolutization of the notion of nation. One of the main points of the text is to differentiate between national existence and nationalism. Nationalism cannot be justified, such as decontextualized national existence since one of the main consequences would be a misunderstood concept of progress. A correctly articulated national existence always brings to the fore the concern for sovereignty. The article argues that a nation’s sovereignty from the Christian point of view can be neither detached from the sovereignty of God nor expressed without taking it seriously. Since proper sovereignty is only to be practised not against but for something, it always points towards God’s sovereignty.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, nationality was the most important element of collective identity, but it already heralded an era of decline of this collective identity. The assertion of ...the individual and of their rights as well as the disappearance of the seduction exercised by the great ideals brought two great challenges: What is the principle of solidarity (collective identity) according to which a community is organized? How can societies with a diluted collective identity meet non-conflictingly with those with a strong collective identity? The answers are still to be discovered; we only have reference points. What we can say for sure is that it is very tempting to revert to the former strong collective identity, but it only generates bigger issues than the ones it seems to solve. We consider that the care for the only available world, the reflective assumption of options of collective identity that were previously self-evident, the cultivation of “capillary” ties between individuals with different collective identities and defining a public space meant to develop the specificity of the individual, without breaking the solidarity of the community, are among the landmarks that indicate the direction of the answers to the challenges mentioned above.
The human being is homo religiosus through his ability to experience the sacred, laying special emphasis on the meaning of existence of all things, expressed afterwards in a metaphysical ...interpretation concealed behind symbolic-religious language. One of the most important processes of integration into reality is self-identification as a person and gaining a group identity –processes that take different shapes over the history of human existence. The formation of state entities has always been preceded by a process of creating a social identity that manifests itself through the spiritual life materialized in culture and religion. These processes have led to the birth of mediaeval states and then to the shaping of modern Europe, necessary to the deconstructions and reconstructions in the inter-war time. These processes are also visible today during cultural globalization. What we need is a critical approach on unity in diversity that characterizes humanity in history and that will shape the future evolution of humanity.
Über uns der Ideenhimmel, in uns das Bewusstsein und dazwischen: die Religion als Bestandteil der soziokulturellen Wirklichkeit. Volkhard Krech entfaltet in seinem soziologischen Grundriss der ...religiösen Evolution das Verständnis von Religion als Kommunikation, die zwischen den Menschen entsteht und stattfindet.In seiner Analyse zur Ausdifferenzierung des Religiösen, die Bezug auf die Evolutionstheorie, Systemtheorie und eine semiotisch informierte Kommunikationstheorie nimmt, bewegt er sich in der Zirkularität von Gegenwart und Geschichte. Dabei macht er Religion als Sinnform zur Bearbeitung unbestimmbarer Kontingenz begreifbar.
Care - Vom Rande Betrachtet Gronemeyer, Reimer; Schuchter, Patrick; Wegleitner, Klaus
2021, 20210620, Volume:
5
eBook
»Care« steht im Zentrum des Lebens - aber am Rande der Gesellschaft. An den Abbruchkanten der Existenz werden Widersprüche besonders deutlich. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes spannen einen Bogen von ...der Verletzlichkeit der Existenz und den Bewegungen des Gemüts am Rande des Lebens und der Gesellschaft hin zu Fragen, wie Care die Wissenschaft, die Gesellschaft und deren Organisationen vom Rande aus zu transformieren vermag: Was hilft uns dabei, mit den unauflösbaren Widersprüchen des Lebens und Sterbens umzugehen? In welcher Gesellschaft wollen wir leben? Ein inter- und transdisziplinärer Dialog mit dem Wirken von Andreas Heller.
This volume explores how religious and spiritual actors engage for environmental protection and fight against climate change. Climate change and sustainability are increasingly prominent topics among ...religious and spiritual groups. Different faith traditions have developed "green" theologies, launched environmental protection projects and issued public statements on climate change. Against this background, academic scholarship has raised optimistic claims about the strong potentials of religions to address environmental challenges. Taking a critical stance with regard to these claims, the chapters in this volume show that religious environmentalism is an embattled terrain. Tensions are an inherent part of religious environmentalism. These do not necessarily manifest themselves in open clashes between different parties but in different actions, views, theologies, ambivalences, misunderstandings, and sometimes mistrust. Keeping below the surface, these tensions can create effective barriers for religious environmentalism. The chapters examine how tensions are manifested and dealt with through a range of empirical case studies in various world regions. Covering different religious and spiritual traditions, they reflect on intradenominational, interdenominational, interreligious, and religious-societal tensions. Thereby, this volume sheds new light on the problems that religions face when they seek to take an active role in today’s societal challenges. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
