Sentences with phrase «american religious culture»

Although Taja thinks often about the unspoken rules and misogyny of African American religious culture (Sister Davis has to wear «looser skirts, lighter lipstick, and panty hose» if she wants to continue reading church announcements), she doesn't publicly challenge them with her friends or family members.

Passages that were originally written for groups of people, and intended to be read and applied in a community setting (the nation of Israel, the various early churches, the first followers of Jesus), have been manipulated to communicate a personal, individual message... thus leading the reader away from the original corporate intent of the passage to a reaffirmation of the individualistic, me - centered, and consumerist tendencies of American religious culture.

The second effect to be considered is that on American religious culture as a whole.

More significant also may be the particular effect the broadcasters have had on the development of American religious culture.

Because the selective nature of television is often overlooked, the diversity of American religious culture is in danger of being narrowed to that particular strand of religious faith which is now being promoted by television largely because of its acceptance and coherence with television's own social and economic goals.

Television's managers have exercised a powerful censoring effect on the expression of religious faith in America, giving them consequentially an exaggerated influence over the development of American religious culture and institutions and possibly over the nature of American and even global religious life.

Indeed, the persistence of these beliefs seems to be one of the more stable elements of American religious culture, in contrast with the serious restructuring that has taken place in many other beliefs and practices.

The biggest shift in American religious culture in my lifetime has been the extraordinary decline of mainline Protestantism as a vital force in public life.

In relation to American religious culture, therefore, television has exercised a major status - conferral effect, not on the basis of a representativeness, nor on a calculated moral - evaluative basis, but solely on the basis of a correspondence of a minority religious ethos with television's own economic, functional, and mythical goals.

Part of the reason for the takeover of religious television by conservative, paid - time religious broadcasters has been the changes that have occurred in American religious culture, changes that have reduced the power of those broadcasters who represent the mainline denominations while increasing the power of those representing the conservative denominations and groups.

The dominance of religious television by this one minority expression of American religious culture assumes more serious implications when it is considered with the factors that have influenced it, which is the substance of our next chapter.

In other words, the questions and issues I raise in the post aren't new; these questions and issues are recurring ones in American religious culture (though they have manifested themselves differently through the years) and have been inherited by my generation.

Televangelism and African American Religious Culture.»

Not exact matches

CNN: In culture war skirmishes, Georgetown becomes political football In the latest round of culture wars over contraception and religious liberty, most Americans would probably identify places like the White House and Congress as key battlefields.

As Todd Brenneman argues in his recent book, Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism, sentimentality may be a defining characteristic of religious life for many Americans, and so most readers in the dominant Evangelical culture, outside a few hip and urban churches, are more likely to encounter the treacly poetry of Ruth Bell Graham than the spiritually searing work of R. S. Thomas or T. S. Eliot.

Religious historian Thomas S Kidd writes, «In American pop culture parlance, «evangelical» now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote RepublicaReligious historian Thomas S Kidd writes, «In American pop culture parlance, «evangelical» now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republicareligious and who vote Republican.»

The Secular City helped accelerate the secularization of American elite culture, which created not only new openings in the public square for more - traditional religious bodies but also new fault lines in our politics» fault lines that are as visible as this morning's headlines and op - ed pages.

As mainline Protestantism ceased to be a culture - forming force in American public life, the void was filled by a new Catholic presence in the public square and, perhaps most influentially in electoral terms, by the emergent activism of evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Protestantism in what would become known as the Religious Right» a movement that has formed a crucial part of the Republican governing coalition for more than a quarter - century.

While culture war issues make headlines galore, an exhaustive study of Americans» religious attitudes shows the public as a whole might not find the debate so enticing.

Religious liberty is plainly essential for the endurance of our free society and for the protection of the rights and freedoms of the many millions of Americans who dissent from the caustic Gnosticism that increasingly dominates our culture.

The past two years have seen the appearance of an informative Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (4 vols., edited by Leonard W. Levy [Macmillan]-RRB-, several outstanding studies on its intellectual background (including Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seculorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution [University Press of Kansas] and Morton White's Philosophy, The Federalist, and the Constitution [Oxford University Press], at least one pathbreaking effort to trace the document's role through the years (Michael Kammen's A Machine That Would Go of Itself The Constitution in American Culture [Knopf]-RRB- and a gaggle of good books on its religious themes (see Martin Marty's review in The Century [«James Madison Revisited,» April 9.

Some Protestant forms of communication may be so integrated into secular American culture that we fail to see their religious roots.

To the degree that traditional religious groups in American culture have emphasized the word and de-emphasized images, they have deprived themselves of an effective force for transmitting their own symbols.

More recently, the idea of plausibility structures has been employed in several studies concerned with the question of how American evangelicals are able to maintain their traditional religious beliefs within the secular, pluralistic context of modern culture.

Numerous cultures in SE Asia are changing with the times and accepting molted tail feathers from endangered hornbills species maintained in zoos instead of harvesting / killing them in the wild so that they can meet their cultural / religious needs without killing off the species... why can't this Native American tribe do the same?

Though Robert Handy has written of the «second disestablishment» of Protestantism (from the Depression on), until now the historical record behind the decentering of American religious and secular culture has been neglected.

Further, as the Cold War began, Christianity was unquestionably in control of American culture, so much so that religious organizations initially felt unthreatened by the new Supreme Court decisions.

It would also, I hope, go some way toward remedying the privatization and trivialization of religious commitment that is so endemic to both American culture in general and to academic institutions in particular.

The power of the television industry has acted in this way to shape the public perception of American religious life and culture, not so much by the creation of a particular phenomenon, but by the selective promotion of one particular expression over another in a way that distorts the factual situation.

In The Reason For God, Keller argues that Christians have served on the front lines of nearly every social movement toward morality and justice in modern Western civilization, including the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in America, which is certainly true given the religious demographics of Western and American culture.

Even though American people are very religious, that does not mean the culture is devoted to serving the God of the historic Hebrew and Christian traditions.

The paganism of American culture is less obvious, for we do not have to contend with a government that suppresses religious freedom or harasses religious leaders.

That question was at the center of a recent conference at which more than 200 people assembled under the auspices of the Center for the Study and Religion and American Culture to discuss «public religious discourse and America's pluralistic society.»

«Ex-gay movement members, like other conservative Christians, view themselves as part of a positive transformation of American culture and religious life, often describing themselves as embattled or besieged by secular culture or the gay rights movement.

Flawed and impossible though they may be at times, congregations are the most powerful antidote we have to the radical individualism that pervades American secular and religious culture.

«I believe the American culture to be one of the best nurturing grounds for individuality... I hope it should go without saying that I reject blindly embracing the religious values of different people especially when they are in violation of the law and rights of individuals.»

The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion by Stephen L. Carter Basic Books, 328 pages, $ 25

Her work should be required reading not only for students of American religion, but also for anyone who wishes to study sympathetically and fruitfully a different religious culture.

One way of acknowledging its revisability is to say that it can survive the critique laid for it by Wayne Proudfoot in his 1985 Religious Experience and, more importantly, by the postmodern culture for which Proudfoot speaks.13 If it ignores that kind of postmodern critique, I am suggesting, it will not deliver on the promise it has shown recently in the growth of The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, in the founding of The Highlands Institute for American Religious Thought, in the resurgence of Columbia and Yale forms of neonaturalism and pragmatism in the work of Robert Corrington and William Shea, 14 and in the American Academy of Religion Group on Empiricism in American Religious Thought — as well as in the growing independent scholarship of those working out of the empirical side of process theology and the Chicago school.

John M. Staudenmaier, «The Influence of Communication Technologies on Modern American Culture: A Framework for Analysis,» paper presented at the University of Dayton Conference on Religious Telecommunications, Dayton, OH, September 26, 1988, p. 4.

A noted sociologist analyzes the reasons behind the current religious malaise in American culture, then proposes three possible scenarios for the future.

Americans are more religious than most other industrialized countries, and it's holding us back, both as a nation and a culture.

Given that these results tally with religious and secular aims in the United States, we should anticipate that parents concerned about the direction that American culture is taking will regard faith - based schools as providing a positive environment for their children.

To what extent are religious television programs affecting American culture?

The problem is that in the context of American evangelicalism, where religious images are often absent, pop - culture representations of the faith can become the formative symbols and images that a faith community encounters.

In the past, the fundamentalist and evangelical traditions within Christianity have tended to stand in a counterculture relationship with American society while the mainline churches have been more identified as a culture - affirming religious tradition.

Importing Vivaldi or Brahms or William Mathias into a church community whose native musical languages are closer to those of Madonna, Jimmy Buffett or John Tesh is like missionaries imposing European or North American religious styles on drastically different cultures.

At the very least, a renewed culture of hospitality could help debunk what seems (at least on the Internet) to be an operating assumption of Americans on both sides of our religious - cultural - political divides: the belief that our «enemies» are almost uniformly malevolent and unintelligent.

What can be seen from a study of religious uses of television in America is that over the past several years there has developed a marked imbalance in the presentation of American religious faith and culture.

For many years — perhaps since the Scopes trial in 1925 — the eastern secular and liberal Protestant establishments treated evangelical religion as though it were an archaic religious form, peculiarly persistent in some regions of the country, but not a significant factor in American culture.