I remember learning the details about the killing of Osama bin Laden. At the time it was reported that is was a mission in which the military could capture him if that was possible. But, the way I heard it was that they were to shoot him unless there was no possibility he could engage in violence. I guess if they caught him coming out of a shower naked they could know he had no weapons upon him, but otherwise,... Read more
It’s a festive time of year for Asian Americans. As many readers know, the Lunar New Year celebration kicked off last week, and I hear that in China, the celebration lasts a good deal more than 1 day due to the mass migrations that occur for work-related reasons. For example, last year a PBS documentary called “Last Train Home” focused on the journeys of Chinese workers who often leave their rural villages to travel hundreds of miles for work and... Read more
A longstanding theme in the sociology of religion is how religious beliefs and practices affect one’s place in society. I’ve been reading lately some psychological studies of self-control, and it seems that self-control might prove to be an important mechanism by which Christianity influences its adherents’ place in society. Having high levels of self-control has all sorts of benefits (at least, that’s what I’ve heard). It helps people make good impressions on others, get more education, do better in the workplace, and avoid crime.... Read more
As a follow up to my recent post about my Monastic Vacation at a 13th-century monastery in Italy with the Servants of the Lord, my friend, the Professor of Political Science and host of the Research on Religion podcast series, Tony Gill, interviewed me about that vacation. Please visit their page to hear the podcast and learn more about the numbers of religious vocations in the U.S. and worldwide, as well as details about everyday life inside of a monastery.... Read more
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Although many Protestants do not celebrate this 40-day season, many churches do celebrate this period as a way to prepare for Easter. We’ve been rereading The Screwtape Letters with our Bible Study group this year. These letters by C.S. Lewis document an exchange between an older demon, Screwtape, and his younger nephew, Wormwood. While C.S. Lewis would hardly qualify as a social scientist, I appreciate the ways that he recognizes the... Read more
Lots of us are thinking and writing with an unusual mixture of heavy heart and curiosity today, with the news of the unusual retirement of a pope. There’s gratefulness for his service and sadness at its forthcoming conclusion, yet without the grief that typically accompanies the news of a new and needed conclave. Since there’s no shortage of content flying around the Internet today, I’ll keep my comments fairly brief. (Well, they were brief when I started…) For people who’ve... Read more
While attending the American Sociological Association annual meetings are a humbling experience when you hear and see scholars asking super-big questions, there’s something perhaps even more humbling when attending an interdisciplinary science mini-conference like the one I attended last week. Up until the invitation to present I had never heard of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This organization has been around since 1932 according to their website. It was initiated by the Japanese emperor Showa to... Read more
In the 1990s, a sociology psychologist named Peter Gollwitzer conducted a fabulously useful experiment. He wanted to know under what conditions intentions to do a behavior actually translated into doing behavior. To find out, he did a simple experiment. His university students were getting ready to leave for home at the end of the fall semester, and he gave them a simple task to do. Write an essay about what they did on Christmas Day and send it to Gollwitzer... Read more
When I first started read Gretchen Rubin’s best-selling book, The Happiness Project, I thought, “Wow, she does a great job of summarizing tons on research on positive psychology in a way that is accessible and engaging. But, I mean, her life is so bourgeois! She has a happy marriage already, two lovely kids, and she lives comfortably in NYC. How applicable is her happiness project to my life or my students’ lives?” Since I’m teaching some texts from positive psychology... Read more
Although I didn’t blog on it here, back in December I published a piece about the empirical connection between porn use and support for same-sex marriage among men, using the notorious-but-wonderfully-valid-and-versatile dataset called the New Family Structures Study. It turns out I’m not the only one saying it, which is always nice. Scholars from Indiana University and the University of Arizona are reporting the same phenomenon in the General Social Survey, the granddaddy of datasets. The article itself is appearing... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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