The “Emerging Church” Conversation

As the contemporary discussion on the “Emerging Church” (ECC) conversation shows, there is a shift in the understanding of Christian religion. (In its historical context, this is strongly related to Evangelism.) On closer examination, the ECC actually boils down to a transformation of Christian religion – a version of an experienced‐based, postmodern religiosity. The engine of this transformation is the clarification of the religious identity. The ECC can be described as a movement that serves as a transition for the protagonists in order to shape their individual processes of resistance as well as the processes of disentanglement in regards to their own religious orientation. Therefore, the discussion represents an “alternative space,” which is best seen in five motifs: the change of religious alignment; the significance of community; specific theological themes and strategies; dealing with different “contexts” in the conversation; and the emphasis of values, attitudes, and practices. On the one hand, the conversation can be described as a “biotope of innovation.” On the other hand, protagonists handle intellectual doubt, their lack of religious experience, the lack of moral authority of their previous religious community, and theological uncertainties with courage and a certain nonchalance, which must be addressed critically.     

“Practical Divine Influence”: Socioeconomic Status and Belief in the Prosperity Gospel

The “prosperity gospel” is an understudied feature of the religious landscape of the United States. Little is known about the social patterning of prosperity gospel beliefs. We focus on two core dimensions of socioeconomic status (SES)—education and income—as potential influences. Our analyses of data from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's 2006 Survey of Pentecostals produce three findings. First, education and income have negative and mostly independent associations with prosperity gospel beliefs. Second, SES‐based patterns remain after accounting for other attributes of the religious role. Third, while most education‐based differences are contingent upon the attributes of the religious role, these contingencies are not replicated for income‐based differences. These observations reinforce the long‐standing claim that SES plays a pivotal—and complex—role in the social patterning of religious beliefs.     

THE “DEATH OF THE EGO” IN EAST‐MEETS‐WEST SPIRITUALITY: DIVERSE VIEWS FROM PROMINENT AUTHORS

Eastern religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, have traditionally held to the view that in order for an individual to fully benefit from their practice it was important to lessen or eliminate one's individual desires. Such practice was sometimes referred to as the “death of the ego” in order to emphasize its importance. However, the relatively recent popularity of East‐meets‐West spirituality in Western consumer cultures tends to emphasize the acceptance and transformation of one's ego rather than its death. This essay discusses sociological changes that have shaped and contributed to the popularity of East‐meets‐West spirituality in Western culture that in turn have brought about a modification of the principle of ego death. The views of six Western authors and practitioners of East‐meets‐West spirituality on the importance of the principle of ego death are compared and contrasted. Theories related to the management of self‐identity in consumer society can partly explain the modification of traditional Eastern religious practices, such as ego death, in order that they become relevant and appealing to a society that increasingly reifies the concept of the self. The implication is that the excision of the concept of ego death from the practice of East‐meets‐West spirituality may affect its efficacy.     

“No More” leads to “Want More,” but “No Less” leads to “Want Less”: Consumers' counterfactual thinking when faced with quantity restriction discounts

The current research examines the impact of point‐of‐purchase (POP) discounts on consumers' counterfactual thinking (CFT). Study 1 reveals that consumers tend to engage in upward CFT (what might have been better) rather than downward CFT (what might have been worse) in response to POP discounts. Study 2 shows that upward CFT depends on how the discount information is framed. A discount with a lower‐quantity restriction (e.g., “X % off if you buy at least Y items”) leads consumers to counterfactually wish to buy more, but a discount with an upper‐quantity restriction (“X % off – limit Y items per customer”) leads consumers to wish to buy less. Study participants in both conditions report they would buy the same POP‐suggested amount, but for completely opposite reasons. In Study 3, this convergence effect in purchase quantity disappears when the maximum and minimum restrictions are lifted, suggesting that quantity restrictions in POP discounts guide quantity decisions. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Countermovement Mobilization and State Raids on Minority Religious Communities

An ongoing study of government raids on minority religious communities in 19 Western‐style democracies over seven‐plus decades shows a dramatic increase in raids beginning in the 1990s. Two distinct and related patterns are found to explain this escalation in frequency. Both patterns involved countermovement mobilization by coalitions of oppositional groups that effectively framed new or nontraditional religious movements (NRMs) as threats to their own members and the larger society, thereby prompting state actions of social control. The patterns are distinguished by a new relationship of countermovement actors to the state. In one pattern, we found the development of a transnational network forging a common collective action frame, movement ideology, and organizational strategy. Seizing political opportunities in the wake of increasing concerns regarding child endangerment, countermovement actors targeted NRMs as harbingers of child abuse and pressed authorities to take action. In the second pattern, we found a concentration of raids in one country (France). Here, the oppositional networks were not simply third‐party interest groups but were fully integrated into the state apparatus, hence awarded power and given extraordinary influence. Consequently, state raids increased exponentially. The study also provides five years of new data from a previous report examining their impact on the larger set of findings and identifying new trends.     

ECONOMY OF “INVISIBLE DEBT” AND ETHICS OF “RADICAL HOSPITALITY”: Toward a Paradigm Change of Hospitality from “Gift” to “Forgiveness”

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct a Christian theology of “hospitality” through a critical reading of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as through an in‐depth biblical and theological reflection on the ethics of hospitality. Out of this reconstructive investigation, I propose a new Christian ethics of hospitality as a radical kind. As a new paradigm, this radical hospitality is distinguished from other types in that it is no longer conceived on the model of “gift”. The new Christian ethics of hospitality is rather reconstructed on the model of “forgiveness” by critically appropriating the concept of “invisible debt” that lies between the hosting citizens and the migrants in the senses of “you owe us your presence” and “I owe you my security and success.” While the hospitality of the gift defines the relationship between the hosting citizens and the migrants as givers and givees, the new paradigm of hospitality identifies this relationship as between creditors and debtors. In this regard, a new Christian hospitality called for unto citizens of the hosting society is a radical kind that challenges them to transcend the creditor‐debtor consciousness.     

“Ghosts in the Nursery:” Infant sleep and sleep‐related cognitions of parents raised under communal sleeping arrangements

In an experiment of nature, a normal cohort of parents who were raised under communal sleeping arrangements (CSA) in Israeli kibbutzim are raising their infants at home under home‐based family sleeping arrangements. The present study focused on exploring the links between the early sleep experiences of CSA parents and their present sleep‐related beliefs and behaviors. In particular, the study assessed whether the cognitions of CSA parents regarding infant sleep differ from cognitions of parents who were raised under home‐based family sleeping arrangements. Furthermore, parental soothing methods and infant sleep patterns were compared. One hundred forty‐one families participated in this study. The children's ages ranged between 4.5 to 30 months. Parental cognitions were evaluated by two questionnaires. Infant sleep was assessed by a questionnaire and by daily parental reports. As expected, CSA parents were more likely than were control parents to: (a) interpret infant night wakings as a sign of distress and (b) actively soothe their infants at bedtime, co‐sleep with them, and report more night wakings of their infants. These findings support the hypothesis that early childhood sleep‐related experiences of parents (“Ghosts in the Nursery”) influence their parental sleep‐related cognitions that in turn affect infant sleep patterns.     

An Examination of the “Greening of Christianity” Thesis Among Americans, 1993–2010

Some environmental and religious scholars, religious leaders, and media figures have claimed there has been a “greening of Christianity” in the United States since the mid‐1990s. Such a trend would be socially significant, as the integration of Christian values and environmental values may invigorate both domains. Using nationally representative data from the 1993 and 2010 General Social Surveys, we analyze how green self‐identified Christians in the U.S. general public are in their pro‐environmental attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, we find no clear evidence of a greening of Christianity among rank‐and‐file Christians in the general public between 1993 and 2010. Indeed, the patterns of our results are quite similar to those from earlier decades, which documented that self‐identified Christians reported lower levels of environmental concern than did non‐Christians and nonreligious individuals. We did find evidence of some greening among evangelical Protestants, especially relative to mainline Protestants, between 1993 and 2010. We close by suggesting a few fruitful avenues for further research in this area via variable‐oriented, case‐oriented, and experimental studies and discussing some theoretical implications of our findings.     

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self‐consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service‐learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter‐intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.     

“Noxious Weed”: Persecution in the Development of Korean Christianity

The experience of persecution during the late Joseon and Japanese colonial period was not unusual for Korean Christians, who endured living as a minority faith within a hostile context. Like the pre‐Constantinian Christian communities and many Christians today who live in the global South, suspicion and persecution defined their world as openly confessing Christians, and they embraced, as part of converting to Christianity, the stark reality that their faith could incur personal harm in the form of hostility, incarceration, and even death. This article explores how conversion and maintaining Christian faith in a society adverse to Christianity shaped believers’ self‐understanding of the breadth of faith and acceptance of its mortal implications. Focusing on the Catholic and Protestant experience in Korea, Christian believers rigorously tested the country's attitudes against Christianity. In so doing, their experience provokes a critical reflection on the profoundness of the missionary mandate and illuminates the complexity with which their faith is forged as they must confront the brutal reality that they may be, at the very least, arrested. For many Korean Christians during Joseon Dynasty and the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), conversion to Christianity was part of the process that transformed for believers a religious identity that was understood to be potentially detrimental to their relationship with the state.     

“Equal access” without “establishing” religion: The necessity for assessing social perspective-taking skills and institutional atmosphere

We concur withMoshman (1990) that in public high schools there should be unimpeded religious freedom if an empirical assessment shows students have the proficiency to evaluate and freely choose religious systems and practices and to discern attempts by authorities to establish a religion. We differ with Moshman,however, regarding (a) the relative importance of a school's ethical, moral and political climate in influencing the exercise of free religious and political choice; (b) his focus on religious over political freedoms; (c) what kinds of proficiencies need to be assessed; (d) how to assess these proficiencies; (e) his claim that that the reasoning ability of high school and college students is similar; and (f) the manner in which decisions permitting religious clubs in high schools should be made. Reasoning proficiency must be assessed in high school, as well as post-high school, populations of students, teachers, and administrators using a social perspective-taking task with establishment of a religion content. A school's institutional atmosphere must be assessed.     

“Victims” Versus “Righteous Victims”: The Rhetorical Construction of Social Categories in Historical Dialogue Among Israeli and Palestinian Youth

Informed by social identity theory and a rhetorical approach to the study of social category construction in social interaction, this study analyzed the nature and function of participant utterances in two conditions of intergroup dialogue about history between Israelis and Palestinians. Across conditions that sought to either emphasize recategorization into a common in‐group identity or subcategorization into mutually differentiated identities, Palestinian and Arab Israeli utterances primarily reflected the theme of victimization, while Jewish Israeli utterances primarily reflected themes of justification and victimization. The way in which these utterances produced social competition for victim and perpetrator roles and reproduced master historical narratives of Palestinian victimization versus Jewish Israeli “righteous” victimization is illustrated. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of narrative and rhetoric about social categories in settings of intractable political conflict, and implications for dialogue‐based intervention about history are addressed.     

Responses to the AAR‐Teagle White Paper: “The Religious Studies Major in a Post‐9/11 World”

In October 2008 The American Academy of Religion published the findings of an eighteen month study (conducted with funding from the Teagle Foundation) on “The Religious Studies Major in a Post–9/11World: New Challenges, New Opportunities.” Re‐published here, this AAR‐Teagle White Paper provides the opportunity for four respondents to raise issues and questions about the teaching of religion in their own institutional contexts. First, Jane Webster describes how the White Paper's “five characteristics of the religion major” find expression in her biblical literature course. Then James Buckley suggests some of the general level teaching issues provoked by the study and analyzes how well the White Paper aligns with how the teaching of religion is conceived in his Catholic university context. Tim Jensen draws comparisons between the White Paper and the higher education structures and goals from his university context in Denmark, raising questions about what motivates students to major in religious studies, the “utility” of a religious studies major, and whether students' religious and spiritual concerns ought to enter the classroom. And finally Stacey Floyd‐Thomas finds surprising similarities between the state of the religion major and the various crises facing contemporary North American theological education.     

“In‐Group Love” and “Out‐Group Hate” in Repeated Interaction Between Groups

Costly individual participation in intergroup conflict can be motivated by “in‐group love”—a cooperative motivation to help the in‐group, by “out‐group hate”—an aggressive or competitive motivation to hurt the out‐group, or both. This study employed a recently developed game paradigm (Halevy, Bornstein, & Sagiv, 2008) designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game was played repeatedly between two groups with three players in each group. In addition, we manipulated the payoff structure of the interaction that preceded the game such that half of the groups experienced peaceful coexistence and the other half experienced heightened conflict prior to the game. Enabling group members to express in‐group love independently of out‐group hate significantly reduced intergroup conflict. Group members strongly preferred to cooperate within their group, rather than to compete against the out‐group for relative standing, even in the condition in which the repeated game was preceded by conflict. Although both “in‐group love” and “out‐group hate” somewhat diminished as the game continued (as players became more selfish), choices indicative of the former motivation were significantly more frequent than choices indicative of the latter throughout the interaction. We discuss the implications of these findings for conflict resolution. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FOLLOWING A TRAJECTORY: ON “TRACING A TRAJECTORY” AND “EXPLAINING AND VALUING,” BY JAMES M. GUSTAFSON

Abstract. The roots of religious faith–and the provenance of ethical thought–may be sought in the human sciences, the physical sciences, literature, religious traditions, and deep human intuitions. Gustafson's religious stance and the author's, while different on their face, in common reflect a mingling–and tangling–of skepticism, understanding, and transcendence. Let all of us hope and believe what we can.     

Search strategies in decision making: the success of “success”

Examination of search strategies has tended to focus on choices determined by decision makers' personal preferences among relevant cues, and not on learning cue‐criterion relationships. We present an empirical and rational analysis of cue search for environments with objective criteria. In such environments, cues can be evaluated on the basis of three properties: validity (the probability that a cue identifies the correct choice if cue values differ between alternatives); discrimination rate (the proportion of occasions on which a cue has differing values); and success (the expected proportion of correct choices when only that cue can be used). Our experiments show that though there is a high degree of individual variability, success is a key determinant of search. Furthermore, a rational analysis demonstrates why success‐directed search is the most adaptive strategy in many circumstances. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

“Towards a Global Vision of the Church”

After the publication of The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV) in 2013, the major task and challenge for the Faith and Order Commission's Study Group II has been the progress of the multilateral ecumenical dialogue on ecclesiology. The two subgroups of Study Group II have been working in close cooperation with each other, focusing on two major ways to achieve this progress. The focus of Subgroup 2 has been to harvest the fruits of the official responses to TCTCV. This is being done by the collection and analysis of the official responses to TCTCV, the identification of some key themes and issues that emerge from them, and the evaluation of how they point to the next steps. So far 74 responses have been received; however, geographically speaking, there has been essentially no response from the global South (there have been no responses from Africa, no responses from Latin America, and one from Asia); and, denominationally speaking, roughly 10 percent of the responses come from churches or streams that have not been part of the “traditional” ecumenical movement. Nevertheless, the latter regions and denominational families are crucial: they represent the largest and fastest‐growing part of global Christianity, and thus it is impossible to have a really “universal” and contemporary‐sensitive approach to ecclesiology without substantial input from them. Many of them have also not always been clearly or strongly part of the ecclesiological conversation before TCTCV, and thus it is even more important to include them from now on, and be enriching the multilateral ecclesiological conversation with their contributions as well. Hence, the focus of Subgroup 1 has been to broaden the table of ecclesiological dialogue, by getting into more and wider conversations with ecclesiological perspectives from regions (especially from Asia, Africa, and Latin America), denominational families (e.g., evangelical, Pentecostal, Independent churches, etc.), and forms of being church (e.g., movements, new monasticism, online churches, etc.) “which have not always been clearly or strongly part of discussions on the way to TCTCV, and whose understandings of ecclesiology we want to discover and to enter into dialogue with” (Caraiman minutes, p. 55; cf. Krakow report p. 1).