Specific Religious Denominations Research Articles

Between Lynn White and Big Gods – religious sources of pro-environmental attitudes – cross-cultural test of Lynn White's Hypothesis

Between Lynn White and Big Gods – religious sources of pro-environmental attitudes – cross-cultural test of Lynn White's Hypothesis

Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. In search of identity – Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka’s life and work have been the subject of many research papers. While the interpreters of his works knew that he was a Jew, they did not always fully realize the significance of this fact. Some would treat this issue as a marginal one, failing to see that it was the pivot of his existence and work. Kafka kept wandering about in search of his own identity. As a lost agnostic who “lapsed” from the hand of God, lived without Him in the darkness of atheism and tried to discern His light, Franz Kafka was not really dependent on any specific religious denomination. However, Judaism is so strongly related to the Mosaic revelation – like Christianity is related to Christ’s Revelation – that it cannot be here omitted or forgotten, as this would result in some misunderstandings. In a sense it is impossible to separate the fact of being Jewish from the religion. Kafka’s life, as well as his writing, resulted from his continual reference to the Absolute. There are two worlds far removed from each other: the world of spirit and the world of man. Kafka believed that there is a world of that which is spiritual, absolute, pure, true, unchanging and indestructible – the world devoid of sin, but full of perfection; therefore, there exists that which man tends to encapsulate in the concept of God.

Me, myself and the other. Interreligious and intrareligious relations in neo-conservative online forums

ABSTRACT The Internet can be a place for exchange, but also foster echo chambers of closed world views. This poses interesting questions for the possibility of interreligious dialogue online. The article examines the cases of German Evangelical and Salafist Internet forums which mainly target a specific religious denomination, but nevertheless provide spaces for contact between different religions and denominations. For the study, a combination of quantitative and qualitative text analysis is applied. Quantitative analysis makes it possible to gain an overview of the discussed themes from a large body of text and serves as a basis for sampling smaller textual units for close examination using qualitative content analysis. The analysis yields two primary results: First, intrareligious dialogue plays a particular role for the negotiation of religious identity. Second, interreligious relations reflect the societal positions of both religious groups.

Gender Role Attitudes and Religious Denomination: Context Matters*

Abstract Traditional gender role attitudes are often associated with specific religious denominations. However, members of religious denominations are also impacted by other institutions in society. This research uses the European Social Survey to determine how the impact of religious denominations on traditional gender role attitudes varies across welfare regimes. Macro-level analysis examines this relationship with national-level indicators. Religious denomination impacts gender role attitudes, though not uniformly. Public expenditures on social services and working-age cash benefits are negatively related to traditional gender role attitudes, with the strongest impact on attitudes toward men’s right to paid work among Muslims and Eastern Orthodox.

Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement

Eat, Sing, Love: How Interfaith Families Model Interfaith Engagement Susan Katz Miller I lift my eyes up, unto the mountains, from where, from where can my help be found? (Psalm 121) Dancing a grapevine step, while singing Psalm 121 set to a minor melody, I was conscious of a pleasant harmonic buzz created by engaging more than one of my senses simultaneously. The circle connected dozens of members of the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC (IFFP), a community of Jews and Christians celebrating both Judaism and Christianity together. When we reached the line “My help comes from the one, maker of heaven and earth” I looked into the eyes of the random person across from me in the circle, and thought about that person as my source of help. I felt deeply moved by the intensity of this direct gaze, and the pleasure of moving in sync with a chain of people who embodied interfaith life. In that moment, claiming an exclusive label or theology for myself as a Jew or Christian felt entirely beside the point. A growing number of Americans are rebelling against the traditional narrative of lifelong allegiance to a specific religious denomination, movement, community, dogma, or creed. Free to move about the country, free to love across boundaries, they are forming interfaith families, and participating in multiple religious practices as “lived religion.” Rather than attempting to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “competing” religious truth claims, they are content to immerse themselves in the rich sensory experiences of the entire extended family: the sounds, smells, tastes, and imagery. Resisting the false binaries of religion versus culture, belief versus cynicism, intellectual versus corporeal, these families may access spirituality, and even transcendence, through performance of ancestral and contemporary rituals. And increasingly, they resist internalizing the idea that they are transgressors, gate‐crashers, or dabblers. At the same time, they may resist the idea that their hybridity is a disrespectful form of cultural appropriation, because they are growing up in families with historical connections to more than one religious culture. They take pleasure and pride from eating, singing, dancing, and loving in the new liminal spaces they are creating together. Today, at least one quarter of married people in the U.S. say they have a spouse with a different religious (or nonreligious) identity, according to the Pew Research Center. And one in every five people in the U.S. now grows up in an interfaith family. While traditional religious institutions have often warned against forming such families, Pew finds that “Nearly three‐quarters of those raised by parents from different religious backgrounds say their parents disagreed little, if at all, about religion.” In this essay, I explore what I believe is one of the secrets to that harmony: an emphasis on embodiment rather than exposition and explication. In much of the literature on interfaith families, religious institutions (and those scholars they fund) have tended to studiously ignore multiple religious practitioners, at best, and discourage their existence at worst. In part as a result, and because the study of religious complexity in families with multiple religious heritage is relatively new, the terminology remains fluid and contested. In the Jewish world, academics and community leaders still refer to “intermarriage” or possibly “interfaith marriage,” while referring to multiple religious practitioners as “partly Jewish.” The term multiple religious belonging (MRB) came out of Catholic academic theology, with the writings of Catherine Cornille and Peter Phan, and continuing through the work of Paul Knitter. The Protestant world has begun to take an interest more recently, often adopting the terms multiple religious practitioners (MRPs) or multiple religious participation as more appropriate since belonging may be moderated by institutional gatekeepers. In recent years, sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion have explored the reclaiming or creation of other terms including complex religious identity, religious syncretism, bricolage, and hybridity. And in his essential new book When One Religion Isn't Enough: The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People, Christian minister and Buddhist practitioner Duane Bidwell uses the terms religious multiplicity, or spiritual fluidity. Meanwhile, in many societies it is entirely normal and unremarkable to practice more than one religion—as in the intertwined practice of Buddhism and...

A Brief Historical Review of Specific Religious Denominations: How History Influences Current Medical-Religious Partnerships.

Improving health care in the twenty-first century will require new and creative approaches, with special attention given to health literacy and patient engagement since these two variables play a significant role in chronic health issues and their management. In order to better improve these key variables, strong partnerships between patients, their communities, and medical institutions must be developed. One way of facilitating these relationships is through medical-religious partnerships. Religious leaders are in regular contact with people who need education about and support with health issues. However, identifying the most effective way to approach specific congregations can pose a challenge to healthcare providers and institutions. In this paper, we provide a brief historical review of certain religious traditions and how their history plays a role in current medical-religious partnerships.

Religious Pluralism and Organizational Diversity: An Empirical Test in the City of Zwolle, the Netherlands, 1851-1914

This study addresses the question as to why there are so many different kinds of organizations. It puts forth the general proposition that organizational diversity in a community is isomorphic to the heterogeneity of the composition of its population. Given that religion is a fundamental category of identity and association, with potentially far-reaching implications for social structure, we focus on religious pluralism. By linking religious pluralism to organizational diversity for the first time our study contributes to both the sociology of religion and organizational ecology. We propose that religious pluralism spurs organizational diversity, and vice versa. Specifically, denominational pluralism may drive community differentiation with respect to the supply of and demand for different products and services, which ultimately determines community-level organizational diversity. Second, organizational diversity might trigger immigration of people from specific religious denominations, so affecting the community's religious composition in turn. We empirically explore this reciprocal relationship with detailed time series data for the Dutch city of Zwolle in the 1851–1914 period. Our exploratory findings are consistent with our proposition. Avenues for further research are discussed in relationship with some of the limitations of our exploratory case study.

Religious Involvement and Adult Mortality in the United States: Review and Perspective

The scientific community has recently taken a serious interest in the relation between religious involvement and adult mortality risk in the United States. We review this literature, highlighting key findings, limitations, and future challenges. Literature from medicine, epidemiology, and the social sciences is included. Taken together, the existing research indicates that religious involvement is related to US adult mortality risks. The evidence is strongest for public religious attendance and across specific religious denominations. The evidence is weakest for private religious activity. The mechanisms by which religious involvement appear to influence mortality include aspects of social integration, social regulation, and psychological resources. The religion-mortality literature has developed in both size and quality over the past decade. Fruitful avenues for continued research include the analysis of (1) more dimensions of religious involvement, including religious life histories; (2) population subgroups, including specific race/ethnic and socioeconomic populations; and (3) a richer set of social, psychologic, and behavioral mechanisms by which religion may be related to mortality.

Religious importance and practices of patients with a life-threatening illness: implications for screening protocols

Although providing spiritual support to patients has received growing attention in the nursing and medical literature, little has been written about how to screen new patients to determine whether a more in-depth spiritual assessment is in order. In many hospitals, newly admitted patients are simply asked whether they are affiliated with a specific religious denomination. This question alone provides little insight into potential spiritual needs that may require attention. Questions that inquire about patients' religious practices and the importance of religion in their lives may be more useful as screening questions to identify the need for a more detailed spiritual assessment. As a part of a longitudinal study on decision control preferences in terminal illness, data were collected on enrollment about religious practices and the importance of religion in a group of subjects recently diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. This study examines cross-sectionally the relationship between religious practices, importance of religion, and demographic variables. Recommendations are presented on how health professionals can use the responses to these questions to determine the need for further spiritual assessment and intervention.

Religious Liberty in Eastern Europe and the USSR: Before and After the Great Transformation.

A systematic study of the evolution of religious liberty in Eastern Europe and Russia before, during and after the period of communist repression, which compares the countries in terms of common trends and developments that transcend national boundaries and specific religious denominations.

Patterns of Contraceptive Use in the United States: The Importance of Religious Factors

Previous research has shown that the major religious communities in the US have all shifted their expected family size downward but significant differences in contraceptive use styles continue to characterize Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and those of no religious affiliation. This paper examines data from Cycle IV of the National Survey of Family Growth (1988) to extend the time period covered by previous research by comparing the emerging contraceptive use patterns and fertility expectations among women in the late 1980s with earlier cohorts from previous national studies, beginning in the 1960s. The categories of religious affiliation are extended to include specific religious denominations (fundamentalist Protestants, Baptists, and other denominations, as well as Mormons) and include measures of religiosity--church attendance, the extent of receiving communion among Catholics, and attendance at church-related schools. These data are examined for blacks, Hispanics, and non-Hispanic whites. The analysis suggests how religious affiliation and religiosity continue to be important factors in the contraceptive paths to low fertility under general conditions of controlled fertility and in the context of secularization.

Religious Influence and Congressional Voting on Abortion

The abortion question has been politicized since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortions during the first trimester of a pregnancy. In reaction, pro-life advocates have shifted their attention to Congress in efforts to restrict the availability of abortions. Recent studies have analyzed congressional voting on abortion legislation and have concluded that the political ideology of the congressperson is the most important reason for supporting or opposing abortions (see Eccles, 1978: 259; Vinovskis, 1979: 1790-1827; and Bardes & Tatalovich, 1982). These studies find liberals supporting the pro-choice position on abortion while conservatives more often selected the pro-life position. The research of Vinovskis and that of Bardes and Tatalovich, moreover, indicate that Congresspersons' religious affiliation is the second most important predictor of their votes on abortion legislation. This research note amplifies that aspect by delineating congressional voting in terms of specific religious denominations. This examination is based on thirty roll-call votes taken in four Congresses: four rollcalls from the 93rd Congress, two roll-calls from the 94th Congress, seventeen roll-calls from the 95th Congress and seven roll-calls from the 96th Congress. These thirty votes include all the roll-calls reported in the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report during the period from 1973 to 1980. Sixteen involved some version of the well-known Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal medicaid funds for abortions. Other bills included such issues as banning Legal Services Corporation attorneys from taking abortion cases, prohibiting the Commission on Civil Rights from collecting data on abortion policy, and forbidding the use of District of Columbia appropriations for abortions. As the index to voting on abortion, we used a form of Guttman scaling to construct a scale score to indicate each Representative's position. To achieve comparability across the four Congresses, each legislator's scale score was divided by the number of votes included, thus creating a range from 0.0 (pro-life) to 1.0 (pro-choice). The congresspersons' religious affiliation was coded according to the detailed classification used by the University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research for election studies. From this array, we grouped the legislators in each Congress based on the average scale score (Table 1). Not all Representatives are included since ambiguous affiliations (e.g., other Protestants) were *Byron W. Daynes is Associate Professor of Political Science at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Raymond Tatalovich is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois.

Influences of Culture on Sexuality

Religion is a cultured phenomenon, a subculture within our larger cultural system. Different religions have different teachings about what constitutes sexual morality, while members within a specific religious denomination may also have different beliefs and practices. Religiosity, or acceptance of the teachings of a particular religion, is more important as a determinant of sexual behavior than a specific religion per se. Orthodox Judaism, traditional Catholicism and traditional Protestantism are alike in their condemnation of masturbation, abortion, homosexuality, and premarital and extramarital coitus. More liberal members of these religions may not tolerate these activities, but may espouse them as necessary means to maintain or attain health. Nurses assess the beliefs that clients hold in regard to sexual morality and also identify if the client is experiencing guilt about past sexual practices. Interventions are planned with the client within the framework of the client's religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. To do otherwise is to invite distrust and distress in the client. Nurses intervene with sensitivity, compassion, and respect for beliefs and values that may be different from their own.

The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America

Current attitudes of religious organizations toward the civil rights movement prompt the raising of various historical questions. These concern, among others, the attitude of the churches toward the slave trade and the use of slave labor in the American colonies. Did the churches ignore slavery or did they object to it but were unable to change it because of vested economic interests? Were there any individual clergymen who raised particularly loud voices of protest against the use of slave labor and the buying and selling of human beings? Did the churches make any effort to convert the Negroes to Christianity? The examination of such questions with reference to a specific religious denomination, the Dutch Reformed Church, sheds light on this subject.

Personality and Socio-cultural Variables Associated with Religious Behavior

1. Although a number of personality variables have been identified by various authors as the determinants of religious behavior, independent of specific religious denomination, the results of the studies under consideration certainly appear to be inconsistent with such claims. It is suggested instead that the personality correlates of religious behavior vary with the specific religious denomination. 2. For most people religious belief and religious observance are acquired or learned in the socialization process. In a culture in which there is no social pressure to conform in relation to religious behavior (e. g., Israel in relation to religious belief), individual differences in adult religious behavior may be a result of certain personality differences. In the Israeli Jewish sample a number of personality variables were found to covary with religious belief and/or observance. Religious belief and observance, however, were also highly significant sources of variance in subjects' values. These value differences probably influence the what and how of the socialization process which in turn may be responsible for some-although probably not all-of the personality variables associated with religious behavior. 3. In cultures which are characterized by strong social pressure in relation to religious conformity, e. g. the culture represented by our United States Protestant sample, the religious behavior of many individuals will be a result of their need to conform rather than other personality variables directly related to their religious behavior as such. Thus in the United States Protestant sample conformity and variables associated with it were the only significant sources of variance in subjects' religious behavior. The results of our studies indicate the importance of differentiating between religious belief and observance which is merely the result of social conformity and religious belief and observance which is also the result of other variables which are more directly related to religious behavior as such. Presently we are in the process of constructing instruments to measure these two types of religious behavior. 4. Finally, it is suggested that in trying to discover the determinants of individual differences in religious behavior there has been too much emphasis on motivational variables and not enough on environmental factors. A social learning model may be the best suited for the investigation of the sources of individual differences in religious behavior.