Race differences in abortion attitudes: some additional evidence

Although Combs and Welch reported a trend of decreasing racialdifference in abortion attitudes, Hall and Ferree used datafrom the 1982 General Social Survey to argue that racial differencewere not declining. This paper updates this debate through the1988 General Social Survey and concludes that racial differenceshave indeed declined over time. Morever, when new religiousitems introduced in the 1984 survey are included in the multivariateanalysis, blacks are not significantly different from whitesin their support of legal abortion. This finding obscures amore intersting pattern, however, of offsetting, statisticallysignificant racial differences among respondents of the samegender—black men are significantly less supportive ofa abortion than white men, and black women are significantlymore supportive than white women.     

Narrative Structures and the Catholic Church Closings in Detroit

We distinguish narrative structures as master frames from stories as actual telling of events, and show how they operated in the case of the Catholic church closings in Detroit in the late 1980s. Narrative structures drawn from Detroit industrial history and from reform in the Catholic church were imposed on the actual events constituting the closing process, and powerfully defined the terms of public discussion and debate about the meaning of the closings.     

The Politics of Migration,Church, and State: A Case Study of the Catholic Church in Ireland

This article investigates the ways in which a shift from post‐colonial nation building to neoliberal state restructuring has shaped church and Irish state relations regarding migrant welfare. It develops the extensive work of Bäckström and Davie (2010) and Bäckström et al. (2011) on how majority churches in European countries are reclaiming a social welfare role as the state relinquishes this responsibility: first, by examining the domain of migrant welfare which is not developed in their work; and second, by arguing that majority church pro‐migrant service provision, as it has evolved in recent decades, can be understood in relation to an emergent neoliberal mode of collective responsibility for migrant welfare. It suggests that in spite of other factors and forces that undermine Irish Catholic Church authority, the marketization of more domains of life in the first decades of the twenty‐first century has given new significance to Catholic Social Teaching and pro‐migrant church initiatives.     

Hiding behind the cloth:child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church

The existence of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has shocked many. In this article, the authors review the history of child sexual abuse in the church, the recent events that brought this tragedy into societal consciousness, and the efforts by the church to conceal the abuse. Two sources of empirical literature, the general psychological writing on priest sex abuse and the psychoanalytic literature, on child sexual abuse are compared. Both sources of literature seek explanation for priests' child sexual abuse within the structure and culture of the church rather than viewing the priest as a "typical" sex predator. The authors argue that, in fact, the guilty priests are child predators who differ little from other child predators.     

The History and Consequences of the Sexual-Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church

The sexual-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church was first publicized in 1985 in Louisiana and continues to capture headlines and the imagination of the public across the country. This article reviews the history of the contemporary scandal and delineates a paradigm of abuse and cover-up common in cases of sexual abuse by a priest. While the sexual victimization of minors by priests and vowed religious men has been wrenching for the many decent clerics and for Catholics everywhere, the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy live daily with its aftermath. In this article, the experiences of one young man sexually abused by a priest when he was a boy are presented and the sequelae of such abuse are discussed.     

Religion and social capital: evidence from European countries

This exploratory study investigates how various aspects related to religion are related to different dimensions of social capital, based on the latest data from the European Values Study. The study intends to include as many religion-related variables as possible and to cover all main dimensions of social capital. In addition to regression analysis, cluster analysis is used for further exploration of religious composition and its consequences for social capital. The broadest conclusions are that religion is highly related to social capital, but the cognitive dimensions of social capital seem to have a closer relationship with social capital than the structural dimensions. Also, many relationships may be overlooked if not enough different religion-related aspects and social capital dimensions are analysed.     

Media,Religion, and Politics in Nicaragua: How an Independent Press Threatened the Catholic Church

Nicaragua's La Prensa newspaper stopped publishing a weekly Catholic "Sunday Reading" page in May 2001, replacing it with a more diverse "Religion and Faith" page. A storm of protest followed, with some religious leaders saying the church was being censored. Even Violeta Chamorro, a co-owner of La Prensa and a former Nicaraguan president, denounced the action. Although this was a simple journalistic decision to better serve the readers, the move also carried substantial political implications. La Prensa and the Catholic Church had long been aligned with the powerful economic elite and shared similar histories. Both, for example, had internal battles over whether to support the socialist Sandinista revolution, and both were struggling to hold onto their clients—readers and church members. This power struggle between an independent press and the Catholic Church illustrates their respective efforts to remain relevant to Nicaraguans. This study demonstrates that both acted rationally in support of their own best interests.     

Social mobility and personal satisfaction: evidence from ten countries

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally representative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. The evidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the mobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals who move from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likely to be systematically satisfied or dissatisfied with life than are the socially immobile or even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the working class. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience and satisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains. The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodology more generally.     

Paternal childcare and parental leave policies: evidence from industrialized countries

This paper merges data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) with national parental leave characteristics from eight industrialized countries from 1971 to 2005 to estimate the association between national parental leave arrangements and paternal childcare. We also test whether this association varies according to a father’s educational level. We find that the number of parental leave weeks available to fathers and high rates of benefit are positively associated with fathers’ childcare time. This is generally robust when taking into account country and year as fixed effects, and other country-specific variables such as female employment rates. The magnitudes of the coefficients are economically significant. For example, high parental leave benefits compared to none are associated with an increase of almost 1 h per week in paternal childcare time. This relationship between benefit rate and time spent on childcare is strongest for highly educated fathers. They also benefit the most from exclusive ‘daddy weeks’ whereas the positive association of transferable leave to paternal childcare is solely driven by lowly educated fathers.     

Radio Free Europe and the Catholic Church in Poland During the 1950s and 1960s.

A review of the literature on Radio Free Europe’s role throughout the Cold War reveals its underdeveloped historiography. Yet, how valuable are RFE’s reports and broadcasts as a tool for historical exploration? Drawing on a wealth of materials from Polish programming, this analysis uses the case study of the role of the Catholic Church in Poland throughout the 1950s and the 1960s, to appraise not only the content of RFE reports but also the extent to which they can be used as a historical tool. The reports reveal, for example, that the Church became politically active already in the mid 1960s during its struggle with the Communist regime over the Millennium anniversary celebrations and the issue of Poland’s Western territories. This analytical framework allows for an examination of RFE’s comments in terms of what they might tell us about what really happened, and in terms of what they actually tell us about the station’s perceptions of what happened. The station’s position as an observer, critic and participant in the turmoil of the Cold War, gave it a distinct ability to access both the realities behind the Iron Curtain and the Western perceptions of what was happening in the satellite countries.     

A Significant Shift: A Pentadic Analysis of the Two Rhetorics of the Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church Regarding Homosexuality

This paper argues that, since the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), there has been a significant shift in the rhetorical stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward homosexuality in which the pre-council rhetoric, which condemned both act (i.e., homosexual behavior) and actor (i.e., the homosexual) has been replaced by two distinctly different rhetorics: a moral rhetoric, which continues the Church's long-standing condemnation of homosexual acts as sins, and a pastoral rhetoric, which argues that homosexuals should be ministered to and embraced. A Burkean pentadic analysis is used to define how the two rhetorics differ from each other and from the earlier rhetoric. The three major influences (i.e., Scripture, Tradition, and Catholic theology/philosophy) that have shaped, and continue to shape, the Church's position regarding homosexuality are described. Some of the socio-political implications of this shift are emphasized.     

The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

Cultural Studies and its local resources: discourse and practice in the Rural Reconstruction Movement

ABSTRACT

Emphasis on ‘context’ and ‘practice’ has been the tradition of Cultural Studies. Now Cultural Studies in Mainland China are facing the following difficulties: lack of attention to local issues and thoughts, lack of holistic horizon and sense of history. How can Cultural Studies in Mainland China search out more potential recourse and forces for critique and resistance from modern China and urban–rural China and confront Chinese problems and experiences which are of great complexity, by returning to its unique historical and social context and taking local resources into consideration? We try to return to the long-term engagement in ‘action-writing’ practice in the Rural Reconstruction Movement. Under the unique perspective of ‘practitioner-researcher’, they hope to explore plural spaces veiled by the mainstream and search out, in the historical context of China, local resources for Cultural Studies and possibilities for its advancement.