Download or read book Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest written by Patricia O'Connell Killen and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When asked their religious identification, more people answer 'none' in the Pacific Northwest than in any other region of the United States. But this does not mean that the region's religious institutions are without power or that Northwesterners who do attend no place of worship are without spiritual commitments. With no dominant denomination, Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, adherents of Pacific Rim religious traditions, indigenous groups, spiritual environmentalists, and secularists must vie or sometimes must cooperate with each other to address the regions' pressing economic, environmental, and social issues. One cannot understand this complex region without understanding the fluid religious commitments of its inhabitants. And one cannot understand religion in Oregon, Washington, and Alaska without Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest.
Download or read book Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Region written by Wade Clark Roof and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pretty much like the rest of the country, only more so." This quip from Wallace Stegner well-represents the Pacific region's religious culture. California, Nevada, and Hawaii emerged more recently, more quickly and with more diversity and fluidity than the other United States. Although influenced by Mexican Catholicism, Native Traditions, Asian Religions, and Euro-American Christianity, no religious tradition dominates, and a secular ethos usually reigns. But this very religious indifference makes California and the rest of the region open to all sorts of missionary movements and religious innovations. New organizational forms, new spiritual therapies, and new religious hybrids all compete for residents' attention along with secular ways for making meaning. With all these options, residents of the region mix, match, and move between religious identities more than other Americans. Without ignoring its diversity, Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Region highlights the key aspects of the region's fluctuating religions and its spirituality's impact on political life.
Download or read book The Secular Northwest written by Tina Block and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of a rough frontier – where working men were tempted away from church on Sundays by more profane concerns – was perpetuated by postwar church leaders, who decried the decline of religious involvement. In this pioneering book, Tina Block debunks the myth of a godless frontier, revealing a Pacific Northwest that consciously rejected the trappings of organized religion but not necessarily spirituality – and not necessarily God. Secularism was not only the domain of the working man: women, families, and middle-class communities all helped to shape the region’s secular identity. But rejection of religion led to family, gender, and class tensions. Drawing on oral histories, census data, newspapers, and archival sources, Block explores the dynamics of Northwest secularity, grounded in the cultural permeability of the Canada–United States border, the independent spirit of those who called the region home, and their openness to secular ways of experiencing the world.
Download or read book One Nation Divisible written by Mark Silk and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One Nation, Divisible shows how geographical religious diversity has shaped public culture in eight distinctive regions of the country and how regional differences influence national politics. --from publisher description.
Download or read book Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America written by Crawford Gribben and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.
Download or read book The Future of Catholicism in America written by Mark Silk and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catholics constitute the largest religious community in the United States. Yet most American Catholics have never known a time when their church was not embroiled in controversies over liturgy, religious authority, cultural change, and gender and sexuality. Today, these arguments are taking place against the backdrop of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda and the resurgence of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. What is the future of Catholicism in America? This volume considers the prospects at a pivotal moment. Contributors—scholars from sociology, theology, religious studies, and history—look at the church’s evolving institutional structure, its increasing ethnic diversity, and its changing public presence. They explore the tensions among members of the hierarchy, between clergy and laity, and along lines of ethnicity, immigration status, class, generation, political affiliation, and degree of religious commitment. They conclude that American Catholicism’s future will be pluriform—reflecting the variety of cultural, political, ideological, and spiritual points of view that typify the multicultural, democratic society of which Catholics constitute so large a part.
Download or read book Religion at the Edge written by Paul Bramadat and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cascadia bioregion – British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon – has long been at the forefront of cultural shifts occurring throughout North America, in particular regarding religious institutions, ideas, and practices. Religion at the Edge explores the rise of religious “nones,” the decline of mainstream Christian denominations, spiritual and environmental innovation, increasing religious pluralism, and the growth of smaller, more traditional faith groups in Cascadia. This volume is the first research-driven book to address religion, spirituality, and irreligion in the Pacific Northwest, past and present. Employing surveys, archival sources, interviews, and focus groups, contributors showcase a spectrum of adherents from Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i, New Age, Indigenous, and irreligious communities. Religion at the Edge expands our understanding of contemporary society, pursuing empirical and theoretical debates about the nature, scale, and implications of socio-religious changes in North America, and the relevance of regionalism to that discussion.
Download or read book Religion and the Public Conscience written by Randi J. Walker and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores the nature of public conscience, the influence of the generation that came of age in the Progressive Era on the modern civil rights movements, the nature of women’s leadership, the dynamics of civil rights in a multi-racial context, and the way in which religion plays a role in broader social movements. These two ecumenical groups can be credited with contributing to Seattle’s relatively peaceful engagement with the civil rights movement compared to other cities in the United States during the 1960s.
Download or read book Evangelical Vs Liberal written by James K. Wellman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural conflict that increasingly divides American society is particularly evident within Protestant Christianity. Liberals and evangelicals clash in bitter competition for the future of their respective subcultures. In this book, James Wellman examines this conflict as it is played out in the American Northwest. Drawing on an in-depth study of twenty-four of the area's fastest-growing evangelical churches and ten vital liberal Protestant congregations, Wellman captures the leading trends of each group and their interaction with the wider American culture. He finds a remarkable depth of disagreement between the two groups on almost every front. Where evangelicals are willing to draw sharp lines on gay marriage and abortion, liberals complain about evangelical self-righteousness and disregard for personal freedoms. Liberals prefer the moral power of inclusiveness, while evangelicals frame their moral stances as part of a metaphysical struggle between good and evil. The entrepreneurial nature of evangelicalism translates into support of laissez-faire capitalism and democratic political advocacy. Liberals view both policies with varying degrees of apprehension. Such differences are significant on a national scale, with implications for the future of American Protestantism in particular and American culture in general. Both groups act in good faith and with good intentions, and each maintains a moral core that furthers its own identity, ideology, ritual, mission, and politics. In some situations, they share similar attitudes despite having different beliefs. Attending church services and interviewing senior pastors, lay leaders and new members, Wellman is able to provide new insights into the convenient categories of "liberal" and "evangelical," the nature of the conflict, and the myriad ways both groups affect and are affected by American culture.
Download or read book A Country Strange and Far written by Michael C. McKenzie and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1834 the weary missionary Jason Lee arrived on the banks of the Willamette River and began to build a mission to convert the local Kalapuya and Chinook populations to the Methodist Church. The denomination had become a religious juggernaut in the United States, dominating the religious scene throughout the mid-Atlantic and East Coast. But despite its power and prestige and legions of clergy and congregants, Methodism fell short of its goals of religious supremacy in the northwest corner of the continent. In A Country Strange and Far Michael C. McKenzie considers how and why the Methodist Church failed in the Pacific Northwest and how place can affect religious transplantation and growth. Methodists failed to convert local Native people in large numbers, and immigrants who moved into the rural areas and cities of the Northwest wanted little to do with Methodism. McKenzie analyzes these failures, arguing the region itself--both the natural geography of the place and the immigrants' and clergy's responses to it--was a primary reason for the church's inability to develop a strong following there. The Methodists' efforts in the Pacific Northwest provide an ideal case study for McKenzie's timely region-based look at religion.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics written by Jeffrey Schultz and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1999 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, such issues as abortion, capital punishment, sex education, racism, prayer in public schools, and family values keep religion and politics closely entwined in American public life. This encyclopedia is an A-to-Z listing of a broad range of topics related to religious issues and politics, ranging from the religious freedom sought by the Pilgrims in the 1620s to the rise of the religious right in the 1980s.
Download or read book Sacro Egoism written by John S. Knox and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacro-Egoism: The Rise of Religious Individualism in the West discusses the relationship between secularization, participation in religious practices and belief, and the emergence of radical individualized expressions of faith in the West. Using McMinnville, Oregon, as a case study, it presents the data collected and analyzed from several churches, denominations, and spiritual settings in that unassuming town, and compares it to the results of Heelas and Woodhead's "Spiritual Revolution" project, arriving at a provocative conclusion. Rather than abandoning Christianity for alternative spirituality practices, McMinnville citizens still feel strongly about their Christian faith, taking their spiritual walk to a more personal level than ever before in church history. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative research, along with personal stories of faith and exploration from McMinnville residents themselves, Sacro-Egoism: The Rise of Religious Individualism in the West tells a story of radical individualists who have become the highest religious authority in their lives--even over the church, the Bible, and traditional Christian society.
Download or read book America s Religions written by Peter W. Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic introduction to religion in America, newly revised and updated
Download or read book Religion and Public Life in the Middle Atlantic Region written by Randall Herbert Balmer and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2006 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of public religion in Delaware, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC.
Download or read book Religion and Resistance in Appalachia written by Joseph D. Witt and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-12-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last fifty years, the Appalachian Mountains have suffered permanent and profound change due to the expansion of surface coal mining. The irrevocable devastation caused by this practice has forced local citizens to redefine their identities, their connections to global economic forces, their pasts, and their futures. Religion is a key factor in the fierce debate over mountaintop removal; some argue that it violates a divine mandate to protect the earth, while others contend that coal mining is a God-given gift to ensure human prosperity and comfort. In Religion and Resistance in Appalachia: Faith and the Fight against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining, Joseph D. Witt examines how religious and environmental ethics foster resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, teachers, preachers, and community leaders, Witt's research offers a fresh analysis of an important and dynamic topic. His study reflects a diversity of denominational perspectives, exploring Catholic and mainline Protestant views of social and environmental justice, evangelical Christian readings of biblical ethics, and Native and nontraditional spiritual traditions. By placing Appalachian resistance to mountaintop removal in a comparative international context, Witt's work also provides new outlooks on the future of the region and its inhabitants. His timely study enhances, challenges, and advances conversations not only about the region, but also about the relationship between religion and environmental activism.
Download or read book Towards Cascadia written by Ryan C. Moothart and published by Hillcrest Publishing Group. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Towards Cascadia is about the unique region of Cascadia, and explores themes of bioregionalism, identity, freedom, civics, and more so as to make one comprehensive, coherent argument in support of Cascadia. The goal of this book to propose a different way of understanding the Pacific Northwest and regional differentiation in upper North America that readers find legitimate.
Download or read book Dixie Dharma written by Jeff Wilson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhism in the United States is often viewed in connection with practitioners in the Northeast and on the West Coast, but in fact, it has been spreading and evolving throughout the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. In Dixie Dharma, Jeff Wilson argues that region is crucial to understanding American Buddhism. Through the lens of a multidenominational Buddhist temple in Richmond, Virginia, Wilson explores how Buddhists are adapting to life in the conservative evangelical Christian culture of the South, and how traditional Southerners are adjusting to these newer members on the religious landscape. Introducing a host of overlooked characters, including Buddhist circuit riders, modernist Pure Land priests, and pluralistic Buddhists, Wilson shows how regional specificity manifests itself through such practices as meditation vigils to heal the wounds of the slave trade. He argues that southern Buddhists at once use bodily practices, iconography, and meditation tools to enact distinct sectarian identities even as they enjoy a creative hybridity.
