Social Compass

The aim of this article is to analyse the origin and development of ‘prison Pentecostalism’ in the Penitentiary System of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The article is divided into three parts. In the first, we briefly describe the current situation in prisons, focusing on their crisis of governance, how the religious phenomenon is involved in this context and the discussions posed by researchers on this new topic. In the second, we will explore, through the trajectory of its initiators, the different strategies of evangelism that led to the emergence of Unit 25, the first prison-church. Finally, we will characterize the processes of intramural leadership and the profiles of inmates who govern the daily life of the evangelical cellblocks.

This article examines the individual and societal explanations for the persistence of the hijab as a conservative cultural norm in persistently religious and culturally conservative communities. Analyzing data from 300 hijab-wearing women in Egypt and 198 hijab-wearing women in Kuwait, our findings confirm the importance of considering societal as well as individual-level factors in the persistence of conservative cultural norms. We find that low salience of the hijab is associated with beliefs that others misuse the hijab. High salience of the hijab is correlated with beliefs that the hijab brings its wearer greater social mobility. Exposure to non-hijab-wearers was associated with both high and low salience of the hijab, and demonstrates the influence that exposure to norm breakers has on reinforcing the salience of conservative social norms.

The aim of this article is to furnish insights of the Italian public debate on the recognition of LGBTQ rights, which can be understood as an interesting case study of the complex relationship between (multi)secularisation processes and re/definition of citizenship models. More specifically, the article analyses two political events related to this debate that took place in Rome in June 2015. The first is the Family Day demonstration, promoted by conservative Catholic groups; the second is the LGBTQ Pride parade, promoted by various gay, lesbian and transsexual/gender associations. We analyse the official statements issued by the two organising committees of the demonstrations, adopting the framework and methods of the Critical Discourse Analysis. Above and beyond an evident political conflict between the two discourses, we try to shed light on their mutual construction on the basis of what we call ‘naturalization’ and ‘universalization’ processes.

André Jarlan was a French priest murdered by the Chilean police during a protest against the dictatorship in the working-class neighbourhood of La Victoria. In this article, I will show how the Jarlan case can be framed in what the sociology of Luc Boltanski calls affaire. The Jarlan case, through the denunciation of the murder, contributed to develop a generalisation of the critique of the dictatorship, giving visibility to other crimes and allowing the re-humanization of its victims. This case shows that the critical capacities of people and the claim for justice can be mobilized with success even in an unfavourable situation such as a dictatorship. The condition of the victim (a priest), the accuser (the Catholic Church), the executioner (the dictatorship), and the cause (the pobladores) are the elements that will give exemplarity to this case that morally defeats the Chilean dictatorship.

Religiously unaffiliated Canadians have been persistently more likely to reside in the western provinces. In parallel, the degree of religiosity of the affiliates has been generally higher in the low affiliation provinces of the west. This pattern has led some scholars to characterize Canada as religiously polarized. However, in the literature, a quantitative measure of polarization is lacking. Moreover, religious polarization, a rather vividly debated characterization, is not by itself an explanation for the patterns. The present article, using the Canadian General Social Surveys of 1985 to 2011, contributes to the debate in three ways. First, this article establishes the robustness of the geographic discrepancies in unaffiliation rates and the degree of religiosity in Canada. Second, this study proposes and computes a quantitative measure of polarization. Finally the article explores the role of free-rider exclusion as an explanation for the patterns.

The past decades have seen an intensification of debate around migrants, gender and sexuality. For the Netherlands, several authors have pointed out how this has given rise to a form of sexual nationalism whereby the idea of being a modern, progressive country is strongly linked to a program of liberal sexual values and offset against a presumably ‘backward’ migrant who is ‘still’ religious and traditional. In this article, the author analyses how these dynamics played out in the controversy around HIV-healings or homo healings supposedly taking place in Pentecostal churches in Amsterdam. Media attention highlighted the theme of homosexuality while forgetting the interests of women. This article shows that the sexual nationalism scheme was also operative here, and proposes further developing existing approaches as intersectional ‘post-secularist’ sociological perspectives aimed at unearthing the ways narratives of modernity, secularization and sexual nationalism structure attitudes towards migrant and religious actors both in social scientific research agendas and among societal actors.

This article discusses John Dewey’s (1859–1952): Theory of valuation (1939), Art as experience (1934), A common faith (1934), The public and its problems (1927) for the socio-anthropological analysis of the religious. This pragmatist approach, attentive to intersubjectivity and experience, allows to work on aspirations and ideals, through giving place to emotions besides rationality in the valuation process. Further, the idea of public and pre-political, permits to pay attention to processes which are different from differentiation and where people contribute to the common good from their specific (minority) situation. In a pragmatist approach, believing comes in three modalities as ‘caring about,’ in the sense of giving value to forms of experiences and self-construction, respectively, to forms of self-transcendence, and to ways of connecting with the world (others and nature).

This article aims to investigate the relationship between religion and national identity through the experiences of female converts to Islam. Gender is essential in this conjuncture, as many national, religious and secular markers are gendered and, most of the time, specifically focused on women and their bodily practices. Through a literature review and discussion of preliminary interview results, we will investigate how female converts negotiate their multiple belongings, especially regarding the relationship between religion and national identity. The focus is not on self-understanding of converts, but on in/exclusion of Muslims in European nations. The final aim is to explore options for more inclusive interpretations of ‘Dutchness’, in order to counter the idea that Islam and ‘Dutchness’ are not compatible.