Religious Logic Research Articles

The Potential for Plurality and Prevalence of the Religious Institutional Logic

Religion is a significant social force on organizational practice yet has been relatively underexamined in organization theory. In this article, I assert that the institutional logics perspective is especially conducive to examine the macrolevel role of religion for organizations. The notion of the religious logic offers conceptual means to explain the significance of religion, its interrelationship with other institutional orders, and embeddedness into and impact across interinstitutional systems. I argue for intrainstitutional logic plurality and show that specifically the intrareligious logic plurality has been rather disregarded with a relative focus on Christianity and a geographical focus on “the West.” Next, I propose the concept of interinstitutional logic prevalence and show that the religious logic in particular may act as a metalogic due to its potential for uniqueness, ultimacy, and ubiquity. Through illustrations from Islamic Finance and Entrepreneurship, I exemplify implications of logic plurality and prevalence for organizations and societies.

World Culture, Uncoupling, Institutional Logics, and Recoupling: Practices and Self‐Identification as Institutional Microfoundations of Political Violence

This study proposes a micro‐institutional theory of political violence, according to which citizens' participation in political violence is partially an outcome of tight coupling of persons' practices and self‐identifications with institutional logics opposed to dominant logics associated with world culture, such as the nation‐state and gender equality. The study focuses on two types of institutional carriers through which persons adopt institutional logics: routine practices and self‐identifications associated with three institutional logics: the familial, the ethnic, and the religious logics. Using a 15‐country survey data from early twenty‐first‐century sub‐Saharan Africa, the study finds evidence in support of the theory. Reported participation in political violence is associated with practices and self‐identifications uncoupled from dominant world‐culture logics but tightly coupled with the patriarchal familial logic, with an oppositional ethnic logic, and with a politicized oppositional religious logic.

Word Avoidance as a Relation-Making Act: A Paradigm for Analysis of Name Utterance Taboos

This article outlines several layers of the relation-making indexicality of name avoidance in a New Guinea society. These layers include: avoidance's paradoxical logic of achieving relational intensification through relational restraint; the enthusiasm with which people seize on avoidance to create or define relations anew; the ways avoidance extends social involvement beyond spaces and times of face-to-face copresence; the emergence of micro-communities of common alignment around specific avoidances; and speakers' active engagement with powers of transgressing avoidance norms. I also suggest that the efficacy of avoidance in interaction can usefully be understood as similar to a religious logic of sacrifice.

The Transformation of Yiguan Dao in Taiwan: Adapting to a Changing Religious Economy by Yunfeng Lu (review)

160 Journal of Chinese Religions highly visible memorial arches and shrines, played a crucial role in the affirmation and dissemination of the cult in the final centuries of the imperial era. Lu also highlights the importance of childhood betrothal in creating a sense in the young girl that she already belonged to another family and the overwhelming importance of marriage in the female lifecycle : “without marriage, a woman’s life was incomplete” (p. 113). Should she live on in her natal home to be a burden to her brothers after the death of her parents? Would she lose a sense of moral integrity if she accepted another suitor? Should she force herself on the home of her deceased betrothed to face an uncertain welcome? The sexual repression required in the lifelong faithful maiden and faithful widow cult could also give rise to the kind of despair that led to suicide as the only choice. As Lu explains, “suicide came only after they saw overwhelming odds against the possibility of living on with the dignity to which they aspired” (p. 133). The cult of the faithful maiden is another example, together with the egregious case of foot-binding, where Chinese women in imperial times persisted with what from a modern perspective would be called oppressive practices that led to their victimization and marginalization. In both cases, women responded to and helped to create elaborate ritual practices and discourses that validated and celebrated their fierce upholding of notions of female heroism. Readers of True to Her Word will no doubt continue to debate the extent to which the cult of the faithful maidens should be judged as a form of female agency or simply the result of restricted life choices and an intoxicating ideology of female virtue. Weijing Lu has made a path-breaking and illuminating contribution to our knowledge of one of the most intriguing phenomena in the history of Chinese women. True to Her Word will be indispensable reading for those with an interest in the cultural, social, and intellectual history of late imperial China. ANNE E. MCLAREN, University of Melbourne The Transformation of Yiguan Dao in Taiwan: Adapting to a Changing Religious Economy YUNFENG LU. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008. xi, 201 pages. ISBN 978-07391 -1719-4. US$65.00 hardcover. As Daniel Overmyer has pointed out: “the great difference between China and both Europe and Japan is that in the Chinese situation, incipient ‘denominational’ or ‘church’ structures were never allowed to develop to their full potential because of official hostility, an Book Reviews 161 opposition present even during periods of political disunion.”1 For this reason, in Taiwan, after the lifting of martial law in 1987, it is a perfect time to observe this “full potential” of Chinese popular religion. However, the lifting of martial law also brought a newly open and free religious market to Taiwan. Under these circumstances, how can the religious economy model deriving from the observation of the United States be applied to Chinese religions? When these two things―a full potential of Chinese popular religion and a newly open, free religious market―happen at the same historical moment, it does indeed give us a good chance to resolve these puzzles simultaneously. Yet it is also unfortunate that when these two lines intersect, a most confusing moment is produced. The phenomena we are observing could be due to the stimulation from the newly open free religious market, yet it is also very possible that we are just witnessing a full display of Chinese religious logic. The book under review, The Transformation of Yiguan Dao in Taiwan by Lu Yunfeng, is based on his fieldwork conducted in 2002 in Taiwan, and it faces the two issues together. Lu’s main focus is the applicability of the religious economy model to Chinese religions, yet he also has to deal with the problem of the potentiality of Chinese religions. Furthermore, as the author proposes to put these questions within the local context, an entire reflection on contextual and categorical differences between Chinese religions and Western religions is necessary. How much has Lu accomplished toward his ambitious goal? The purpose of this book certainly is both empirical and...

<i>Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature Anne C. Rose Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 337 pp. $35.00. The stated purpose of Culture and Redemption is to make religion a standard category of analysis in the study of American literature, but the book defines religion so narrowly that it leaves an impression of the author’s suspicion of religious activity and her inclination to speak quickly and be done with it. Tracy Fessenden argues that although literary scholars gladly embrace a “secularization narrative” that reduces religion to a historical artifact, pious instincts persist today in covert as well as overt forms (3). Alongside evangelical celebrations of Christianity as the American national faith, one finds a “hegemonic Christian secularism,” or what used to be called a civil religion consisting of public commitment to the country’s democratic mission (214). Escape from Puritanism’s intolerance, in other words, has been illusory. This is not a new thesis. Perry Miller spent his career documenting the capacity for self-transformation of the Reformed tradition, as did Max Weber before him, and although neither man explicitly named romantic nationalism or capitalist entrepreneurship a religion, they did not naïvely think of secularism as a simple mood of detachment but rather as a mind-set friendly to potent ideologies descended from faith. What distinguishes Fessenden from them is how dark her vision is. The American Protestant legacy uniformly oppresses, and she offers scholarly cultural criticism as the instrument to unmask popular errors. Her initial pessimism grows, however, from a questionably selective reading of American religious history. Fessenden’s bird’s-eye view of denominational and sectarian disagreements all but erases religious self-reflection and dialogue. After admirably [End Page 376] criticizing the current American habit of instantly equating all “religion” with conservative Christianity, she turns around to lump together Protestants over four centuries by virtue of their shared anti-Catholicism. Her chapter title, “From Disestablishment to ‘Consensus,’” for example, means that the First Amendment to the Constitution inspired an ecumenical Protestant campaign to make public schools places of indoctrination in commonly held views. The degree of truth to this argument should be appreciated along with its presentist orientation: doctrinal differences among Protestants that have seemed increasingly unimportant since World War II were once worth fighting for, and they produced widely diverging political stances. Baptists and Quakers championed religious disestablishment in the early republic, while Congregationalists deplored it. Unitarians joined Catholics, Jews, and Deists after the Civil War to block a constitutional “Christian” amendment, in opposition the initiative’s Methodist and Presbyterian supporters. Elemental as anti-Catholicism was in Protestant America, the behavior of Protestants has not been wholly predetermined by prejudice, and yet Fessenden’s decision to emphasize instances of bigotry makes Protestants seem pawns of destructive convictions. We may reject the religious logic of historical figures, I believe, but we first ought to get close enough to them to discover their reasoning. A book so concerned with the repressive potential of Protestantism at its ethnic and racial boundaries also remains surprisingly focused on the Protestant mainstream. Although Fessenden makes the Catholicism of F. Scott Fitzgerald the historical endpoint of an analysis that begins with the Puritans, she devotes almost no attention in between to non-Protestants. Minority writing, she clarifies briefly, signified “resistance” (106). Catholics and Jews, however, the most visible non-Protestants before the 1960s, supported healthy literatures that were not solely defined by feelings of disadvantage. Mathew Carey (1760–1839), the Philadelphia publisher and a staunch Catholic, chose the Catholic Douai text of the Bible in 1790 for his first edition of scripture, but he used the Protestant King James Version for more than sixty printings of the Bible after 1800. He was not at war with Protestant culture. Jewish immigrants living after 1880 in the crowded poverty of New York’s Lower East Side felt liberated by their tawdry share of American commodities because they remembered far worse deprivation at home. Reform Judaism became the dominant American practice precisely because Jews embraced their new land as nearly free of age-old prejudices. The self...

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

The God Delusion Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press, 2006. Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Is America a Christian Nation, or merely one tolerant of religious diversity? As Bill Moyers documented on his PBS Journal episode Buying the War (April 25, 2007), after 9/11 there was a conspiracy involving the Administration, the Pentagon, and, shamefully, the press to sell the war in Iraq to the American people. At a rigged press conference on March 6, 2003, one friendly reporter fed President George W Bush this patsy question: Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you? So, do Americans fight wars on the basis of faith? Is the role of religion in foreign affairs so influential? If religion guides our nation into war, then the American people had better be well informed about at least the three major faiths that divide the Holy Land and about what religious logic could result in such a catastrophe. Wasn't there an oddly overlooked passage in the New Testament about Peacemakers as being blessed? Richard Dawkins would reject the very notion of religious logic, however, because for him religion depends entirely upon ignorance, fear, and superstition, decidedly a minority position today in the United States. Free-thinkers should of course be outraged by the suggestion that foreign policy should be by faith rather than diplomacy, as was Sam Harris, who has now written two books challenging religious dogma and its role in American life and politics. Harris's first response was a national bestseller entitled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), followed by a smaller, almost pocket-sized sequel with a deceptively bland title, Letter to a Christian Nation. It belongs to the tradition of polemical pamphlets that were popular during the Enlightenment. Harris effectively orchestrates a mass of statistics to overwhelm the reader and to show agnostics that they are surely outnumbered: More than 50% of Americans have a 'negative' or 'highly negative' view of people who don't believe in God; 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be 'strongly religious'; 44% of Americans think Christ will return in the next fifty years; more than 50% of Americans believe that the universe was created six thousand years ago (putting the starting point of creation about one thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue); 62% of Americans want creationism taught in schools, while 44% want it taught exclusively; 73% of Americans believe in the existence of Hell; only 28% believe in evolution (and twothirds of these believe evolution was guided by God. Such was the promotional copy published in the Atlantic Monthly (December 2006), intended, of course, to hype the book, but absolutely reflective of the book's tone and content. Harris promoted his first book extensively on cable television, with effective readings and discussions on C-SPAN, so by the time the second book appeared, skeptical readers would recognize the author's name. Please note, though, that Letter to a Christian Nation offers little additional insight for anyone who has already read The End of Faith. It's rather like a less-expensive digest and abridgement. Or maybe an easily digested codicil. Economy of style is not Harris's forte. In both books, Sam Harris was effective in a kind of outraged, dumbfounded, vox populi way; but Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, is an even more formidable nemesis of the Christian Right. As a well-educated Brit, Dawkins has a better command of the English language than most of his devout competitors, those who would presume to refute him. As a scientist and logician, Dawkins understands Darwin in a way those who might argue for intelligent design could probably never grasp. He explores the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and in Middle America, while Europe, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly secular. …

A política da Igreja Universal e seus reflexos nos campos religioso e político brasileiros

The paper analyses the insertion of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in the national politics scenario and its effects in the religious and political fields. Due to the efficacy of its institutional charisma, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) has given, within its own religious group, a new meaning to the specific act of voting and to the general perception of politics in general, putting both of them in its own religious logic. This is an important explanatory key for the high level of loyalty in voting and the growing political success verified in every new election. Furthermore, the political practice of the UCKG is producing a mimetic effect on other evangelic churches, which tend to imitate its way of doing politics. Its political insertion, mainly through the Liberal Party, has not remained unnoticed by the political parties, making the fact a relevant actor in the current Brazilian political conjuncture.

Son of Heaven: Sacral Kingship in Ancient China

In his well-known book, Arthur M. Hocart speaks of kingship as a gift of the gods, which is often inherited through a special lineage. Thus, the new king's accession to the throne, on the death of his predecessor, signifies continuity and stability, through a kind of religious logic that is tantamount to a deification of the deceased king, and, by extension, of his heir. This is also symbolised by the passing on of the royal regalia, whether these be the crown, sceptre, sword, seal or anything else. And then, frequently, sacrificial offerings accompany or follow the accession, serving as the sources of royal power.3 The sacred character of kingship in China has been little studied, when compared to the subject of kingship, or the emperor system, inJapan or Egypt, where the divine character of the royal

Sharing the flower: A non-supernaturalistic theory of grace

Questioning the usual understanding of Native American religions as supernaturalistic, this study re-examines the ritual system of the Yaqui people of Arizona. First, it evaluates assumptions about the nature of religion—including God, grace, and prayer—which inform the ethnographical interpretation of Yaqui religion. Second, it reconstructs the Yaqui cosmological system and relates their complex cosmos to the traditional religious actors, the Deer Dancer and the Pascola clowns. Third it examines the master symbol, Sewa or Flower, to demonstrate that Yaqui religious logic does not correspond to the grace theory of Catholicism. Fourth, it demonstrates that flower embodies a causal system in which all religious actors, human and transcendent beings alike, achieve ritual efficacy in mutual, reciprocal acts of witnessing. Finally, the essay observes that ‘conversion’ fails to make sense of Yaqui syncretism for two related reasons. In the first place, the Yaqui neither rejected the world nor embraced a monotheism which assigns a privileged, vertical superiority to God. In the second, the Yaqui applied traditional insights deriving from the most basic realm of myth to reach an understanding that Jesus and Deer are alike powerful innocents who sacrifice themselves so that others might live. In all these ways, the essay demonstrates that the concept of the supernatural fails to explain either the traditional or the Christian sides of Yaqui religion and suggests that the same may be true for other Native American religions as well.

Radhasoami reality: the logic of a modern faith

In this book, Mark Juergensmeyer seeks to explain why the religious logic of Radhasoami, which is based on the teachings of medieval Hindu saints, is so compelling to hundreds of thousands of businessmen, intellectuals, office managers, and other urban professionals in North India. Juergensmeyer addresses the perplexing relationship between modernity and religious faith and examines it from historical, sociological, and phenomenological points of view.In this book, Mark Juergensmeyer seeks to explain why the religious logic of Radhasoami, which is based on the teachings of medieval Hindu saints, is so compelling to hundreds of thousands of businessmen, intellectuals, office managers, and other urban professionals in North India. Juergensmeyer addresses the perplexing relationship between modernity and religious faith and examines it from historical, sociological, and phenomenological points of view.

Indiscriminate Proreligiousness: Conceptualization and Measurement

This paper examines indiscriminate proreligiousness as construct which holds important implications for the scientific study of religion. Approaches by researchers relevant to the construct are critically reviewed. As an alternative, our research team developed two scales directly measuring personal and congregational aspects of indiscriminate proreligiousness. The scales were refined using factor analytic methods and were empirically validated on samples of church members and churchgoing students. Both scales demonstrated evidence of content validity, internal consistency, construct validity, genernlizability, and utility. A number of empirical and theoretical questions about the antecedents and consequents of indiscriminate proreligiousness are raised. Indiscriminate proreligiousness has been thorn in the side of the scientific study of religion for many years. The term grew out of Allport's studies of personal religious orientation. Allport was puzzled by the lack of strong negative correlation between the intrinsic and extrinsic religious dimensions, dimensions which he had conceptualized as two contrasting poles lying on single continuum. He resolved this discrepancy, in part, by defining those who endorse both intrinsic and extrinsic items as inconsistently proreligious, that sizable group of muddleheads who refuse to conform to our neat religious logic (Allport, 1966: 6). In later work, Allport broadened his conception of this phenomenon to one which had more general implications for the scientific study of religion (Allport & Ross, 1967). He noted that there are some individuals who respond to religious material with a superficial or hit and run approach. These people fail to make