Religious Islands, Partners, and Bridges: Studying Cross-Denominational Shared Ideas Using Book Co-Purchase Networks
Open Access
- Author:
- Porter, Nathaniel Douglas
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 18, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Roger Finke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Roger Finke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Diane Helen Felmlee, Committee Member
Alan M Sica, Committee Member
Stephen Howard Browne, Outside Member - Keywords:
- sociology
religion
social network analysis
sna
network science
denominations
amazon
culture
consumption
Christianity
US religion
affiliation networks - Abstract:
- This dissertation attempts to answer three questions about ecumenical relationships between U.S. Protestant Christian denominations and families: What denominational families are culturally isolated overall and why? Why are some pairs of denominational families more closely connected than others? To what extent are the connections between denominational families mediated by a general Christian culture, as opposed to taking place through direct contact? All three bear implications for major theories of religion related to tensions and strictness. To accomplish this, I collect and analyze a new set of data from book product pages on Amazon.com. Data are drawn from recommendations in the “Customers who bought this also bought” feature and allow for studying with which other books and topics an individual book is commonly bought. Methods include mixed effects fractional logistic regression, MRQAP, and Partial Group Betweenness Centrality, a generalized version of group betweenness described in the Appendix. Taken together, results suggest informal cultural ties form through a mix of individual, congregational and group processes. Relationships occur both directly, through co-purchase of ecumenical titles, and mediated by co-exposure to pan-denominational titles designed to appeal to a wide range of Christians. The dissertation contributes both technically, through introduction of new data and methods, and theoretically, by applying network theories and informal cultural analytics to key questions in the sociology of religion.