Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:48:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ivan Santos Ruppell Junior.pdf: 398345 bytes, checksum: d0764d82b307a953cb7c4ca9f0f9d677 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-09-12 / Launched at the beginning of the twentieth century, the book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism became a classic work of Sociology of Religion, when it developed a social analysis method feeling the influence of religion in the society structure. With tests from Calvinists Groups of seventeen and eighteen centuries, the sociologist Max Weber extract elements from Puritan Calvinist Doctrina which ones gave a behavior to Christians in the economic society, generating a new type of capitalism the modern Ocident capitalism. John Calvin was one of the main leaders of the Protestant Reformation of sixteen century and at this time, he transmitted to the Christian Church and to the world, an acknowledged work about Protestant Systematic Theology that became the base of Reformed Churches Doctrina. In this dissertation, we tried to appreciate the analysis of Max Weber about Protestan Ethics, which dominated the spirit of capitalism, like to learn from original writes of Calvin at sixteen century, the proposal of behaviour and elements of Doctrina tha identified an original Protestant Etchic to the reformer thoughts. The purpose is to know and to recover the Calvin thoughts and then the trues and values that formed his different Christian Ethic, to advise the Christian behaviour in society. / Lançado no início do século 20, o livro A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo tornou-se obra clássica da Sociologia da Religião, ao desenvolver método de análise social em percebendo a influência da religião na estrutura da sociedade. Tendo por objeto textos oriundos de grupos Reformados Calvinistas dos séculos 17 e 18, o sociólogo Max Weber extraiu elementos da doutrina puritana calvinista que propiciaram uma conduta aos cristãos em meio à sociedade econômica, gerando assim um novo tipo de capitalismo o capitalismo moderno ocidental. João Calvino é um dos principais líderes da Reforma Protestante do século 16, época em que legou à Igreja Cristã e ao mundo, reconhecida obra de Teologia sistemática Protestante, que se tornou base de doutrina às Igrejas Reformadas. Nesta dissertação, buscamos apreciar a análise de Max Weber acerca da ética protestante que denominou espírito do capitalismo, bem como apreender dos escritos originais de Calvino no século 16, a proposta de conduta e elementos de doutrina que identificariam uma Ética Protestante original ao pensamento do reformador. O propósito é conhecer e resgatar o pensamento próprio a Calvino e assim as verdades e valores formadores de sua distinta ética cristã orientada à conduta do cristão em sociedade.

Using ten sermons from five prominent and politically active evangelical megachurch pastors taken from the 2016 presidential campaign season, this case study utilizes frame analysis to understand the political relevance of modern evangelical sermonizing. An inductive frame analysis allows the concept of a collective action frame to be observed as a process and for patterns to emerge from the source text. Within these sermons, ministers offer self-identifying evangelicals a vocabulary with which to understand and describe their own identity. In this context, the Bible is a powerful cultural symbol that represents an allegiance to traditions that are framed as the bedrock of American exceptionalism. The boundaries that are drawn and vociferously maintained in this sample emphasize exclusion over inclusion, especially in terms of salvation and righteousness, which can emotionally motivate action. In an election year, this sample demonstrates how evangelical identity is mobilized as an electoral force.

Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and legislative histories, we examine Westboro Baptist Church, a religious group infamous for homophobic rhetoric and funeral protests. Employing cultural and interactionist perspectives that focus on the semiotics of death, the sacred, and desecration, we outline how Westboro’s activities purposively violate deeply held signifiers of moral order through language, while simultaneously respecting extant laws of behavior. This strategy, in conjunction with the political profitability of opposing the group, explains why the group’s activism triggered extensive legal disputes and modifications at multiple levels of governance. Westboro’s actions and use of symbols—and those of others against the group—lay bare multiple threads in the sacred cultural fabric of American society.

Book Summary: Does theism dominant the language and practices of public life in the United States? This volume explores this question from a humanist perspective, and in so doing it provides insight into the relationship of religion to public policy, and offers ways to advance a more democratic and secular public arena.

Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self-identification. Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture. We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular, there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population.

Gender gaps in religiosity among Western populations, such that women are more religious than men, are well documented. Previous explanations for these differences range from biological predispositions of risk aversion to patriarchal gender socialization, but all largely overlook the intersection of social statuses. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, we contribute to the cultural and empirical analysis of gender gaps in religiosity by documenting an interactive effect between gender, education, and political views for predicting religious nonaffiliation and infrequent attendance at religious services among Americans. For highly educated political liberals, gender gaps effectively disappear, such that men and women are almost equally likely to be secular (or religious). The results have implications for the long-standing disputes about the gendered “nature” of religiosity and highlight the importance of multiple intersecting statuses and modalities in shaping aggregate patterns of religiosity and secularity.

Book Summary: The Routledge Handbook on Deviance brings together original contributions on deviance, with a focus on new, emerging, and hidden forms of deviant behavior. The editors have curated a comprehensive collection highlighting the relativity of deviance, with chapters exploring the deviant behaviors related to sport, recreation, body modification, chronic health conditions, substance use, religion and cults, political extremism, sexuality, online interaction, mental and emotional disorders, elite societal status, workplace issues, and lifestyle. The selections review competing definitions and orientations and a wide range of theoretical premises, while addressing methodological issues involved in the study of deviance. Each section begins with an introduction by the editors, anchoring the topics in relevant theoretical and methodological contexts and identifying common themes as well as divergence. Providing state-of-the-art scholarship on deviance in modern society, this handbook is an invaluable resource for researchers and students engaged in the study of deviance across a range of diciplines including criminology, criminal justice, sociology, anthropology, and interdisciplinary departments, including justice studies, social transformation, and socio-legal studies.

The purpose of this study is to present some of the history of the Baptist Church in Clinton County, Kentucky. A detailed study of the early church in the county also presents a picture of the county's social history as well because of the very close association between the individual and his church. The scope of this study does not lend itself to presentation of the individual histories of all the Baptist churches in the county. It is, rather, the purpose of the author to cover the history of Baptists in the county by tracing the history of their two associations and then to discuss specifically two churches from each association as examples. The criterion for the selection of these churches (Clear Fork, Seventy-Six, Albany and Stony Point) was the date of founding of each of them. Clear Fork and Seventy-Six are the two oldest churches in the Stockton Valley Association and Albany and Stony Point Baptist churches are the oldest in the Freedom Association.

This research applies C. Wright Mills’ theory of vocabularies of motive to reveal the collective narratives, which were used to justify the atypical founding of an urban Jewish congregation in the 1970s. Prior to and during this period, US Jewish communities were migrating out of city centers into their surrounding suburbs. Most Jewish congregations followed their congregants and moved into the suburbs. This study identifies the collective justifications within the Hatchala Chadasha community, which are the accepted reasons for the organization’s atypical urban location and organizational structure. The findings of this research are based in the examination of interviews with individuals who were community members during the earliest years of Hatchala Chadasha’s existence. Patterns of similar accounts across the interviews revealed the collective narratives that defended four of the congregation’s fundamental decisions: why the congregation was founded, where the congregation chose to locate, how the congregation acted politically, and what organizational structure the congregation employed. These justifications are further examined, in relation to the behavior and values common within the broader Jewish community and other contextual components, to theorize why certain accounts became the accepted narrative within Hatchala Chadasha. Fundamentally, this research examines informants’ motive statements to discern and analyze the collective narratives formed in a community, which justify the community’s atypical behavior in the context of a predominant, external culture.

To explore relational processes of couple’s satisfaction this study drew on the relational spirituality framework (Mahoney, 2010) in order to test a relational religiosity model to evaluate the effects of public, private, ideological, intellectual, and experiential religiosity that were mediated by relational virtues of commitment, sacrifice, forgiveness, and sanctification and relational equality on couple’s satisfaction in two cultures. Data for this component used convenience samples of English-speaking respondents (hereafter American sample; n = 1,529) and Russian-speaking respondents (hereafter Russian sample; n = 529). Results provided evidence to partially support relational religiosity model; specifically commitment, while a statistically significant intervening element, worked alongside other relational virtues such as (a) sanctification, as hypothesized, to positively mediate the indirect effect of ideological religiosity on couple’s satisfaction for the American men, (β = .17, 95% BCa CI [.11, .24], p < .001); (b) sanctification, as hypothesized, to positively mediate the indirect effect of experiential religiosity for the Russian men (β = .39, 95% BCa CI [.12, .65], p = .002); and (c) sacrifice and forgiveness, contrary to the hypotheses, to negatively mediate the indirect (β = -.20, 95% BCa CI [-.35, -.06], p = .005) and total (β = -.27, 95% BCa CI [-.43, -.12], p = .001) effects of ideological religiosity on couple’s satisfaction among Russian women. The second approach to this topic followed the family systems perspective, to examine the effect of religiosity on respondents’ own and their partners’ satisfaction with the relationship via the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006). This dyadic approach used samples of 435 American couples (n = 870) and 129 Russian couples (n = 258). The results provided evidence to support an actor effect of husbands’ religiosity on their own couple’s satisfaction for the American (t = 2.00, p = .046, β = .15, 95% CI [.01, .29]) and Russian (t = 3.65, p < .001, β = .45, 95% CI [.21, .70]) husbands. Moreover, APIM testing provided sufficient evidence to support a positive partner effect in that husband’s religiosity predicted their wives’ satisfaction with the relationship in the American (t = 2.06, p = .041, β = .17, 95% CI [.01, .33]) and Russian (t = 2.77, p = .006, β = .37, 95% CI [.11, .64]) couples. The parallels between the cultures strongly resembled existing cross-cultural dyadic scholarship providing compelling evidence to support cultural similarities rather than differences and suggesting that cross-cultural relational dissimilarities might not exist in the ways religiosity is linked to couple’s satisfaction; however, the differences between male and female respondents in each culture might be worth studying further. Additionally, this dissertation’s results and scholarship mentioned above reveal that religiosity and couple’s satisfaction may be indifferent to cultural variations suggesting these phenomena may be universal rather than culture-specific. Outcomes of this dissertation may benefit researchers, educators, policy makers, and practitioners who are interested in relationship virtues and religiosity's effect on couple’s satisfaction, which is known to provide a positive connection to the psychological, social, physical, and spiritual well-being of couples.