LAWIN

Category: Uncategorized

  • THEORY

    THEORY The attempt to explain or account for religion and its role in society as well as in individual experience; systematic social scientific theories begin primarily in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with such writers as Marx, Weber, Durkheim and his school, Freud, Troeltsch, James, and others. Although more recent work builds on these…

  • TELEVANGELISM

    TELEVANGELISM Term first used by Jeffrey K. Hadden and Charles E. Swann in Prime Time Preachers: The Rising Power of Televangelism (Addison-Wesley 1981) to describe a new form of religious broadcasting combining television and evangelism. Televangelism also is referred to as “the electric church” by religious broadcasters, especially Ben Armstrong (The Electric Church , Nelson…

  • TECHNOLOGY

    TECHNOLOGY Application of science to the solution of human problems. The use of technology traditionally has been viewed as somewhat problematic by theologians and religious leaders. On the one hand, technology brings forth new practices and procedures that pose ethical dilemmas. Such is the case with the development of effective artificial birth control methods, which…

  • TAOISM

    TAOISM Religious and philosophical tradition of China founded on the philosophy of mystic Lao Tzu (or Tze), a contemporary of Confucius (although some doubt exists regarding his historicity, the name simply meaning Old One or Old Master). A central concept of Taoism is the Tao , or the Way, which involves a state of acceptance…

  • TABOO

    TABOO Also tabu, tapu, kapu ; a prohibition of acts and/or contacts dangerous to the doer and his or her group. Captain James Cook first heard the word in 1777 at Tonga and found the idea of taboo even more prevalent on the Sandwich Islands. Cook discovered that the term had wide usage among various…

  • SUBSIDIARITY

    SUBSIDIARITY Although now one of the core terms in Catholic social thought, to expect for the term subsidiarity any substantive content or any specific rule for its application would be a case of misplaced concreteness. The term captures the aspiration that polities and administrations have responsibilities for “distributive justice” in ways that promote “social” or…

  • STRATIFICATION

    STRATIFICATION A structure of social inequality in which individuals and groups have an unequal share in the distribution of power, privilege, and prestige in society. Over the years, social scientists have investigated the relationship between religion and social inequality. Researchers have focused on issues such as the impact of inequality on religion, the effect of…

  • STATUS

    STATUS Of considerable significance for social scientific investigations of the origins, development, and decline of a wide variety of religious ideologies, movements, and institutions. Like other concepts that seek to impose sociological rigor on familiar societal terminology, status is subject to a number of distinct (although overlapping) usages that sometimes generate confusion. The Legal Context…

  • SPIRITUALISM

    SPIRITUALISM Religious and social movement based on the belief that it is possible to communicate with the deceased after their bodily death. Although mediumship exists in many societies, the American Spiritualist Movement was launched in 1848 with mysterious knockings in a house in Hydesville, New York. The phenomena, thought to be caused by spirits, attracted…

  • SOUTHERNIZATION

    SOUTHERNIZATION The process whereby the distinctive cultural forms associated with the American South spread to other geographic regions of the United States. Scholarly attention in the 1970s to the disappearance of regional distinctiveness in the United States—the homogenization of American culture—included examination of how the South was becoming more like the rest of the nation…

  • ROLES

    ROLES Comprehensive patterns of behavior and attitudes, constituting a strategy for coping with a recurrent set of situations (Turner 1990). A social role is played by different individuals and supplies a major basis for identifying and placing persons in a group, organization, or society. Roles consist of rights, duties, and expected behavior and give stability…

  • SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

    SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION A recently published British textbook describes the task of the sociology of religion in three ways: first, to further the understanding of the role of religion in society; second, to analyze its significance in and impact upon human history; and, third, to understand the social forces and influences that in turn shape…

  • SOCIALIZATION

    SOCIALIZATION The process by which values, norms, attitudes, and behavior, shared by the subjects who belong to a particular group, are transmitted to a new member. It is the process whereby people learn to conform to social norms, a process that makes possible an enduring society and the transmission of its culture and religion between…

  • SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

    SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY A subdiscipline of both sociology and psychology, yet much of the two major disciplines is actually social psychology. If sociology deals with social categories or groups and if psychology deals with individuals, social psychology involves the intersection of the social and the individual where the individual is influenced by the social and, in…

  • SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

    SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Network-configured collectivities that seek to promote or resist political and/or cultural change on the basis of shared group identity. As Stanford Lyman (1995:397) has observed, “In virtually all their various manifestations in the United States, social movements have proclaimed a salvational message, each has sought to cure the soul of either the nation,…