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This chapter addresses the topic of the religious self. It considers various “conversational shards” indicative of Catholics' negotiation with their tradition on the basis of what feels authentic to them. These include their perceptions about their faith and their negotiation with the Catholic tradition by blunting its doctrinal edges.

This chapter considers parishioners' awareness of the various institutional dilemmas that encumber their church, as well as the ways in which these influence their perceptions of themselves as members of the broader institution. It argues that parishioners tend to be quite critical and self-conscious in their use of Catholic symbols when thinking about themselves as both individuals and members of a hierarchical institution.

This chapter shows that Catholics' personally tailored projects of identity construction are both highly localized and communal in nature. They also complicate one of the most broadly accepted master narratives of contemporary social analysis: the inexorable decline of community that it is presumed accompanies the transformation from traditional to individualistic, modern societies.

This chapter shows that parishioners are unaware of the ways their parish cultures often delimit the role the church's social justice teachings might otherwise play in influencing Catholics' sense of obligation and contributions to civil society.

This chapter focuses on how parishioners viewed the clergy's responsibilities. It describes the particular characteristics that parishioners commended. Parishioners had strong ideas of what a minister of the Word should be like — what was fit, and what was not. They also expected dignified behaviour from their minister, and objected to drunkenness and sexual laxity.

This chapter explores parishioners' attitudes to church authority. Good fellowship among the less-godly was bestial sin to the godly, and the ceremony of ‘good and faithful drunkards’ became notorious, featuring in Samuel Ward's 1622 sermon ‘Woe to Drunkards’ — where Ward claimed that the participants all ‘died thereof within a few weeks, some sooner, some later’. But men and women could not be kept out of the alehouse — even when they should have been at church. When in 1571 Thomas Harmer of Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, was rebuked by the minister for playing cards in the alehouse in service time, he gave him an earful of abuse and called him ‘knave’. John Gay of Childerditch, Essex, was presented in 1584 for keeping evil rule in his house on a Sunday, ‘in so much that the minister could not say service for the great noise of the people’.

This chapter focuses on parishioners' mocking of the clergy. It shows that making fun of the ministry was easy — and a good laugh. Any of the functions of the clergy could be mocked, including their claims to authority, learning, rectitude, and status.

The perception of a “peculiar” alliance between nineteenth-century Protestant clergy and their female parishioners emerges from contemporary sources such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the widely publicized adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher (1875), and the influential monograph The Feminization of American Culture (1977) by Ann Douglas. By examining a wider variety of primary sources from mostly ordinary northern, white, Protestants, Gedge analyzes the similarities and differences between perceived, imagined, idealized, and experienced pastoral relationships, and identifies the cultural, spiritual, and psychological tensions they reveal. She outlines the argument that women were without benefit of clergy in the pastoral relationship. Though viewed as natural allies in their mission as moral guardians of the new republic, women and clergy were estranged by the same ideology that prescribed their alliance.

This chapter describes a survey of Christian pastors and church members about money and stewardship in order to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, and meanings of American Christians that might affect their financial giving behaviors. In-depth, face to face interviews were conducted with twenty-six Christian church pastors and fifty-one church parishioners in Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and California. The interview respondents came from many Christian denominations representing different kinds of conservative Protestant, mainline Protestant, black Protestant, and Catholic churches. The interviews revealed that the issue of financial giving is one that seems to matter to American Christians, yet about which they are not clear and settled but rather uneasy if not uncomfortable. Many American Christians are less than fully contented with the practice and amount of their voluntary financial giving, but most seem content to live with whatever underlying guilt, confusion, or uncertainty they feel about it. Many American Christian pastors also struggle with varying degrees of discomfort and frustration over the issue of giving in their churches.

This chapter examines the results of a focused mental experiment wherein a nationally representative sample of American Christians was asked to ponder their response to the idea of their churches raising expectations on the financial giving of Christians. The idea in doing this is that having ordinary Christians all over the United States run this mental experiment in their heads will provide yet another angle on understanding how Christians think and feel about the issue of religious and charitable financial giving. The results showed that American Christians are ready and waiting to give ten percent of their after-tax income if only their churches were to ask them firmly to do so; earning higher incomes does not make American Christians more generous with their money; and racial differences among American Christians influence the matter of raising expectations of financial giving.

Although a first reading of Augustine's Commentary suggests that his purpose was simply to expound the meaning of the Letter to the Galatians line by line in a clear and concise manner, closer reading uncovers implicit polemic against Manicheism, Donatism, Arianism, and paganism. Nevertheless, Augustine's Commentary is not essentially polemical, but pastoral. Comparison with his monastic Rule demonstrates that the Commentary was written for Augustine's monastic community as its primary audience and that Augustine's immediate concern was to discover ways in which Paul's directives for Christian living could be implemented within that community. Success within the monastic community would enable Augustine as parish priest to implement Paul's directives within the wider community of his parishioners at Hippo and beyond.

This chapter examines the changes and challenges in the tradition of baptism in England during the period from 1642 to 1660. Even before the start of the war in August 1642, there were already increasing reports of desecrations, repudiation of Laudian practice, and of parishioners taking control of the liturgy. Traditional objections to Church of England ritual and radical rethinking of ecclesiastical organization and conduct combined together transformed and, in many cases, obliterated the customary form of baptism. This chapter investigates conservative and radical response to these disturbances and changes.

This chapter argues that George Gifford's Countrie diuinitie (1581) and I.B.'s much less well-known A dialogue between a vertuous gentleman and a popish priest (1581) form a polemical pair, and that they are particularly instructive when read in tandem. The unreformed country parishioner personified in Gifford's ‘Atheos’ and the unreformed country parson personified in I.B.'s ‘Neverbegood’ give shape to perennial puritan concerns, namely that the English ministers are readers not preachers, and as a consequence, the English people are ‘atheists’, but ‘halfly reformed’. Whereas Gifford stages a failed conversion, I.B. has the gentleman parson ‘Neverbegood’ experience a complete change of heart via the agency of a gentleman wayfarer, opposing conversion narratives that convey powerful messages.