Although childhood vaccination programs have been very successful, vaccination coverage in minority groups may be considerably lower than in the general population. In order to increase vaccination ...coverage in such minority groups involvement of faith-based organizations and religious leaders has been advocated. We assessed the role of religious leaders in promoting acceptance or refusal of vaccination within an orthodox Protestant minority group with low vaccination coverage in The Netherlands.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with orthodox Protestant religious leaders from various denominations, who were selected via purposeful sampling. Transcripts of the interviews were thematically analyzed, and emerging concepts were assessed for consistency using the constant comparative method from grounded theory.
Data saturation was reached after 12 interviews. Three subgroups of religious leaders stood out: those who fully accepted vaccination and did not address the subject, those who had religious objections to vaccination but focused on a deliberate choice, and those who had religious objections to vaccination and preached against vaccination. The various approaches of the religious leaders seemed to be determined by the acceptance of vaccination in their congregation as well as by their personal point of view. All religious leaders emphasized the importance of voluntary vaccination programs and religious exemptions from vaccination requirements. In case of an epidemic of a vaccine preventable disease, they would appreciate a dialogue with the authorities. However, they were not willing to promote vaccination on behalf of authorities.
Religious leaders' attitudes towards vaccination vary from full acceptance to clear refusal. According to orthodox Protestant church order, local congregation members appoint their religious leaders themselves. Obviously they choose leaders whose views are compatible with the views of the congregation members. Moreover, the positions of orthodox Protestant religious leaders on vaccination will not change easily, as their objections to vaccination are rooted in religious doctrine and they owe their authority to their interpretation and application of this doctrine. Although the dialogue with religious leaders that is pursued by the Dutch government may be helpful in controlling epidemics by other means than vaccination, it is unlikely to increase vaccination coverage.
While studies of Pentecostalism have played an important role in forming the emergent anthropology of Christianity, research on pilgrimage has had far less of an effect on this subfield. I explore ...some of the reasons why by looking at the “semiotics of theory” and asking what constitutes resonant anthropological model making at a particular moment in the construction of anthropology. Having provided a critical account of past theoretical and ethnographic work on Christian pilgrimage, I suggest an alternative approach, drawing in part on fieldwork carried out at the pilgrimage shrines of Walsingham, in Norfolk, England. I suggest that my approach can provide useful perspectives not only on the anthropology of Christianity but also on aspects of our understanding of ritual and religious experience more generally.
Our Country Brodrecht, Grant
2018, 2018-06-05
eBook
Our Country explores northern evangelical thought and sentiment regarding the concept of Union during the Civil War and Reconstruction. A primary aim of the book is to shift our focus back toward the ...Union's importance in relation to northern understanding during the Civil War-era.
The Dutch intellectual Allard Pierson (1831–1896) is often considered to be an example of secularism. In 1865, he resigned as a minister from the Dutch Reformed Church in order to promote true ...humanity in society at large. This article explores how Pierson’s true humanity can be considered as an ultimate concern (Tillich) or a religion without religion (Caputo) by reading him through the lens of John D. Caputo’s thinking. Both Caputo and Tillich developed a non-institutional and undogmatic understanding of religion, in which religion is related to a universal human love, passion, or ultimate concern that is not necessarily linked to a religious institution or doctrine. After an elaboration of Caputo’s religion without religion, the article discusses Pierson’s thinking in the context of nineteenth-century theological modernism and debates on the modernist’s right to stay in the church. Then, Pierson’s reasons for his resignation and his true humanity are examined. It becomes clear that Pierson did not choose secularism over religion, but rather surpassed the religious-secular divide by a focus on our common human nature. Being human was more important than being Christian, which exemplifies the late-nineteenth-century move from a theistic Christianity towards a humanistic religiosity or humanism.
The article discusses the legacy of Protestantism in Poland and the Protestant collections preserved in museum institutions in Poland. The author presents the collections of Evangelical artefacts ...amassed in various ways and forms and at different times, which thus constitutes a preliminary typology of the legacy of the Reformation. For simplification, she defines Evangelical objects as all objects which are part of the broadly-understood Protestant legacy. The spectrum of these objects is very broad, ranging from artefacts in traditional museum institutions, through sacred places, works of art, technical monuments, ephemera, cemeteries, to virtual collections of audiovisual and digitised legal instruments. The examples quoted in the text do not exhaust the subject, but evidence the vastness and richness of the legacy acquired as a donation after the Reformation movement initiated by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther.
The changes in the discipline of liturgical studies over the preceding one hundred years can be focused around the application of two words, 'ceremonial' and 'ritual'. It might seem ambitious to set ...on such a small hinge the scholarship, pastoral dynamics, artistic endeavour and ecclesial understanding that collectively contribute to the discipline; however, the hope in this article is that the pair capture the profound movement that took place and continues apace. A number of other polarities also will be drawn out here, allowing the reader to work from a matrix of the discipline.
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