Suchergebnisse

This 1990 study in historical sociology explores the relationship between educational development and religious change in Norwegian society during a period of significant social and economic transition. John Flint traces the processes whereby the laity radically reduced clerical control over religious institutions. He examines census materials, reports to the Ministries of the Church and Education, and information from organizational histories, using historical role analysis to describe the changing relationships among state church pastors, parish school teachers, pupils, parents, and lay preachers. In his examination of the movement toward mass literacy, John Flint draws on and contributes to the sociology of comparative education development. His findings from this Norwegian study have wider theoretical and methodological implications, and will be of interest to historians and sociologists studying religion and education

Conceptions of the nature and process of secularization have ranged in scope of reference from those encompassing all aspects of social change to those limited to alterations in the religious order of human societies. General theories of social change in modern sociology remain schematic. Indeed, until recent years, concern with this once central problem has been peripheral to the main trend in sociological research and theory construction. Howard Becker, whose conception of the process of secularization was intended to encompass all aspects of social change, remained, until his death, one on the very few American sociologists devoted to this once classical problem.