“Keeping Scientology Working”

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-124
Author(s):  
Donald Westbrook

This chapter introduces features of Scientology’s systematic theology as developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1959, L. Ron Hubbard established a headquarters at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England. This location became the international base of Scientology until the founding of the Sea Organization in 1967. The Saint Hill period was instrumental in the intellectual development of Scientology. During these years, Hubbard systematized Scientology’s educational methodology (Study Technology), theology of sin (overts and withholds), theology of evil (suppressive persons), and standards of orthodoxy and orthopraxy (“Keeping Scientology Working” or KSW). KSW serves to legitimate Dianetics and Scientology within the church because it self-referentially dictates that Hubbard’s “technologies” provide mental and spiritual benefits only insofar as they are uniformly understood, applied, and perpetuated by others.

Author(s):  
Rory Scothorne ◽  
Ewan Gibbs

The current state of the radical left and, more broadly, politics in Scotland has its roots in the unique set of political, economic and intellectual conditions found in the 1960s and 1970s. Where mainstream accounts of the origins and development of Scottish nationalism - and its increasing popularity on the left - emphasise political and economic origins in these decades, this chapter emphasises the equally crucial intellectual developments of the period. Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’, ‘de-Stalinization’ and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 engendered a growing plurality of perspectives on the European left, and it was under these new conditions that the British left increasingly questioned Stalinist orthodoxies, and established critiques of labourism and the ‘British Road to Socialism’. The search for alternatives to the classical Marxist, social democratic and Soviet canons led to a new theoretical heterodoxy, bringing Gramscian and world-systems theories to the fore along with a more politically ambiguous conception of the ‘national question’. This chapter integrates an analysis of the intellectual development of left-wing Scottish nationalism with a consideration of the growth of its influence within the labour movement during the 1960s and 1970s.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

The Epilogue considers recent attempts to affirm the importance of Catholic laywomen in the church and extend their participation in decision making, while upholding Catholic teaching on gender essentialism and complementarity. Such limited efforts must be placed in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, when Catholic women’s leadership was also affirmed, and yet these women were still limited to prescribed roles and excluded from power. The work that Catholic laywomen did in these years to challenge Catholic teaching on gender roles, and remake laywomen’s identity, has been largely ignored and forgotten. As a result, the church, and particularly Pope Francis, continue to give lip service to laywomen’s dignity while failing to listen to their voices or give them genuine authority.


2018 ◽  
Vol 98 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 407-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.C. Bennett

AbstractUnder the Church Building Acts beginning in 1818, new English Anglican churches received governmental approval to formally rent sittings to congregants. Initial profits seem to have been high enough to make the practice financially viable. But over the Victorian era a flurry of popular protests and governmental acts, combined with lower rates of church-going, reduced the profitability of pew-renting. Churches built under the auspices of the Church Building Commissioners were generally offered grants in exchange for ending pew-rents. S.J.D. Green concluded that pew-renting was generally extinguished by the 1920s or earlier, which is correct regarding Anglican churches which received such “in lieu” grants. But Green’s assessment must be modified for other churches receiving no grants and needing even small profits. Primary sources reflect that many of these continued to set sittings for decades after the 1920s—in a few cases, into the 1960s and 1970s.


Ecclesiology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-45
Author(s):  
Paul Avis

Stephen Sykes chastised English (especially Anglican) theology for its neglect of systematic and doctrinal theology and worked for its revival. He viewed the liberal tendency in English theology in the 1960s and 1970s as attributable, at least in part, to lack of doctrinal rigour and to ecclesiastical woolliness. Sykes contributed to methodological reflection on systematic theology, but his occasional forays into systematics were not his major efforts. However, one systematic theological topic to which Sykes made a significant contribution was the question of the essence of Christianity, which he pursued in critical dialogue with a galaxy of modern theologians. His account of the essence in relation to the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ aspects of Christianity is not satisfactory and his conclusion that the essence is an ‘essentially contested concept’ is disappointing. Nevertheless, his discussion sheds light on the problem and remains a stimulus and resource for further work on this topic.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Loss

AbstractIn the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.


Author(s):  
Matthew A. Shadle

This chapter examines the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America. It offers three cases studies illustrating the economic and political turmoil in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s: Chile, Brazil, and El Salvador. The chapter then turns to the theology of two prominent liberation theologians, Gustavo Gutiérrez and Ignacio Ellacuría. Gutiérrez proposes that God calls us to make a preferential option for the poor, and to work for integral liberation in history. Similarly, Ellacuría explains that God offers his salvation in history, and the church is called to realize the Reign of God in the midst of historical reality, siding with the “crucified people” with whom Jesus identifies.


2020 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter

This chapter assesses the bearing of bureaucratic cultures on science, then shows how inferential statistics became standard in medicine and psychology as a response to internal disciplinary weakness and external regulatory pressures. The massive effort to introduce quantitative criteria for public decisions in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply an unmediated response to a new political climate. It reflected also the overwhelming success of quantification in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences during the postwar period. This was not a chance confluence of independent lines of cultural and intellectual development, but in some way a single phenomenon. It is no accident that the move toward the almost universal quantification of social and applied disciplines was led by the United States, and succeeded most fully there. The push for rigor in the disciplines derived in part from the same distrust of unarticulated expert knowledge and the same suspicion of arbitrariness and discretion that shaped political culture so profoundly in the same period. Some of this suspicion came from within the disciplines it affected, but in every case it was at least reinforced by vulnerability to the suspicions of outsiders, often expressed in an explicitly political arena.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Saresella

The issue of divorce is a thermometer of the cultural, religious, and political sensitivity of Italy’s citizens and political caste. In the liberal period (1961–1922), Italy, a profoundly Catholic country with the Vatican City on its own territory, attempted to establish the nonreligious nature of the State, yet its ruling class never dared pose the problem of the divorce law. Subsequently, with the advent of fascism, close relations were established between the State and the Church, which prevented any challenge to the indissolubility of marriage for years to come. Not until the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the changes induced by the Vatican Council II and the new national and international climate in politics, did many believers start freely discussing the possibility of a divorce law in Italy.


Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Caradonna

The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s overshadows a second, less heralded intellectual development that took place at the exact same time: the birth of “ecological economics.” A cluster of nonconforming economists in this period drew on the fledgling science of ecology to rethink many of the assumptions of neoclassical economics, with its “growthmania,” general indifference toward pollution and ecosystem destruction, and dogmatic belief that “tastes and preferences” are innate in humans rather than culturally shaped. What emerged was a new school of thought that integrated ecological concerns into an essentially capitalist economic framework. These iconoclasts brought together the dual nature of the Greek word “oikos” (literally: household), which is the etymological root of both “economics” and “ecology.” They asserted that the human “household” could not exist without a healthy and functional natural environment. This has become the essential insight of economic sustainability—the second “E” of sustainability: that the world needs economic systems that exist harmoniously with nature (and which promote social equality and justice). Those who practice the economics of sustainability in the present day— William E. Rees, Mathis Wackernagel, Peter Victor, Tim Jackson, Richard Heinberg, and many others—are the heirs of these early critics who challenged the hegemony of business-as-usual economics. First-wave ecological economics shares the readability of the classic environmental works discussed in the previous chapter. The main authors associated with ecological economics—E. J. Mishan, E. F. Schumacher, Kenneth Boulding, Howard T. Odum, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Amory Lovins, and the members of the shadowy-sounding Club of Rome—went out of their way to write nontechnical books that were meant to appeal to the average-educated reader. Collectively, these authors ask deep and penetrating philosophical questions: What is the point of endless economic growth? What are the environmental costs of a wasteful and fossil-fuel-addicted consumer society? What is the best way to measure the well-being of a society? What is the role of economics in ensuring that human society remains within its ecological limits and avoids overshoot and collapse? How can nature, society, and the economy be studied as a single system?


2014 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
George Harinck

Historiography of the Netherlands 1945–1970 leaves one with the impression that the church as an actor in society had already acknowledged that it was obsolete. The role of the church in these decades is above all a passive one: at first the church does not do anything of importance within society, and subsequently it is abandoned by it. This impression overlooks the fact that the church—Catholic as well as Protestant, but this article is focused on the two largest Dutch Protestant denominations—changed its attitude towards society in these decades immensely. From institutions that sustained the societal order they became its major critic, calling for justice in a welfare state that blurred moral boundaries. This change is most clear in the new role the diaconie [the social welfare work of the church] assumed. Now the welfare state took care of the material needs of the destitute, the diaconie focused on social and also counter-cultural church social welfare work. The churches’ criticism of especially Protestant civil society ultimately achieved the opposite of what it was aiming for: in the hope that they could change the character of society and under their influence bring about salvation, their criticism led externally to a further weakening and a greater invisibility of the church in society. The churches’ new role engendered much debate in the 1960s in and outside the churches, but the result was increasing isolation. This became visible when members started to leave the church en masse in the 1960s and 1970s. The abandonment of the churches in favour of society that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s was preceded by the churches’ rejection of that very same society. In other words, the churches were not overcome by this reversal of fortune, but had themselves provoked it.


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