Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921

宗教信仰和经济行为之间的关系一直是社会科学和人文科学中的一个长期主题，影响了卡尔·马克思、马克斯·韦伯、埃米尔·涂尔干、米尔莎·埃利亚德、R·H·托尼、维维亚娜·泽利泽和许多其他理论家的著作。在承认并在许多方面赞扬这些有影响力的思想家和学者的开创性工作的同时，这个项目也是关于宗教实践和经济思想之间的关系。它建立在一个鲜为人知的前提之上，即宗教环境中的主要经济交换不是、也从来不是智力交换，而是一直是物质交换。换句话说，该项目表明，教会筹款过程本身就是一个重要的经济现象，本身就值得研究和概念化，它有可能告诉我们许多关于宗教和经济在普通人生活中的互动。因此，这项研究采用了扩展的历史案例研究的形式，研究了爱尔兰天主教会在其对爱尔兰人口的影响方面处于巩固地位的关键时期，即从1850年到1921年之间，一些人认为这段时期是爱尔兰人“虔诚革命”的开始，1921年，它不再是英国境内的少数教会，而是成为一个新独立国家的主导教会。该项目将包括一个由多个教堂和其他档案构建的独特的收入数据库，对所采用的各种收入收集策略的系统概述，捐款动机的类型学，以及对该项目发现的现代适用性的考虑。尽管它主要是一个历史项目，但就像经济人类学和经济社会学最近的许多研究一样，它思考并希望以主流经济学往往忽视的方式提供对个人经济行为的洞察。主流经济学的重点是理性参与者模型。(Graeber，2011；Stirrat，2006；Zelizer，2013；Dodd，2014)因此，尽管一些美国宗教社会学家已经开始考虑宗教筹款背后的动机和后果(Peifer 2010；Mundey等人，2011)，但有不可抗拒的理由将这些问题记录下来，并放在爱尔兰天主教的背景下这样做。这些问题包括：在一个更加虔诚的时期涉及的资金相对更多；爱尔兰以外国家存在多个“爱尔兰”教区，以及爱尔兰神职人员针对吸引海外移民宗教汇款的呼吁所提供的有用且几乎无与伦比的跨国比较；所谓的世俗化/现代化和日益货币化的消费社会的平行关系；以及公认的爱尔兰天主教会财富的象征意义和天主教对新兴爱尔兰认同的核心重要性。对于这个项目的成功完成至关重要的是，爱尔兰和英国的档案以及数字仓库中也存在着大量可供访问和未被开发的原始材料，用来探索这些主题。因此，这个项目将代表着对宗教史的贡献，特别是对爱尔兰天主教会的贡献，探索这个占主导地位的机构在经济领域的地方、国家和跨国权力和影响力，并询问它在多大程度上帮助爱尔兰在爱尔兰和爱尔兰境外形成了爱尔兰的经济身份。但它也旨在作为关于更广泛的金钱和经济行为历史的文献的及时补充。通过提供一个国家以宗教为动机的筹款活动的全面探索，并提出关于宗教和经济在人们生活中相互作用的基本问题。

The relationship between religious faith and economic behaviour has been a perennial subject in the social sciences and the humanities, informing the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, R.H. Tawney, Viviana Zelizer and many other theorists besides. While acknowledging and in many respects speaking to the path-breaking work of such influential thinkers and scholars, this project is also about the relationship between religious practice and economic thought. It is predicated on the little-appreciated premise that the primary economic exchange in a religious setting is not and has never been an intellectual one, but rather, has always been a physical one. In other words, the project suggests that the process of church fundraising was (and is) in itself a significant economic phenomenon, worthy of examination and conceptualisation in its own right, and that it has the potential to tell us a great deal about the interaction of religion and economics in the lives of ordinary people. This research therefore takes the form of an extended historical case study of the Irish Catholic Church's finances during what was a key period of consolidation in its influence over the Irish population, namely between 1850, considered by some the beginning of a 'devotional revolution' among the Irish, and 1921, when it ceased to be a minority church within the United Kingdom, and instead became the dominant church in a newly independent country. The project will incorporate a unique database of income constructed from multiple church and other archives, a systematic overview of the kinds of income-gathering strategies employed, a typology of motives for contributing funds, and a consideration of the modern-day applicability of the project's findings.Though primarily a historical project, it is, like much recent research in economic anthropology and economic sociology, thinking about and hoping to provide insights into individual economic behaviour in ways that mainstream economics, with its focus on rational actor models, has tended to neglect. (Graeber, 2011; Stirrat, 2006; Zelizer, 2013; Dodd, 2014) Thus, while some sociologists of American religion have begun to consider the motivations behind and consequences of religious fundraising, (Peifer 2010; Mundey et al, 2011) there are irresistible reasons for historicising these questions, and for doing so in the Irish Catholic context. These include the relatively much larger sums of money involved in a much more devout period; the useful and virtually unmatched transnational comparison afforded by the existence of multiple 'Irish' parishes in countries outside Ireland and of Irish clerical appeals directed at attracting religious remittances from the diaspora; the parallel nexus of supposed secularisation/modernisation and an increasingly monetised and rising consumer society; and the acknowledged symbolic significance of the Irish Catholic Church's wealth and central importance of Catholicism to emerging Irish identity. Crucially for the successful completion of the project, there also exists a multiplicity of accessible and underexploited source materials, in archives in both Ireland and Britain and in digital repositories, with which to explore these themes.Therefore, this project will represent a contribution to the history of religion and the Irish Catholic Church in particular, exploring that dominant institution's local, national, and transnational power and influence in the economic realm, and asking to what extent it helped to shape an Irish economic identity both in Ireland and amongst the Irish abroad.But it is also intended to serve as a timely addition to the literature on the history of money and economic behaviour more generally, by offering a comprehensive exploration of one nation's religiously-motivated fundraising and asking fundamental questions about the interaction of religion and economics in people's lives.