Religious communities, including brotherhoods, mystery cults, synagogues, churches, sects, and monastic and missionary orders, serve initially to preserve and interpret their traditions or the body of doctrine, practices, and liturgical forms through which religious experience comes to be expressed.
Denominations were based, after all, on distinctions of social class, region, ethnicity and race, along with (perhaps more than) distinctions of doctrine, practice and polity.
Across the sweep of Indian religious history, at least five elements have given shape to the Hindu religious tradition: doctrine, practice, society, story, and devotion.
I often hear the argument that religious African Americans are somehow required to be homophobic and to oppose marriage equality because of their deep commitment to Christian doctrine, practice, and belief.
A pure instrumentalist seeks to explain every aspect of a justified system of criminal law in consequentialist terms: in designing a system, we need only ask which doctrines, practices and rules will efficiently serve the goals we have posited.
Their doctrines, practices and institutions have never had only one voice of authority, and dialogue has been a shared tactic for negotiating contesting interpretations within each tradition.
Anglicanism was born in rebellion against unfounded and unfair doctrine and practices.
The issues themselves are seen as threats to church teaching by some, but are also seen as a test of the bigger question about whether, and how, Catholicism can change doctrine or practices.
Constitutional law, the body of rules, doctrines, and practices that govern the operation of political communities.
Early Christian attempts to forge a "unity of doctrine and practice" often dissolved into theological controversies, many of which persist.
And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.
