scholarly journals The religious body imagined

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-107
Author(s):  
Pamela D. Winfield
Keyword(s):  
Religious Body

Christianity and Rome

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. A. Drake
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Roman Religion ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
The Right ◽  
Religious Body

While Constantine’s conversion to Christianity changed the deity, it did not change the ideology of the Roman empire. Before Constantine’s relationship with Christianity, there was no religious body in the empire capable of providing a sanction for imperial rule similar to what a vote in the Roman Senate had been able to do. Roman religion was conducted by the same civic authorities who performed “secular duties”; the emperor as pontifex maximus could not credibly ratify himself. But over the centuries, Christians had developed an empire-wide organization completely independent of government control. As the new legitimators of imperial power, bishops demanded and got the right to pass judgment on emperors. The division was neatly framed with give and take on both sides; but from this perspective, the Christian turn to coercion is better analyzed as an outgrowth of power relationships than as the product of an inherent intolerance.

Mitre Without Sceptre: An Eighteenth Century Ecclesiastical Revilution

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-371
Author(s):  
Frederick V. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Parent Body ◽  
The State ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Religious Body ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Church

The American revolution caused the Anglican churches in America to separate from their parent body: the Church of England. This threw the Episcopalians upon their own resources to rebuild their church. In the process of reorganization, the former Anglicans accomplished an ecclesiastical revolution in respect to episcopacy. For the first time since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Episcopalians in America made a bishop of a major religious body the elected official of a convention of clergy and laymen. In the second place, the office of bishop in a major denomination was completely separated from the state for the first time since Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity in 313 A.D.

The Problem of the Cistercian nuns in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth centuries

1978 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Cistercian Order ◽  
Religious Body

The early Cistercians were remarkable for their hostility to the feminine sex. ‘No religious body’ wrote Southern, was ‘more thoroughly masculine in its temper and discipline than the Cistercians, none that shunned female contact with greater determination or that raised more formidable barriers against the intrusion of women.’ The whole tenor of several of the early Cistercian statutes was that women were to be avoided at all costs. One decree enjoined the monks to sing like men and not imitate the high-pitched tinkling of women. Apart from these disparaging references to the female sex in general, an early statute explicitly stated that no Cistercian abbot or monk should bless a nun. In the thirteenth century this was interpreted as applying to the solemn consecration of nuns—a task which pertained to the bishop. It is stated that abbots did have the power to bless nuns at the end of their novitiate. But this later interpretation may well reflect later subtleties. It seems probable that the decree was originally intended to stop the Cistercians concerning themselves with nuns. The view that it was originally a straight-forward prohibition is strengthened by the fact that the same early decree went on to forbid the baptizing of infants. This decree, therefore, is crucial to any analysis of the position of nuns within the Cistercian order in the twelfth century. Dating it is difficult.

Health Policy and Applied Anthropology in the Catholic Church

1996 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Angrosino
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Health Care Technology ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
American Society ◽  
Care Technology ◽  
Religious Body

Decisions about health care often reflect moral choices, and they are often couched today in the discourse of social justice that has diffused from the religious to the secular sphere of American society. Although thinking about health care technology and service delivery in terms of moral values is hardly novel, it is still relatively uncommon for an applied anthropologist to seek to understand and advocate for health care reform from within an organized religious body, as I do within the Roman Catholic Church.

Contrasting Patterns of Belonging and Believing

2019 ◽  
pp. 102-126
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Church Attendance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
The Media ◽  
Religious Body

This chapter analyzes the strikingly divergent trajectories of Christian belief and practice in Scandinavia and the United States. All Scandinavian countries in the twentieth century experienced a decline in regular church attendance that appears to have been consistent throughout the century, and that may have begun as soon as religious compulsion was lifted in the nineteenth century. This protracted decline mirrored the slow waning of orthodox Christian belief, but this was not a decline from a previous golden age of faith; rather there seems every likelihood that the adherence of many Scandinavian people to Christian faith had been quite tenuous ever since the region was first evangelized. Yet the Scandinavian countries also illustrate in a pointed way the possibility that in certain conditions, stable patterns of religious belonging can exist almost independently of personal religious belief. Meanwhile, the United States in the twentieth century was by some criteria a more “secular” nation than Sweden or Denmark. The American state from its inception has refused to give any religious body privileged status before the law. In consequence, religion in the United States has always been divorced from the apparatus of government and public institutions to a much greater extent than in the Scandinavian nations, and in the course of the twentieth century, that divorce became more absolute in certain spheres, notably in the universities, public education, and the media.

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