Religious congregations and social work have long been a neglected field of research. Although the number of studies have increased during the last twenty years. With a starting point in the situation in this field of research and in the current public debate in Sweden the focus of this study will be on how Christian and Muslim congregations view cooperating with the municipalities, organizations, the religious community to whom which the congregation belongs and how the congregations view cooperating with other religious communities. Qualitative method of research was used. Representatives of four religious congregations was interviewed; a deacon in a congregation in the Swedish Lutheran Church, a pastor in a congregation belonging to the Mission Covenent Church of Sweden, the chairman in a the board of a Muslim congregation and volunteerleader in another Muslim congregation. For analyzing the transcribed interviews the method of sentence – categorization was used and institutional theory, political opportunity structure and Bauböcks theory of integration was applied. The result showed the degree and form of cooperation varies between the congregations but all four congregations are overall positive towards cooperating with the municipality, organizations, the own religious community and other religious communities.

This dissertation seeks to answer two important questions about the reign of Louis the Pious: What was Louis' personal and intellectual conception of the nature of kingship? What political and moral role did his second wife, Judith Augusta, play in support of her husband's position? The author contends that Louis' reign was beset by a power struggle of epic proportions, one that pitted the monarch against the most influential lords of the realm and against the political aspirations of the Frankish Church hierarchy. The root of this struggle was the contradiction between Louis' conviction of the priestly nature of royal power, a concept bequeathed to him by his father Charlemagne and one to which he held tenaciously, and that of the Frankish hierarchy that sought to interpose itself between the monarch and God. Judith supported her husband's position with unstinting loyalty. Her historic reputation is nothing more than the result of personal attacks launched by spokesmen of the Frankish Church in an effort to undermine her credibility, and thus the position of Louis. Only in this century have historians begun to view Judith in a more benign light. The author, however, sees Judith as a more active participant in the affairs of state, as one who wielded real power in support of the Frankish monarchy. The Franks viewed the power of the king to be of a sacral nature; the adoption of that concept by Charlemagne provided the foundation of the renovatio in the Frankish realm. During his reign, the Papacy and the Frankish Church were clearly subservient to the will of the monarch and both were cleverly employed to promote the ideas and policies of Charlemagne's imperium christianum. The reign of Louis the Pious is treated in an episodic manner in keeping with the presentation of that period in the sources. Emphasis is given to the role of the Ordinatio Imperii of 817 since that document, viewed initially by all as a guarantee of imperial unity, provided the Frankish bishops and their allies with a weapon against the monarch. Louis' marriage to Judith and the subsequent birth of their son Charles were the events that endangered the role of the Frankish Church as the arbiter of power in the kingdom. The catalyst came when Louis attempted to provide his new son with a portion of his royal inheritance, a move that contravened the Ordinatio. The author presents a detailed account of the efforts of the Church hierarchy to undermine the concept that the monarch embodied the imperium christianum, not by attacking Louis directly, but by willful attempts to sully the reputation of the monarch's most loyal supporters, especially the empress Judith. In this 'dress rehearsal' for that most infamous of all Church-crown confrontations, the Investiture Controversy, Louis was forced to his own 'Canossa' on three different occasions. The victor of this struggle, the author contends, was undoubtedly Louis, for the duration of his reign and that of Charles II the Bald. The images in contemporary manuscripts from both reigns show the king in direct contact with God; Frankish bishops are not represented in portraits of the king. Even Judith, the empress and indefatigable supporter of the sacral nature of her husband's position, is represented positively and without any reference to the Church hierarchy.

Despite the fact that Puritans viewed themselves as honest embodiments of God's Word, they were routinely condemned as consummate liars, dangerous sharpers, and seditious malefactors. The perception of Puritans as hypocrites and tricksters began in Elizabethan England and gained wide currency during the Stuart monarchies. The disreputable attributes attached to Puritans followed them across the Atlantic when they settled New England. Throughout the seventeenth century the stigma of dishonesty and deceptiveness tainted perceptions of the Puritan plantations. By the eighteenth century, the English speaking world universally held New Englanders in low repute. Like their Puritan forebears, New Englanders during the decades prior to the Revolution were seen as deceptive, dishonest, and crafty. In Old England, Puritans created a cultural identity based upon privileging oaths as a sacred form of discipline and this preoccupation with oaths played a major role in generating their reputation for dishonesty and hypocrisy. They antagonized their neighbors by attacking the popular vernacular habit of swearing low-grade oaths. Worse still, they lied or found ways of lying to circumvent the oaths mandated by the crown and church to enforce religious conformity. Their reaction against English state oaths made them enemies of the crown and church and led them into exile on the Continent or in New England. In New England, Puritans created a civil and ecclesiastical polity complete with its own loyalty oaths which substituted the English oaths of allegiance. These innovations enraged the home government and generated scathing denunciations of New England Puritans. Resistance to English trade regulations, especially the subterfuge practiced around the required customs-house oaths, similarly contributed to Puritan's low repute. Puritans fretted over their reputation for dishonesty. In New England, the social structure they created aimed to eliminate hypocrisy and identify the godly. Nonetheless, the decades of oath controversies led Puritans to become adept at verbal play and resorting to literal interpretations of truth. These characteristics came to be recognized as a key component of the region's identity and endured into the eighteenth century to become the hallmark of the ‘Yankee’ personality.

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The political concept of corporatism is used to analyze Catholic-sponsored organizations as providers of US welfare-state services. Corporatism nowadays characterizes a political arrangement by which professional and industrial sectors acquire state-like powers in order to coordinate social productivity. Though corporatism usually refers to nongovernmental fields which acquire government-like status, this dissertation takes a somewhat reverse perspective by focusing on the welfare state, an area which by definition already is governmental, yet by 1996 US welfare reform legislation is slated to increase its delegation of welfare delivery services to non-government practitioners. Much of early twentieth century corporatist thought was founded on the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931), but the Church cut Its involvement with corporatism after disastrous coöptations by fascism. This study presents a revised formulation of Catholic corporatism by tracing its origins to the eleventh century canon law concept of the Mystical Body of Christ, whereby sacred imagery was invoked to protect religious vocations from encroachments by the newly evolving sovereign state. Today, as the devolution of the welfare state includes faith-based organizations, the largest of which are Catholic, a more complete genealogical look at Catholic corporatism provides a framework to evaluate a welfare industry increasingly run by a semi-public aggregation of professional institutions invested with the duties and resources of the state. The study uses a conjectural hypothesis, “Catholic Welfare Corporatism,” defined by three traits—organicism (unity), subsidiarity (localism), and multimodality (performance across business, government and community forums). By this measure, Catholic-sponsored organizations in the welfare service industry are found to demonstrate a “social-corporatist” orientation at odds with the “state-corporatist” authoritarian category into which Catholic corporatism is typically placed. But the public warrant of Church-sponsored operations in the US have been contingent on their adaptation to American democratic pluralist values. The balance struck between a Catholic corporate identity and its responsiveness to the culture which it serves is key to its survival. Prewar Catholic corporatist inclinations toward monopolism, institutional hubris and political naiveté must be resisted for corporatist innovations to progress.

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