Examining Care and Opposition in the Narratives of U.S. Local Women of Color Activists

As a result of persisting stigma, transgender people experience vastly higher rates of harassment, violence, and mental health issues compared to cisgender people. The current study experimentally evaluated a computer-mediated intergroup contact strategy, called E-contact, to reduce transgender stigma. E-contact is a synchronous, cooperative, goal-directed online interaction which is informed by Allport’s intergroup contact theory. In total, 114 cisgender, heterosexual, Australian undergraduates and community members (83 women, 31 men) were randomly allocated to E-contact with an online confederate who either disclosed that they were a transgender woman or a cisgender woman. Following the online interaction, participants then completed measures assessing prior transgender contact and transgender stigma. The findings revealed that transgender E-contact reduced stigma for cisgender men whereas it had no impact on women’s already lower levels of stigma. These novel findings have important implications for researchers, policymakers and counsellors interested in developing transgender stigma reduction interventions by (a) highlighting the importance of transgender contact for those individuals with low or poor prior contact and (b) targeting prejudice-prone populations, such as men, who stand to gain the most from such cooperative, goal-directed interventions.

     

Text-based E-contact: Harnessing cooperative Internet interactions to bridge the social and psychological divide

ABSTRACT

In order to bridge the psychological and physical divide between different groups, researchers have harnessed the positive elements of the Internet to improve intergroup contact. One new and effective Internet strategy is Electronic- or E-contact. Unlike other contact approaches, E-contact is an experimental intergroup intervention that uniquely accommodates Allport’s contact theory and recategorisation processes, to create a structured, cooperative, synchronous and goal-directed online text interaction between members from different groups. E-contact has been found to successfully improve intergroup relations between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Muslims and Catholics in Australia; and reduce bias against lesbian women and gay men, people with schizophrenia, Indigenous Australians, and transgender individuals. This paper discusses the unique engineering and advantages of E-contact interventions in comparison to existing contact strategies, identifies the theories that guide E-contact interventions, provides meta-analytic evidence of its effects, and discusses the strengths, limitations and future directions for E-contact research.     

Investigating the role of E-contact and self-disclosure on improving Turkish-Kurdish interethnic relations

While recent research has started to pay more attention to the role of contact strategies on promoting intergroup harmony between Turkish and Kurdish communities, the effectiveness of a novel form of indirect contact strategy, E-contact—where participants engage in a cooperative and structured online interaction with an individual from the outgroup—has not yet been tested. Across two studies (N_{Study 1} = 110, N_{Study 2} = 176), we investigated the effects of E-contact among Turks on promoting positive attitudes and behavioral tendencies toward Kurds, testing outgroup trust and intergroup anxiety as mediators and incorporating a distinction between lower and higher self-disclosure conditions. As expected, E-contact led to more positive outgroup attitudes, as well as greater approach tendencies and decreased avoidance tendencies through increased outgroup trust (Studies 1 and 2) and reduced intergroup anxiety (Study 2). Study 2 also found that E-contact produced lower perceived interethnic conflict through increased outgroup trust. While both lower and higher personal disclosure conditions provided similar effects in the two studies, E-contact with heightened self-disclosure was especially effective at promoting more positive outgroup attitudes and reducing avoidance tendencies. Findings highlight potential benefits of using E-contact as a prejudice-reduction strategy in conflict settings.     

Residents' Attitudes About On-Site Religious Activities: A Comparison of Continuing Care Retirement Communities in Two States

ABSTRACT

Twelve older adults were interviewed in two continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs), one in Florida and the other in Wisconsin. Only the residents in Wisconsin maintained contact with local congregations, probably because most had always lived in communities not far from the CCRC. On-site religious activities such as worship and study groups were important because of the ways they ordered the week and the opportunities they offered for social interaction. In both locations, Protestant residents appreciated the opportunity to worship in ecumenical services conducted by clergy of different Protestant faith traditions. Catholic services were also available in both locations. Suggestions are offered about ways that faith communities can nourish the spiritual lives of persons living in CCRCs by working with chaplains and by conducting small prayer and study groups.     

Higher Education as Moral Community: Institutional Influences on Religious Participation During College

Borrowing from the literature on religion and deviance, the concept of moral communities is applied to religious and secular postsecondary education to explain institutional influences on student religious participation. Results from nationally representative panel data indicate that students attending Catholic and mainline Protestant affiliated institutions decline in religious participation at a faster rate than students attending evangelical institutions or students attending nonreligious public colleges and universities. This finding is consistent with Catholic and mainline Protestant institutions less successfully providing a shared moral order that legitimates religious language, motive, and behavior when compared to conservative Protestant colleges. At the same time, the religious and ethnic pluralism that activates minority religious identity at nonreligious public institutions is also less likely to be present on Catholic and mainline Protestant college campuses. Additional results indicate that evangelical students' religious participation declines while attending Catholic colleges and universities, while Catholic students increase their participation while attending evangelical institutions. The religious composition of students may act to alter friendship networks, and thus participation rates, on these campuses, although further research is necessary to validate the proposed institutional mechanisms.     

The Scottish Reformation was not Protestant

This article argues that the generally accepted term for the Protestant revolution of 1559–60 in Scotland, ‘The Scottish Reformation’, hides the remnant of a sectarian denominational historiography and should be abandoned. These events should be called ‘The Scottish Protestant Reformation’ while ‘The Scottish Reformation’ should be used for a ‘long reformation’ including Catholic and Protestant reform movements extending from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This terminological change represents a new way of understanding the Scottish Reformation as a long process in the Christian culture of Renaissance Scotland. It brings historical research in line with developments in other disciplines, which have uncovered a flourishing early Scottish Renaissance. Making Christianity the primary category in the religious history of this period, rather than the polemical binary ‘Catholic/Protestant’, enables a more balanced appraisal of the various religious and cultural movements in Scotland.     

Purpose in Life and Prayer Among Catholic and Protestant Adolescents in Northern Ireland

Data are provided from a sample of 2,670 young people aged between 13 and 15 years from Northern Ireland. This article compares the replies of 1,206 young people who attend a Catholic school and 1,464 young people who attend a Protestant school. The data examine the relationship between frequency of personal prayer, perceived purpose in life, sex, age, church attendance, and personality (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). These data demonstrate a clear relationship between frequency of prayer and perceived purpose in life among the young people from the Protestant and Catholic communities.     

Credo Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam: The Relationship between the Catholic and the Protestant Principles in Fundamental Ecclesiology

Abstract

This article treats of characteristically Catholic and Protestant ecclesial principles and reflects on Anglicanism within this context. Where the Catholic ‘principle’ is concerned for the structural unity of the Church, the Protestant ‘principle’ focuses on the Church as a dynamic, Spirit-given reality. In turn, Anglican comprehensiveness is assumed to reflect the concern to achieve a harmonious balance between these principles. Having traced key developments that brought Catholic and Protestant principles into creative relationship in the 20th century and more recent developments, that threaten once again to oppose them, this article argues – through reflection on the unity and holiness of the Church – for their necessary interrelationship and concludes that realising this in practice represents the central ecumenical challenge of our age. En route, attention falls on the relationship between the local and the universal Church, on the importance of keeping communion with the breadth of the tradition and on the doxological dimension of ecumenism.     

Local Religious Subcultures and Generalized Social Trust in the United States

Using multilevel analyses of 21,193 General Social Survey respondents nested within 256 metropolitan areas and counties, we find that individuals’ willingness to trust others is strongly related to the denominational make‐up of geographic areas. The percent of evangelical Protestants in the population negatively predicts individual‐level generalized trust, while percent mainline Protestant and percent Catholic positively predict trust. The effect sizes of these results are large and robust to statistical controls, and they hold even among nonmembers of the religious groups; for instance, “percent evangelical” predicts lower trust even among nonevangelicals. Black Protestant population share initially appears to predict lower trust, but the association disappears after adjusting for racial residential segregation. Following a longstanding theoretical tradition in the sociology of religion, we argue that the religious characteristics of places—not just individuals—shape local subcultures in ways that affect a broad range of behaviors, attitudes, and values such as generalized trust.     

Religion,Race, and Discrimination: A Field Experiment of How American Churches Welcome Newcomers

This article reports the results of a nationwide audit study testing how Christian churches welcome potential newcomers to their churches as a function of newcomers’ race and ethnicity. We sent email inquiries to 3,120 churches across the United States. The emails were ostensibly from someone moving to the area and looking for a new church to attend. That person's name was randomly varied to convey different racial and ethnic associations. In response to these inquiries, representatives from mainline Protestant churches—who generally embrace liberal, egalitarian attitudes toward race relations—actually demonstrated the most discriminatory behavior. They responded most frequently to emails with white‐sounding names, somewhat less frequently to black‐ or Hispanic‐sounding names, and much less to Asian‐sounding names. They also sent shorter, less welcoming responses to nonwhite names. In contrast, evangelical Protestant and Catholic churches showed little variation across treatment groups in their responses. These findings underscore the role of homophily, organizational homogeneity, and the costs of racial integration in perpetuating the racial segregation of American religious life.     

Paradox and Paul: Catholic and Protestant Theologies of Grace

John Barclay offers a capacious and helpful framework for reflection on large swathes of the history of the theology of grace with his notion of the six ways of ‘perfecting the gift’. In this article, I extend his analysis to a consideration of certain typical differences between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of grace. Where Protestant theology tends toward a juxtaposition of grace with sin, Catholic theology often considers grace in relation to nature, and each side, I suggest, has its own characteristic proclivity towards paradox.     

Schooling,the Protestant churches and the state in Northern Ireland: a tension resolved

In 1998, Byrne and McKeown examined the churches’ roles in Northern Ireland’s (NI) schooling system. NI was then governed by direct-rule from the UK’s Westminster Parliament. The authors concluded that the desire of the Protestant churches to re-establish their influence in schools was ‘unlikely to succeed’. This was contrasted with the ‘success-story’ of Catholic influence in schooling. This article tracks the fortunes of the Protestant churches in NI’s educational policy developments in the last 18 years. Of particular interest are the government’s proposals to establish an Education and Skills Authority (ESA) under a new Education Bill. A careful reading of the Protestant churches’ annual education reports indicates the alarm with which these proposals were met. In the early years of the new millennium it seemed that the conclusions of the 1998 paper were prescient. However, extensive lobbying by the Protestant churches in a changed (devolved) political context secured almost all their demands. This article concludes that the ‘tension’ (claimed in the 1998 paper) between the Protestant churches and the state has largely been resolved. The article evaluates the significance of recent developments for the Protestant churches and their involvement in schooling. More critically, the propriety of these developments is questioned asking if they mark an advance for the Protestant churches and/or schooling in NI.     

Social Categorization and Stimulus Equivalence

Northern Irish Protestant subjects, Northern Irish Catholic subjects, and English Protestant subjects were taught a series of conditional discriminations using a matching-to-sample procedure. In the presence of Northern Irish Catholic names, subjects were trained to select three-letter nonsense syllables, and in the presence of the nonsense syllables subjects were trained to select Northern Irish Protestant symbols. Subjects were then tested to determine whether the Protestant symbols and Catholic names had become related through symmetry and transitivity. A generalization test was employed to allow for a preliminary investigation of the transfer of experimentally generated equivalence responding to untrained, socially loaded names. Preliminary findings suggest that prior social learning might interfere with equivalence responding. The relevance of these results to the theoretical interpretation of the equivalence phenomenon and to social attitude measurement in general is discussed.

     

Religion and self-efficacy: a multilevel approach

Can the religious values of an entire geographic area affect the self-efficacy of emerging adults living in that area? Although prior research has demonstrated that individual religious characteristics are associated with self-efficacy, less is known about how the overall religious context influences self-efficacy. Using multilevel analyses on two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) merged with county-level variables, this study finds that a county’s higher conservative Protestant population share is associated with lower self-efficacy even after controlling for various variables. Surprisingly, this conservative Protestant contextual effect also applies to residents who are not conservative Protestants but live in a conservative Protestant county. In contrast, county-level Catholic population share is linked with higher self-efficacy. However, this Catholic contextual effect is explained when controlling for county-level variables.     

Robert Persons’s Resolution(1582) and the issue of textual piracy in Protestant editions of Catholic devotional literature

Abstract

Despite current attention to continuing crypto-Catholics in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, less attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic culture may have affected the Protestant mainstream. This study demonstrates the general neglect of this subject, and examines the role played, then and now, by the attack of Robert Persons SJ on Edmund Bunny, a Church of England minister, for publishing a Protestant adaptation of Persons’s work. This study argues that Bunny had a more serious intent than the ‘piracy’ he is widely credited with, and that his editorial practices resembled those employed by Roman Catholics, including Persons himself. While more serious cases of textual piracy have been largely overlooked, conventional condemnation of Bunny’s edition has done little more than contribute to a general misunderstanding of (and a paucity of interest in) the reception of Catholic literature in whatever format by Protestants.     

Consumerism,Catholicism, and Hall's Theology of the Cross

Abstract : This article examines what Catholics can learn from Douglas John Hall, a Protestant, in relationship to consumerism and the North American context. It does this by first, examining the relationship of consumerism to this context; second, viewing various Catholic reflections on consumerism through the lens of Stephen B. Bevans’ models of contextual theology; and third, placing the Catholic reflections in conversation with Hall in order to come to a constructive conclusion.     

Secularisation and the Future of Christianity

The article is not an account of a debate. Rather it summarises a position arrived at over 40 years with respect to Secularisation. It deals with master narratives, the differences between Catholic and Protestant trajectories, with European exceptionalism, and the varying consequences of ‘spirituality’ and individualism.     

Church‐based Community Activism: A Comparison of Black and White Catholic Congregations

Scholars have recently examined the role of black churches ein einitiatingcivil rights and social justice activities, community development and rehabilitation projects, and family support and community health outreach programs. Practically all of this research has been on black Protestant churches. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature byinvestigating the extent to which African‐American Catholic congregations engage in social action and social service programs in their communities. Data drawn from a nationwide survey of U.S. Catholic parishes are us d to show that black church s are significantly more likely than white churches to engage in social service and social action activities independent of a variety of demographic, organizational, and structural factors known—or suspected—to influence activism. This finding lends support to the argument that the extra‐religious functions of black churches—Protestant and Catholic—are more deeply ingrained in these religious institutions than is suggested by some analysts. Equally significant is the finding of positive and significant relationships between churches that have parish councils and leadershiptraining programs and congregational activism. This finding lends support to previous findings that suggest that the organizational structure of religious institutions may influence churchgoers opportunities for learning and practicing civic skills relevant to community activism.     

Re-identifying residential mixing: Emergent identity dynamics between incomers and existing residents in a mixed neighbourhood in Northern Ireland

Research on residential diversification has neglected its impact on neighbourhood identity and overlooked the very different identity-related experiences of new and existing residents. The present research examines how incoming and established group members relate to their changing neighbourhood in the increasingly desegregated city of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Thematic analysis of interviews with 24 residents (12 Protestant long-term residents, 12 Catholic incomers) from an increasingly mixed neighbourhood identified asymmetrical concerns and experiences: Incomers reported undergoing an ‘identity transition’ between local communities, while long-term residents faced an ‘identity merger’ within their neighbourhood. Where their identity concerns diverged, emergent intergroup perceptions of the residents were negative and divisive; where they accorded, positive intergroup perceptions and a shared neighbourhood identity evolved. From this, we propose a Social Identity Model of Residential Diversification (SIMRD) to encourage future research into how different identity concerns shape emergent intergroup dynamics between long-term residents and incomers within diversifying neighbourhoods.