Reaching out is so hard to do....
In a study of faith-based civic organizations for his book, Elusive Togetherness: Church Groups Trying
to Bridge America's Divisions (Princeton University Press,
2005), Professor Paul Lichterman finds that even members who share the
same religious beliefs can have different ideas about what it meant to
be a civic organization, and what the organization’s role in the
community should be. “I found that the same religious beliefs turned different people in very different directions,” he says. “Some of the liberal, mainline Protestants I studied assumed a good church group is a gathering of charitable volunteers or ‘helpers.’ Other mainline Protestants thought a good church group should act like a ‘partner,’ creating new ‘public’ goods. The difference here was not a matter of differing religious beliefs, or even differing political beliefs, but different customary ideas about what a good group is and what the role of a religious group in public life should be—it’s different customs, different ways of doing things together.”
Elusive Togetherness is the winner of the 2006 Winner of the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award, Pacific Sociological Association.
To read more about Professor Lichterman's research, click here.
Posted Monday, May 1, 2006