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In the literature on religion and assimilation, Muslims are usually categorized into one group without any reference to their differences in terms of religious practice and ethnicity. This paper sheds light on such differences by illustrating the case of Turkish immigrants in the USA, one of the least studied immigrant groups. Based on interviews with practicing and non-practicing Turkish Muslims in Houston, we address the issue of how practices of religion play its role in the assimilation of Turkish immigrants. Data reveal that while Turks in general are fairly well adapted into American society, there are some major differences between practicing and non-practicing Turkish Muslims, even though practically all Turks identify as Muslim.

Global processes present a challenge for scholarly work on religion, necessitating new concepts, theoretical and analytical models, intellectual sensitivity, and imagination. This calls for focusing on (1) cross-border interpenetration of religious organizations, beliefs, and practices; (2) variations in the potential for religious beliefs and institutions to be transported; and (3) the use of multiple frames of reference to examine the dispersion of religious cultures and communities. A presidential panel presents the need for generating new research questions, improving measurement tools, and updating methodological techniques so that social scientists of religion accurately and authentically portray the nature and expression of religion in the 21st century.

are equally modern. Religious organiza tions, historically associated with family life, are the natural venues for construct ing visions of the good family, for practi cal programs of help and support, for conversations with like-minded men and women confronting similar dilemmas, for places to recharge and renew one's own faith, and for support in attempting to re sist the encroachment of paid work on family life. (P. 160)

Based on the first national survey of faith-based social service coalitions in the United States, this article presents data on the degree to which these nonprofit organizations collaborate with other specific organizational types, as well as the range and intensity of these collaborations. In general, faith-based coalitions tend to collaborate most frequently with other faith-based agencies, a pattern especially characteristic of the more religiously expressive ones. However, collaboration with non-faith-based organizations is also quite common. Based on seven organizational characteristics, we are able to predict which faith-based coalitions are most likely to collaborate with different types of organizations: coalitions that have more explicitly religious policies and practices with reference to clients and staffs are less likely to participate in intense collaborations with some types of secular organizations, and consistently less likely to do so with all types of governmental agencies.

Organizational religiosity is analyzed with data from a national survey of faith-based social service coalitions (N = 656). Twenty-one items related to religious practices within these organizations result in three distinct factors: service religiosity, staff religiosity and organizational religiosity scales. Self-defined faith-based coalitions vary widely on all three. OLS analysis regressing 12 coalition attributes on the three scales demonstrates that the religiosity measures often relate to the predictor variables in different ways, although in two cases there is consistency. Government funding is inversely related to all three religiosity measures, and evangelism as a coalition goal is positively related to all three.

Data from the first national study of faith-based social service coalitions ( n = 656) are used to achieve three goals. First, the authors describe their myriad funding sources. Second, they discuss their attitudes toward three major ones: government, foundations, and congregations. Third, they analyze organizational characteristics that correlate with funding sources. Given a paucity of empirical literature on faith-based agencies, the authors depend heavily on that pertaining to secular nonprofits to identify 13 predictor variables that might be related to two funding measures (logged dollars and budget percentage) for each of the four most important funding sources: government, foundations, religious organizations, and individual donors. Predictor variables fall into three clusters: attitudes toward funding source, organizational religiosity, and organizational structural features and activities. The complex findings indicate that dollar amounts and budget percentages are associated with predictor variables in different ways, depending on the source of funds.

Objective. The objective of the research reported in this article is to test four hypotheses concerning government funding among faith-based social service coalitions: that it is positively related to size and organizational professionalism; positively related to attitudes toward government funding; positively related to social activism; and negatively related to organizational religiosity. Method. Our method is the application of OLS and probit analysis to data from a national survey of 656 such organizations. Results. Using three measures of government funding and 12 predictor variables, results are mixed in their support of the size and professionalization hypothesis and generally support the remaining hypotheses. These findings are replicated when we compare coalitions that had and had not applied for government funding. Conclusions. Our findings emphasize that greater religious expressiveness dissuades coalitions from both seeking and receiving government funding, but higher levels of social activism expedite both.

The fact that recent immigrants to the United States continue to participate in the daily life of the society from which they emigrate is true for religious identities and behaviours as well as in political, economic and family life. This paper describes transnational religious ties between immigrants in six American religious congregations; and family, friends and co-religionists in the home country. In addition to monetary exchanges that benefit religious purposes, there are also exchanges of norms, practices, and social capital. The varied pathways whereby remittances are exchanged are also described. The religious exchanges between home and host countries impact global religious systems.

The role of religion in the stages of the migration process has been overlooked by both immigration and sociology of religion scholars. This article draws on the migratory and religious history of a transnational Maya community with members in the western highlands of Guatemala and Houston, Texas. Drawing on field research of Mayas in both the sending and receiving areas, we show how migrants use religion in the following stages of the migration process: 1) decisionmaking; 2) preparing for the trip; 3) the journey; 4) the arrival; 5) the role of the ethnic church in immigrant settlement; and 6) the development of transnational linkages.

The charitable choice provision and President Bush's proposed Faith-Based and Community Initiative have spurred debates regarding government support of faith-based social service programs and their effectiveness. To address the issue of relative effectiveness, the logically prior question of what constitutes a faith-based agency and how they differ from secular providers must be answered. Utilizing data from a mailed survey, this study compares the organizational characteristics of faith-based and secular agencies that provide services to the homeless in Houston, Texas. Results indicate that the two agency types vary significantly across several dimensions including funding sources and preferences, decision-making tools, organizational culture, practices, leadership, and staffing characteristics. In addition, survey data and content analysis of mission statements reveal that 80 percent of faith-based agencies use religious imagery in some form of their “public face” to communicate their religiousness.

Research shows that religion continues to be an important identity marker for new immigrants in the United States. However, immigrant groups differ in the ways they integrate religious and ethnic identities and the emphasis they place on each. In this paper, we argue that majority or minority status of their religious affiliation in the home and host countries is an important, but overlooked, factor in understanding strategies concerning religious and ethnic identities. By comparing two Chinese congregations, a Chinese Buddhist temple and a Chinese Christian church in Houston, Texas, we analyze what happens when an immigrant group moves from majority status in the home country to minority status in the United States (Chinese Buddhists) and when a minority group (Chinese Christians in China) become part of the Christian majority in the United States. We conclude by arguing the importance of going beyond U.S. borders and taking into account factors in their home countries in attempts to understand patterns of adaptation of the new immigrants.

Fictive kin, defined as family-type relationships, based not on blood or marriage but rather on religious rituals or close friendship ties, constitutes a type of social capital that many immigrant groups bring with them and that facilitates their incorporation into the host society. We describe three types of fictive kin systems in different immigrant populations and argue that their functions are similar across various ethnic groups and types of fictive kin relationships. Fictive kin systems expand the network of individuals who provide social and economic capital for one another and thereby constitute a resource to immigrants as they confront problems of settlement and incorporation. While anthropologists have long noted systems of fictive kin in premodern and modernizing societies, sociologists have paid little attention to fictive kin networks. We argue, however, that systems of fictive kin constitute an important part of the social networks that draw immigrants to a particular locale and provide them with the material and social support that enables them to become incorporated into a new and often hostile society. Data are derived from interviews with informants from various immigrant groups in Houston, Texas, and from a Yoruba community in Brooklyn, New York.

In this paper, we utilize GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping data to locate eleven immigrant congregations and the residential addresses of their members in Houston, Texas. Combining this information with ethnographic data allows us to understand how ecological variables impact organizationalcharacteristics of religious institutions. Specifically, we combine GIS and ethnographic data on immigrant congregations in Houston, Texas, to analyze characteristics that make them more parish or niche-like in structure. We demonstrate that the combination of GIS techniques and standard field methods yields the greatest potential to provide a comprehensive understanding of what congregations mean to their members.

Cooptation is used as a conceptual framework for analyzing a case of environmental conflict over a proposed toxic waste site that ended with allegations of betrayal aimed at community leaders who participated in structured negotiations with a waste disposal company. Though the negotiations committee challenging the waste company's proposal was stacked with veteran environmental activists, evidence suggests that they were effectively coopted. However, cooptation eventually failed when local activists not on the committee lost confidence in the negotiating process and accused committee members of “selling out” to the waste company and compromising the interests of the community. As a result of protests and citizen awareness campaigns, the opposition forces successfully convinced the regulatory agency to deny the company's permit. We find that cooptation theory helps to explain the short-lived success of corporate efforts during the early stages of negotiations, as well as the dynamics of failure in the long run. Three major components of cooptation are identified and discussed: (a) channeling, (b) inclusion/participation, and (c) salience control. The eventual failure of the siting process is linked to the latent demise of salience control.

Despite the classic patriarchy of the Roman Catholic church, American Catholic nuns entered into patriarchal bargains that latently gained them access to resources and status within the system. By means of educational advancement and professional careers, encouraged by the male hierarchy as necessary to performing the works of the church, nuns gained both informal power in the system and an awareness of their disadvantaged position. This article analyzes the shifts that have occurred in these bargains during the past 40 years in terms of the submerged networks of feminist consciousness that have existed in Catholic convents for decades. The article concludes with a description of the current crisis occurring within religious orders as they experience a decline in membership and rapidly increasing median ages of members.

The success of Gulen-inspired projects relies on the numerous local circles of businessmen, professionals and workers in Turkish cities, towns and rural areas. The model of the local circles arose within the cemaat, a type of social group that evolved in Turkey after the formation of the Republic and the outlawing of the Sufi orders and the abolishment of the madrasas. Practicing Muslims who wanted to preserve the Islamic heritage while adapting to modernity formed circles around scholars and intellectuals who promoted various approaches such as focusing on Qur’anic studies, the blending of religious devotion with a mild form of nationalism, or individualized spiritual practices. These groups of readers and listeners around pioneering figures were later called cemaats, a grassroots movement of practicing faithful Turkish people who did not want to abandon their faith tradition while embracing the modern age. Within the cemaats were established the sohbets or small groups that have no formal membership, no initiation rites, require no building to convene the group and have no public insignia or recognition of membership. Rather, they consist of people who meet regularly to read Qur’anic commentary, the prophetic tradition and Muslim scholars, to share ideas and needs of people in the group and to determine service projects that the group chooses to support financially.

Fethullah Gulen’s early upbringing in a small village in southeastern Turkey, his early education and exposure to the ideas of Said Nursi, his later participation in Nursi reading circles and his increasing fame as a preacher in Turkey occurred within the context of Turkish history described in the previous chapter. In addition to his training in classical Islamic sciences, he is very much a product of his Turkish nationality and the political events that influenced his six or so decades as a Turkish citizen. In this chapter, I first introduce the reader to those aspects of Mr. Gulen’s early life that formed his later ideas and plans of action. Secondly, I discuss the major beliefs, convictions and priorities that guided both his early and later teachings. Thirdly, I trace the origins of the Gulen movement in Turkey and then its spread to the former Soviet Union countries and ultimately world-wide.

In order to understand the impetus and motivation behind the service commitment and financial support on the part of millions of Turkish people for the Gulen movement, it is necessary to understand certain cultural-religious practices related to philanthropy and charity in Turkish history. It is clear that the movement started in Turkey and that its activities are organized predominantly by Turkish citizens and by Turks in the diaspora around the world. Numerous scholars have concluded, for better or for worse, that the movement is inherently tied to Turkish culture and a specifically Turkish understanding of Islam.

In order to build and sustain the numerous projects associated with the Gulen movement, financial resources are essential. Data presented in Chapter 4 “The Network of Local Circles” describe the mechanisms established within the local circles to generate substantial financial resources. Chapter 5 “The Turkish-Islamic Culture of Giving” presented Turkish-Islamic concepts of giving and hospitality that are deeply rooted in Turkish culture. This chapter focuses upon financial arrangements in relationship to the institutions that are associated with the Gulen movement.

Changes in U.S. immigration laws in the past four decades have had far-reaching consequences for American religion. Even though the majority of the new immigrants are Christian (Warner and Wittner 1998; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000b), the practices, symbols, languages, sounds, and smells that accompany the ethnically and racially diverse forms of practicing Christianity, brought by immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, India, Africa, and elsewhere challenge the various European practices of Christianity that have predominated in the United States since its founding. As Maffy-Kipp (1997) argues, rather than immigrants “de-Christianizing” religion in America, they have, in fact, “de-Europeanized” American Christianity. In addition, the new immigrants have brought religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Vodou, and Rastafarianism, that were unfamiliar to Americans prior to the mid-1960s. Today many American neighborhoods are dotted with temples, mosques, shrines, storefront churches, Christian churches with foreign names, guadwaras, and botannicas. THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT The “new immigrants” refer to those who entered the United States after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. The abolition of the country-of-origin quotas established in 1924, and the dramatic increase in immigration visas provided to people from Asia and Latin America, in particular, significantly altered the racial and ethnic backgrounds of immigrants. For example, the number of Asian immigrants living in the United States rose from about 150,000 in the 1950s to more than 2.7 million in the 1980s, while the number of European immigrants fell by more than one-third.

Both the charitable choice provision, Section 104 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, and President Bush's recent Faith-Based and Community Initiative were designed to encourage the increased participation of faith-based organizations as government supported social service providers. This article examines 14 faith-based coalitions in Harris County, Texas, and their response to accepting government monies for social services. Description of these coalitions indicates great variability among them in regard to structure, resources, programs offered and attitudes towards government contracts. This study demonstrates the importance of including faith-based coalitions, along with local congregations, in the effort to understand faith-based social services. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) addressed President Clinton's campaign promise to "change welfare as we know it." Welfare policy changes such as the elimination of entitlements to public assistance, work requirements for benefit recipients, limited immigrant eligibility, and state controlled social programs demonstrate the new emphasis on personal responsibility and local solutions. This retrenchment of the federal government has been accompanied by a renewed effort to promote religious charity as a "safety net" that will fulfill society's "responsibility to the disadvantaged" (Mitchell 2000). The "charitable choice" provision, Section 104 of PRWORA, was an attempt to bolster this safety net. This provision requires that states treat religious organizations as any other non-government provider when contracting for services funded under this legislation. Specifically, the charitable choice clause establishes a statute that protects the religious

Immigrant religious communities in the United States are undergoing profound transformations. Three processes of change occurring in new immigrant religions are described and analyzed: (1) adopting the congregational form in organizational structure and ritual, (2) returning to theological foundations, and (3) reaching beyond traditional ethnic and religious boundaries to include other peoples. These changes support the new paradigm in the sociology of religion that refutes secularization theories: Internal and external religious pluralism, instead of leading to the decline of religion, encourages institutional and theological transformations that energize and revitalize religions. Moreover, these changes are not merely attributable to Americanization. Rather, these changes have transnational implications for global religious systems-implications that are facilitated by the material and organizational resources that new U.S. immigrants possess.

Language usage poses a series of dilemmas for immigrant religious congrega tions. In both ethnic and multi-ethnic congregations, the use of native languages in services and activities provides ethnic solidarity and multi-cultural sensitivity while, simultaneously, creating tensions among language groups and between generations of immigrants. The data in this paper come from ethnographic case studies of thirteen immigrant congregations in Houston, Texas, and eight focus groups with religious leaders, two aspects of the broader RENIR (Religion, Ethnicity, New Immigrant Research) project. In addition to outlining four dilem mas that accompany language usage, we discuss some of the reasons for and consequences of specific choices made in these congregations.

In this paper we show that immigrant religious institutions tend to assume many elements of a congregational structure and a community center model of functioning, characteristics usually not found in their countries of origin. Based on data from the Religion, Ethnicity, New Imnigrants Research (RENIR) project in Houston, Texas, we found, however, that the two dimensions are distinct and largely unrelated to one another. Whule each serves as a vehicle to engender high levels of member commitment to the religious institution and serves to meet both religious and material needs of the immigrants, congregations vary in the degree to which they develop the two major elements of

While many of the studies of Korean Christian churches in the United States mention the presence of cell groups within the churches, little scholarly research exists on the structure and functions of the cell group ministry. Based on data from a large Korean Christian Church in Houston, Texas, the structure of the cell group ministry is described in ethnographic detail. Four major functions that the cell groups provide for both Korean immigrant newcomers and established Korean residents are described, with emphasis upon the mutual benefits that exist between cell groups and Korean entrepreneurs. The paper concludes with the delineation of organizational problems that may also result from a strong cell ministry.

Le nombre des religieuses catholiques est en train de decliner aux Etats-Unis ainsi que dans les nations occidentales depuis 25 ans. L'A. cherche a expliquer les causes de ce declin. L'A. evoque ainsi les formes particulieres de secularisation propres aux pays industrialises. De plus, la situation pour les femmes dans la societe est devenue assez confortable pour ne pas rechercher dans les Ordres catholiques une mobilite sociale. Utilisant des echantillons preleves sur 50 nations entre 1960 et 1990, l'A. confirme ces intuitions notamment dans le domaine de l'education et des metiers sociaux

In thinking about the life and works of Joe Fichter, I am immediately reminded of the statement that precedes every episode of Star-Trek: "Face the final frontier, these are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. It's continuing mission is to seek out new life and new civilizations, to explore strange new worlds, to boldly go where no one has gone before." For me, this mandate sums up much of what Joe Fichter was about. In this paper I want to trace some of the new worlds that he uncovered, usually amidst great strife and criticism. He was like a lightning rod that called attention to new storms a'brewing and he often took the heat of being the first to venture in where angels would have feared to tread. The invitation to participate in a symposium on Joseph Fichter provided me the opportunity and impetus to read Fichter's two autobiographies and to reflect upon what his career has meant not only to me personally but, even more importantly, to the Sociology of Religion. When I was asked what aspect of his works I wanted to explore, my immediate response was that I wanted to look at Fichter as a bold explorer of new arenas that many people, especially church-folks, considered too sacred to subject to the scrutiny of scientific methodology and objective analysis. Here was a Jesuit priest, very committed tO his religious values and upbringing, willing to take a hard look at aspects of his church that were previously taken-for-granted. As I got to know Fichter personally at our national meetings (and realized the pains he suffered because of his pioneering work in areas that were controversial within the Catholic Church), I came to respect his courage, his commitment to the scientific study of religion, and his excitement in foraying into topics that were risky and "new" in tenns of cutting edge on the religious scene. In fact, over the years I looked forward to seeing him at meetings because I knew he would have his pulse on topics that were just beginning to be explored and talked about in church circles. He became my "weather-vane" in terms of the issues that were just breaking within Catholic circles. In rereading his first autobiography, One man research (Fichter 1973), and then reading for the first time his latest autobiography, The sociology of good works (Fichter 1994), my admiration for him as a pioneer into new territories and his courage in forging ahead even against protest and criticism was rekindled. I will review the five or six most daring projects I think he undertook that were risky in terms of challenging established notions and elites, especially in terms of church hierarchy. In particular, I want to share some of the criticisms, attacks