Formal Church Research Articles

Mary’s Reincarnation and the Banality of Salvation: The Millennialist Cultus of the Lady of All Nations/Peoples

Abstract This article deals with the transnational Dutch-Canadian apparitional cultus of our Lady of All Nations/Peoples. It analyses how contemporary visionary Catholicism is influenced by religious eclecticism, esotericism, and New Age spiritualities, and how this devotion has shifted into an autonomous millennialist movement. Finding fertile soil in modern societies in socio-economic, political, and religious crisis, and due to the dwindling of existential certainties at the individual level, its ideology of “progressive millennialism” has shown itself to be a successful religious format that mobilizes devotees, even when its deviation brings the movement into conflict with the formal Church. The movement’s prophetic and millennialist views fit into a salvific system of conditionality according to which the visionary, unveiled as the reincarnation of Mary herself, will realize the new millennium if her party will fulfill certain conditions. With its new theology the Quebec movement tries to appropriate the whole Lady cultus as a vehicle for universal salvation. In this way the means for revelation and salvation are taken from the hierarchical ecclesiastical powers-that-be and situated in the “banality” of the everyday life of the reincarnated Mary. In the providential Marie-Paule Giguère, the devotees involved find an appealing prophet who is both Mary and a co-redeeming messiah, and who in the near future is supposed to realize the second millennium, framed in a new, modern cosmology, for all peoples and faiths.

The Makers of the Sacred Harp (review)

Reviewed by: The Makers of the Sacred Harp Drew Beisswenger The Makers of the Sacred Harp. By David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. [xv, 321 p. 9780252035678 (hardcover), $70; ISBN 9780252077609 (paperback), $25.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. In the twentieth century, The Sacred Harp emerged as the preeminent nineteenth-century shape-note sacred tunebook in the South. In fact, in my experience, many people today believe shape-note singing and Sacred Harp singing are synonymous; for them there is no other shape-note music. The library world reinforces this understanding slightly in the way it places the heading "Sacred Harp singing," but no other tunebook-specific heading, within the syndetic structure of the "Shape note singing" subject heading. David Warren Steel's book fills an important gap in the scholarship about The Sacred Harp by focusing to a large degree on the individual people and songs associated with the early years. Before I comment specifically on the importance of Steel's book, I would like to place The Sacred Harp within the broader field of shape-note music as a whole. When The Sacred Harp was first published in 1844, many similar oblong-style tune-books already had been published (more than 100, according to the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association's Web site: http://fasola.org/shmha/, accessed 6 July 2011). The compilers of The Sacred Harp copied liberally from existing tunebooks that utilized a four-shape-notation system—a system that was most popular in the South—including the Southern Harmony, published in 1835. Such tunebooks, which [End Page 381] typically contained a few hundred religious songs notated in three- or four-part harmony, were widely sung in a congregational style at community singing events outside of formal church services. In the decades that followed, several other oblong-style tunebooks, many of which incorporated a newer seven-shape system such as the Christian Harmony and the Harp of Columbia, enjoyed substantial success. In the twentieth century, over thirty Southern publishers, most notably James D. Vaughan and Stamps-Baxter, published hundreds of smaller shape-note gospel songbook titles that typically featured newer songs. Shape-note hymnbooks such as Heavenly Highway Hymns and Favorite Songs and Hymns, both published by Stamps-Baxter, became very popular and are still found in many Southern church pews. The history and variety of shape-note music traditions are complex and rich, and stretch far beyond The Sacred Harp. That being said, the extraordinary popularity of The Sacred Harp music is undeniable, and for reasons that will perhaps never be fully understood, the singing traditions associated with most other shape-note tunebooks have diminished or ended (although singings and singing conventions can still be found that use The Southern Harmony, The Christian Harmony, The Missouri Harmony, The New Harp of Columbia, and various newer shape-note gospel song-books). The Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association Web site lists over 375 locations where Sacred Harp singers gather regularly, mainly in Georgia and Alabama but also throughout the world. The tunebook, which has gone through numerous revisions, has become the primary song book used at informal singing events not only in rural churches and community buildings in the Deep South, but also at college campuses, music-related conferences, and informal house gatherings on a national scale. Typically, the songs are sung by everyone in attendance at a Sacred Harp singing, and the singers, who are organized by vocal part, sit in a square facing a song leader. The Sacred Harp has been the subjects of several books and recordings, innumerable articles, and a feature-length documentary titled Awake, My Soul (the movie's trailer is, in and of itself, a striking piece). The tunebook clearly deserves the attention of researchers of American music traditions. With his book The Makers of the Sacred Harp, David Warren Steel makes an important contribution to the scholarship on The Sacred Harp, in large part because he includes biographical sketches of over 250 composers and poets whose songs are contained in its early editions. He also includes data on over 550 Sacred Harp songs, including source information. Most of this information is...

Shifting agency: male clergy, female believers, and the role of icons

ABSTRACTIn Eastern Orthodox traditions, an icon is a religious image, a depiction of a saint or a significant event. Icons are deployed by believers as symbols, teaching tools, and aids to concentration, but they can also function as social agents that decentralize authority normally concentrated in jurisdictional hierarchies. In the Russian Orthodox Church, all but the lowest formal positions are held exclusively by men, even though women make up the majority of the parishioners. Even among male believers, lay men and junior priests are subject to the power of a very few senior priests, abbots, and bishops. But while Church hierarchies control wealth, real estate, assignments, seminaries, and so on, they do not monopolize spiritual power. Heavenly authority supersedes the clergy's, and, discursively, heavenly participation by means of miraculous icons can limit hierarchs' power. When parishioners choose to address their problems by appealing to an icon directly rather than submitting a request that it be included in a formal service, they are bypassing the formal Church structure. Priests, monks, and bishops can ask for miracles, but they can not make them. Icons act as leveling mechanisms shifting power from (masculine) authorities to the (predominantly feminine) laity.

African American Churches as Venues for Dietary Interventions in the Mississippi Delta

Churches play a central role in African American (AA) culture and are often the only organizational unit in remote rural communities of the Mississippi Delta. While the church environment provides social support and promotes self‐efficacy to facilitate dietary changes, investigators must be aware of social and environmental characteristics unique to AA churches in the region. While typically small congregation sizes and overrepresentation of older and middle aged females present problems for recruitment, the role of these women as heads of household and trusted information sources often gives them influence over their households and extended families, broadening diffusion of messages. At the same time, formal church leaders such as pastors and deacons are often male. Recruitment messages and intervention messages must recognize the gender specific nature of this bifurcation. Members also are often related to one another through extended families, complicating statistical assumptions of independence. Environmental challenges include a lack of adequate physical facilities to adhere to confidentiality requirements or conduct food preparation demonstrations. Some rural churches convene only biweekly and members may live distant from the church, making it difficult to schedule activities. Investigators must address these and other unsuspecting issues with creativity and flexibility.

Coping With Thoughts of Suicide: Techniques Used by Consumers of Mental Health Services

Suicide is a devastating public health problem, and research indicates that people with prior attempts are at the greatest risk of completing suicide, followed by persons with depression and other major mental and substance use conditions. Because there has been little direct input from individuals with serious mental illness and a history of suicidal behavior concerning suicide prevention efforts, this study examined how this population copes with suicidal thoughts. Participants in 14 regional consumer-run Hope Dialogues in New York State (N=198) wrote up to five strategies they use to deal with suicidal thoughts. Strategies were classified according to grounded theory. First responses included spirituality, talking to someone, positive thinking, using the mental health system, considering consequences of suicide to family and friends, using peer supports, and doing something pleasurable. Although a majority reported that more formal therapeutic supports were available, only 12% indicated that they considered the mental health system a frontline strategy. Instead, respondents more frequently relied on family, friends, peers, and faith as sources of hope and support. Consumers' reliance on formal therapeutic supports and support from peers and family suggests that education and support for dealing with individuals in despair and crisis should be targeted to the social networks of this high-risk population. The disparity between availability of formal mental health services and reliance on them when consumers are suicidal suggests that suicide prevention efforts should evaluate whether they are effectively engaging high-risk populations as they struggle to cope with despair.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE CHURCH

The nineteenth-century afforded women opportunity to work beyond the home in society and church. This can be seen in The General Baptist Magazine (GBM) and The Sword and the Trowel (S&T), which reflect differences in mainstream Baptist theology - Evangelical Arminianism and Evangelical Calvinism respectively.1 Both show that, while allowed a certain informal ‘functional' role in the church, women were not recognized in formal church order.

RESEARCH: "Exploring Race and Sex Differences in Church Involvement During Late Life"

The purpose of this study was to provide a descriptive analysis of involvement in the church during late life. In the process, we made an effort to see if involvement in the church varied by race and sex. Data on 13 different aspects of church participation were obtained from a nationwide survey of older Whites and older African Americans. The items assessing church involvement reflected activity in the following areas: group worship, service activities, offices and formal church roles, involvement among the homebound, and financial contributions. The findings indicate that older Blacks were more involved than older Whites in every dimension except financial contributions. The results further reveal that older women were more involved than older men in one area only: group worship activities.

Women as Religious and Political Praise Singers within African Institutions: The Case of the CCAP Blantyre Synod and Political Parties in Malawi

THIS COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE FOLKlorist Lisa Gilman and the ethnomusicologist Clara Henderson explores the roles played by women in two types of institutions in Malawi: on the one hand, political parties, and on the other, Blantyre Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), a member of the largest protestant denomination in the country. Both the three dominant political parties and the Presbyterian churches have women's wings whose activities include the singing of praise songs and dancing at all-female as well as public events, a custom rooted in community cultural practices that contribute to an Africanization or localization of these Western-style institutions. Most formal institutions in Malawi, be they governmental or political, church or educational, are based on European models--a legacy of colonialism and a result of the globalization of cultural and political systems that has marked the last century and continues into the new one. From the time of colonialism to the present, men have integrated more readily into emergent structures, whereas the majority of women have tended to remain more rooted in cultural practices (Johnson-Odim and Strobel 1999, xxxv; Martin 1994, 413, 419). In both real and symbolic ways, women are frequently relied upon to sustain the country's connection to and groundedness in what is often labeled or traditional ways of doing things, while men have been expected to Westernize and move the country into the new modern or Western world. The social and political situation in contemporary Malawi is one in which participation and identification with the West or the modern is generally linked with success, power, and prestige. Within formal church and political institutions, for example, those people who wield the most power come from the country's social, economic, and political elite and thus usually have high levels of education, speak English, live in urban areas, have access to company cars, and so on. Conversely, the majority of the population in Malawi (approximately 88 percent) is more closely linked in their activities and in public discourse to the traditional or ways of life; they tend to have little formal schooling, and they struggle to sustain themselves at very low economic levels, relying mostly on subsistence-based agriculture (Lwanda 1996, 19; Mvula and Kakhongwa 1997). (1) The association of women in church and political institutions with African or local ways of doing things therefore implicitly places women at least symbolically in gendered roles in which they have less access to resources and positions of power. This article grows out of our interest in detailing the similarities of women's performances in these distinct institutions, both of which are central to social, political, and religious life in Malawi. We begin by comparing and contrasting some of the features (dress, movement, and singing) of women's performances in each type of institution in order to demonstrate the gendering that occurs within both. We then examine the organizational structures through which women perform and explore some functions that these performances play both in individuals' lives and in the furthering of the organizations' goals. Our analysis reveals that though women performers play central roles in both types of institutions, they (as well as the specific activity of their singing and dancing) are frequently placed in peripheral roles within their organizations, and women who perform often have fewer opportunities than do their male counterparts to participate in the decision-making bodies and power structures of these institutions. Research Methods Lisa Gilman's interest in Malawi began in 1994, shortly after the country, went through a transition from a single-party state under the authoritarian rule of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda to a multiparty system of government. After preliminary research during the summers of 1995 and 1996, she returned to Malawi and lived in the Nkhata Bay district, in northern Malawi, from August 1998 to May 1999. …

Enlightener of Rus': The Image of Vladimir Sviatoslavich across the Centuries by Francis s> Butler Prince, Saint and Apostle. Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavič of Kiev, His Posthumous Life, and the Religious Legitimization of Great Russian Power by Jukka Korpela (review)

REVIEWS 739 between Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but also between a weak tsarist and equallyweak Soviet systemof government. The editor can be congratulated for compiling a stimulating collection of essays. It deserves to be included in undergraduate as well as graduate libraries. University ofLeicester IAN D. THATCHER Butler, Francis.Enlightener ofRus'. TheImageof Vladimir Sviatoslavich Acrossthe Centuries. Slavica,Bloomington, IN, 2002. Vi + 204 pp. Notes.Appendices . Bibliography. Index. $24.95 (paperback). Korpela, Jukka. Prince,SaintandApostle.PrinceVladimir Sviatoslavic of Kiev,his Posthumous Life, and the ReligiousLegitimization of GreatRussianPower. Veroffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Institutes Munchen. Reihe: Geschichte , 67. HarrassowitzVerlag,Wiesbaden, 2001. 267 pp. Notes. Bibliography . Index. ?49.00 (paperback). BY repute Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich is the pivotal figure of early Rus history, perhaps of East Slav history in general. By officially converting his people to ChristianityVladimir achieved many things, depending on one's perspective and values: he brought Rus the possibility of true Salvation, or located Rus in the European, Judaeo-Christian tradition, or made possible the subsequent development of East Slav culture, or put in place the ideological structuresto support the proper consolidation of statehood and nationhood. Whichever way you look at it, by repute Vladimir Sviatoslavich led and pushed Rus to take a giant stridein the march of Progress.By repute. The problem is that Vladimir Sviatoslavichis known almost entirelyby later repute, and barely at all on the basis of contemporaryreliablefactualrecord. He is a shimmeringmirage, apt to dissolveaswe tryto get close. This does not mean that he is wholly unknowable, merely that we have to be very cautious, for the reputation and the man may be two quite different creatures. It is particularlysobering to realize, for example, that St Vladimir, Apostle of the Rus, was not actually given formal Church acknowledgement as a saint until he had been dead for nearly three hundred years (by contrast with his sons Boris and Gleb, who were formally acknowledged within a few decades at most). But the reputationshould not be dismissedasjust an irritatingobstacle to the facts. Itjustifiesattention as a prominent factof culturein itself. English book-length studies of Vladimir and his reputation are like traditional London buses:you wait an age and none appears, then suddenly two turn up at once; except that the two London buses probably look much likeeach otherand aretravellingthe same route, whereas,despitetheirsimilar points of departure, these two books by Francis Butler and Jukka Korpela negotiate quite different paths through their chosen field, and in tone and substancethey bear remarkablylittleresemblanceto each other. The subtitle of Butler's book is a fair summary of its contents. This is unequivocally a book about the image, not the man. It reallydoes not matter to Butlerwhether or to what extent any of the portrayalsof Vladimir is true. His interest is in the ways the image changed over time, and how each 740 SEER, 8i, 4, 2003 successive recreation of Vladimir reflects the age in which it was produced. Butler's main method for elucidating and trackingthe image is the detailed exposition of texts about Vladimir. Thus he analyses the posthumous Vladimirscreatedin mid-eleventh-to early-twelfth-centuryKiev byMetropolitan Ilarionand the compilersof the Primagy Chronicle, then with an excursus on Novgorod and the problem of Vladimir's 'late' canonization he follows Vladimir through twelfth-to sixteenth-centurytexts (and frescoes, and textile portraits) from Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma and Moscow, culminating in the huge biography in the Stepennaia kniga.Kiev in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries merits a chapter to itself, drawing attention to the discovery of Vladimir'srelicsby PeterMohyla and to the influentialaccount in the Sinopsis. Kiev features again in the final chapter, but now in conjunction with its human exports to St Petersburg in the eighteenth century: here Butler provides a detailed exposition of FeofanProkopovich's Vladimir before ending with comments on GavriilBuzhinskii'sI 723 sermon on the subject. Butler does not have an overall thesis. He identifies several varieties of Vladimir: the innovator, the preserverof tradition, the fratricide,the apostle of his people, the reformer, the protector of his dynasty, or of Kiev, or of Moscow, or of Orthodoxy. Vladimir can be proclaimed analogous to Solomon, or to St Paul,or to Constantine the Great, or to Dmitrii Donskoi, or to Ivan the...

Judgment & Grace in Dixie Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (review)

Judgment & Grace in Dixie Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (review)

Religious Involvement Among Rural Youth: An Ecological and Life-Course Perspective

Developmental expressions of religion in the lives of youth extend from formal church attendance and ritual involvement to religious beliefs and knowledge, self-identity, and participation in youth groups. Little is known about developmental change in these activities and definitions among youth, especially in rural America, although they represent social capital for human development. Using multiple dimensions of religious development (church attendance, involvement in church activities, felt religiosity, religious identity), this panel study (7th-10th grades) investigated their developmental pathways over a 4-year period, giving particular attention to changing influences among farm and nonfarm rural youth. Data come from 365 White, two-parent families in the Iowa Youth and Families Project. Adolescents who have grown up on a farm have stronger ties to religious institutions than nonfarm youth, and they express stronger commitments to religious values. The correlates of religious change and continuity i...

On arithmetic complexity of certain constructive logics

A constructive arithmetical theory is an arbitrary set of closed arithmetical formulas that is closed with respect to derivability in an intuitionsitic arithmetic with the Markov principle and the formal Church thesis. For each arithmetical theory T there is a corresponding logic L(T) consisting of closed predicate formulas in which all arithmetic instances belong to T. For so-called internally enumerable constructive arithmetical theories with the property of existentiality, it is proved that the logic L(T) is II1T-@#@ complete. This implies, for example, that the logic of traditional constructivism is II20-complete.

Formal Church Polity and Ecumenical Activity

Formal Church Polity and Ecumenical Activity

The 'Consciousness Reformation' Reconsidered

Social scientists often assume that individuals and societies orient themselves with respect to overarching symbolic frames of reference, sometimes called systems. But until the recent publication of Robert Wuthnow's analysis of San Francisco area survey data, evidence in favor of this key theoretical proposition has been lacking. This paper inspects both a new network survey of 1439 respondents and the original data in search of the four competing meaning systems reported by Wuthnow. We find strong evidence demonstrating that traditional religion remains an influential meaning system, producing conventional attitudes and preventing experimentation with radical lifestyles and occult practices. But the three alleged secular meaning systems failed to emerge, even in the original data. These findings undercut the assumption that most persons possess meaning systems, and they support our view that a meaning system is easiest to sustain if it is based on supernatural beliefs and promulgated by formal church organizations and religious social movements.

The effects of formal church affiliation and religiosity on the fertility patterns of Mexican-American catholics

Abstract The effects of religion on the fertility patterns of Mexican Americans are examined with two different path models, the Institutional Model using formal affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church as a measure of religion, and the Religiosity Model using a measure of religiosity. Each model, tested separately for husbands and wives, examines the effects of religion on types of contraceptive methods used and on wanted family size. Although the majority of Mexican Americans are Catholics and tend to have large families, religion does not seem to have the same effect on their fertility patterns as on that of other Catholics in the United States. Among the men, neither formal affiliation nor religiosity affect the fertility patterns in any way, while among the women the effect is slight. Considering the Catholic Church’s position on contraceptive usage, it is especially noteworthy that religion does not affect the use or non-use of the more effective means of contraception, a factor contributing to the generally weak association between the measures of religion and wanted family size. The last section attempts a partial explanation of why the results turned out as they did.

Studying Social Organization in the Local Church: A Sociometric Approach

The study of religious group behavior has been largely neglected. This paper attempts to demonstrate how sociometry may be utilized to study informal group formations in the local church and how a knowledge of the informal structure can aid in understanding formal church structure. Members were classified sociometrically as clique members, marginals, and isolates; this distinction was supported by their attitude toward and frequency of attendance at Sunday church services. The formation of sociometric clusterings and of cliques within these clusterings was found to be based primarily upon the variables of sex, age, marital status, and length of church membership. For clique members, involvement in a particular sociometric clustering was related to variation in emphasis on different types of organizational gaols. A finding with significant implications was that, while formal church leaders seldom occupied central positions in the church's informal structure, their wives often performed an informal, integrating role. It is suggested that such role differentiation may be quite functional in certain forms of church polity.

Religion in Russia

THE story of the Communist attack on religion seems to me a very simple one. But to understand any Russian problem one has to know the country ? its real values and par ticularly its hidden values. Here, to start with, is one fact which explains more than per haps anything else in this story. M. Pal?ologue, witty and courtly ambassador of the French Republic to the last Tsar, states in his diary: This people is more religious than its Church. The observation is true, but not because Russians are ignorant or superstitious; it applies not only to the masses but also to the best Russian minds. Hardly any really intelligent person can fail to recognize this even as he enters the country. I remember the words of Harold Williams, our greatest Russian scholar: Don't you feel when you are leaving Russia as if something were being taken out of you? All native Russian philosophy has always been idealistic. Of itself, without any special pleading, it arrived at the recognition of the unseen world, of the guiding Deity. When I was translating an article on Lopatin, one of the best Russian philosophers, I remember how a great and loved teacher of mine stood by and listened. As Lopatin's argument reached the conclusion just indicated, my friend commented: A spirit such as that could dwell in no meaner shrine. It was within the people of all classes, not within the formal Church, that the spirit of religion dwelt. In no country did the great German philosophers from Kant to Hegel leave a greater impression than on the educated ?lite in Russia; but no sooner did a German idea, perhaps quite secular in its origin, take root in Russia than it at once took on a religious character. Of course, this happened among the native Slavophils, men of enlightened, conservative and patriotic thought. The leader of the school, Kireyevsky, was at one time a pupil of Hegel. But even the westernizers like Belinsky could only preach atheism in the language of religion ? the cowl has been placed on our heads. The same thing occurred in the case of Marxism. And the giants of Russian literature, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (especially the last two, who were the most characteristically Russian), were all permeated with religion

Religion in Russia

THE story of the Communist attack on religion seems to me a very simple one. But to understand any Russian problem one has to know the country ? its real values and par ticularly its hidden values. Here, to start with, is one fact which explains more than per haps anything else in this story. M. Pal?ologue, witty and courtly ambassador of the French Republic to the last Tsar, states in his diary: This people is more religious than its Church. The observation is true, but not because Russians are ignorant or superstitious; it applies not only to the masses but also to the best Russian minds. Hardly any really intelligent person can fail to recognize this even as he enters the country. I remember the words of Harold Williams, our greatest Russian scholar: Don't you feel when you are leaving Russia as if something were being taken out of you? All native Russian philosophy has always been idealistic. Of itself, without any special pleading, it arrived at the recognition of the unseen world, of the guiding Deity. When I was translating an article on Lopatin, one of the best Russian philosophers, I remember how a great and loved teacher of mine stood by and listened. As Lopatin's argument reached the conclusion just indicated, my friend commented: A spirit such as that could dwell in no meaner shrine. It was within the people of all classes, not within the formal Church, that the spirit of religion dwelt. In no country did the great German philosophers from Kant to Hegel leave a greater impression than on the educated ?lite in Russia; but no sooner did a German idea, perhaps quite secular in its origin, take root in Russia than it at once took on a religious character. Of course, this happened among the native Slavophils, men of enlightened, conservative and patriotic thought. The leader of the school, Kireyevsky, was at one time a pupil of Hegel. But even the westernizers like Belinsky could only preach atheism in the language of religion ? the cowl has been placed on our heads. The same thing occurred in the case of Marxism. And the giants of Russian literature, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (especially the last two, who were the most characteristically Russian), were all permeated with religion