Abstract
In this article, we present a newly established corpus of 11,955 sermon manuscripts written by pastors in the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD) in 2011-2016. We argue that this corpus provides a resource for studying how pastors within the same religious institution attend to general themes in church and society, respond to contemporary events, and represent social worlds. The aim of the article is twofold. 1) To present and discuss our approach to acquire and assemble the sermons corpus. This approach entailed sampling sermons directly from Danish pastors, and cleaning the corpus and annotating it with metadata manually. 2) To demonstrate the research potential of the corpus through a case study on gender representations in the sermons. We find that male and female pastors differ in their use of fundamental linguistic components, namely gendered pronouns and associated verbs. This affects how they assign agency to male and female characters in the corpus, and indicate that male and female pastors shape the social worlds in sermons in quite different ways. This case study therefore illustrates just one of the ways in which corpus-based research of Danish sermons may provide novel insights in the field of religion and society.
Highlights
The role of religion in contemporary democratic societies is a complex topic
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD) is present in the public sphere in Denmark, but as an institution, the church has no distinct agency that speaks in public on behalf of the ELCD: it has no unified voice to respond to societal change or crises, to address ethical matters, or to prioritize particular societal or religious topics over others
The content of preaching depends upon tradition and doctrine but preaching is shaped by contemporary contingencies and by the profile of the individual preachers and recipients. This practice results in the production of approximately 1,500 written sermons a week, a collective production of texts which remain the property of the individual pastors after the service
Summary
The role of religion in contemporary democratic societies is a complex topic. A tendency within the study of religion has been to assert that religion today emerges primarily in individualized spiritual forms that have displaced the relevance of the old religious traditions in society – in the European context, of the old Christian majority churches in particular.[1]. The ELCD is present in the public sphere in Denmark, but as an institution, the church has no distinct agency that speaks in public on behalf of the ELCD: it has no unified voice to respond to societal change or crises, to address ethical matters, or to prioritize particular societal or religious topics over others It is individual pastors who speak for the ELCD, and Journal of Cultural Analytics 12 (2020): 1-27. The content of preaching depends upon tradition and doctrine but preaching is shaped by contemporary contingencies (local and global news, natural disasters, elections, and cultural discourses) and by the profile of the individual preachers and recipients (gender, age, personality, and sociodemographics) This practice results in the production of approximately 1,500 written sermons a week, a collective production of texts which remain the property of the individual pastors after the service. In view of the societal structure of the ELCD, the church is intricately involved in the public sphere of Danish society
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