J V Spickard
Biographic Data
| ID | 3812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J V Spickard |
| GIVEN NAMES | J V |
| FAMILY NAME | Spickard |
| SIGNATURE | SPICKARD J V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Redlands |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4191-7953 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 146 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Sensitizing Blinders
Theories in the sociology of religion do more than identify the patterns that shape religious life. They also systematically hide other patterns from easy view. This often stems from the unexamined assumptions that each theory inherits from its cultural and historical context. This address presents three examples from the sociology of religion's recent past. The first is an 'underlying forces' theory that traces religious developments to long-ter…
Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain”
The rational choice approach to religion ( RCAR ) applies neoclassical economic principles to religion to create models of religious behavior. It presents both those principles and the resulting models as universal. Most critics of that approach have challenged those models’ empirical predictions. In contrast, this article develops an ‘upstream’ critique of the theory by examining the problems with its chosen approach in economics itself. The his…
Why Reflexive Ethnography Matters to the Study of World Christianity
This article outlines the importance of reflexive ethnography for the emerging discipline of World Christianity. Ethnographers study religion as it is lived in everyday life. This requires cross-cultural understanding, but that understanding is always shaped by the ethnographer’s own social, cultural, and intellectual locations and the perspectives they bring. Reflexivity highlights those perspectives so that we can account for their distortions.…
Alternative Sociologies of Religion
Uncovers what the sociology of religion would look like had it emerged in a Confucian, Muslim, or Native American culture rather than in a Christian one Sociology has long used Western Christianity as a model for all religious life. As a result, the field has tended to highlight aspects of religion that Christians find important, such as religious beliefs and formal organizations, while paying less attention to other elements. Rather than simply …
Introduction to the Special Issue
The world is currently gripped by pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges
The dark side of religious individualism
Sociologists of religion have recently focused on the growth of religious individualism in Western societies. Whether seen as a new religious trend or as a cultural correlate to the general weakening of civic organizations in the contemporary era, it is often presented as the growing tendency in religious life. It is also frequently presented in a positive light. This article explores a different alternative. Based on the work of Herbert Marcuse,…
The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó
This complex and rewarding book is a fine example of socially and scientifically informed history. It traces the origins, development, and present status of El Santuario del Chimayó—a prominent Catholic pilgrimage shrine in northern New Mexico. Brett Hendrickson organizes his book around the shifting (and often conflicting) ownership of the shrine: not just legal ownership, but the ways by which various groups claim the shrine as their own. He re…
The Sociology of Religion in a Post-Colonial Era
This article makes two points. First, it argues that sociology, like all knowledge, is shaped, though not determined, by its historical-cultural origins. Early sociology arose in 19th-century Europe and its core concepts were shaped by that era-both in what they reveal about society and what they hide. We now realize this, so we sociologists of religion need to examine our inherited concepts to understand those concepts' limitations. We also need…
Diversity vs. Pluralism
The United States has considerable religious and ethnic diversity; it has not always embraced pluralism. Known as “a nation of immigrants”, religion has often been seen as a way to integrate newcomers into its national project. That may have worked for European immigrants, who could become ‘White’; it has not worked so well for other ethnic migrants, who could not. The result is a diverse intersectionality that as the present moment is a source o…
The Porcupine Tango
Ethnography and theology are two contrasting life-activities, regulated by separate ideals. Like other sciences, ethnography is regulated by the ideal of ‘truth’. It gathers data about human communities, particularly their worldviews and their tacit social practices. New data correct old conclusions, forcing ethnographers to discard the ideas with which they began their investigations. Following the regulative ideal helps them avoid placing their…
Multiple Secularities beyond the West
Secularization is a problematic concept for the sociology of religion. Long identified with modernity, various secularization theories have attributed religious decline in the developed world to institutional differentiation, to the spread of instrumental rationality, to pluralism, and to religious privatization. Even writers who note religion's recent resurgence often see it as a backlash against modern life. The root image is of a West overcomi…
Sex, Death, and Witchcraft
This book breaks boundaries on several levels. In the process of describing the ‘Faunalia’ festival in southwest Australia (a pseudonym), Douglas Ezzy deepens our understanding of ritual experience
Crafting Culture
Religion in China
Religion in Consumer Society
This is an extremely valuable book—on two counts. Firstly, it exhibits a high degree of theoretical adventurousness as it explores the relationship between religion and consumer culture. Secondly
In Memoriam
OTTO MADURO, THE VENEZUELAN-BORN SOCIOLOGIST OF RELIGION and liberation theorist, was the first Latino President of the AAR. In his 2012 Presidential Address, he issued an “urgent invitation for us as researchers, teachers, academics, scholars of religion—but also as plain citizens and simple human beings—to hear the cry of the oppressed and to respond to that cry, with our power, our ethical responsibility, and our role in the production and dis…
Fenomenologia
Tradução do Capítulo 2.15. do The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, organizado por Michael Stausberg e Steven Engler
Religion and the State
Jack Barbalet, Adam Possamai & Bryan S. Turner, eds., 2011 London & New York: Anthem Press 282 pp., £60.00, US$99.00 (hb) ISBN 978–0–85728–798–4 This insightful and wide-ranging collection is one o
Rethinking Secularism
Accepting the post-colonial challenge
This article seeks to expand the sociology of religion's conceptual toolkit beyond the focus on religious belief and on organizational structures inherited from Western Christianity. After criticizing these origins, I use Ibn Khaldûn's notion of al 'assabiyyah or "group-feeling" to analyze the events surrounding the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, Bosnia, in the 1980s and the later events in the same region during the 1990s Bosnian wars. This c…
Religion and the New Atheism
Journal Article Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Review Get access Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Review, by AMARNATH AMARASINGAM. Leiden: Brill, 2010, 231 pp.; $141.00 USD (cloth). James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 73, Issue 1, SPRING 2012, Pages 94–96, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srs026 Published: …
Religion and Modern Society
Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State BRYAN S. TURNER, 2011 Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 344 pp., £60.00, US$99.00 (hb), £19.99, US$32.99 (pb) I
The American Soul Rush
The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion
Bryan Turner's new Companion to the Sociology of Religion is a wide-ranging work of comparative sociology that explores the significant new sociological forces at work in the work that are both shaping and are shaped by religious groups and their beliefs and practices. As Turner notes in his opening essay, to examine the topics covered in this volume, globalization, resacralization, religious violence, and postmodernity, is to recognize "just how…
Alternative Sociologies of Religion
Steps toward a Sociology of Religious Experience
Journal Article Steps Toward a Sociology of Religious Experience: The Theories of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Alfred Schutz Get access Mary Jo Neitz, Mary Jo Neitz University of Missouri, Columbia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 51, Issue 1, Sprin…
Experiencing Religious Rituals
Journal Article Experiencing Religious Rituals: A Schutzian Analysis of Navajo Ceremonies Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 52, Issue 2, Summer 1991, Pages 191-204, https://doi.org/10.2307/3710963 Published: 01 July 1991
Rethinking Secularism
The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion
Bryan Turner's new Companion to the Sociology of Religion is a wide-ranging work of comparative sociology that explores the significant new sociological forces at work in the work that are both shaping and are shaped by religious groups and their beliefs and practices. As Turner notes in his opening essay, to examine the topics covered in this volume, globalization, resacralization, religious violence, and postmodernity, is to recognize "just how…
A Guide to Mary Douglas's Three Versions of Grid/Group Theory
In several publications over the last 18 years, Mary Douglas has advanced a theory for correlating cosmological beliefs with concrete social life. Though she acknowledges that her thinking has changed with time, nowhere does she systematically address the underlying differences between her recent and previous formulations. This article identifies three main versions of Douglas's theory, which are highly unlike. Each version differently typifies h…
Ethnocentrism, Social Theory and Non-Western Sociologies of Religion
The sociology of religion claims to possess a cross-culturally valid objectivity that is belied by its paradigm shifts in both classical and recent times. Its sequential emphasis on such issues as the changing bases of religious authority, secularization and rational choice depends in large part on Western models of religion, of the relationship between the individual and society, and on key Western values. These are not shared by other tradition…
Rethinking Religious Social Action
The rational-choice/market-model of religions really consists of two, separable parts: a model of religious behavior plus a rational-choice explanation of why that behavior occurs. This article examines three key theoretical assumptions of the latter explanation. It shows two of these to be false and the third to be so vague as to be useless. This undercuts a rational-choice psychology as an explanation for religious actions. It undercuts, howeve…
Ritual, Symbol, and Experience
This article uses house masses in a Catholic Worker community to examine the interaction of symbols and experience in religious rituals. It argues that, during the period of this study, these weekly masses served to reinforce Worker identity by guiding participants' experiences along specific lines. Ritual symbolism and the moment-to-moment attention of the participants combined to move participants from despair at the state of the world to an ex…
Globalization and Religious Organizations
Moon, Sun and Witches
The Sociology of Religion in a Post-Colonial Era
This article makes two points. First, it argues that sociology, like all knowledge, is shaped, though not determined, by its historical-cultural origins. Early sociology arose in 19th-century Europe and its core concepts were shaped by that era-both in what they reveal about society and what they hide. We now realize this, so we sociologists of religion need to examine our inherited concepts to understand those concepts' limitations. We also need…
Sensitizing Blinders
Theories in the sociology of religion do more than identify the patterns that shape religious life. They also systematically hide other patterns from easy view. This often stems from the unexamined assumptions that each theory inherits from its cultural and historical context. This address presents three examples from the sociology of religion's recent past. The first is an 'underlying forces' theory that traces religious developments to long-ter…
Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain”
The rational choice approach to religion ( RCAR ) applies neoclassical economic principles to religion to create models of religious behavior. It presents both those principles and the resulting models as universal. Most critics of that approach have challenged those models’ empirical predictions. In contrast, this article develops an ‘upstream’ critique of the theory by examining the problems with its chosen approach in economics itself. The his…
Crafting Culture
Does Taves reconsider experience enough? A critical commentary on religious experience reconsidered
Three problems beset Ann Taves' thought-provoking book. The first is her failure to recognize that her focus on “experiences deemed religious” makes just as many metaphysical claims as does the focus on “religious experiences” that she seeks to replace. Second, her building-block definition of religion drops her into the middle of controversies over the nature of religion, rather than rescuing her from them. Third, her approach embodies a peculia…
Does Christianity Work? What we would Need to Validate Smith's Approach
A response to Christian Smith's provocative 2007 article in this journal, "Why Christianity Works". Though I support Smith's intent to broaden the reasons that people find religion plausible to include emotional factors, I find three problems with his approach. First, it treats American Evangelical Christianity as if it were an adequate model for all kinds. Second, emotion is central to some religious traditions but not to all (e.g., Zen, America…
A revised functionalism in the sociology of religion
Mary Douglas is justly famed for her social analyses of symbolism and for her ‘grid/group’ technique of relating cosmologies to particular social structures. In recent years she has turned her attention toward developing, in her words, ‘a coherent argument about the social control of cognition’. She argues that religious and other beliefs are ‘part of the action’ in society. They are strongly connected with the needs of the institutional order, w…
Introduction to the Special Issue
The world is currently gripped by pressing environmental, social, and economic challenges
The dark side of religious individualism
Sociologists of religion have recently focused on the growth of religious individualism in Western societies. Whether seen as a new religious trend or as a cultural correlate to the general weakening of civic organizations in the contemporary era, it is often presented as the growing tendency in religious life. It is also frequently presented in a positive light. This article explores a different alternative. Based on the work of Herbert Marcuse,…
Sex, Death, and Witchcraft
This book breaks boundaries on several levels. In the process of describing the ‘Faunalia’ festival in southwest Australia (a pseudonym), Douglas Ezzy deepens our understanding of ritual experience
Religion in Consumer Society
This is an extremely valuable book—on two counts. Firstly, it exhibits a high degree of theoretical adventurousness as it explores the relationship between religion and consumer culture. Secondly
Religion and Modern Society
Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation and the State BRYAN S. TURNER, 2011 Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press 344 pp., £60.00, US$99.00 (hb), £19.99, US$32.99 (pb) I
Disciplinary Conflict in the Study of Religion
This article explores the differences between the anthropological and the sociological approaches to religion as they have developed in the last decades of the twentieth century. Both disciplines are divided between generalizing and particularizing schools—"ethnology" vs "ethnography" to use the anthropologists' preferred terms. Where once the disciplinary affiliation of particularizers/ethnographers determined the content of their studies—anthro…
Narratives of Commitment
No abstract available
Handbook of Religious Conversion
Essays in the Sociology of Perception
First published in 1982, this is one of Mary Douglas' favourite books. It is based on her meetings with friends in which they attempt to apply the grip/group analysis from Natural Symbols. The essays have been important texts for preparing grid/group exercises ever since. She is still trying to improve the argument of Natural Symbols and is always hoping to find better applications to illustrate the power of the two dimensions used for accurate c…
Cultural Analysis
Part 1: Introduction 1. Limiting Assumptions 2. Four Perspectives on Culture 3. Toward Clarification and Culture Part 2: The Phenomenology of Peter L. Berger 4. Intellectual Assumptions 5. Berger's Perspective on Culture 6. Culture and Social Change 7. Conclusions Part 3: The Cultural Anthropology of Mary Douglas 8. Intellectual Assumptions 9. Douglas' Perspective on Culture 10. Culture and Social Change 11. Conclusions Part 4: The Neo-Structural…
Social/Cultural Anthropology
Environmental Variation and the Plausibility of Religion
Coast Miwok Indian religion before the European conquest of California appears to have been bimodal. Its public face -- a world-renewal cult -- brought together peoples from surrounding regions in great celebrations. More privately, sorcery pitted neighbor against neighbor, village against village. This essay -- an exercise in historical reconstruction -- argues that the variable California environment let both aspects of this religion make sense…
Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology
Journal Article Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology by John Heritage. Cambridge: Polity Press (Basil Blackwell), 1984, viii + 336 pp. $34.95 and Studies in Ethnomethodology , by Harold Garfinkel. Cambridge: Polity Press (Basil Blackwell), 1967, xi + 288 pp. $9.95 (paper, reissue) Get access Jim Spickard Jim Spickard Cultural Development InstituteAromas, CA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, …
General/Theoretical Anthropology
Moon, Sun and Witches
The Social Organization of Zen Practice
Journal Article The Social Organization of Zen Practice: Constructing Transcultural Reality, by David L. Preston. Cambridge Univesity Press, 1988, xviii + 171 pp. $37.50 Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 50, Issue 4, Winter 1989, Pages 435–436, https://doi.org/10.2307/3710783 Published: 01 December 1989
A Guide to Mary Douglas's Three Versions of Grid/Group Theory
In several publications over the last 18 years, Mary Douglas has advanced a theory for correlating cosmological beliefs with concrete social life. Though she acknowledges that her thinking has changed with time, nowhere does she systematically address the underlying differences between her recent and previous formulations. This article identifies three main versions of Douglas's theory, which are highly unlike. Each version differently typifies h…
The Terrible Meek
Journal Article The Terrible Meek: Essays on Religion and Revolution edited by Lonnie D. Kliever. New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1987, xvi + 259 pp. $22.95 Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 50, Issue 3, Fall 1989, Pages 310–311, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711574 Published: 01 October 1989
Steps toward a Sociology of Religious Experience
Journal Article Steps Toward a Sociology of Religious Experience: The Theories of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Alfred Schutz Get access Mary Jo Neitz, Mary Jo Neitz University of Missouri, Columbia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 51, Issue 1, Sprin…
A revised functionalism in the sociology of religion
Mary Douglas is justly famed for her social analyses of symbolism and for her ‘grid/group’ technique of relating cosmologies to particular social structures. In recent years she has turned her attention toward developing, in her words, ‘a coherent argument about the social control of cognition’. She argues that religious and other beliefs are ‘part of the action’ in society. They are strongly connected with the needs of the institutional order, w…
Experiencing Religious Rituals
Journal Article Experiencing Religious Rituals: A Schutzian Analysis of Navajo Ceremonies Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 52, Issue 2, Summer 1991, Pages 191-204, https://doi.org/10.2307/3710963 Published: 01 July 1991
Where the Spirits Ride the Wind
The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism.Aaron Wildavsky
Handbook of Religious Conversion
Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice
This article examines the relationship between ritual theory and ritual practice. It argues that current theories of ritual, influenced by structuralism and symbolic anthropology, often prioritize abstract meanings and neglect the practical aspects of ritual performance. The authors propose a more grounded approach that considers the embodied, sensory, and social dimensions of ritual action. They draw on ethnographic examples to illustrate how ri…
Texts and Contexts
L'A. analyse le traitement de la sociologie religieuse dans les recueils destines aux etudiants des Etats-Unis. Les recueils d'introduction sont essentiellement de structure parsonienne. Ils presentent la sociologie des religions comme l'etude d'une sphere institutionnelle de la societe et se concentrent sur la contribution de cette sphere au maintien des croyances, des valeurs et de la solidarite sociale. Les livres d'introduction specialises da…
American Society in the Buddhist Mirror
Journal Article American Society in the Buddhist Mirror, by Joseph B. Tamney. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993, xx + 191 pp. $33 Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 55, Issue 3, Fall 1994, Pages 368–369, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712065 Published: 01 October 1994
Faces in the Clouds
Journal Article Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, by Stewart Elliot Guthrie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994,290 pp. Can$: 44.50 Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 57, Issue 1, Spring 1996, Pages 102–103, https://doi.org/10.2307/3712008 Published: 01 March 1996
Rational Choice Theory and Religion
Aids As Apocalyptic Metaphor
Journal Article Aids As Apocalyptic Metaphor, by Susan Palmer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997,199 pp. $18.95 (pbk.) Get access James V. Spickard James V. Spickard University of Redlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 59, Issue 1, Spring 1998, Pages 97–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/3711973 Published: 01 March 1998
Anthropology of Religion
Rethinking Religious Social Action
The rational-choice/market-model of religions really consists of two, separable parts: a model of religious behavior plus a rational-choice explanation of why that behavior occurs. This article examines three key theoretical assumptions of the latter explanation. It shows two of these to be false and the third to be so vague as to be useless. This undercuts a rational-choice psychology as an explanation for religious actions. It undercuts, howeve…
Ethnocentrism, Social Theory and Non-Western Sociologies of Religion
The sociology of religion claims to possess a cross-culturally valid objectivity that is belied by its paradigm shifts in both classical and recent times. Its sequential emphasis on such issues as the changing bases of religious authority, secularization and rational choice depends in large part on Western models of religion, of the relationship between the individual and society, and on key Western values. These are not shared by other tradition…
Sociology (68 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (51 works) · Philosophy (50 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Political science (28 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Media studies (19 works) · Religious studies (19 works) · Anthropology (18 works)