Church and State in the Roberts Court: Christian Conservatism and Social Change in Ten Cases, 2005–2018. By Jerold Waltman

Disparities in population health statuses are tied to inequities in society, and not just differences in personal decision-making and behavior. Christians should (and must) play a role in confronting these inequities, based upon three biblical themes: 1) the instructions in the book of Leviticus regarding the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee as a way to protect the economic system from producing insurmountable inequities and degrading the environment; 2) the eschatological image of the New Jerusalem in the book of Isaiah, with its focus on Shalom in contrast to a religion focused on personal piety in the face of oppression and social injustice; and 3) Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom, which include its imminence and the counter-cultural nature of its ethic. The notion of the kingdom can be applied in the lives of Christians (particularly those involved in public health) through individual acts, corporate acts in the context of the church, and state-led actions to bring about social change to achieve social justice. Social change can be described as an act of reconciliation in which systems of society are redeemed by the power of kingdom principles.

Download Full-text

Floreas into Virágs: State Regulation of First Names in Dualist Hungary

Austrian History Yearbook ◽

10.1017/s0067237816000096 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 47 ◽

pp. 107-127

Author(s):

Ágoston Berecz

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Political Institutions ◽

Church And State ◽

Nation Building ◽

State Regulation ◽

Major Step ◽

Policy Makers ◽

National Minorities ◽

Administrative Division ◽

Special Challenge

The Kingdom of Hungary instituted the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths in 1894. While the new institution was both eulogized and criticized as a major step in the separation of church and state and toward the creation of a modern, secular Hungary, it also opened up a new path for nation building. In this exceedingly multilingual and multinational country, churches often acted as proxies of cultural and political institutions for the national minorities. In the present article, I examine the specifically nation-building aspects embodied in the new regulation for the official use of first names that accompanied Act XXXIII of 1894 on the civil registry, and focus particularly on Romanian first names. Due to their considerable mismatch with Hungarian first names, Romanian names posed a special challenge to policy makers, and for this reason they demonstrate some less obvious dimensions of the changes instituted in 1894. The geographic parameters of this investigation have been imposed by the spatial framework of a wider research project on the interconnections among language, nationalism, and social change in the eastern part of Dualist Hungary, a territory encompassing Transylvania, the easternmost counties of contemporary Hungary proper (according to the administrative division created in 1876), and the eastern two-thirds of the Banat. This framework enables me to make comparisons with other ethnolinguistic groups, notably Transylvanian Saxons and the Catholic Germans of the Banat.

Download Full-text

Anglicanism

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198718406.013.9 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Frances Knight

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Social Change ◽

Church And State ◽

British Isles ◽

Oxford Movement ◽

The Third ◽

The World ◽

Mission History ◽

Anglican Theology

This chapter analyses the ways nineteenth-century Anglicanism has been studied by scholars. Three different traditions of historiography are identified and explored. The first approach is interested in internal ecclesiastical debates, in relations between Church and state, and in wider social change. A brief discussion of the historiography of the Oxford Movement illustrates how academic approaches to this topic have developed since the 1840s. The second approach is scholarly immersion in nineteenth-century Anglican theology, which remained influential for most of the twentieth century. However, it fell out of favour from the 1980s, as new styles of theology became more fashionable. The third approach is the study of Anglicanism outside the British Isles. This developed from a focus on mission history and the development of the Anglican Communion, to more recent appreciation of global Anglicanism, seeking to do justice to the experience of Anglicans, wherever they live in the world.

Download Full-text

Moderation, Religion, and Public Discourse: The Rhetoric of Occasional Conformity in England, 1697-1711

Rhetorica A Journal of the History of Rhetoric ◽

10.1525/rh.1997.15.1.53 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 53-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Sandra J. Sarkela

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Seventeenth Century ◽

Social Change ◽

New Testament ◽

Public Discourse ◽

Church And State ◽

Theoretical Understanding ◽

The New Testament

Abstract: This paper analyzes the rhetoric of the eighteenthcentury English debate over occasional conformity in order to develop a better understanding of how persuasive appeals to moderation were used in this particular case. This debate is noteworthy because it reveais how the eighteenth-century veneration of moderation was influeneed by the seventeenth-century Protestant reading of the New Testament. This understanding of moderation led to some of the first arguments suggesting a need for separation of church and state. Further, this example extends our theoretical understanding of moderate rhetoric when we observe its use as a justification for social change.

Download Full-text

Mina All New: An Unmarried Mother on Italian Television in the Early 1960s

Journal of Contemporary History ◽

10.1177/00220094211039552 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 002200942110395

Author(s):

Emma Barron

Keyword(s):

Social Change ◽

Mass Culture ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Church And State ◽

State Control ◽

The Public ◽

Unmarried Mother ◽

Moral Content ◽

Television Content ◽

Illegitimate Child

In 1960s Italy, mass culture played an important role in the circulation of ideas as tens-of-millions of people read magazines, listened to music, and watched television. In 1963, Mina – one of Italy’s most popular singers and a variety television star – had an illegitimate child. Despite this public moral lapse, her records continued to sell, magazines reported on her situation, and advertisers continued to use her to promote products. While the Italian state and the Catholic Church sought to guide the public and slow the pace of social change by restricting mass culture, Mina’s case reveals cracks in the mediation of moral content by the state broadcaster and demonstrates the growing influence of middle-class audiences by the end of Italy’s economic ‘miracle’. The article uses magazine and television content, market research, and viewer surveys to argue that Mina’s case shows the importance of mass culture in social change and new limits to church and state control over audiences. Mina’s career recovery would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Her return to television variety in 1965 demonstrated the importance of mass culture in social change, and a new role for audiences, advertisers and enterprises in setting Italy’s moral codes.

Download Full-text