From Excommunication to Nullification: Testing and Extending Supply-Side Theories of Religious Marketing with the Case of Catholic Marital Annulments

Since the Second Vatican Council (1965), Catholic marital annulments have risen dramatically, especially in the United States. A comparison of American and international rates demonstrates that, consistent with supply-side theories of religion, annulment rates have risen only in countries where the Church competes with other religious institutions. However, supply-side theory cannot explain why the American rate is double that of other countries with competitive religious economies. Historical analysis suggests that the growing number, estrangement, organization, and mobilization of divorced American Catholics motivated the American Church to engage in more intense marketing of annulments. I therefore argue that another variable that incorporates these "qualities of the target market" should be considered in future analyses of religious marketing.     

Reliabilism without Epistemic Consequentialism

This paper argues that reliabilism can plausibly live without epistemic consequentialism, either as part of a non-consequentialist normative theory or as a non-normative account of knowledge on a par with certain accounts of the metaphysics of perception and action. It argues moreover that reliabilism should not be defended as a consequentialist theory. Its most plausible versions are not aptly dubbed ‘consequentialist’ in any sense that genuinely parallels the dominant sense in ethics. Indeed, there is no strong reason to believe reliabilism was ever seriously intended as a form of epistemic consequentialism. At the heart of its original motivation was a concern about the necessity of non-accidentality for knowledge, a concern quite at home in a non-consequentialist or non-normative setting. Reliabilism's connection to epistemic consequentialism was an accretion of the ’80s, and a feature of only one of its formulations in that decade.     

Surrender-and-catch and phenomenology

Revision of a lecture given on November 10, 1982, in the course of a faculty seminar at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The present version owes much to the participants in the rational, undistorted discussion which followed, as well as to written comments by Erazim Kohák, his book, Idea and Experience: Edmund Husserl's Project of Phenomenology in IDEAS I (1978), discussions with Mildred Bakan, Helmut R. Wagner's response to a related paper, and a critical reading by George Psathas. I am deeply grateful.