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Megachurches represent an interesting empirical and conceptual phenomenon. Empirically, megachurches (Protestant churches with average weekly attendance of greater than 2,000 members) are growing at a time when overall church participation in the United States is steady or declining. Conceptually, megachurch pastors can be viewed as institutional leaders who attempt to reconcile new technologies and large congregations within a highly institutionalized setting. While many of these megachurches have a denominational affiliation, some do not. In this essay, we describe the literature on megachurches and offer observations about the megachurch as an institution. Drawing from preliminary analysis of a sample of over 1,400 megachurches (identified from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research), we also draw tentative conclusions about the characteristics of the pastors of megachurches, and one growing institutional maintenance practice: writing texts. We propose that examining megachurches can help extend the current research on institutional leadership, institutional work, and institutional support mechanisms.

This chapter explores the impact of delivering culturally community family therapy with strength-based strategies, to transgenerational Black Haitian families living in Haiti and the Dominican Republic following the 2010 earthquake. A series of workshop intervention over several years, which were co-facilitated by community pastors and leaders provided a cultural-based intervention drawing on Black British and Caribbean culture, Haitian culture, Christian spiritual belief systems, in conjunction with some bi-cultural attachment and systemic methods and techniques. Community feedback through testimonies contributed to evaluation and outcomes in developing new strategies to manage stress, and family conflict and distress, together with developing new strategies in sharing a vision for the future across the community.

This chapter explores how discourse about Barack Obama's community organizing background underscores his new Black politics. Whereas new Black politics is associated with a minimization of race, centrist and neoliberal policies, and an unwillingness to “speak truth to power,” Obama has been characterized as “different” due to his community organizing experience. As I show, Obama's community organizing background is invoked by him and others in ways that amplify an opposition to Black racial solidarity associated with the tradition of old Black politics. The first section examines how Obama's community organizing is depicted as a quest for racial acceptance from old guard Black activists but translates into a story of his political maturation. The second section considers how Obama's relationship with his (now) former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright is symbolized as a struggle between old and new Black politics and thus serves as a commentary on the presumed ineffectiveness of racial solidarity for addressing the plight of working-class Blacks.

Given the unprecedented scale of the climate emergency and the need for swift and radical change in how we travel, it is important for local authorities to consider how best to use their ‘authority’ to initiate sustainable change. However, without collective decision-making, longstanding issues around equity, real, and perceived injustices will trump any good intentions and policies. In this chapter, I attempt to make sense of why the initial stages of the Emergency Active Travel Fund (EATF) a mobility scheme designed to tackle two emergencies – the pandemic and the climate – largely failed in the eyes public, even though it was designed with their benefit in mind.

The last three decades of the 20th century was a period of momentous social, economic, political and religious turmoil in many African societies. Nigeria is a prime example. Although the economic transformations of this period were perhaps bigger than other kinds of change, religious shifts probably had more remarkable social effects. One particularly noticeable development was the emergence of a new strand of Pentecostalism that serves as a source of political power and as a vehicle for economic mobilisation. Embedded in a theology of materialism and a redefinition of ‘money’, this new ideology found a fertile ground among local and global corporations struggling to cope with problems such as a devalued currency and political corruption and instability. Using data from ethnographic research on the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), with more than 10,000 congregations worldwide, this chapter shows how the near economic meltdown of the last decades of the 20th century precipitated a massive religious (re)engagement with economic structures and practices in Nigeria.

Unprecedented levels of investment in transit and transit-oriented development in Los Angeles County have not resulted in gains for transit-dependent populations or overall higher ridership for that matter. They have instead saddled them with inordinate cost burdens and displacement pressures. Yet racialised, low-income communities that rely on transit are far from passive victims. Rather, they are participating in advocacy campaigns that penetrate decision-making venues and procedures and co-create institutional practices, policy priorities, and public and private investments that serve their interests and build a Los Angeles that is more widely accessible and affordable. This chapter presents a case study of the Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles (ACT-LA), a regional coalition of over 40 community-based organisations at the helm of direct-action policy campaigns and participatory planning initiatives to advance transit justice and equitable transit-oriented communities (TOC). After examining ACT-LA's origins in the LA-based movement for community benefits agreements, the analysis focuses on how ACT-LA has combined political mobilisation for ballot-box measures with participatory policy-making and planning processes to advance just, equitable, sustainable transit systems, and TOC. The concluding discussion considers the implications of the ACT-LA case for reformulating participatory policy-making and planning around transportation and land use to further equity and climate goals.

Purpose – Religious addiction treatment has experienced a rise both in its reach and exposure to attention from medical professionals. Largely autonomous conversion-based programs have received unprecedented support and legitimacy. We investigate “Victory Ministries,”11The organization ‘Victory Ministries’ is a pseudonym. Any resemblance to actual locales of this name or similar is entirely coincidental. All names have been change to protect the identity of the participants. a large Midwestern evangelical rehab facility, exploring the similarities and differences between formulations of addiction-as-disease found in “secular” rehab and the moral binaries that guide Victory's program.

Methodology/approach – Qualitative case study: Interviews and ethnography.

Findings – Working from in-depth interviews, we explore the inner workings of Victory's curriculum and program design, as it transmutes dominant therapeutic concepts and methods into its own Manichaean frame. Aided by superior financial resources and support of a tight-knit network of churches, it delivers its most successful clients into a new life “redeemed by Christ.”

Social implications – Proponents of conversion-based service provision position religious institutions as the primary agents of willing compassion and generosity beyond the family compass, stripping the rest of civil society of any claims to promote the greater good. In Victory's metaphor of “invisible war,” a Manichaean vision is quite explicit. Every definition of recovery and reintegration in terms of conversion and submission to religious authority inherently suggests that substance use stems largely from immorality and that the unsaved in general are sinful and dangerous. By funding a conversion-based shadow welfare apparatus, we argue, the US government is intensifying the criminalization of poverty, the steady downgrading of more inclusive institutions, and ultimately the materialization of Victory's Manichaean vision in a polarized nation.

Both guidance to transport planning practitioners and scientific literature advocate the adoption of in-depth and inclusive participation and consultation methods when developing new transport plans and measures. The motivations for this normative stance are however unclear, other than general statements that public participation is inherently a good thing, and that new forms of transport planning must be different from what has gone before. However, these documents cite little or no evidence to demonstrate that more participatory transport planning has produced ‘better’ decisions or outcomes. It is also important to note that the legitimacy conferred on governments from adopting this form of participation and consultation is only one of several forms of legitimacy. The purpose of this chapter is thus to attempt to assess whether more participatory approaches to transport planning do indeed lead to ‘better’ decisions and outcomes. It does this by developing, based on the literature, a number of criteria by which to judge the decisions made and outcomes delivered. It then reviews the experience of consultation and participation in a non-random sample of four pairs of transport plans or measures, and evaluates the experience in each against the criteria developed. It finds little evidence that more in-depth and inclusive participation processes that follow the normative stance found in practitioner guidance and the literature lead to better outcomes, and some evidence that such processes may in some cases compromise legitimacy by slowing and changing measure implementation.