Congregations, Local Knowledge, and Devolution

Current efforts to devolve social services from the federal government to state or local levels have been accompanied by raised expectations concerning congregations as community institutions. State and local governments, as well as secular non-profit organizations, are attempting to build new allia...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Farnsley, Arthur Emery (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer 2000
In: Review of religious research
Year: 2000, Volume: 42, Issue: 1, Pages: 96-110
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
Description
Summary:Current efforts to devolve social services from the federal government to state or local levels have been accompanied by raised expectations concerning congregations as community institutions. State and local governments, as well as secular non-profit organizations, are attempting to build new alliances with congregations. In these new alliances, both congregations and their would-be partners lack critical information about the social environment, the local religious ecology, and the organizational differences among religious groups. This paper traces the very different socio-religious context in two apparently similar neighborhoods in order to suggest important variables that demand the attention of all actors - government, secular service providers, and congregations - involved in welfare devolution. The paper concludes with a call for sociologists of religion to take a more aggressive role in explicating religion's role in the social ecology for the benefit of policymakers.
ISSN:2211-4866
Contains:Enthalten in: Review of religious research
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2307/3512147