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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 9 page paper discusses three articles that appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Religion in 2002. The first article by Bruce, Praying Alone? Church-Going in Britain and the Putnam Thesis, spurred the responses of two other authors. This essay also discusses Robert Putnam's thesis regarding the decline in voluntary associations among the populous and the premise that declining church attendance is just another example of a general shift away from collective activity. Using the three articles, Putnam's article and book and other sources, the writer asserts this is too simplistic. There are many factors involved with lower church attendance. Social capital is also discussed. Bibliography lists 11 sources.
Page Count:
9 pages (~225 words per page)
File: MM12_PGchatd.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
premise is too simplistic; there are many factors that may contribute to fewer people attending church. In 2002, Steve Bruce wrote an article entitled: Praying Alone? Church-Going in Britain
and the Putnam Thesis; an article that resulted in two responses to Bruces article appearing in the very same issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Bruce began his article
by reporting the smaller numbers of people attending church in Great Britain has been used as evidence of a decline in individual interest in religion but another set of authors,
Davie and Brieriey, argued that declining church attendance had to do with people not wanting to congregate (Bruce, 2002). When discussing the decline of association in all civic activities,
Bruce cites Davie who noted there was a significant decline in both "secular voluntary organisations and communal leisure activities" that has been even more dramatic than the decline in church
attendance (Bruce, 2002, p. 317). For this reason, Bruce asserts that the declining church attendance needs to be considered in the larger context of the decline in all sorts of
voluntary group activities (Bruce, 2002). Bruce spends a great deal of time discussing the possibility of comparing church attendance to other forms of voluntary association, such as union membership (Bruce,
2002). He also discusses the advent of television evangelism and the data regarding viewship (Bruce, 2002). Bruce finally gets back to the topic and notes that there may be a
definite difference between believing and attending church (Bruce, 2002). It is to Bruces credit that he states clearly it is difficult to compare association in one organization to association in
another, in other words, it may not be useful to try to compare affiliation and participation in one voluntary activity with affiliation and participation in a different voluntary activities (Bruce,
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