Ecologies of Faith in New York City

Description

Urban congregations confront rapid social change

Ecologies of Faith in New York City examines patterns of interreligious cooperation and conflict in New York City. It explores how representative congregations in this religiously diverse city interact with their surroundings by competing for members, seeking out niches, or cooperating via coalitions and neighborhood organizations. Based on in-depth research in New York's ethnically mixed and rapidly changing neighborhoods, the essays in the volume describe how religious institutions shape and are shaped by their environments, what new roles they have assumed, and how they relate to other religious groups in the community.

Acknowledgments
Foreword/Nancy T. Ammerman
Introduction: The Ecology of Religious Institutions in New York City/Richard Cimino and Nadia Mian, with Weishan Huang
I. Religious Institutions and Gentrification in the Religious Ecology
1. Disneyfication and Religion in Times Square/Hans E. Tokke
2. Filling Niches and Pews in Williamsburg and Greenpoint—The Religious Ecology of Gentrification/Richard Cimino
3. Korean American Churches and the Negotiation of Space in Flushing/Keun-Joo Christine Pae
II. Immigration, Religion and Neighborhood Change
4. Diversity and Competition: Politics and Conflict in New Immigrant Communities/Weishan Huang
5. The "Brazilianization" of New York City: Brazilian Immigrants and Evangelical Churches in a Pluralized Urban Landscape/Donizete Rodrigues
6. Building and Expanding Communities: African Immigrant Congregations and the Challenge of Diversity/Moses Biney
III. Entrepreneurial Innovation and Religious Institutions
7. The ABC's of Faith and Commerce in the Lower East Side/Sheila P. Johnson
8. Navigating Property Development through a Framework of Religious Ecology: The Case of Trinity Lutheran Church/Nadia A. Mian
9. Hinduism at Work in Queens/Matthew Weiner
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Sociology of Religion
• Organizations
• Social Science
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Sociology
• Social sciences
• Religion
• United States
• Urban
• Institutions

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253006943
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Ecologies of Faith in New York City
POLIS CENTER SERIES ON RELIGION AND URBAN CULTURE
David J. Bodenhamer and Arthur E. Farnsley II, editors
Ecologies of Faith in New York City
The Evolution of Religious Institutions
EDITED BY RICHARD CIMINO, NADIA A. MIAN,
AND WEISHAN HUANG
FOREWORD BY NANCY T. AMMERMAN
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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2013 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ecologies of faith in New York City: the evolution of religious institutions / edited by Richard Cimino, Nadia A. Mian, and Weishan Huang; foreword by Nancy T. Ammerman.
p. cm. - (Polis Center series on religion and urban culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00684-4 (cloth: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00690-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00694-3 e-book) 1. New York (N.Y.) - Religion. 2. Religions - Relations. I. Cimino, Richard P. II. Mian, Nadia A., [date] III. Huang, Weishan, [date]
BL 2527. N 7 E 26 2013
200.9747 1 - dc23
2012026047
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For Lowell Livezey
Contents
FOREWORD Nancy T. Ammerman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: The Ecology of Religious Institutions in New York City Richard Cimino and Nadia A. Mian, with Weishan Huang
PART 1 RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS AND GENTRIFICATION IN THE RELIGIOUS ECOLOGY
1 Disneyfication and Religion in Times Square Hans E. Tokke
2 Filling Niches and Pews in Williamsburg and Greenpoint: The Religious Ecology of Gentrification Richard Cimino
3 Korean American Churches and the Negotiation of Space in Flushing, Queens Keun-Joo Christine Pae
PART 2 IMMIGRATION, RELIGION, AND NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE
4 Diversity and Competition: Politics and Conflict in New Immigrant Communities Weishan Huang
5 The Brazilianization of New York City: Brazilian Immigrants and Evangelical Churches in a Pluralized Urban Landscape Donizete Rodrigues
6 Building and Expanding Communities: African Immigrant Congregations and the Challenge of Diversity Moses Biney
PART 3 ENTREPRENEURIAL INNOVATION AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS
7 Changing Lives One Scoop at a Time: The Creation of Alphabet Scoop on the Lower East Side Sheila P. Johnson
8 Navigating Property Development through a Framework of Religious Ecology: The Case of Trinity Lutheran Church Nadia A. Mian
9 Hinduism at Work in Queens Matthew Weiner
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Foreword
Nancy T. Ammerman
After pioneering research by H. Paul Douglass in the 1920s and 1930s, the questions surrounding what congregations do and how they are related to the larger society faded from view for half a century. 1 Social scientists were preoccupied with the notion that religion was a dying force, a story line interrupted only by macro social forces like the civil rights movement, not by the ordinary religious lives carried on in local communities. Local communities of faith were simply not on the radar screen, either of sociologists or of denominational leaders. The religious heroes of the day were theologians (such as the Niebuhrs) and movement leaders (like Martin Luther King, Jr.). If religion changed the world - or was changed by the world - the changes would involve seismic cultural shifts, not alterations in local landscapes.
When a small group of sociologists and church leaders met at the Lilly Endowment in the early 1980s, the notion of studying congregations was something of a dare. 2 Would anyone pay attention? But an informal group, known as the Congregational Studies Project Team, emerged, and it produced The Handbook for Congregational Studies in 1986. 3 The Handbook struck a responsive chord, and attention to congregations began to gather momentum in both seminaries and among social scientists. One of the key analytical moves advocated by the Handbook s authors was attention to what they called context. They spoke of congregations as in a constant state of flux. The sources of change are primarily environmental, forcing the religious institution to adjust to what is going on around it, they wrote ( p. 48 ). As the team was steeped in an activist liberal Protestant tradition, the well-being of society was a critical concern, and the embodiment of the gospel in human cultures was taken for granted.
By the early 1990s, it was not just liberal Protestants doing the studying or being studied. My own earliest work had focused on American Fundamentalism through the lens of life in a local congregation, 4 but Peter Berger had challenged me to devise a plan for studying key social trends affecting American religion. My answer was that we should look at local communities where those trends were especially visible and examine the work of the congregations in those communities. The resulting book, Congregation and Community , was among the first attempts to provide a systematic mapping of the relationships between religious institutions and their geographic locations. 5 While the project started with assumptions about how those institutions were shaped by changing local communities, the reality on the ground pushed toward a different, more interactive perspective.
As the work on that project moved forward, I joined the Congregational Studies Project Team, and the team as a whole was at work on a revision of the Handbook . Rather than seeing congregations as situated in a context, we began to talk about them in an ecological framework, looking for the ways in which congregations competed for resources (such as people, money, space) and established themselves as legitimate, mutually dependent participants in the environment, with the necessary habits for surviving. We also noted the particular symbioses that sometimes created niches in which a particular, specialized way of relating to the population could thrive. Indeed, one of the most important findings of Congregation and Community was that congregations need not be local at all. Some respond to the loss of a symbiotic relationship with their immediate neighborhood by establishing a niche identity sufficiently strong to draw members and resources from a broad geographic area.
The Congregation and Community research team, spread out in communities across the country, spawned a rich next generation of work that expanded what we know about the ecological world of congregations. Art Farnsley went on to direct a series of projects in Indianapolis in which the civic contributions and social services of congregations were a special focus. 6 Nancy Eiesland widened the urban lens to include the exurbs, writing about the way rural and urban sensibilities intermingled in the congregations of the particular place of Dacula, Georgia. 7 She drew our attention especially to the way congregations are lodged in shifting networks of people and institutions. Beyond that core group, Omar McRoberts was completing a Harvard dissertation that would become Streets of Glory , and he would insist that we take seriously the theological differences that shape congregational responses to the urban realities of the street. 8 Each of these (and a growing cadre of others) expanded both the congregations about which we knew and the ideas we had for thinking about the social ecology in which those congregations are actors.
Alongside this work, a parallel young generation of social scientists was being nurtured in Stephen Warner s New Ethnic and Immigrant Congregations project. Recognizing that immigrants were reshaping American society and that religion was a big part of that experience, Warner commissioned a group of young scholars to pay attention. Their collection of case studies, Gatherings in Diaspora , 9 was the seed for an enormous harvest of attention to immigrant congregations, a harvest that continues in the pages of this book. The study of immigration pushed the ecological perspective out to the global level at the same time that it built on a tradition of urban neighborhood studies from the past. Warner s insight from that project joined with Eiesland s study of exurban networks to inform the chapter they produced for Studying Congregations . It was a defining statement about what it means to think about congregations ecologically, and it is a resource on which many of this book s authors draw. 10
By the time Congress passed Charitable Choice legislation in 1996, then, the study of congregations was no longer in its infancy, and in the years that followed, it has become a veritable industry. Two waves of a national representative survey of congregations have established a rich base of data from which many researchers are writing, and policy makers from local to national know that congregations are a critical part of the social safety net. 11 Putnam and Campbell s massive study of American religion, in contrast to what might have been written in earlier decades, puts congregations squarely in the picture. Even as old, established churches and