Suchergebnisse

Margarita Mooney interviews Robert P. George.

AbstractIn this article, I use cross‐national comparative and ethnographic methods to explore how religion influences the incorporation of Haitian immigrants into theUS, Quebec and France. First, I explore the ideological, legal and institutional forces that shape religion‐state differentiation in theUS, Quebec and France. Using census and immigration data from each site as well as interviews with Haitian leaders and government officials in Miami, Montreal and Paris, I show that the general pattern of consensual differentiation between religion and state in theUSfavours the more successful symbolic and socio‐economic incorporation of Haitians in Miami, whereas secular nationalism in Quebec and assertive secularism in France weaken the incorporation of Haitian immigrants in Montreal and Paris, respectively.

The secularization paradigm in the social sciences led many scholars to presume that religious organizations no longer had a public role in society. The author argues that one pressing public issue today, immigration, has become a strategic site on which the Catholic church has reasserted its prophetic voice in society, in particular calling for more humane treatment of undocumented immigrants and greater intercultural dialogue. The author compares evidence from the Catholic Bishops Conferences in the United States and France to show how the Catholic church is defining its role as a public religion in modern democratic states.

The 1990s marked the beginning of a new era of immigration in terms of volume and settlement patterns and also witnessed significant changes in the social contexts confronting immigrants. These changes could have significant repercussions for immigrant youth. While previous research on high school dropout behavior suggests immigrant youth are faring better in US schools, our research provides a less optimistic outlook. Using the National Educational Longitudinal Study (1988) and Educational Longitudinal Study (2002), we use multivariate analysis, regression decomposition, and fixed effect models to examine how reading and math test scores of children of immigrants changed during the 1990s.

AbstractMuch social theory tends to emphasize the external goods of social practices, often neglecting the internal goods of those practices. For example, many analyses of religious rituals over‐emphasize the instrumental and individualistic ends of prayer and liturgy by describing such religious practices as effective means for achieving external ends like positive emotions, psychological benefits, social status, or social capital. By contrast, we use a neo‐Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective to analyze the relational goods, such as trust and intimacy, which are expressed and sustained through ritualized social practices. Using ethnographies ofHaitian andGhanaianChristians in theU.S., we demonstrate that prayer and liturgy can also be understood as constitutive‐ends practices, practices in which human persons engage to sustain relations with others because there are goods inherent to those relationships. We further argue that in many religious practices, the end goals and the means—i.e. specific aspects of the practice—are inseparable. Our approach to developing theory combines critical engagement with numerous other theorists and also exploring how well various theories can explain the motivations and experiences of participants in the religious rituals where we conducted our ethnographies.