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Surveying the Religious Landscape

Author : George Gallup

Publisher : Morehouse Publishing

Page : 200 pages

File Size : 35,44 MB

Release : 1999

Category : Religion

ISBN :

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Book Description

These surveys will appeal to those who track religion professionally, but they will also be of interest to clergy, church members, and others interested in the spiritual landscape of today. A wide variety of beliefs and practices are surveyed including: belief in God, attendance at church or synagogue, religious beliefs of today's teenagers, views about the interaction between politics and religion, life after death, questions of ethics, and others. Surveys address the differences in beliefs among those of various faith perspectives, races, age groups, genders, and those in varying geographic locations.





Journey Preparation

Author : Kay Kotan

Publisher :

Page : pages

File Size : 28,46 MB

Release : 2021-05

Category :

ISBN : 9781950899258

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Book Description

Before we head in any direction, we must first have a starting point. What does the ground under our feet look like? Are we trying to hike mountains in flip flops? Do we have a desire for something really cool to happen in the life of our church, but we do not have enough people willing to roll up their sleeves to make it happen? Is honoring history and tradition more important than anything else? Has method become the true north rather than the mission? Is there a key influencer, matriarch, patriarch, or family in control of "their" family chapel? In the life of the church, I like to refer to this as the current reality.The church has become distracted by the latest bells and whistles, personal preferences, lack of accountability, and being program-driven rather than missionally driven. If what the church is doing and spending its resources on is not making disciples, then why are we doing it? Yet, so many churches continue to do what they are doing (working really hard at it) without ever evaluating the effectiveness of their "doing." We have fooled ourselves into thinking that as long as we are a "busy" church then we must be an effective church. But, the real question to ask is if our busy-ness is fulfilling the mission.How would you rate your church's missional effectiveness currently? How effective is your church in its mission of making disciples who disciple others? How often is your council or board asking this foundational question? How are the leaders of your church trained to know the purpose of the church and to continue to ask the question and evaluate? How many adult professions of faith did your church have this year? Last year? Two years ago? In Journey Preparation, Kay Kotan will lead the reader into a deep dive into a congregational assessment to ascertain the current lay of the internal land of his/her congregation.



Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Author : Joel W. Martin

Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press

Page : 344 pages

File Size : 49,27 MB

Release : 2010-10-11

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0807899666

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Book Description

In this interdisciplinary collection of essays, Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas gather emerging and leading voices in the study of Native American religion to reconsider the complex and often misunderstood history of Native peoples' engagement with Christianity and with Euro-American missionaries. Surveying mission encounters from contact through the mid-nineteenth century, the volume alters and enriches our understanding of both American Christianity and indigenous religion. The essays here explore a variety of postcontact identities, including indigenous Christians, "mission friendly" non-Christians, and ex-Christians, thereby exploring the shifting world of Native-white cultural and religious exchange. Rather than questioning the authenticity of Native Christian experiences, these scholars reveal how indigenous peoples negotiated change with regard to missions, missionaries, and Christianity. This collection challenges the pervasive stereotype of Native Americans as culturally static and ill-equipped to navigate the roiling currents associated with colonialism and missionization. The contributors are Emma Anderson, Joanna Brooks, Steven W. Hackel, Tracy Neal Leavelle, Daniel Mandell, Joel W. Martin, Michael D. McNally, Mark A. Nicholas, Michelene Pesantubbee, David J. Silverman, Laura M. Stevens, Rachel Wheeler, Douglas L. Winiarski, and Hilary E. Wyss.



Prayer Is a Place

Author : Phyllis Tickle

Publisher : Image

Page : 351 pages

File Size : 46,32 MB

Release : 2010-04-28

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0307551229

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Book Description

A leading authority on religion and spirituality in America recounts the changes she witnessed from 1992–2004, a period she compares to the tumultuous years of the Reformation and Peri-Reformation in Europe. As the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly, Phyllis Tickle was a key figure in bringing discussions about religion into the nation’s cultural and intellectual mainstream. Prayer Is a Place is her insightful first-person account of the people she has met and the trends she has observed over twelve crucial years of change in American religion. Tickle writes about her face-to-face meetings with such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Chief Mullah of Jerusalem; describes speeches and conferences that redefined traditional religions; and chronicles the birth of new approaches to religion and spirituality. The result is a fascinating overview of the reconfiguration of religion in America and its impact on our culture. In charting the changes, passions and innovations that have occurred, Tickle remains a clear-eyed, unbiased and sympathetic observer. From her lively reminiscences of the 1003 Parliament of the World’s Religions—a seminal gathering of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists—to an intriguing look at the rise of Gnosticism in the country to a cogent analysis of the spirituality movements that swept through America during the last decades of the twentieth century, Prayer Is a Place reminds readers that reverence can be expressed in many different forms and in many different settings.



Religion and Place

Author : Peter Hopkins

Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media

Page : 232 pages

File Size : 24,39 MB

Release : 2012-09-14

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 9400746857

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Book Description

This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.



The Triumph of Faith

Author : Rodney Stark

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 194 pages

File Size : 12,26 MB

Release : 2023-08-22

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1684516595

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Book Description

"God is not dead." —Wall Street Journal Believe it or not, the world is more religious than ever before. Everyone seems to take it for granted that the world is getting more secular—that faith is doomed by modernity. Scientists, secularists, and atheists applaud the change; religious believers lament it. But here's the thing: they're all wrong—and the bestselling author and influential scholar of religion Rodney Stark has the numbers to prove it.The Triumph of Faith explodes the myth that people around the world are abandoning religion. Stark marshals an unprecedented body of data—surveys of more than a million people in 163 nations—to paint the full picture that both scholars and popular commentators have missed. And he explains why the astonishing growth of religion is happening and what it means for our future. Stark's bracing book is full of insights that defy the conventional wisdom. With vigorous prose he reveals: •Why claims about Millennials' lack of religion are overblown and historically ignorant •Why Islam is NOT overtaking Christianity •How 4 out of 5 people worldwide now belong to an organized religion •How 50 percent have attended a worship service in the past week •Why much-ballyhooed studies from the Pew Research Center and others get the religious landscape wrong •Why atheists remain few, anywhere—despite all the talk of the "New Atheism" As Stark shows, secularists have been predicting the imminent demise of religion for centuries. It is their unshakable faith in secularization that may be the most "irrational" of all beliefs. As the author of How the West Won, The Victory of Reason, and many other bestselling works, Rodney Stark has a richly deserved reputation for writing page-turning, myth-busting books. He is also a groundbreaking scholar who has so reshaped the social scientific study of religion that his work has become the basis of a "new paradigm." Stark puts all those talents on full display in The Triumph of Faith.This book will change how you see both religion and the forces of secularization.



Wells of Wisdom

Author : Andrew J. Weaver

Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers

Page : 161 pages

File Size : 35,94 MB

Release : 2010-04-01

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1608992357

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Book Description

The essays in this book stress the importance of grandparents as bearers of the history, the values, and the traditions of each of the tribal units . . . The essays in this book take us into different tribal gatherings with their stories of family struggles and growth. They invite us to explore our memories of what we have experienced with our own grandparents and what we might yet find time to do with succeeding generations. We are shaped by our past and we have the capacity to shape those that come after us. What an opportunity; what a challenge. --from the Foreword by James M. Wall, former editor and president of The Christian Century Foundation A distinguished group of Catholic and Protestant writers draw from their wealth of experiences as grandparents and those who have been grandparented. They offer encouragement, insight, solace, and reminders to others who desire the spiritual and emotional wisdom of grandparents. These creative voices in the Christian community reflect on their experiences as and/or with their grandparents as a part of their faith journeys. Those contributors who are grandparents share their personal experiences and those who have been grandparented explore how their grandparents shaped their lives and faith journeys. Contributors ¥ Paschal Baumstein ¥ Gilbert H. Caldwell ¥ Muriel Duncan ¥ Cliff and Ulrike Guthrie ¥ George McGovern ¥ Donald E. Messer ¥ Trish Muco-Tobin ¥ M. Basil Pennington ¥ Cora Crow Poteet ¥ Bill Ritter ¥ Donna Schaper ¥ Robert C. Schnase ¥ Donald B. Strobe ¥ Stephen Swecker ¥ Maren C. Tirabassi ¥ Halbert Weidner



Trial and Error

Author : Edward John Larson

Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA

Page : 287 pages

File Size : 34,49 MB

Release : 2003

Category : Education

ISBN : 0195154711

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Book Description

The debate over teaching evolution in schools remains one of the biggest controversies in 20th century America. This study - which ranges from before the Scopes trial of 1925 to the creationism disputes of the 1980s - offers an account of the battles erupting from this persistent belief.



Religion and American Cultures [4 volumes]

Author : Gary Laderman

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Page : 1712 pages

File Size : 13,85 MB

Release : 2014-12-17

Category : History

ISBN :

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Book Description

This four-volume work provides a detailed, multicultural survey of established as well as "new" American religions and investigates the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, politics, regionalism, ethics, and popular culture. This revised and expanded edition of Religion and American Cultures: Tradition, Diversity, and Popular Expression presents more than 140 essays that address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. The entries cover virtually every religion in modern-day America as well as the role of religion in various aspects of U.S. culture. Readers will discover that Americans aren't largely Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish anymore, and that the number of popular religious identities is far greater than many would imagine. And although most Americans believe in a higher power, the fastest growing identity in the United States is the "nones"—those Americans who elect "none" when asked about their religious identity—thereby demonstrating how many individuals see their spirituality as something not easily defined or categorized. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices, covering the range of different religions among Anglo-Americans and Euro-Americans as well as spirituality among Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, addressing topics such as film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, and new religious expressions. The new third volume expands the range of topics covered with in-depth essays on additional topics such as interfaith families, religion in prisons, belief in the paranormal, and religion after September 11, 2001. The fourth volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents.