Sociology of Religion Commons^™

Queerly Faithful: A Queer-Poet Community Autoethnography On Identity And Belonging In Christian Faith Communities, Eric Van Giessen

Social Justice and Community Engagement

In a cultural climate characterized by increasing polarization and hostility towards difference, the lives and bodies of those standing at the intersection of religious and marginal sexual identities are actively shaped by and reshaping our social and cultural landscape. Cultural narratives that conflate religion with oppression and pit religion against ‘progressive’ political movements create artificial divisions that undermine the efforts of LGBTQI+ people of faith to effect change in their communities by pressuring them to compartmentalize—or closet— their spiritual or sexual selves. These constructions also reinforce discourses that claim there are no queer people in faith communities and no people …

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Authority, Representation, And Offense: Dalit Catholics, Foot Washing, And The Study Of Global Catholicism, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

In reflecting on a sharp scholarly exchange at a conference, this article explores issues of authority, representation, and offense in global Catholic and South Asian Studies. Focusing on the act of foot washing by Dalit Catholics, the article examines how scholarly offense is linked to particular claims of representational authority. The article also puts this discussion within the context of contemporary debates about Western portrayals of Indian culture and society.

The Tying Of The Ceremonial Wedding Thread: A Feminist Analysis Of “Ritual” And “Tradition” Among Syro-Malabar Catholics In India, Sonja Thomas

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article presents a feminist analysis of patriarchy persisting in Catholicism of the Syro-Malabar rite in Kerala. The article specifically considers the impact of charismatic Catholicism on women of the Syro-Malabar rite and argues that it is important to interrogate this new face of religiosity in order to fully understand how certain rituals are allowed to change and be fluid, while others, especially concerning female sexuality, are enshrined as “tradition” which often restricts the parameters for women’s empowerment and may reinforce caste and patriarchal hegemonies preventing feminist solidarity across different religious- and caste-based groups.

Dalit Catholic Home Shrines In A North Indian Village, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines three Catholic home shrines in a Dalit community in North Indian and argues that it is misleading to think that home shrines and other collections of material objects are somehow static conveyors of meaning. “Meaning” can mean many things or nothing at all, depending upon the terms we are using and the scholarly methods we deploy. The crucial aspect of Dalit Catholic home shrines is that they are literally open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to touching and being touched. Their significance—their meaning—depends not on decoding their structure or symbolic logic, but interacting with them as part of …

The Grace Of God And The Travails Of Contemporary Indian Catholicism, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay discusses the challenges faced by Indian Catholicism, particularly as it seeks to adapt to and in contemporary, post-colonial India through the process or program of what is called inculturation, a self-conscious program of adaptation to Indian religion and culture. Since Indian Catholicism is constituted by so many irreducible persons-in-relation, the article focuses on the life of the Catholic priest, Swami Ishwar Prasad in whose life we may chart something of the inculturation movement and the Catholic tradition as it is found in North India region, in one rather long and rich lifetime connecting two centuries. The article seeks …

In Continuity With The Past: Indigenous Environmentalism And Indian Christian Visions Of Flora, James Ponniah

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article considers whether Indian Christianity can be said to have a distinctive ecological vision. The first two parts of the article examine Christian environmentalism in two native forms of Indian Christianity: Tamil Christianity and Tribal Christianity. Continuing with the theme of conformity to the local culture—though of the elite—the third part of the article investigates how Christian Ashrams function as dynamic centers for ecological praxis. The last part of the article considers how contemporary Indian Christian communities can respond to the ecological challenges confronting them.

Antoniyar Kōvil: Hindu-Catholic Identity At The St. Anthony Shrine In St. Mary’S Co-Cathedral, Chennai, Pj Johnston

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article combines ethnographic description of the practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the observation that this material cannot be understood using the standard world religions paradigm that essentializes Christianity as exclusivistic. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine in light of premodern and Vatican II templates for inculturation and the negotiation of religious difference, the article highlights overlap between Tamil Hinduism and the Tamil Popular Catholicism of the site to argue that the beliefs and practices documented should inform descriptive and normative accounts of Catholic Christianity. Because Tamil …

Pilgrimage And Its Dual Functions In Iranian Shiitsm, Zahra Khoshk Jan

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Salvation is the main concern not only for theistic religions but also for atheistic ones, therefore, all of them try to offer doctrines for achieving both salvation and redemption in this world or in another world. Followers of the Twelver Shiism strongly believe in salvation through the Imam. Imamat and Imam, do not just refer to a special person, more than that, they involve a spiritual / worldly doctrine toward a complete and multilateral salvation, and also socio-political leadership. One of the important parts of this doctrine that involves spiritual / worldly salvation is intercession via religious rituals like praying, …

Modern Megachurch Organization In The United States (2005-2013) : An Exploratory Organizational Study Of The American Megachurch Phenomenon., Robert Lee Shelby Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation study explores the applicability of two for-profit organizational theories on a non-profit sector. Theoretical concepts from organizational ecology (OE) and new institutional sociology (NIS) provide the framework for exploring modern megachurches as an organizational phenomenon in the United States between 2005 and 2013. Modern megachurches are modern in the sense they really began to be an organizational population starting in the 1970s and 1980s. These churches are distinctively from the Protestant Christian tradition having 2,000 or more attendees (Thumma & Travis, 2007; Hartford Institute for Religion Research, n.d.). Three empirical chapters test several hypotheses germane to these aforementioned …

Rising Against The “Enemies Of The Church”: The Dynamics Of Russian Desecularization And The Making Of Its Punitive Regime, Rachel Lynn Schroeder

Dissertations

This study makes an original contribution to theorizing desecularization, which Karpov (2010) defines as “a process of counter-secularization, through which religion reasserts its societal influence in reaction to previous and/or co-occurring, secularizing processes.” Existing theory states that desecularization is agency driven, involves social actors and activists with specific interests, ideologies and strategies. However, the theory does not explain the dynamics whereby desecularization takes place and a particular desecularizing regime—in structural and normative form and symbolic and discursive content—develops through social action and achieves hegemonic status. This dissertation fills this important gap by asking: How and why, in the anomic post-Soviet …

What All Americans Should Know About Women In The Muslim World: An Introduction, Amy Y. Evrard

What All Americans Should Know About Women in the Muslim World

This brief introduction to the “What All Americans Should Know About Women in the Muslim World” series provides information about women in the Muslim world, why they are important for Americans to understand, some challenges that arise in the study of Muslim women, and what these particular papers bring to bear on the topic.

Tradition And Transition: American Orthodox Jewish Women Preparing And Becoming Sexually Active Within Marriage, Shoshannah D. Frydman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this project is to expand knowledge about the lived experience of married Orthodox Jewish women’s preparation and transition into sexual activity in marriage. When Orthodox women get married, they are undergoing a significant shift, for many, this is their first experience having a sexual relationship. In addition to the prohibition of premarital sexual behavior, the Orthodox Jewish community has a number of rituals, laws, and practices specifically related to menstruation and sexual relations within marriage. These laws, taharat hamishpacha, or family purity, are a set of laws and practices that regulate sex within marriage for both …

The Relative Impact Of Psychosocial Well-Being And Mental Health On The Relationship Between Economic Circumstance And Religiosity, Veronica Momjian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Employing Norris and Inglehart’s concept of existential security as a theoretical framework, this dissertation utilizes three data points from the Americans’ Changing Lives study (1986, 1994 and 2011) to interrogate the link between the economic circumstance and religiosity. More specifically, the mediating impact of psychosocial well-being and mental health on religiosity are explored.

This dissertation hypothesizes that individuals employ religious coping strategies to deal with the stress of economic uncertainty; and when that uncertainty subsides, so too does religiosity. The results of this study show that, on average, religiosity increases during times of economic instability, and decreases when the economy …

The Perceived Need For Spiritual Development Among Female Church Of Christ Students At Harding University, Anessa Westbrook

Discernment: Theology and the Practice of Ministry

This work explores how female students perceive their need for personal spiritual development. In a male-dominant structure, women may question their need to develop spiritually. Three areas of college life were investigated to see how they influenced female students’ perception of their own need for spiritual development: pre-college experiences, classroom experiences, and co-curricular religious activities. The research questions focused on these three areas in an effort to identify what was most effective in achieving spiritual growth among female students from a Church of Christ background. A survey was conducted among a sample of 610 sophomore female and male students.

Results …

The Oval Office Is Ready For Madame President: Predictors And Support, Brittney E. Souza

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The 2016 United States Presidential Election brings the revolutionary idea of a woman president with the Democratic candidate of Hillary Clinton. The current opposition for a woman president has been generalized gender stereotypes that she will be incompetent, too sensitive, temperamental and fickle with other world leaders. Many studies show that these arguments lack evidence in current female leaders and many commanding women in democracies have proven to be sufficient leaders to their male counterparts. Judeo-Christian traditions have permeated political voting and has acted as an important role in American public opinion on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. These …

Honor Killing Attitudes Among San Jose State University Students, Pedja Ilic

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

This study examines honor killing attitudes amongst a sample of sixty graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State University and offers a systematic review of published academic literature on honor killings. It hypothesizes that students who strongly adhere to patriarchal traditionalism are more likely to endorse legitimacy of honor killings, controlling for gender, education, family size, religion, religiosity/religious conviction, and female chastity expectations. Descriptive findings suggest that the majority of respondents disagree that honor murders are justified, regardless of circumstances, dependent variable honor killing attitudes. Respondents also report negative attitudes toward authority and …

Eveiluating Secularism And The Treatment Of Muslim Women: A Cross-Cultural Study Of France, The United States And India, Bridget Stack

International Affairs Senior Theses

Secularism, although linked with ideals of democracy and equality, does not always result in the equal, treatment by the government and under the law, of all religious peoples. There are many types of secularism, but the three types examined in this paper are hard secularism, moderate secularism, and soft secularism. Hard secularism discourages religious visibility and attempts to keep religion in the private sphere. Soft secularism values religious visibility and encourages religious visibility, pushing religion to enter the public sphere. Moderate secularism takes a neutral stance, not encouraging religion to enter the public sphere, nor confining religion to the private …

Wesleyanism, Fundamentalism, And The Dones, Mature Christians Who Are Done With The Institutional Church: Two Book Reviews, Craighton Hippenhammer

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Book #1: "Square Peg: Why Wesleyans Aren't Fundamentalists," written by Nazarene and published by the Nazarene Publishing House. Book #2: "Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are DONE with Church but Not Their Faith," by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, which tells why there are mature, highly educated Christians leaving the institutional church. The reasons why they are leaving are for the same four unexpected reasons. While these folks may not be large in numbers, they may be large in impact because they are doers and leaders at all levels of the church, so they may be leading the church …

The Digital Watchmakers: Playing With The Sacred In Video Games, Anthony Langley

Research and Creative Activities Poster Day

With video games establishing itself as a multi-billion dollar industry, academia as a whole has been slowly looking at the medium as an object of study. The field of religious studies has also begun to take notice of it. At face value, this is a great a way to observe concepts of religiosity in a fairly new medium. In spite of this, the same questions are being asked. The first is how are the narrative of games depicting religious motifs? Secondly, what can we learn through the social interactions of people within a digital space about religion? Finally, how are …