Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Wei-Hsian CHI Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. This article delves into the evolution of Taiwanese popular religion amid the backdrop of social modernization. The emphasis on orthopraxy in Taiwanese popular religion offers a unique perspective on how religion adapts to modernization. It argues that the significance attributed to rituals in Taiwanese religions not only underscores a long-standing tradition but also serves as a fundamental aspect of popular religion. The materiality of rituals establishes heterogenous connections between the religious and non-religious, enabling popular religion to thrive and evolve in contemporary society. The study focuses on the ritual practice of ‘incense-offering pilgrimages’ by a local lay group, highlighting how the public visibility of deities is rooted in ritual observance rather than faith alone. Through detailed case studies, this article underscores the multifaceted ‘diversion connections’ between religious and non-religious domains. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-22T10:40:28Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241261292
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Roberto BLANCARTE Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. We live in an Apocalyptic Era, in frustrated disappointed and enraged societies that have lost the future. Eternity has become an outcast and salvation in the afterlife is no longer a leading quest. In short, we live the end of the centrality of the concept of theodicy. The conjunction of the crisis in religious socialization mechanisms and those of secular socialization is what largely generates this widespread disappointment. The idea of Apocalypse, historically related to condemnations and Manichean visions, has returned with force to our contemporary societies through new forms of exclusion and discrimination in populist regimes relating to popular religiosity. The role of sociology of religions is to assess the current social disappointment and demystification of the future and at the same time distinguish and warn about the political processes of reproduction and representation of contemporary apocalypses. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-22T10:38:18Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241260829
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Satoko Fujiwara, Hiroki Miura Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. This article discusses the transformation of religious and non-religious practices in contemporary Japanese youth culture. The article employs both western analysis of ‘nones’ and Japanese theories to explain this transformation. Three concepts characterize (non-)religiousness in Japanese youth culture: ‘practicing belonging’, ‘vicarious spirituality’, and ‘gendered fetishism’. These concepts are first exemplified in a culture surrounding the concept of ‘tulpa’ (created paranormal beings, derived from Tibetan Buddhism) in Japan. Other examples reflecting each of these concepts are presented, along with a discussion of why Japanese youth culture came to manifest such characteristics. In so doing, we will refrain from drawing a rigid line between religious and non-religious settings, acknowledging that what may appear religious to Japanese scholars may not be viewed as such by western scholars. The factors behind the transformation of religiousness in Japan affect not only religious and spiritual but also non-religious or secular settings, resulting in parallel phenomena. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-22T10:36:48Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241260494
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:André LALIBERTÉ Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. In this article, I will first describe the extent of the influence of Buddhism in Taiwan, presenting some data on the demographic importance of this religion in terms of people who identify with it, but also in terms of associations that claim to do so. I will then introduce the positions of the main masters of this tradition relevant to four kinds of political issues relevant to Taiwan: the democratic transition process itself, the development of Taiwan’s welfare regime, cross-strait relations with China, and the contribution of Buddhist associations to the international influence of Taiwan in the context of the latter’s diplomatic isolation. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-22T10:35:04Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241259711
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Pi-Chen LIU Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. The traditional religions of Taiwan’s Indigenous people (Austronesian speaking) are very diverse. The 16 officially recognized ethnic groups differ markedly in notions of deities, spirits, ancestors, classes of beings, and ritual groupings. This article attempts to use Philippe Descola’s concept of ontology to understand their differences. I investigate how Indigenous people perceive their world through the two basic mechanisms of body and intentionality to infer similarities and differences between themselves and nonhuman beings. Three modes of identification result: animism, analogism, and totemism. Their traditional religions are often regarded as animism, rather than typical of societies identified with analogism or totemism. However, I will explore these groups’ distinguishing ontological characteristics. By demonstrating the process of diversification through the religious changes since the 1950s, a new understanding of their impacts on different combinations of ontology will be obtained. This can avoid the critique that structuralist and ontological approaches ignore contemporary changes. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-20T05:38:46Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241261281
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Inger FURSETH Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. This article presents the main work of two women in classical sociology, Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931). While some sociologists have pointed to the significance of their work and that of other early women classical sociologists, most sociologists, and in particular, most sociologists of religion, have ignored their work. This article asks which themes in sociology and the sociology of religion these women addressed that many male classical sociologists failed to address. How does the study of these two women point to important issues in current sociology of religion' The analysis shows that central themes in the work of Martineau and Wells were the intersections of religion, gender, race, and social class. Their work also points to another highly important issue seldom addressed in current sociology of religion, namely the link between various forms of religion and the realization of democracy. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-20T05:36:56Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241260197
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Jen-Chieh TING Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. I see the emerging new religious groups in Taiwan as an emerging form of popularism in its encounter with the post-colonial situation. This scenario differs greatly from Western new religious movements, where new religion lies outside culturally established religious traditions, and it is also distinct from other Eastern traditions, such as those found in Japan, where traditionally elite and popular traditions have a larger social and mental distance from each other. In the complex Chinese cultural and historical tradition, there exists a deeper interpenetrating elite-popular relationship, therefore determining a different route for religious phenomena. I use the term ‘popular humanism’ to label this trend in contemporary Taiwan. Finally, I use two axes to codify the emerging Taiwanese new religions, ‘methods in popular humanism’ and ‘institutional framing’, mapping the key new religious movements of Taiwan within these axes to localise each group and their mutual positions. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-20T05:35:26Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241259732
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Douglas EZZY, Bronwyn FIELDER, Angus MCLEAY Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. This article argues that the focus on the harm and stigma experienced by LGBTQ+ Christians misrepresents the complexity of the experience of many LGBTQ+ Christians, many of whom report affirmation and self-acceptance. A national representative survey indicates 5.5% of all Australians, 2.9% of Christians, and 8.4% of those with no religion identify their sexuality as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or ‘other’. LGB+ Christians appear to be distributed through all large Christian denominations. A second non-random national online survey indicates that many LGBTQ+ Christians report both self-acceptance and acceptance in their Christian community. While many LGBTQ+ Christians experience significant discrimination in Christian contexts, the often reported incompatibility of Christianity with LGBTQ+ sexual and gender identities is only one part of the story. There are significant sectors of Australian Christianity that are welcoming of LGBTQ+ people. Furthermore, LGBTQ+ people who remain Christians are often deeply committed to their faith. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-06-19T12:24:01Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241255648
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Christoph NOVAK, Astrid MATTES, Miriam HASELBACHER, Katharina LIMACHER Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. Scholarship on religious belonging has overwhelmingly labelled believers’ religion in very broad and superficial terms, presuming that individual practices and beliefs are congruent with religious doctrines and official discourses. By splitting up religious socialisation into two crucial phases, the adoption and the adaption of religion, this article offers a more procedural understanding to investigating how young believers develop their own sense of religious belonging. Based on biographical narrative interviews with Viennese believers (aged 16–25) from 7 religious groups, we observe that the adoption of a certain religion is primarily bound to family ties. The adaption phase serves to develop personal approaches towards religion based on two major rationales: adapting one’s own religiosity by engaging with religious doctrine and community itself, and negotiating religion within society. We argue that adaption is closely tied to social relations within and across religions and to (secular) society at large. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-05-04T09:24:31Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241242267
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Barbora SPALOVÁ, Vojtěch PELIKÁN, Marek LIŠKA Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. The presented text builds upon 4 years of applied research intended to support the transformation of a Czech Catholic diocese into a more participative organisation, internally and externally. This process allowed us to see different positions in the relationship between the religious and the secular within the highly secularised Czech Republic. In some places, the religious and the secular appeared incompatible. Elsewhere they influenced each other and intermingled. And still, in other places, the religious escaped horizontal opposition to the secular and differentiated itself vertically as a transcendental other. In all cases, it was evident that we cannot consider the religious and the secular as categories which define mutually competitive worlds. This definitional opposition is disappearing, and the terms are losing clarity as well as the capacity to organise the lives of Western subjects. We suggest using Dalferth’s differentiation of R-secularity and D-secularity as a tool to gasp this shift. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2024-05-04T09:18:31Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686241241017
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Lori G BEAMAN, Lauren STRUMOS Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. This article explores how sociologists of religion can respond to ‘the animal turn’ in studies of lived religion and nonreligion. We begin by considering how sociology has neglected the place of non-human animals and the ‘more than human’ in social life. We then turn to the sociology of religion, where animals have often been devalued or ignored as irrelevant to understanding religion in society. We argue that it is necessary to consider the ways in which human activities are shaped by non-human animals. This does not mean that animals should be thought of as nonreligious or religious. We contend that the failure to incorporate non-human animals in sociological considerations of religion and nonreligion replicates a hierarchical model, which sees human life as above or higher than non-human life and calls our attention to the place of sociological research amid the climate crisis. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2023-05-25T12:10:38Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686231170993
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Anna Sofia Salonen Abstract: Social Compass, Ahead of Print. The contemporary food system relies on a paradigm of human exceptionalism. But living well together with all forms of life would require that we imagine humans’ place in the world as embedded, not as separate. This study explores food waste as a case for how to reimagine humans’ place in the world. Drawing from individual and group interviews conducted in Canada and Finland, I trace the roles that ordinary people assign for themselves when talking about food waste. Humans see themselves as both creators of food waste and as saviours of food that is in danger of going to waste. These images uphold the division between humans and the nonhuman world. As a way of troubling these anthropocentric notions and re-embedding the human in the analysis in a way that transcends hierarchical subject positions, I identify a third role: that of the garburator. This role takes humans seriously as material, embodied, and eventually decomposing beings. Citation: Social Compass PubDate: 2022-12-29T05:08:49Z DOI: 10.1177/00377686221144400
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
