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3 books match the query 'Public Religion'
Devotional Activism
Public Religion, Innovation and Culture in the Nineteenth-CenturyRichard Schaefer
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Modern history has not been neutral in telling the story of religion. Since it presumes the centrality of human motives and machinations as the one and only means of explicating the unfolding of ‘events’, it has helped set the terms for what counts as a viable motive and what does not, and this is evident in the systematic unmasking of religion as only really ever about ‘something else’. By distilling more substantive/primary economic, political or other kinds of motives from the detritus of ‘religion’, the latter is thus consigned to the past as the primitive husk of more substantive and rational ways of thinking and acting. As a set of historical case studies, the essays collected here forgo that tendency, and suggest different possibilities for conceptualizing the fate of religion in the modern world. They chart a different course, one of faith and self-assertion.
The essays take up a variety of episodes from modern European and American history and explore, from various angles, three interrelated themes: 'public religion', and the role of Catholicism as a determined critic of modernity; religion as an impetus for innovation; and the tendency to reduce religion to culture.
The essays take up a variety of episodes from modern European and American history and explore, from various angles, three interrelated themes: 'public religion', and the role of Catholicism as a determined critic of modernity; religion as an impetus for innovation; and the tendency to reduce religion to culture.
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Habitat For Humanity
Building Private Homes, Building Public ReligionJerome Baggett
Temple University Press, 2001
Habitat for Humanity®, a grassroots house-building ministry founded in 1976 by evangelical Christians, is one of the best-known and most widely popular nonprofit organizations in operation today. With approximately 1500 local Habitat affiliates in the United States and more than 85,000 homes primarily by mobilizing concerned citizens, who include about 250,000 American volunteers each year.
The author tells the story of Habitat's development and the special fervor it evokes among volunteers and those for whom it builds houses. Through interviews with staff, he also provides a look into the organizational dynamics of Habitat, a non-profit whose religious mission for social change is inevitably affected by the instrumental, bottom-line orientation of the state and the market.
Baggett argues that Habitat is an examine of a particular social form of religion, the paradenominational organization, that is uniquely adapted to the climate of the modern world. It is one of the vital forms that voluntarism takes today.
The author tells the story of Habitat's development and the special fervor it evokes among volunteers and those for whom it builds houses. Through interviews with staff, he also provides a look into the organizational dynamics of Habitat, a non-profit whose religious mission for social change is inevitably affected by the instrumental, bottom-line orientation of the state and the market.
Baggett argues that Habitat is an examine of a particular social form of religion, the paradenominational organization, that is uniquely adapted to the climate of the modern world. It is one of the vital forms that voluntarism takes today.
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Producing the Sacred
AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC RELIGIONRobert Wuthnow
University of Illinois Press, 1994
What is Public religion? How does it manifest the sacred? These are the fundamental questions Robert Wuthnow addresses in Producing the Sacred.
Wuthnow uses as a guiding assumption the idea that cultural expressions, religious or otherwise, do not simply happen but are produced. He considers the major kinds of organizations that produce public religion--congregations, hierarchies, special interests, academies, and public rituals--showing how these organizational vehicles shape public religion's messages and how specific types of religious organization draw resources from their environments. He also reveals the implicit and unintended ways in which sacredness is expressed in modern society.
A volume in the series Public Expressions of Religion in America
Wuthnow uses as a guiding assumption the idea that cultural expressions, religious or otherwise, do not simply happen but are produced. He considers the major kinds of organizations that produce public religion--congregations, hierarchies, special interests, academies, and public rituals--showing how these organizational vehicles shape public religion's messages and how specific types of religious organization draw resources from their environments. He also reveals the implicit and unintended ways in which sacredness is expressed in modern society.
A volume in the series Public Expressions of Religion in America
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