Are religious organizations becoming green? Faith communities’ role in advancing environmental sustainability in Switzerland

This chapter discusses how the urban is experienced by a group of religiously minded young people with different ethnic backgrounds who have been born and educated in Germany, showing how their everyday lives in their urban environment are formed by their participation in a Muslim 'faith community'. The chapter suggests first, how this religious 'faith community' continuously shapes Muslim youth's religious identifications, and secondly, how this youth organisation connects religious knowledge, consumption and ideas from the transnational, national and local levels. It also focuses the female participants of this organisation. In the weekly meetings the young women read together from the Koran in Arabic, followed by a German translation, and present Powerpoint presentations of the contemporary value of different hadith to their own lives in Germany. Keywords:Berlin; faith community; German; Muslim; National; religious youth organisation; transnational powers

Faith Communities Are Potent Resource for Creating Connection and ‘Mattering’

Authors’ introduction Contemporary religion is at its core an organizational phenomenon. Religious behaviour is channelled and religious communities are structured through congregations, denominations, religious nonprofits, seminaries, and other organizational forms. To understand religion, then, one must understand the organizational aspects of religion. This includes those aspects common to all organizations and those unique to religious organizations. Authors recommend Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997) and Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). No organization, religious or otherwise, is an island. Each is surrounded by a unique environment, and each is embedded in a network of social and organizational ties. These two works by Ammerman explore the ecologies and networks that shape the identity and behaviour of religious congregations. Ross P. Scherer, American Denominational Organization: A Sociological View (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1980). This edited volume serves as an introduction to the structure and operations of different religious organizational forms, including denominations, Catholic religious orders, theological schools, and ‘parachurch’ mission societies. It also has three chapters addressing issues of change and conflict in religious organizations. Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Why did some denominations adopt policies allowing the ordination of women earlier than others? What explains the lag between adoption of the policy and actual implementation? Chaves applies ideas in organizational studies and social movements to understand these issues. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). Finke and Stark explore the dynamics underlying historical patterns of denominational growth and decline in the United States. Drawing upon ideas in economics, organizational studies, and other related disciplines they argue that American religious history can be understood as marketplace in which religious groups and organizations compete for resources. N. J. Demerath III, Peter Dobkin Hall, Terry Schmitt, and Rhys H. Williams (eds.), Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998). An interdisciplinary collection of authors examines the intersection of research on religion, organizations, and social movements. Chapters include essays and empirical studies, mostly pertaining to religious organizations. They cover prominent organizational forms (denominations, congregations, and religious non‐profits) and incorporate theories drawn from organizational sociology, social movements, economics, and the sociology of religion. Online materials 1. The Association of Religion Data Archives http://www.thearda.com/ The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) contains over 400 freely downloadable data files focusing on religion in the United States and around the world. The site also features many interactive online tools, including QuickStats on religious beliefs and behaviors, denominational profiles and statistics, and maps of religious, social and demographic information. Instructors and students will be particularly interested in the ARDA's Learning Center, which features downloadable ‘Learning Modules’ and other classroom resources. 2. The Pluralism Project http://www.pluralism.org/ The Pluralism Project at Harvard University aims to ‘help Americans engage with the realities of religious diversity through research, outreach, and the active dissemination of resources’. The website contains a variety of tools for students and instructors, including online slideshows of religious communities around the United States. Check out the site's Teacher Resources page for syllabi, maps, weblinks, and many other valuable resources. 3. Hartford Institute for Religion Research http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ The Hartford Institute's website is a virtual clearing house of information on religion research. It has content devoted to congregations, theology, denominations, religious leadership, and the sociology of religion as a field. Under these areas, you can find helpful summaries, bibliographies, and links. A special section on megachurches is especially popular. 4. Faith Communities Today http://fact.hartsem.edu/ This is the homepage for a major collection of data on religious congregations. The Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey was first conducted in 2000 and has been repeated in 2005 and 2008. You can access summaries of findings and other resources related to the study on this site. 5. The U.S. Congregational Life Survey http://www.uscongregations.org/ Another valuable source of information on congregations comes from the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (USCLS), administered in 2001 and again in 2008. The USCLS is a nationally representative study of congregations and their worshippers. A novel feature of the USCLS is that it gathered information from both a leader and participants in each congregation. The website gives an overview of the survey, reports on key findings, and links to publications. 6. Religion & Ethics Newsweekly http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/ This is the website of a long‐running PBS series focusing on contemporary religion in the United States and abroad. Episodes are available online and often have relevance to the study of religious organizations. In addition, teachers can find other resources in the ‘For Educators’ section. Focus questions How are religious organizations unique from other types of organizations, if at all? What are common forms of religious organizations? What research methods do sociologists use to study religious organizations? What are the major forces that influence the success or failure of a religious organization? Sample syllabus

Back to table of contents Next article Taking IssueFull AccessThe Faith Community and Mental Health CareNorman A. Clemens, M.D., Norman A. ClemensSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in ClevelandPublished Online:1 Feb 2005https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.56.2.133AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail From shamanism, ritual dances, and exorcism to modern pastoral counseling, efforts to deal with mental illness have been in the domain of religious practice throughout cultural history. Now that the demons of mental disorders have been substantially tamed by scientific approaches, people with mental illness in medically advanced cultures are likely to seek relief from a physician or mental health professional. However, many will turn first to clergy or a faith-based agency.Although the movement to fund faith-based agencies with federal monies raises concerns about eroding the constitutional separation of church and state, faith-based agencies serve a significant part of the population. Churches, synagogues, and mosques serve as surrogate families and community centers for millions of people. Religious writings and spiritual practices bring solace, support, sharing, practical wisdom, and guidance for dealing with myriad challenges, relationships, transitions, and losses. People with incipient mental illness may trust religious organizations far more than community health services.This issue of Psychiatric Services reports the results of two surveys of leaders in the faith community that sought to examine attitudes about mental illness and the types of care that congregants might expect to receive when they seek help within the faith community. Ali and colleagues surveyed the imams of 62 mosques across the country, and Dosset and coauthors surveyed 42 faith-based organizations—churches, schools, and nonprofit agencies—in Los Angeles. Both surveys found that although many congregants received individual or marital counseling within their religious organizations, relatively few of the counselors had formal training. Interestingly, in view of the concerns about the separation of church and state, half of the Los Angeles agencies were reluctant to collaborate with government agencies. Evidently the wariness is bilateral. However, because a large part of the care for severe mental illness occurs in governmental agencies, this attitude could impede access to treatment. A case could be made for faith-based agencies' having consultative arrangements with mental health facilities, rather than faith-based agencies' attempting to provide full-scale care for patients with serious mental illness.Fundamental incompatibilities exist between faith-based interventions, such as faith healing or exorcism, and a medical model of treating mental illness. Religious leaders and mental health professionals who conduct psychotherapy may differ markedly about basic concepts of psychological health and mental illness. These differences can yield to mutual respect, case-based consultation, education, and exchange of ideas between clergy and mental health professionals, to the benefit of those with mental disorders. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 56Issue 2 February 2005Pages 133-133 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 February 2005 Published in print 1 February 2005

Faith-based organizations can support dementia caregivers in a post-pandemic world.

The chapter provides a framework for religious organizations to contribute within their communities to prevent interpersonal violence of people with disabilities through collaboration with people with disabilities as equal members of their faith communities. Collaboration with people with disabilities requires moving from a medical model, deficit-based orientation of disability to a social, empowering, and strength-based model. This chapter examines how each model intersects with vulnerability to interpersonal violence. Prevention of interpersonal violence requires an understanding of how multiple factors (knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, policies) and multiple system levels (individual, relationship, community/environmental, societal/cultural) interconnect, influence interpersonal violence, and can be targets for prevention. Prevention of interpersonal violence is examined using the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) public health perspective of primary, secondary, and tertiary intervention (a.k.a. prevention) and using the Prevention Institutes’ Spectrum of Prevention. Strategies for religious organizations to examine and modify organizational teachings, policies, and practices, which aim to prevent interpersonal violence or improve response to interpersonal violence perpetrated against people with disabilities, are grounded in the six-level Spectrum of Prevention. Engagement in each of the levels of prevention is predicated upon religious organizations recognizing their roles and responsibilities in preventing and responding to interpersonal violence of their members with disabilities. Emphasis is placed on coordinated community responses to address interpersonal violence. Given that people of faith may prefer to seek guidance and support from their own places of worship, rather than community-based secular organizations, it is imperative that religious organizations collaborate with other community agencies involved in prevention or response to interpersonal violence and organizations serving people with disabilities.

BackgroundSickle cell disease (SCD) is now the most common genetic condition in the world including the UK with an estimate of over 12,500 affected people and over 300 new births per year. Blood transfusion therapy plays a very important role as a disease-modifying strategy in severe SCD e.g. primary and secondary stroke prevention and other acute life-threatening complications such as acute chest infections and acute multi-organ failure. Blood transfusion, however, carries a number of risks including alloimmunisation. There is the need to increase the level of awareness and education about SCD and also to increase blood donation drive among affected communities. These communities are mostly ethnic minority populations who are recognised to have poor access to health care services. Due to the strong impact of religion on these populations, faith organisations may provide potential access for health promotion and interventions.MethodsA literature search was conducted to find studies published between 1990–2008 aimed at examining the influence of religious leaders and faith organisations in health, with particular reference to haemoglobinopathies.ResultsEleven studies were reviewed covering a variety of health interventions. The findings suggest that involvement of religious leaders and faith organisations in health related interventions improved the level of acceptance, participation and positive health outcomes within the faith communities.ConclusionReligious leaders and faith organisations have the potential to influence health education, health promotion and positive health outcomes amongst members of their faith community. They also provide potential access to at-risk populations for increasing awareness about SCD, encouraging health service utilization and ethnic blood donor drives.

There is a critical need for change in America's Health System, and religious organizations can facilitate not only the redefining of what health is but also the shaping of what the primary health services of the future should look like, function as, and be. The vision presented here is that the local parish or some extension of it be seen by the average citizen as a primary health place. The model proposed is that faith based living in community become the core health concept, defining what it means to be human and healthy become the core teaching, and that healing such that no illness need dominate become the goal. Within that context, health information, education, prayer, care, and support for most chronic illness, lifestyle change, and end of life concerns would begin at one's community of faith and only within that context to specially trained persons. This health system will compliment the sophisticated and complex acute medical care system that now exists.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic introduced disruption that crossed sectors, borders, and disciplinary boundaries. Among faith communities and religious leaders, numerous commentators have observed technological innovations in response to physical gathering disruptions. We outline a form of pandemic spiritual leadership that supports faith communities beyond digital innovation by combining original empirical research and a novel conceptual framework.PurposeOur project examined innovation through a comparative study of how faith leaders adapt religious practices during a time of disruption. While existing research on congregational responses to COVID-19 has documented sustained technological innovation, our research argues that technological innovation is only one feature of a broader catalog of innovative practices.MethodsTo generate a trans-national sample, we used purposive sampling in two distinct locations, Pacific Northwest United States and Aotearoa New Zealand. Although separated by culture and geography, a purposeful sample across these two contexts illustrated how spiritual leaders in post-Christian contexts similarly responded to the pandemic crisis. The research involved semi-structured interviewing of nineteen faith leaders from seventeen communities we observed undertaking creative adaption. A trans-national selection deepened understandings of the dynamism of the unfolding pandemic and how limits, experienced differently in diverse contexts, can be generative.ResultsOur study identified six organizing practices: blessing, walking, slowing, place-making, connecting, and localizing care. We demonstrate how the presence of God is cultivated amid local letterboxes and neighborhood crossroads and argue for an intensification of the local as markers of pandemic spiritual leadership. These interrelated spiritual practices express features of Michel de Certeau’s “pedestrian utterings,” Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative recombination” and Pierre Bourdieu's social theory. Working with Certeau, we describe pedestrian utterings as historic church practices reframed as everyday local practices. Working with Schumpeter, we describe how the six practices and the language of innovation used by participants express creative recombinations. Working with Bourdieu, we consider how disruption realigns social fields, including between individuals, congregations, and broader communities. Finally, amid social distancing, congregations proved to be an anchor in resourcing this pandemic spiritual leadership.Conclusions and ImplicationsThese four theoretical foci and six localizing practices provide a conceptual framework for future research into spiritual practices and religious leadership in the wake of a crisis. Confinements in space and movement can be generative of spiritual practice. For religious leaders and organizations, the research informs the cultivation of concrete practices that can encourage communities of care as part of crisis preparation. For scholars and religious practitioners alike, while pandemics enforce social separation, pandemic spiritual leadership combines attention to the local and the particular, as new forms of in-place practice emerge to sustain faith communities.

Climatologists, Theologians, and Prophets: Toward an Ecotheology of Critical Hope

A 2024 Ukrainian law on religious organizations and national security has sparked heated debate at home as well as criticism abroad, amid warnings of an illiberal drift. This article situates the law within Russia’s full–scale invasion and the accompanying “Russian world” ideology, and assesses its purpose, content and projected effects. A doctrinal analysis of the statute suggests that its adoption through transparent legislative procedures is primarily intended to sever a key conduit for the expansionist doctrine. The study disentangles legal terms that have been misrepresented in public discussion, distinguishing the “termination” of an organization’s legal personality (worship is still permitted) from the far more severe “cessation of activities”. It finds that enforcement is court–centred, protected by multiple levels of appeal, and aimed at institutional affiliation rather than theology. Methodologically, it examines the legal text alongside a snapshot of contemporary Ukrainian Orthodoxy identifying the continuing threat posed by the spread of the “Russian world” narrative. While technical refinements to the law may be necessary, the article concludes that generally speaking Ukraine’s approach is consistent with international human rights law, mirrors solutions recently adopted in neighbouring states, and stands in sharp contrast to the documented closures, confiscations and violence inflicted on faith communities in Russian–occupied territories.

This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities tor involvement by religious organizations in this new context. It examines the role that churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, played in welfare reform during the 1990s. The chapter argues that the times provide both a new need and a new opportunity for more effective involvement. In looking at the role of the Catholic Church in both policy advocacy and service provision, the author distinguishes between the actions of official national bodies and the actions of congregations and their members. The Hebrew scriptures are rich with the notions of covenant and community, and of the mandate to do justice, and of the obligation to provide for widows, orphans and strangers. Churches should approach the political realm carefully, of course, avoiding partisanship and dogmatism. Religious politics has often enough been intolerant and threatening to democracy.

Religious organizations have influenced parts of the history of healthcare in the United States. Whether at the local faith community level or national religious bodies, faith communities and health systems have explored partnerships to connect health service delivery and promote population health in its complexity. The changes to health policy in the past decades have fueled how health systems dedicate financial and tangible resources to improving the health of their local communities. Hospitals also increasingly hire and employ chaplains–professional spiritual care providers with extensive graduate and clinical education. The present explanatory mixed‐methods study explored the integration of these chaplains in their health systems’ community health and wellness initiatives. The findings highlight that chaplains’ activities focus on social connection and improving healthcare access and quality. Chaplains highlighted how they use their interpersonal skills to build rapport and trust with communities, which may provide an additional resource for health systems looking to expand their impact within the local community. That possibility, however, comes with caution as chaplaincy education will need to include population health if the profession considers these activities core to their arena of expertise.

The article explores aspects of the relationship between social capital and religious organizations with particular reference to the United Kingdom and the European Union. It draws on guidance from the Local Government Association, a recent report on the interface between government and faith communities from the Faith Communities Unit of the Home Office, and the results of research for the Council of Europe. All this is explored through reference to seven theses on the relationships between religion(s), state(s), and societ(ies) and by using some of the thinking of Marc Luyckx (1994) on the position of religion in post-industrial and postmodern societies.

Religion is the source of much civic engagement. The great theorist of American civic engagement, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw religious values as the reason people could put selfinterest aside in favor of communitarian sentiments that lead people to get involved in their communities (Tocqueville 1945:126-27). The history of good deeds is replete with beneficence based on faith: Mother Teresa's hospices and soup kitchens run by people of faith stand out. So do religious leaders pressing for social reform and civil rights. Half of charitable contributions in the United States and almost 40 percent of volunteering are based in religious organizations (Bakal 1979:10; Hayge 1991:21). Clergy mobilize people into political and social action (Verba et al. 1993a:457). Active membership in a church or a synagogue lets people develop and practice skills (letter writing, organizing) that easily translate into civic engagement (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Donors to charity and volunteers believe that there is a moral responsibility to help others, reject the notion that we should look out for ourselves first, and tie their beliefs to religious ideals (Hodgkinson et al. 1992:203, 206, 218-19; Wilson and Musick 1997:708-09; Wuthnow 1991:51). Yet, religion may also lead people away from civic engagement. Some churches may encourage people to get involved in civic life, others may discourage participation. Some churches may encourage people to take active role in their faith communities, but not in the larger society. Putnam (1993:107) argues that the Catholic Church in Italy traditionally discouraged participation in civic affairs. The Church, he argued, was an alternative to the civic community, not a part of it. The Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution and its leadership saw citizen engagement as a potential threat to its privileged role in Italian political and social life. Religion may mobilize people to take part in their communities, but perhaps only among their own kind. Religious values tap something within so that people feel obligated to help others (Harris 1994). Some of the faithful may feel a need to reach out to help (and perhaps save) those who don't believe. They may also feel comfortable working with people whose religious principles differ from their own. Yet, religious beliefs may also lead people to distinguish more sharply between their own kind and others. They may be more wary of engagement with others who don't share their principles. Many fundamentalist Protestants withdraw from contact with sinners and retreat into their own communities. Throughout American history, they have been active in nativist organizations that sought to restrict immigration and immigrants' rights. More recently, they have led the fight to bring religious practices and instruction back to public schools and to fight the teaching of evolution in the science curriculum. They fear that people who don't believe as they do are trying to deny them their fundamental rights. So they generally withdraw into their own communities. If they volunteer or join civic organizations, it will be with only their own kind. Religion, then, has complex relationships to civic engagement. Members of liberal (or nonfundamentalist) denominations are likely to reach out beyond their own faith community to work with others and to help people in need who are different from themselves (Greenberg 1999). Fundamentalists will respond to the spiritual demand to do good works, but will focus their efforts