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Journal ArticleDOI

A Religious History of the American People

01 Dec 1973-Religious Studies (Cambridge University Press)-Vol. 9, Iss: 04, pp 473-477
About: This article is published in Religious Studies.The article was published on 1973-12-01. It has received 133 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Political history & Religious controversies.
Citations
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Book
29 Oct 2007
TL;DR: Gill et al. as discussed by the authors developed a theory of the origins of religious liberty based upon the political and economic interests of governing officials, arguing that political leaders are most likely to permit religious freedom when it enhances their own political survival, tax revenue, and the economic welfare of their country.
Abstract: The issue of religious liberty has gained ever-increasing attention among policy makers and the public. Whereas politicians have long championed the idea of religious freedom and tolerance, the actual achievement of these goals has been an arduous battle for religious minorities. What motivates political leaders to create laws providing for greater religious liberty? In contrast to scholars who argue that religious liberty results from the spread of secularization and modern ideas, Anthony Gill argues that religious liberty results from interest-based calculations of secular rulers. Using insights from political economists, Gill develops a theory of the origins of religious liberty based upon the political and economic interests of governing officials. Political leaders are most likely to permit religious freedom when it enhances their own political survival, tax revenue, and the economic welfare of their country. He explores his theory using cases from British America, Latin America, Russia, and the Baltic states.

233 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply the system-accident framework (Perrow 1984) as a pathway to help police agencies reduce fatal police shootings, adapting it as system-crash prevention to encompass a wider range of systemic causes of catastrophic events.
Abstract: Can fatal shootings by American police be reduced? If so, what theoretical framework would be most useful in saving more lives? What research agenda would that framework suggest? The purpose of this review is to answer those three questions. It applies the system-accident framework (Perrow 1984) as a pathway to help police agencies reduce fatal police shootings, adapting it as system-crash prevention to encompass a wider range of systemic causes of catastrophic events. In contrast to deterrence, the dominant policy perspective on reducing fatal shootings, a system-crash prevention approach applies lateral thinking (Johnson 2010) from lessons learned about airplane crashes, surgical errors, nuclear power plant meltdowns, and other rare events in complex systems. This framework spotlights the rare combinations of risk factors and errors that can produce fatal shootings, the prevention of which may need to vary widely between large and small communities. Of the 986 fatal police shootings reported nationally ...

72 citations


Cites background or methods from "A Religious History of the American..."

  • ...Of all the systemic reforms for reducing fatal police shootings, an expert peer review of every shooting is the idea closest to the strategy used for increasing airline safety (Kennedy 2017): the National Transportation Safety Board. There is also good evidence from New York that it can work, at least if it is implemented in a large organizational context. Fyfe (1978) offered a detailed implementation analysis of the new Firearms Discharge Review Board (FDRB) in New York, which required police officers who fire their guns to meet in person with a committee of senior officers to discuss each decision to shoot....

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  • ...Camden police cordon off a man with a knife for more than seven minutes before they use a TASER electric stun gun on him to disarm and arrest him without injury (2015). Source: https://www....

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  • ...they are upset. Using such skills may be a kind of emergency brake against police anger (or fear) escalating in response to citizen anger—a dynamic many observers see in events leading up to police shootings that may have been avoidable. Theoretically, the idea of de-escalation of interactions between police and citizens may be the wrong target. What may be far more important are interactions among police officers and their formal organizations, especially those that create production pressures that make tight coupling even tighter when police encounter noncompliant individuals. These production pressures take away what Perrow (1984) calls slack in the system and do not allow officers the time to practice any form of de-escalation....

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  • ...The bad news is that for some other kinds of systems, attempts to fix these problems either fail or make things worse. Perrow (1984) defines those systems as having organizational structures that have major contradictions, using technological solutions that only increase interactive complexity and tighten the coupling. Which type of system is policing? Reformers quoted by Kennedy (2017) suggest that policing has failed to build a culture of safety comparable to that found in commercial passenger airlines, from which not one passenger died in a US plane crash in either 2015 or 2016, despite almost 912 million passenger journeys in 2016 (FAA 2017)....

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  • ...The bad news is that for some other kinds of systems, attempts to fix these problems either fail or make things worse. Perrow (1984) defines those systems as having organizational structures that have major contradictions, using technological solutions that only increase interactive complexity and tighten the coupling....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explain how seminaries cultivate distinctive social capital (i.e., resources secured through social networks) and religious capital (e.g., mastery of and attachment to a specific religious culture).
Abstract: Debates over seminary education have been at the heart of some of the most heated denominational battles and schisms, often focusing on doctrines being taught at the seminaries. This research moves beyond the debates over specific teachings and explains how seminaries cultivate distinctive social capital (e.g., resources secured through social networks) and religious capital (e.g., mastery of and attachment to a specific religious culture). Using historical and contemporary examples, we illustrate how seminaries provide clergy with social and religious capital that is distinctive from that of the laity. Finally, using Brunette-Hill’s 1994 survey of Milwaukee clergy and the Educational Testing Service’s 1996 survey of exiting seminarians, we test two propositions on seminary training and religious capital.

66 citations


Cites background from "A Religious History of the American..."

  • ...Ahlstrom (1975:93) reports that at the 1784 Christmas Conference, American Methodism “instituted measures to exclude slaveowners or dealers from membership.” He goes on to write that Baptists, too, “have a similar history of forceful statements in the revolutionary period, followed by a steady accommodation of Southern practice.” Conflicts over women’s ordination show how external social capital can challenge organizational norms. Mark Chaves and James Cavendish (1996) note that the conflicts surrounding women’s ordination escalated after 1970 due, in part, to the influx of women into divinity schools and seminaries. “Seminaries in the 1970s brought together women whose common education and shared grievances became resources for increased organization and group-sponsored actions” (Chaves and Cavendish 1996:576). 11. See Loury (1981) and Coleman (1990) for a discussion on the inalienability of most social capital. 12. We would stress, however, that when students enter the seminary they are not empty vessels, void of religious capital. Instead, they come to seminary with preexisting religious capital based on past religious socialization or service in lay ministry. Due to the desire to preserve religious capital (see Iannaccone 1990; Sherkat 1997), future pastors gravitate toward seminaries and seminary programs that align with their existing beliefs and expectations regarding the ministry. Seminaries add to and revise this base of religious capital. 13. Though data are scarce on the fit between clergy and congregation, Clifford J. Tharp (1985) reported that during an 18-month period, between late 1982 and early 1984, Southern Baptist congregations fired approximately 1,600 pastors....

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  • ...Ahlstrom (1975:93) reports that at the 1784 Christmas Conference, American Methodism “instituted measures to exclude slaveowners or dealers from membership.” He goes on to write that Baptists, too, “have a similar history of forceful statements in the revolutionary period, followed by a steady accommodation of Southern practice.” Conflicts over women’s ordination show how external social capital can challenge organizational norms. Mark Chaves and James Cavendish (1996) note that the conflicts surrounding women’s ordination escalated after 1970 due, in part, to the influx of women into divinity schools and seminaries. “Seminaries in the 1970s brought together women whose common education and shared grievances became resources for increased organization and group-sponsored actions” (Chaves and Cavendish 1996:576). 11. See Loury (1981) and Coleman (1990) for a discussion on the inalienability of most social capital. 12. We would stress, however, that when students enter the seminary they are not empty vessels, void of religious capital. Instead, they come to seminary with preexisting religious capital based on past religious socialization or service in lay ministry. Due to the desire to preserve religious capital (see Iannaccone 1990; Sherkat 1997), future pastors gravitate toward seminaries and seminary programs that align with their existing beliefs and expectations regarding the ministry. Seminaries add to and revise this base of religious capital. 13. Though data are scarce on the fit between clergy and congregation, Clifford J. Tharp (1985) reported that during an 18-month period, between late 1982 and early 1984, Southern Baptist congregations fired approximately 1,600 pastors. Of these, 71 percent were seminary graduates, although only 45 percent of all Southern Baptist pastors held seminary degrees in 1982 (Wingo 1984). Whether it is because of their training, their theology, or the selection procedure used, the local congregations are firing seminary graduates at a faster rate than those without the benefits of a seminary education. Also, see Robert C. Thompson (1974) for evidence that the distinctive religious capital of seminaries is cumulative....

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  • ...Ahlstrom (1975:93) reports that at the 1784 Christmas Conference, American Methodism “instituted measures to exclude slaveowners or dealers from membership.” He goes on to write that Baptists, too, “have a similar history of forceful statements in the revolutionary period, followed by a steady accommodation of Southern practice.” Conflicts over women’s ordination show how external social capital can challenge organizational norms. Mark Chaves and James Cavendish (1996) note that the conflicts surrounding women’s ordination escalated after 1970 due, in part, to the influx of women into divinity schools and seminaries. “Seminaries in the 1970s brought together women whose common education and shared grievances became resources for increased organization and group-sponsored actions” (Chaves and Cavendish 1996:576). 11. See Loury (1981) and Coleman (1990) for a discussion on the inalienability of most social capital....

    [...]

  • ...Ahlstrom (1975:93) reports that at the 1784 Christmas Conference, American Methodism “instituted measures to exclude slaveowners or dealers from membership.” He goes on to write that Baptists, too, “have a similar history of forceful statements in the revolutionary period, followed by a steady accommodation of Southern practice.” Conflicts over women’s ordination show how external social capital can challenge organizational norms. Mark Chaves and James Cavendish (1996) note that the conflicts surrounding women’s ordination escalated after 1970 due, in part, to the influx of women into divinity schools and seminaries....

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Dissertation
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: The Institute on Military and Twentieth Century Studies at Kansas State University and Northwest University as mentioned in this paper have published a survey on the military and the 20th century studies at KSU.
Abstract: Institute on Military and Twentieth Century Studies at Kansas State University; Northwest University

59 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: The letters of Julia COMPTON as mentioned in this paper describe her life as a spinster teacher and mother, and her ideas about courtship and marriage, as well as a candidate for heaven and a critic of Protestantism.
Abstract: .............................................................................................................. x INTRODUCTION...................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 “THE ALMIGHTY HAS SENT THEM TO ME””: RELIGION, BENEVOLENCE, AND GENDER IN ANTEBELLUM GEORGETOWN IN THE LETTERS OF JULIA COMPTON ...................... 12 “Ever Your Friend”: Julia as Teacher and Mentor ......................................... 19 “I Have Had Much Fatigue Both of Body and Mind”: Life as a Spinster Teacher ......................................................................................................... 24 “A League of Friendship”: The Laywoman and Visitation Nuns ................... 26 “My Little Girl”: Julia as Mother .................................................................. 32 “Remember Mr. Mate is Head of Your family”: Julia’s Ideas abut Courtship and Marriage ................................................................................ 40 “A Candidate for Heaven”: Raising Catholic Children .................................. 51 “A Most Lamentable State of Things”: Julia’s Criticisms of Protestantism ................................................................................................ 55 “The Homeless Being Must Have a Refuge”: Private Catholic Benevolence ................................................................................................. 58 “. . . [H]eaven Help wHis Preaching:” Church, Public Piety, and Sermons ........................................................................................................ 66 “Always Wear Your Medals”: Meanings of Julia’s Private Piety .................. 78 “How Wrong to Defer Our Preparation for Death” ........................................ 89 2 PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC DEATHS: OBITUARIES OF WOMEN AS REPRESENTATIONS OF MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY CATHOLIC IDENTITY ............................................................................. 100 Early Piety, Early Death ............................................................................. 107 The Domestic Ideal ..................................................................................... 111 Benevolent Women .................................................................................... 119 Unmarried Women ..................................................................................... 126 Genealogies of Respectability ..................................................................... 130

57 citations

References
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Book
01 Jan 1972
TL;DR: Ahlstrom's "Religious Book of the Decade" as mentioned in this paper was the winner of the 1973 National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion and the Christian Century's choice as the religious book of the decade (1979).
Abstract: This classic work, winner of the 1973 National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion and Christian Century's choice as the Religious Book of the Decade (1979), is now issued with a new chapter by noted religious historian David Hall, who carries the story of American religious history forward to the present day. Praise for the earlier edition: "An unusual and praiseworthy book...It takes a modern, almost anthropological view of history, in which worship is a part of a web of culture along with play, love, dress, and language."--B.A. Weisberger, Washington Post Book World "The most detailed, most polished of the works in its tradition."--Martin E. Marty, New York Times Book Review "An intellectual delight that one does not so much read as savor."--America "The definitive one-volume study by the leading authority."--Christianity Today "No one writing or thinking hereafter about America's past will be able to ignore Ahlstrom's magisterial account of the religious element."--American Historical Review

525 citations