This is the start of a series on atheists. I am not sure how many blogs I will write on them but it is connected to a book I have coming out titled There is no God: Atheists in America (Rowman and Littlefield). It is a book I co-wrote with David Williamson. Being a Christian, I believe it to be important to understand those who do not agree with me. Furthermore, atheists have been understudied, and I love doing research... Read more
(Part 2 in a series on Evangelical Christianity in America) In my last post, I examined the wide range of definitions that are given to Evangelical Christianity. In this post, I will take one of those definitions and use it to illustrate the percentage of Americans who are Evangelical Christian. The definition that I’m using is whether a person affiliates with an Evangelical denomination. (Click here if you want the gory classification details). Also, I am analyzing data from the... Read more
Part I of II The issue of women having work/life balance has occupied a lot of media attention as of late. Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece in the Atlantic this summer on the challenges of women having it all attracted a lot of attention (and Margarita Mooney blogged in response to it on this site). Marissa Mayer of Yahoo’s decision to end some work-from-home options received a lot of outrage from people suggesting she was making things harder for women. Most... Read more
In a recent post I shared some of the recent statistics reported by the New York Times regarding the change in the Catholic population around the world. Through the friendly comments I received from Dr. Conrad Hackett of the Pew Research Center and a couple other sociologists, I learned that Pew has their own statistics on the global Catholic population. This got to me as I discovered that the numbers I used to create my graphs were largely taken from... Read more
(Part 1 in a series on Evangelical Christianity in America) There is much confusion about Evangelical Christianity in America, including very basic questions such as: What is it? Who are Evangelical Christians? What do they believe? How is it changing? And so forth. So, I thought that I would start a series, guaranteed to run as long as I feel like writing about it, that simply describes the basics of Evangelical Christianity in modern-day America. Let’s start with perhaps the... Read more
It is with a bit of trepidation that I begin discussing with my students in positive sociology this week Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Is a work written in the 1830s relevant nearly 200 years later? When I assign readings from 1985 my students say, “Gee, this is old and out of context,” so how will they respond to a book from 1835? Will they dismiss Tocqueville’s insights or writing style as irrelevant to their everyday concerns and the... Read more
Normally I do not use my blog to send readers to another blog, but I am preparing to do a series on atheists and I am not yet ready to begin it. This blog by Hoffmeister substantiates an argument I made a while ago about needing a holistic solution to gun violence. Forget the business about the Huffington Post and look at his discussion of video games. With so much concentration on gun control I fear that we are forgetting... Read more
It’s no surprise that part of my interest in sociology is autobiographical, and this week’s selection of a new pope brought me back to some of my own history with the Catholic Church. One of my most recent cultural encounters with Catholicism was at my father’s funeral. While he was not a religious person for most of his life (according to his friend) the last decade or so included weekly attendance at St. Basil’s with one of his siblings and... Read more
Sitting in his office perched above the hills in Berkeley, California, yesterday I got to meet one of the legends of sociology: Robert Bellah. Among other accomplishments, Bellah’s co-authored book Habits of the Heart from 1985 has sold half a million copies, his essay Civil Religion in America is widely discussed and cited, and his very recent magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution has caused quite a buzz in the academic world. (See the lively discussion of it on the Immanent Frame).... Read more
This summer, I have the opportunity to travel to Brazil with Calvin College’s Nagel Institute, for a seminar focused on understanding how Pentecostals are interacting with and shaping globalization forces. This question of how religious actors around the world understand and conceive of economic life—and in particular, aspects of increasing economic liberalization—is a central focus of my research. I’ve recently finished Jill DeTemple’s 2012 book, Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories: Religion and Community Development in Rural Ecuador (University of Notre... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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