Glorious
Church building and the economy during Europe's ‘Age of the Cathedrals’, 700–1500 CE
Eltjo Buringh et al.
Explorations in Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a Christian age, churches reflected societies’ material resources as well as their religious and cultural aspirations. Data on the construction history of 1,695 major churches in present-day Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Low Countries, and Great Britain are used to infer the trend and pattern of economic activity between 700 and 1500 CE. Across this long and economically formative, but relatively poorly documented era, they are among the few artefacts that can be quantified consistently. This is the first attempt to resolve the methodological challenges entailed in systematically gathering, organising and analysing this information at a supra-national scale. The results imply a transformation in Western Europe from the end of the 10th century with steeply gathering momentum, culminating in the great boom of the 12th century. Fresh light is also shed on the long contraction that set in from the late-13th century. Rising agricultural production and feudal surplus extraction were important drivers early on, but over time construction activity was most vigorous at locations enjoying commercial and especially maritime advantages. By the 15th century, as the impetus of construction was faltering almost everywhere, it was in commercially resilient Brabant and the Netherlands that church building remained most buoyant.
Reflection increases belief in God through self-questioning among non-believers
Onurcan Yilmaz & Ozan Isler
Judgment and Decision Making, November 2019, Pages 649–657
Abstract:
The dual-process model of the mind predicts that religious belief will be stronger for intuitive decisions, whereas reflective thinking will lead to religious disbelief (i.e., the intuitive religious belief hypothesis). While early research found intuition to promote and reflection to weaken belief in God, more recent attempts found no evidence for the intuitive religious belief hypothesis. Many of the previous studies are underpowered to detect small effects, and it is not clear whether the cognitive process manipulations used in these failed attempts worked as intended. We investigated the influence of intuitive and reflective thought on belief in God in two large-scale preregistered experiments (N = 1,602), using well-established cognitive manipulations (i.e., time-pressure with incentives for compliance) and alternative elicitation methods (between and within-subject designs). Against our initial hypothesis based on the literature, the experiments provide first suggestive then confirmatory evidence for the reflective religious belief hypothesis. Exploratory examination of the data suggests that reflection increases doubts about beliefs held regarding God’s existence. Reflective doubt exists primarily among non-believers, resulting in an overall increase in belief in God when deciding reflectively.
Is “me-search” necessarily less rigorous research? Social and personality psychologists’ stereotypes of the psychology of religion
Kimberly Rios & Zachary Roth
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although I study many forms of social identity, my research on religious identity has perhaps sparked the most interesting reactions. I first describe these reactions, as well as how I became interested in religious identity. I then report the results of an experiment that my Ph.D. student and I conducted to better understand social and personality psychologists’ perceptions of the psychology of religion/spirituality, relative to other subfields. Psychology of religion/spirituality was rated as less rigorous and “mainstream” than psychology of gender, political psychology, attitudes and persuasion, and judgment and decision making. Furthermore, psychology of religion/spirituality researchers were most often assumed to be religious and least often associated with intelligence. Implications for how to mitigate biases against identity-related research are discussed.
Entangled: Evangelicals and Gangs in El Salvador
Stephen Offutt
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
How are the two most ubiquitous community-based organizations in poor Salvadoran neighborhoods — gangs and evangelical churches — connected? Most studies concur with the Brenneman/Wolseth thesis, which states that evangelical churches uniquely provide people with a pathway out of gangs. This article argues that such dynamics are a relatively small subset of a broad range of interactions between evangelicals and gangs. Data from the Religion, Global Poverty, and International Development study, collected in a mid-sized Salvadoran city from 2014 to 2018, show that: (1) family networks link evangelicals and gangs; (2) evangelicals and gangs share community governance; (3) gangs infiltrate congregations; and (4) evangelical ideas and networks penetrate gang life. These findings indicate that the widely accepted “haven” perspective of evangelicals in Latin America is insufficient to explain current empirical complexities. An “entanglement” framework is thus introduced, which may be relevant to evangelicals’ relationships to contemporary Latin American society more broadly.