Magic feathers, Wittgensteinian boxes and the politics of deeming

Religious Experience Reconsidered offers an “attribution theory of religion” which builds out from Emile Durkheim’s intuition that the sacred is just some aspect of the world that has been set apart. Despite this theoretical pedigree, however, the book violates the central Durkheimian insight when it goes on to ask whether some things are more likely to be set apart than others. I argue that this impulse is motivated by an unfortunate metaphysical desire to determine if some things really are special. Throwing my hat in with Durkheim, I maintain that the academic study of religion should rest content with analyzing the contested politics of “deeming” something special.     

Common Law Approaches to the Relationship Between Law and Morality

How are general relations of law and morality typically conceived in an environment of Anglo-saxon common law? This paper considers some classical common law methods and traditions as these have confronted and been overlaid with modern ideas of legal positivism. While classical common law treated a community and its morality as the cultural foundation of law, legal positivism's analytical separation of law and morals, allied with liberal approaches to legal regulation, have made the relationship of legal and moral principles more complex and contested. Using ideas from Durkheim's and Weber's sociology, I argue that the traditional common law emphasis on an inductive, empirical treatment of moral practices has continuing merit, but in contemporary conditions the vague idea of community embedded in classical common law thought must be replaced with a much more precise conceptualisation of coexisting communities, whose moral bonds are diverse and require a corresponding diversity of forms of legal recognition or protection.     

THE SOCIOLOGY AND THEOLOGY OF CREATIONIST OBJECTIONS TO EVOLUTION: HOW BLOOD MARKS THE BOUNDS OF THE CHRISTIAN BODY

The staying power of creationist objections to evolution needs explanation. It depends on the use of “blood” language. Both William Jennings Bryan and, a century later, Ken Ham connect evolution with the blood of predation and the blood of apes, and both also connect evolution with the blood of atonement. Drawing on Mary Douglas and Bettina Bildhauer, I suggest that blood becomes important to societies that image the social body on the human body. Blood reveals the body as porous and vulnerable and therefore needing social work to be constructed as whole and bounded. Blood is the place where society conducts this work. I conclude that blood language is ineliminable from Christian discourse and indeed from discourses that model the social on the individual body. The solution, I suggest, is not to avoid the language of blood, but to continue to use it in ways that broaden its focus from human sin to human and animal suffering.     

Religion and the Acceptability of White‐Collar Crime: A Cross‐National Analysis

This article examines whether shared religious beliefs and religious social relationships (Durkheim) and belief in a personal, moral God (Stark) negatively affect attitudes toward the acceptability of white‐collar crime. In addition, using a large cross‐national sample and estimating multilevel models, we test whether effects are conditional on modernization and religious contexts characterized by belief in an impersonal or amoral God. Shared religious beliefs and the importance of God in one's life are negatively related to the acceptability of white‐collar crime. These effects, however, weaken in religious contexts characterized by belief in an impersonal or amoral God as do the effects of religious social relationships and belonging to a religious organization; modernization, on the other hand, does not have a moderating effect. In short, religious belief is associated with lower acceptance of white‐collar crime and certain types of religious contexts condition this relationship.     

When festinger fails: Prophecy and the watch tower

Within its history, the Watch Tower has often set dates for the coming of Christ's millennial reign. The ability of Jehovah's Witnesses to endure the failure of these interpretations of Biblical prophecy reveals the power of the Watch Tower to withstand what would seem to be fatal challenges to its system of belief. In what has become a classic study, the social psychologist Leon Festinger has argued that such disconfirmations of prophecy lead only to deepened conviction and increased proselytism to persuade others that the original belief was correct. Applying Festinger's hypothesis to the prophetic speculation of the Watch Tower, I argue that his model fails to recognize how complex organizations and systems of belief shape responses to disconfirmed prophecy. Indeed, the history of Jehovah's Witnesses demonstrates that organizational structure and ideology constitute crucial variables for any analysis of reaction to prophetic failure. It is the very power of the Watch Tower as a millenarian movement that allows not only the rationalization of disconfirmation but the retrospective denial of the prophecy itself.     

Inequality and the Altruistic Life: A Study of the Priestly Vocation Rate

This article takes the rate of new incorporations into the Catholic priesthood within national societies as a social fact revealing underlying societal tendencies of broad theoretical relevance extending well beyond the study of religion. Our emphasis lies on the impact of income inequality on the prevalence of altruistic life options. We examine cross‐national and time‐series variation in the priestly vocation rate as the empirical foundation to theorize social dynamics underpinning a life option that entails the renunciation of opportunities for individual material advantage alongside the commitment to serve a broader community. The article elaborates why we view the vocation rate as resting on a combination of piety and altruistic dispositions, and provides a theoretical rationale for expecting inequality to diminish this—and other—altruistic life options. We also examine the impact of other variables that have been theorized to influence the prevalence of Catholic clerical vocations and elaborate the broader theoretical relevance of our empirical findings.     

Editorial

Mauss's contribution to his uncle's classical study, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, has not been widely acknowledged. It is, however, difficult to assess in the light of inadequate knowledge. This essay is an introduction to the study of the relation of nephew and uncle with regard to this problem. The difference between them as people and their achievements is first briefly considered. Then attention is turned to the way they approached the sociological study of religion. Only two aspects of religion have been selected. The first considers the problems in defining religion. Durkheim holds to the notion of the sacred and Mauss to mana as being central to a definition. The second area is ritual, where there is considerable agreement, although Mauss shows little interest in effervescence. In the final analysis, the two tend to show a complementarity in their work.     

Durkheim,Sellars, and the Origins of Collective Intentionality

Wilfrid Sellars read and annotated Celestine Bouglé’s Evolution of Values, translated by his mother with an introduction by his father (1926). The book expounded Émile Durkheim's account of morality and elaborated his account of origins of value in collective social life. Sellars replaced elements of this account in constructing his own conception of the relationship between the normative and community, but preserved a central one: the idea that conflicting collective and individual intentions could be found in the same person. These notoriously opaque arguments, which seek to save an element of rationalism from social explanation while granting the claims of behavioural science, are illuminated by comparing them to their original Durkheimian form.     

Happiness in Durkheim's Sociological Policy of Morals

Emile Durkheim's (1858–1917) concept of society has its most succinct expression in the call to view social facts, and especially moral norms, as things, as natural facts. A moral-political purpose is to prevent anomy. Anomy spreads when people view moral norms as contingent. It contains the seed of social anarchy and the source of unhappiness because it exposes humans to the chaos and the insatiability of their individual desires. The article places Durkheim's thinking within its social historical contexts.     

The sacred,the holy,the numinous – and religion: on the emergence and early history of a terminological constellation

ABSTRACT

At the turn of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, the sacred (Durkheim, Mauss, Callois), holiness/the holy (Söderblom, Otto) and the numinous (Otto) emerged as key terms in the nascent field of religious studies. These terms set up a discursive space for the study of religion that acknowledged its reality and relevance for modern societies and individuals, but that proceeded independent of confessional theologies and sought to transcend Western-Christian ethnocentrism. By providing a close reading of the works of the above-mentioned scholars, in particular Durkheim, this article revisits the emergence of these terms. In particular, it looks at the different ways in which the sacred, the holy and the numinous were related to religion. The article discusses some differences between the scholars of the sacred and the scholars of the holy in terms of their agendas, aims, and preconditions.