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If you were to take a time machine and travel back to the 1980s, Catholic epistemology would look drastically different than it does today, at least in analytic circles. One of those drastic changes relates to whether Catholic epistemology is consistent with Reformed epistemology. Another issue relates to whether St. Thomas Aquinas was a classical evidentialist. In this paper, I survey recent developments in Catholic epistemology. I do this by first looking at Gregory Stacey's recent work arguing the Catholic Church's teaching on faith is best situated in a Reformed epistemological framework. I then engage decades old objections to Reformed epistemology from a Catholic perspective. I respond to these objections partly by surveying recent work by Catholic epistemologists. The paper then takes a turn to look at the recent scholarship on Aquinas' epistemology. I show that there is now an emerging consensus that Aquinas belongs not to a hard evidentialist camp as it was previously thought, but rather an externalist friendly tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the early incorporation of reinforced concrete in the architecture of Historicism in Austria–Hungary. Spanning the late 19th to early 20th centuries, the research illuminates the period's stylistic pluralism and the transformative impact of reinforced concrete. The paper examines the integration of reinforced concrete into traditional forms, providing detailed case studies and architectural examples. It navigates through various aspects, including the evolution of reinforced concrete during the historicist period, its adoption in notable structures, and its documentation in contemporary literature. Case studies, such as the Lutheran Church in Battyánd (now Puconci, Slovenia), the Roman Catholic Church in Topolya (now Bačka Topola, Serbia), and the former Synagogue in Český Krumlov, Czechia, showcase the innovative ways reinforced concrete addressed structural challenges while adhering to historicist aesthetics. The research concludes by reflecting on the transformative role of reinforced concrete in challenging the conventions of Historicism, paving the way for modern architectural expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the opinions of Professor Hans Küng about the Islamic-Christian relationships. According to Küng, peace could only be achieved through peace among religions, dialogue and understanding. He also tackles such topics as the attitudes of the Catholics and Protestants toward Islam, Islam's Sacred Law, and the concept of extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

This paper argues that it cannot be fitting to blame God. I show that divine immutability, even on a weak conception, implies that God's ethical character cannot change. I then argue that blame aims at a change in the ethical character of the one blamed. This claim is directly intuitive, explains a wide set of intuitions about when blame is unfitting, and is implied by most of the theories blame offered in the philosophical literature. Since blame targeted at God aims to change God's ethical character, an impossibility, such blame is not fitting. I then draw on this conclusion to sketch a new theodicy. I argue that a necessary condition on being blameworthy is that one can be blamed under some possible condition. So, God cannot be blameworthy. Further, I argue that if someone cannot be blameworthy, then they cannot do wrong. Wrong actions tend to make us blameworthy, but since God cannot be blameworthy nothing can tend to make him blameworthy – God cannot do wrong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the danger of perlocutionary dominion in Catholic writing on trans issues specifically the empowerment of cisgender voices and disempowerment of transgender voices.

For all their interest as social phenomena, nations and nationalism have proven to be difficult terms to define, which has resulted in a lack of consensus among scholars working on these subjects. In this paper, it is my intention to expose the deep chasm that engulfs our present knowledge about what nations are. My method for achieving this goal comprises a critical engagement with the most popular definitions of nations and nationalism based upon a single hypothetical premise: that the Holy See of the Catholic Church, with its seat in Vatican City, is a nation‐state which represents a purported Catholic nation. The results of this study suggest that current approaches to the definition of nations and nationalism – be they based on alleged objective criteria, voluntary association, political organization, communal imagination, or organizational patterns – are generally incapable of dismissing the claim of Catholics to nationhood. Despite this fact, certain elements sketched within some of these definitions might hold the key to developing more precise and usable definitions of these two concepts in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aquinas's thoughts about the human soul present us with a puzzle. On the one hand, Thomas has been applauded within the analytic tradition as an anti‐dualistic thinker, who emphasises the animal nature of human beings and denies that there could be disembodied human persons. Yet on the other hand he holds, as a faithful Catholic theologian, that the human soul survives death, and maintains that the post‐mortem soul, prior to its reunification with the body is the subject of characteristically personal intellectual activities. This paper reviews the state of the debate regarding whether these commitments of Aquinas's can be reconciled, and concludes that they cannot in his own terms. However, a recognisably thomist approach to the post‐mortem survival of the soul is available, proceeding on the basis that to be rationally ensouled is to have a life‐story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on intersections of medical ethics and religious commitments by charting conceptions of the Catholic doctor in French and English‐language normative texts from the mid‐nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century. Behavioural norms for doctors were increasingly emphasised in writings on pastoral medicine, especially regarding obstetrics and advice on sexual hygiene, with the Ten Commandments and the Sacraments forming the initial ethical framework. From the 1890s, Catholic medical deontology emerged as a genre in its own right, reflecting a distinct identity of Catholic doctors in medical faculties and in their own professional societies. Simultaneously, the range of topics broadened. While traditional issues of reproductive ethics such as medical abortion and emergency baptism remained central concerns, eugenic sterilisation and euthanasia posed new challenges. Catholic doctors were now expected to take on a social role that went beyond the care of their individual patients, especially in questions of population politics. A popular contributor to the eugenics debate was the French medical scientist Alexis Carrel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic and religious differentials in labour market outcomes within many countries have been remarkably persistent. Yet one very well‐known differential—the Catholic/Protestant unemployment differential in Northern Ireland—has largely (although not completely) disappeared. This paper charts its decline since the early 1980s and examines potential explanations using Census data from 1991, 2001 and 2011 together with annual survey data. These data span the ending of The Troubles, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the introduction of fair employment legislation, growth in hidden unemployment and major structural changes in Northern Ireland. We assess the potential impact of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholics normally approach the Eucharist with great love and devotion. The paper looks at how, through the character, Papa, the reality of this love and devotion to the Eucharist is captured by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Adichie, in her novel, Purple Hibiscus. The novel reveals that while Papa, in various ways, shows great love and devotion to Christ in the Eucharist, his devotion remains inauthentic: it does not lead him to a love of this same Christ in his neighbour. The work, therefore, underscores not only the nexus between theology and creative literature, but also, in a special way, the social implications of the Eucharist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated the impact of religiosity on accrual and real earnings management. Unlike most previous studies which consider this issue in a multi‐religious setting, we use a mono‐religious setting, specifically Poland where the Roman Catholic Church holds a dominant position. Thus, we are able to study the impact of religiosity on earnings management ignoring the impact of different religious denominations magnified by cultural factors. Our study focuses on the impact the Catholic religion has on earnings management. A novelty of this study is our proxy for religiosity. We use the communicantes ratio applicable only to Catholic and Orthodox denominations. This study contributes to the literature by providing a broader picture of the impact of religiosity on earnings management. Based on a sample of Polish companies, we find that Catholicism positively (negatively) influences the level of accrual (real) earnings management. We carefully examine the issue of differences between religiosity and personal faith and highlight the problems related to selecting a proxy for religiosity. The results indicate that a firm's preferred earnings management strategy depends heavily on the values shared by the national community. The majority of previous studies find that religiosity has a negative (positive) impact on accrual (real) earnings management. We provide empirical evidence that this is not always the case. There exists a setting in which the impact of religiosity is opposite, and the mechanisms through which religiosity influences earnings management are much more complicated than what was previously assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Francoist state, in collusion with the Church, tried to domesticate women's bodies and encode dressing patterns in accordance with Catholic moral doctrine. This article interrogates the normative notion of femininity in Francoism, focusing on ecclesiastical discourse and Catholic dress code. The Church dictated dressing norms, and the Franco regime sanctioned to a great extent its sartorial parameters. This paper also explores how women embodied gender ideals and sartorial patterns. I argue that foreign (im)moral influences that fissured normative discourses and sartorial practices from the 1950s onwards, after the international rehabilitation of the dictatorship and the transition from a society marked by an autarkic economic policy to a consumer society. This historical analysis suggests that efforts of (wo)men in positions of power within the Francoist regime and the Catholic Church to control the infiltration of other models and fashions were increasingly unsuccessful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When U.S. respondents to soda surveys are asked to report their attendance at religious services, approximately 40% of Protestants and 50% of Catholics claim to attend church in any given week. These survey findings have been widely disseminated. They are prominently and broadly cited though out scholarly, popular and textbook writing on American religion. Such extensive interest makes it all the more important to investigate whether these rates give a true or a distorted picture of religious practice in the United States. A recent paper has shaken confidence in the self-reported church attendance rates. Using counts of actual attendees at religious services rather than self-reports, the study has argued that the true weekly U.S. church attendance rate is approximately half the rate implied by the self-reports. The line of investigation is continued by collecting count-based church attendance data from an additional 31 Catholic dioceses. Including 17 dioceses reported on in the original paper, one is able to calculate count-based church attendance rates in 48 U.S. Catholic dioceses.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse income differences between Catholic and Protestant families in Northern Ireland (NI) using Family Expenditure Survey micro-data. The paper's film conclusion is that there is much greater inequality within the Catholic and Protestant communities than there is between them. It's second conclusion, based upon econometric analysis of data for full-time employees, is that the lower mean income of Catholics, relative to Protestants, could be entirely explained in terms of different rates of reward attached to a given set of labour market characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interplay between culture and Christianity by detailing the history, experience, and impact of the Charismatic Catholic Renewal in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1985, the PNG Catholic Bishops' Conference approved the charismatic movement as one of the authentic movements for spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church in PNG. However, the conference stressed this renewal not to be made independent or outside of the Church. In this article I discuss how in Bougainville the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) has been predominantly operating 'outside' the institutional Catholic Church, drawing upon both Catholic and cultural logics to mobilise devotees across Bougainville towards renewal and political change. In particular, I will focus on various local Marian movements, elucidating the power and force of the CCR in contexts of Bougainville's civil war (1988–1998). In doing so, this paper will explore what Catholicism and CCR may contribute to discussions about the positioning of culture within Christianity, at the same time showing how charismatic Marian devotion invites reassessment of recent prevailing discussions on cultural 'continuity' versus 'rupture', as well as doctrinal boundaries held so dearly by the CCR and the Roman Catholic Church in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Catholic Diocese of Fukuoka holds documents from the late 1920s when the Diocese was newly established. The documents show how construction of church buildings were carried out in the early days of the Diocese. Madarajima church and Yobuko church were rebuilt in 1929. Both were built using the method of relocation and reuse of wooden church buildings, which became disused due to rebuilding. Study of the documents revealed that old church structures were purposely reused because it could provide a church of Gothic Revival style with rib‐vaulted ceiling and also reduce the construction cost. Gothic Revival style with rib‐vaulted ceiling was the standard of church design in Japan since the late 19th century until the 1920s. Because of this tradition, parish priest as well as parishioners of both of Madarajima and Yobuko churches desired Gothic style with the rib‐vaulted ceiling for the new church buildings. The Diocesan documents showed that the parish priest as well as parishioners of Madarajima Church contributed cash to building funds on top of the deposit of the parish in order to materialize the new church of Gothic Revival style and the Diocese covered the deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a reply from the author to sociologists Michael Hout and Andrew M. Greeley for their comment on his analysis of the General Social Survey data on church attendence. Hout's and Greeley's point that a long time series is more persuasive than a short time series is one with which all can agree. As the author has argued here, there is evidence for secularization even in the longer view. At the same time, a major point in the author's original paper bears repeating, These results do not support the idea that organized religion in the United States will eventually disappear. They do suggest however, that there are social forces at work pushing people away from religious involvement. These forces, be they a crisis in religious authority among Catholics or changes in family structure that show up as cohort effects among Protestants, are appropriately referred to as "secularizing." There is evidence of secularization not in the sense of religious extinction but in the sense of social forces pushing in a secularizing direction in the data on attendance at religious services.

The present paper consists of a contrastive corpus‐based study of the (analytical) Resultative Construction (henceforth, RC) in culinary contexts (e.g. cut thin, whisk to a foam, roll into a ball). Four languages are investigated: two Germanic (i.e. Dutch and English) and two Romance languages (i.e. French and Spanish). Based on a sample of 1000 occurrences of the RC (by language) retrieved from our home‐made comparable corpus of cooking recipes, this study shows that: (i) both 'strong' (i.e. aspect‐shifting) and 'weak' (i.e. non‐aspect‐shifting) RCs are possible in the four languages studied (Washio 1997) – although the latter is said to be the only pattern available in Romance (Fontanals 2000; Mateu 2012; Bigolin & Ausensi 2021); (ii) a greater diversity of verbs occurs in the RC in Dutch and English, which suggests that the construction is still more productive in Germanic languages, even in culinary contexts; and (iii) in Romance, the productivity of the verb slot in the RC depends to a large degree on whether the resultative predicate can be encoded by a prepositional phrase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1980s, a growing body of academic literature has focused upon the 'evangelicalisation' of Latin America and other, less affluent world regions (e.g. Africa and Southeast Asia). Valuable for exploring a host of interconnected social, political, economic and cultural practices, this research has consistently pondered the implications of changing religious affiliations and what the effects of these changes might hold for society and space more generally. In Brazil, for example - with more Catholics than any country in the world and a rapidly growing evangelical population - researchers suggest that the country's spiritual shift may bring with it significant political and cultural change, particularly in the impoverished urban communities (i.e. favelas) where evangelical churches are most prominent. While numerous accounts exist to document these changes and reflect upon their potentialities, few geographers, as of yet, have contributed to these debates. Still unknown are the spatial changes that accompany this spiritual shift, the ways that neighbourhoods and cities are changing, and the day-to-day effects of new and syncretistic religious practices. Through a case study of a favela community in northeastern Brazil, this paper considers the socio-spatialities of religious diversity and change within Brazil's contemporary urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intersecting roles of Catholic religious orders and psychiatrists in the development of residential care for people with an intellectual disability in Ireland during the fifty-year period after political autonomy from the UK in 1922. The context is the postcolonial development of the country and the crucial role played by the Catholic Church through several of its religious orders in developing and staffing intellectual disability services. The paper will consider the divergent positions of church and psychiatry in the foundation and contemporary position of what was originally known as the care of people with a mental handicap nursing in the 1960s. The development of this form of nursing during the mid-twentieth century can be seen as part of a wider postcolonial response to health and social care by the newly independent Irish state. The author argues that intellectual disability nursing in Ireland has been nuanced by association with the nation's struggle for self-determination from colonial oppression through adoption of a religious identity. This conflation of education and social care combined with a specific form of Catholic nursing has left an enduring legacy on the service provision to people with an intellectual disability in contemporary Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effect of religious observance and affiliation to the dominant religion (Catholicism) on trust in institutions and toward others, and market attitudes. The analysis is performed using a Latin American database of 20,000 respondents from 2004 by means of ordered probit models. The most interesting results are: (i) Trust toward others is positively correlated with both religious observance and Catholic affiliation (and practice). (ii) There is a positive correlation between trust in the government, in the police, in the armed forces, in the judiciary and in the banking system and religious practice in general. Identical positive findings are obtained for Catholic affiliation and practice, although they may be affected by a majority effect. Moreover, there is no evidence to support the hypotheses of a negative effect of religion on social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that discourse on community as a socio-political problem needs to be located within historical, institutional, and socio-structural contexts if it is to be properly understood. In particular, it suggests that the role of religion in promoting forms of communitarian discourse and practice needs to be given greater attention than it has hitherto received within the social sciences. The article pursues this argument through examination of the religious discourse on community cultivated and promoted by the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By providing an analysis of its role in Catholic responses to three major socio-political crises in Ireland between the 1890s and 1960s, the paper suggests that not only does socio-religious discourse on community constitute a powerful alternative to secular social-scientific discourses, but that such discourse is particularly effective in helping to constitute specific groups as communities, given favourable sociological conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the ways in which accounts from Glasgow Catholics diverge from those of Protestants and explores the reasons why people leave jobs, including health grounds. Accounts reveal experiences distinctive to Catholics, of health-threatening stress, obstacles to career progression within (mainly) private-sector organisations, and interactional difficulties which create particular problems for (mainly) middle class men. This narrows the employment options for upwardly mobile Catholics, who may then resort to self-employment or other similarly stressful options. The paper considers whether the competence of Catholics or Catholic cultural factors are implicated in thwarting social mobility among Catholics or, alternatively, whether institutional sectarianism is involved. We conclude that, of these options, theories of institutional sectarianism provide the hypothesis which currently best fits these data. In Glasgow, people of indigenous Irish descent are recognisable from their names and Catholic background and are identified as Catholic by others. Overt historical exclusion of Catholics from middle class employment options now seems to take unrecognised forms in routine assumptions and practices which restrict Catholic employment opportunities. It is argued that younger Catholics use education to overcome the obstacles to mobility faced by older people and circumvent exclusions by recourse to middle class public-sector employment. This paper aims to link historical, structural and sectarian patterns of employment experience to accounts of health and work, and in so doing to contribute to an explanation for the relatively poor health of Catholic Glaswegians with Irish roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that a state’s abortion policy is determined by the strength of interest advocacy groups and political forces. The greater the membership in the National Abortion Rights Action League, the percentage of female state legislators and the percentage of Democratic female legislators, the less restrictive a state’s abortion policy. The greater a state’s population that are Roman Catholics, the more restrictive a state’s abortion policy. The paper also estimates the impact abortion restrictions have on a state’s abortion rate. The empirical results show that abortion restrictions have no statistically significant impact on a state’s abortion rate. A state’s abortion restrictions do not significantly increase out-of-state abortions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While membership in Catholic religious orders of women in the United States is declining, demographic data on religious orders worldwide show that growth and decline patterns vary significantly by continent. The data presented in this research note demonstrate a positive relationship between female opportunity in society and the decline of female religious orders, thereby supporting the argument that religious orders serve as avenues of social mobility for women. Since orders are growing in those nations with the smallest percentage of Catholics in the population, as well as with the smallest proportion of religious women, this paper concludes that the prognosis for the future of religious orders is not optimistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The full time religious professional in a religious collectivity occupies a strategic position in the social system in which he is professionally involved. The multifarious tasks in which he engages are to be seen as due, in part, to the diffuseness of his responsibilities, a diffuseness which is characteristic of leadership roles in any social system. The coordinating and harmonizing facets of any leadership role demand this kind of generalized or diffuse role definition. While this diffuseness is characteristic of any leadership role in any social system, goals or objectives of the social system which sustains the full time professional religious leader are themselves more diffuse and less amenable to rational evaluation than are the goals of most organizations in this society. In its own understanding, the church exists to cure souls, to save souls, and/or to witness to God's saving act in Jesus as the Christ; hence, as conceived internally, its ultimate goal transcends moral, cognitive and emotive goals or objectives, although dimensions of each goal are involved in the objectives of the social system that constitutes the church and in the theological understanding that informs these goals.

In this article, the author describes how Leo Pfeffer, the author of the paper entitled, "Issues That Divide," has contributed among other things a unique, highly useful, and systematic cataloguing of the principal issues around which Catholic-non-Catholic tensions and conflicts have developed and exist in America today. This brief postscript to his paper is intended to highlight some of the sociological and social psychological implications of what he has to say on this subject. As it is implied, the essential nature of Catholic-non-Catholic conflict makes it unlikely that such conflict will disappear in the natural course of events in the foreseeable future. Its control requires a more adequate understanding of its process than the social sciences can supply at present.

This study seeks to understand the effects of informal constraints, particularly religious denominations, on corporate governance. Using archival data from a panel sample of 32 countries-between 2006 and 2010-we find that a higher proportion of Protestantism is associated with stronger corporate governance after controlling for cultural, economic, legal, and institutional factors. This study provides empirical support for the socio-cultural theory, which posits that socio-cultural variables such as religion are associated with the level of agency costs (Charreaux, 2004, Corporate governance theories: From micro theories to national systems theories, Working Paper). The findings of this study contribute to the corporate governance, accounting, finance, and management literature by showing that social norms, especially religion, have a strong effect on corporate governance practices. Moreover, this study provides insights for policy makers who are interested in enhancing corporate governance, allowing them to strengthen formal constraints such as rule of law for countries where there is a low proportion of Protestants, in order to improve corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the 'White Australia policy', minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an 'alien' race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous 'white' settler society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposition that Jesus was 'Bad, Mad or God' is central to C.S. Lewis's popular apologetics. It is fêted by American Evangelicals, cautiously endorsed by Roman Catholics and Protestants, but often scorned by philosophers of religion. Most, mistakenly, regard Lewis's trilemma as unique. This paper examines the roots of this proposition in a two thousand year old theological and philosophical tradition (that is, aut Deus aut malus homo), grounded in the Johannine trilemma ('unbalanced liar', or 'demonically possessed', or 'the God of Israel come amongst his people'). Jesus can only be understood in the context of the Jewish religious categories he was born into; therefore, for Lewis, Jesus is who he reveals himself to be. Jesus' self-understanding reflects his identity, his triune salvific role; this is for Lewis, the transposed reality of divine Sonship. Reason and logic are paramount here, reflected in the structure of Lewis's argument. Lewis's trilemma is not so much a proof of God's existence, but a question, a dilemma, where each and every person must come to a decision. For all its perceived faults, its simplistic language, Lewis's trilemma still is a very successful piece of Christian apologetic, grounded in a serious philosophical and theological tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles comments on social deprivation and religiosity. This research report adventitiously ignores its heritage in another respect, which is not uncharacteristic. It is by now a common and established finding that measures of religiosity are correlated with sex especially among Catholics, age, and education. The selection of indices of deprivation and to a lesser degree, of religiosity, is adventitious. This is attributable in part to the fact that this is a secondary analysis, but the difficulty arises frequently even where this is not the case. What is the validity for using age, femaleness and less education as an index for perceived state of deprivation. A rationale is indeed offered in the paper, as is not always the case and the authors are to be commended that they have recognized that this is indeed a question to be answered. The rationale that older age, femaleness and less education are indices of deprivation is plausible. But equally plausible would be the rationale that the young, males, and the more highly educated are likely to perceive greater deprivations.

This article analyses evangelical identity politics and more generally religious competition in contemporary Mexico through a specific focus on the construction, dissemination and imagination of space. The imagination and occupation of a particular space determines the specific identity of its followers. Since the identity-space construct is primarily anchored in the political, religious, economic and funerary contexts in most societies, these four rubrics are woven together to assess of the evangelical Christian space-identity construct. The paper furthers research on religious space creation, dissemination and demarcation amongst evangelical Christians in Mexico, and it emphasises the extent to which the strategies of spatial expansion can lead to rigorous intra-faith competition and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will seek to explore some of the implications of the new evangelization from an ecclesiological perspective. A key question is, what is an appropriate ecclesiological context for the new evangelization? Any conclusions or recommendations about how to respond and contextualize the new evangelization need to be grounded in an appropriate ecclesiology; one that sits well with contemporary Catholic scholarship, especially in light of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Following Dulles, no single approach to ecclesiology can fully explain the complex nature of the Church. Taking the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium as a departure point a number of perspectives will be addressed, but an argument will be made for understanding the new evangelization within an ecclesiology of communion and of discipleship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Northern Ireland, most research on the impact upon children of living through the ‘troubles’ and in a divided society has assumed that children are from either the Catholic or Protestant community. There has been very little research with children from cross-community families who have one parent from a Catholic background and one from a Protestant background. It is known, however, that these children are over-represented in the public care system in Northern Ireland. The study reported in this paper addresses this gap in knowledge by exploring the experiences and views of children from cross-community families who are in public care in Northern Ireland. The study has key messages for the development of services for looked after children from cross-community families, if these are to be delivered in accordance with legislative duties in Northern Ireland and in an anti-sectarian manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The higher education sector in Northern Ireland has been fully involved in the public policies designed to enhance equality. Starting with measures designed to secure greater employment between Catholics and Protestants, known as fair employment, the policies are now designed to promote equality of opportunity across nine designated groups together with the promotion of ‘good relations’ on the grounds of religion and race. The paper examines the implementation of this new policy framework in the universities and suggests that progress to date has been fairly limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Catholic liberation theology seemed poised to become a mass movement in Latin America, whereas evangelical Protestantism did not seem likely to ever receive broad popular appeal. This paper will explore possible reasons why most of the poor in Latin America preferred to join non-Catholic churches, instead of the so-called Christian Base Communities (CEBs) or other grassroot groups connected with liberation theology. It does so by a review of scientific literature and by presenting empirical data from field research in Guatemala City. Using a neo-Weberian approach, I will argue that various non-Catholic churches foster elements of asceticism and self-improvement, which provide an important asset for the poor in Guatemala in their quest to better their lives both economically and spiritually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past thirty years Catholics in Northern Ireland have experienced unprecedented upward social mobility. Some commentators have suggested that this has led Catholics not merely to adopt the lifestyles of the middle class but also to modify their constitutional preferences, leading to a decline in nationalism. In this paper I examine the relationship between social mobility, on the one hand, and, on the other, both constitutional preferences and political (left or right wing) preferences among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, using survey data collected in 1996. There is no evidence that Catholics' constitutional preferences are related to their mobility experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally thought that processes of modernization generic to industrialized societies have resulted in a process of secularization with respect to conventional religious participation and observance in most Western countries. It is not at all clear, however, whether the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe have followed this pattern. In this we paper we examine whether levels of religiosity in ten post-communist societies – five generally Catholic in orientation and five Orthodox – are consistent with secularization theory, or whether instead they display, as some have suggested, the impact of seven decades of atheistic communism followed by a recent resurgence among the young. For this purpose we examine denominational membership and church attendance using descriptive and multivariate analysis of large-scale national sample surveys conducted in the mid-1990s. We find that age and educational differences in participation rates follow patterns expected on the basis of secularization theory with no evidence of resurgence among younger groups. Also, however, Catholic participation rates are significantly higher than Orthodox ones, indicating the importance of denomination in understanding patterns of religiosity in the post-communist context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. This paper provides new empirical evidence about the existence of a Catholic wage premium. A simple allocation-of-time model provides two explanations for the observation that those persons raised in the Catholic religion earn more than their non-Catholic counterparts. The Catholic religion may add to a person's stock of human capital and/or it may act as a signal of desirable labor market characteristics such as discipline, honesty, trustworthiness, and high motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether and how the association between religious homogamy (i.e., whether spouses have the same religious affiliation) and marital satisfaction varies across religious affiliations by utilizing a unique context that four large religious groups (i.e., Buddhists, Protestants, Catholics, and religious nones) coexist in South Korea. Our results show that while religious homogamy has a positive relationship with marital satisfaction among Protestants and Catholics, there is no such association among Buddhists. This study also reveals that higher levels of religious attendance intensify the positive relationship between religious homogamy and marital satisfaction only among Protestants. Moreover, religious heterogamy is positively associated with marital relationships among religious nones compared to religious homogamy. However, this pattern held only for religious nones who married Buddhists or Catholics. We discuss the implications of our findings for research on religion and marriage from cross‐cultural perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of socio-economic achievement is elaborated through an analysis of data from eight NORC surveys, combined to create a sample of members of six religio-ethnic groups. Correlational analysis indicates findings similar to earlier studies. Using Methodists as the comparison group, Scheffe tests indicate that Jews differ in education, occupational achievement and income, Episcopalians in occupational prestige, and Baptists in education and income, but no significant differentials existed for Irish and Italian Catholics. Further analysis using decomposition suggests that traditional Jewish emphasis on education is an important factor in explaining these differences, but that the factors included in the model explain only a small part of the Baptist and Episcopalian differentials. It is suggested that religious values and religious perspectives are important considerations in understanding these findings.
This paper will review research since 1960, and will seek to define the relationship among several social structural determinants of status within each of several religio-ethnic groups. Our guiding hypothesis is that religious values and beliefs interact differently with other variables across these groups in shaping socioeconomic achievement, and decomposition will be used to specify the effects of background factors on achievement among various religio-ethnic groups. The findings reported in this paper are consistent with those of earlier research concerning religio-ethnic differences in education, occupational achievement and income. Scheffe analysis indicated that the hypothesized differences in the relationships among the determinants of socioeconomic achievement are only partly supported. Not only did Irish and Italian Catholics not differ from Methodists on any of the measures used, but Episcopalian and Baptist differentials were smaller than those of Jews. Jews exceed Methodists in income, occupational prestige, and educational achievement,... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Offenbacher's statistical study comparing the school enrollment of German Protestants to Catholics plays a significant role in the articulation of the Weber and Merton theses. The current study provides an overdue correction of obvious flaws in Offenbacher's data. There follows a subsequent reassessment of that recalculated data indicating a now diminished difference between Catholic and Protestant school `preference.' Any remaining disparity between the denominations' school `choice' is seen here as attributable to operative practical factors as opposed to Weber's and Merton's long-standing attribution to differing religious values. The paper argues more generally that the theoretical appeal enjoyed by the conceptually linked Weber and Merton theses in sociology may have invited the all too facile acceptance of idealist interpretation at the expense of practical factors in explanations for discrete denominational behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports that the manifestations of Catholic identity among undergraduates at a private, nondenominational, northeastern university replicate the patterns of communal loyalty evident for Catholics as a whole. The study focuses on the ways in which church attendance differentiates moral and sociopolitical attitudes and values, and also examines whether gender is a significant source of cultural variation. The data used in the analyses are based on a self-administered mail questionnaire sent to a representative random sample of the student population. The findings show that all Catholic respondents are selective in their acceptance of church authority. Regular church attenders, nevertheless, are significantly more likely than less frequent attenders to endorse the Church's teaching on sexual morality, and to identify the influence of their Catholic upbringing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions about Mormons as an identifiable minority. Although the Canadian Constitution of 1982 prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion (as well as ethnic or racial discrimination), examples of religious intolerance continue to be reported by the media. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between tolerance for Mormons and selected religious and non-religious factors. Of particular interest are two social familiarity factors. Data for both Catholics and Anglicans are included for comparative purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two conceptual models have been proposed to describe changes m religious commitment among regional migrants The "dislocation" model predicts that all migrants undergo a decline in commitment after being uprooted from familiar surroundings; the "adaptation" model asserts that commitment among migrants will rise or fall depending on their new region's norms of religious behavior This paper tests these models through an examination of patterns of church attendance and strength of adherence within national samples of white and black Baptists, and white Lutherans. Methodists and Catholics in the United States. Findings confirm the adaptation model's prediction that religious commitment rises among migrants to regions of higher native commitment, such as the South, and fails among migrants to regions of lower commitment, such as the West These results suggest that, contrary to expectation, migration may contribute to the persistence of regional religious differences in the United States.
The purpose of this paper, then, is to test the relative merits of the dislocation and adaptation models, through an examination of variations in religious commitment within a substantial sample of regional migrants and non-migrants in the United States, controlling for denomination and race. It is hypothesized that in this context migrants will tend to conform to their new cultural environments, as the adaptation model predicts, rather than undergo a common decline in religious commitment.
The above findings do not precisely match the results of Wuthnow and Christiano's (1979) study of regional migration and church attendance, the only previous comprehensive study of this topic. Most importantly, Wuthnow and Christiano concluded that white Protestant migrants to the South "are not conforming to the high rates of church attendance characteristic of the South" (1979: 270). This conclusion is contradicted by the data presented here: all white Protestant groups moving to the... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on celibate priest, author and sociologist Andrew M. Greeley's contributions to theory in the sociology of religion, one of two substantive areas in which Greeley has chosen to write extensively on. The other being the sociology of ethnic groups in the United States. The author has discerned and chosen to discuss four substantive themes in Greeley's writings, roughly in chronological order research in the "Protestant Ethics," the sociology of Roman Catholicism, the secularization thesis and denominational membership in society. As early as 1964, Greeley felt justified in calling for a moratorium on the Protestant Ethic research in society. In need achievement, occupational success, income levels and educational attainments, Protestant-Catholic differences were either unproven, insignificant, or in some instances, slightly reversed from the conventional hypotheses. This overall judgment has been sustained by subsequent researchers. Besides clarifying the impact of Catholic elementary, high school and college education on specific Catholic adult religious behavior, Greeley has contributed seven books and numerous articles on the Catholic Church itself. According to the author Greeley is much more convincing as an applied sociologist analyzing critical problems in the changing church than he is as a theorist of Catholic higher education.

This paper considers the causes of the violence that occurred in Northern Ireland from 1968 to early 1971; from the start of the campaign by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) until the opening of the campaign by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Two explanations have been offered for why violence took place during this period. The most popular explanation put forward by journalists, academics, commissions of inquiry, and accepted by British politicians and policymakers, is that violence was a response by the Catholic population to serious and systematic discrimination against them by the Protestants. The second view, put forward by the Protestants, and dismissed by almost everybody else, is that Catholic support for NICRA and the violence associated with the civil rights campaign reflected traditional nationalism. The paper is divided into four parts. The first section presents the conventional account of Catholic grievances. In the second section the economic and political situation of the Catholic minority is examined and it is found that the extent of discrimination against Catholics has been considerably exaggerated. In the third section it is shown that contrary to the popular view nationalism was not declining among the Catholic population and that there was a much greater association between nationalism and NICRA than is generally acknowledged. The fourth section presents a statistical test of the relationship between Catholic grievances, Catholic nationalism and the geographical distribution of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factor analysis is designed for ordering the interrelationship of a number of variables by constructing a smaller number of variables that will adequately account for the correlations among all the original variables. The factors extracted may be viewed as more basic variables that underline the relationships among the manifest variables actually studied. In the original paper, the author examined the concomitants of three dependent variables: family-size preferences, birth intervals, and fertility-planning success. Three factor analyses were performed and reported, one each for samples of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The objective of the paper was to elucidate the structure underlying the concomitants to the three "fertility" variables. On the other hand, the selection of items that have first-order relationships to the fertility variables should tend to emphasize the development of factors with the fertility variables as central items. This should occur since redundant items have been eliminated and the likelihood.

This paper examinee the sustained attempt by Félicité Lamennais to solve the perennial ethical problem of the rapport between liberty and authority. An early apostle of the Romantic reaction of the early 19th century, Lamennais, in his deep-seated yearning for the harmony and religious unity of the medieval world, sought to reconstruct the principle of authority in religion, and, therefore, in society on a broad philosophical base. Using this same philosophical groundwork, he later emerged as a champion of the modern liberties evolving out of the rise of liberalism and the French Revolution. How did such a remarkable transition from theocratic authoritarianism to Catholic liberalism take place? Such themes as tolerance, religion, society, authority, liberty, and history-inter-related elements of political reality--are pieces of the mosaic which Félicité Lamennais labored to bring into being as a major synthesis of theology and philosophy. The originality and the magnitude of the Mennaisian effort had a powerful impact on the subsequent history of Roman Catholicism. The fundamental question of social coexistence, heading in turn to a basically metaphysical reflection upon the nature and sources of society and social being, was the basic issue for Lamennais. The crucial and very contemporary character of the question of unity and plurality within the modern world makes it quite evident that a constant study of the problem, its historical development, and ultimate implications, is readily justifiable and worthwhile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of religious experience provides an example of those strange discontinuities which seem to beset the social sciences. The present paper Is intended as a beginning of this conceptual task. There is an attempt to develop some basic sub-types and ordering dimensions for organizing the variety of experiences to which men attach religious definitions. The conceptual scheme has been informed by data from a sample of Protestant and Roman Catholic church members residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. These data include both quantifiable and qualitative information on the religious experiences of respondents. Where appropriate, these data will be introduced both to indicate the relative frequency of different forms of religious experience and to illustrate how people perceive such experiences. Following many previous writers, it has been suggested that the essential element characterizing religious experience, and distinguishing it from all other human experience, is some sense of contact with a supernatural agency.