Transforming churches: the lived religion of religious organizations in a contemporary context

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes patterns of transformation in a specific majority religious institution, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark (ELCD), through a case study of communicative actions related to new church practices. The argument is that the patterns most often identified in the study of the religion of late-modern individuals, which is an “ever-changing, multifaceted, often messy—even contradictory—amalgam of beliefs and practices” (McGuire 2008, 4), are also relevant when scholars describe changes at the level of religious organizations. Meredith McGuire’s concepts are supplemented with other discussions of the transformation of traditions in a contemporary context. Our research question is: what characterizes the communicative actions concerning the transformation of traditions within the ELCD today? The empirical material consists of communicative actions related to practices associated with Halloween and Valentine’s Day from two distinct contexts: 1) the public debate about the Church in the newspaper The Christian Daily and 2) public announcements in the official online Church calendar. This leads to a discussion of the creative agency of religious institutions as part of the complex pattern of contemporary religion. The article argues in favor of an increased focus on the development of new practices in churches as examples of lived religion at the level of institutional religion.     

The cost–benefit trade-off in young children's overimitation behaviour

In overimitation, an observer reproduces a model's visually causally redundant actions in pursuit of an object-directed outcome. There remains an assumption that costs involved in adopting redundant actions renders them maladaptive in the immediate context. Here, we report on an experiment designed to evaluate whether or not overimitating is costly in this way. One hundred and eight children from two contrasting cultural groups (Australian Western vs. South African Bushman) observed an adult open an apparatus using a process that locked one side and opened another. Two toys were then inserted in the locked side and one in the open side. Copying the model meant access only to the lower quantity reward would be possible. This process was repeated for a second trial. Contrary to expectation, children retrieved similar numbers of toys regardless of whether they reproduced the model's actions or not, suggesting that in contexts like that presented here, overimitation is not costly in the ways commonly assumed.     

SIMULTANEOUS AND RETROSPECTIVE PERSON PERCEPTION

The subjects were shown a silent motion picture and asked to describe simultaneously what they saw. They were then requested to give a retrospective account of the same film. Comparisons of these reports indicated that the simultaneous verbalizations yielded more information about the subjects' perception of other persons' feelings and momentary states. It is proposed that clinical diagnostics should include data on immediate person perception as well as retrospective accounts.