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Why I Love Teaching Sociology of Religion

Posted on December 22, 2011 by | Comments Off

Published on the Black, White and Gray blog on December 14, 2011. Click here to see the full post.

“Unlike other sociology classes I teach at UNC, students who come to this class are not (for the most part) sociology majors. Many are religious studies majors, some are in biology, and many in English. All come because they are curious about religion, but not necessarily sociology of religion.

So I start them off with difficult readings from Daniel Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion on Weber and Marx, along with Karen Fields’ introduction to Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. I mix more contemporary readings for those weeks to show why those theories are still relevant. Then I have them go out and observe a religious service and apply one of those theories to what they observed.

Undergraduates are very skilled observers of the social world, and I always look forward to reading their observations about Mormon congregations, megachurches, Bob Jones University chapel, and a whole host of religious organizations I have never heard of but are right under my nose.”

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Dead Man Walking: An Evening with Sister Helen Prejean in Durham

Posted on December 7, 2011 by | Comments Off

Published on December 7, 2011, on the Black White and Gray blog. Click here to read the full article.

“Our response to crime cannot stop at demanding justice, we must also exercise mercy. One of the most prominent Catholic theologians of the 20th century, Cardinal Avery Dulles, wrote this theological reflection on Catholic doctrine and capital punishment in 2001:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/08/catholicism-amp-capital-punishment-21

He concludes that, in modern societies, the death penalty should not be imposed when “punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment.”

In his 1995 encyclical “The Gospel of Life,” Pope John Paul II also wrote that “modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform,” and he quotes the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states:

“If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.” ”

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Faith Based Social Services: An Essential Part of Civil Society

Posted on December 7, 2011 by | Comments Off

Published November 30, 2011, on the Black, White and Gray blog. To read the full article, click here.

“History, sociology and anthropology all tell us that people’s religious faith will continue to inspire them to do faith-based social service work, and many people will prefer to go to faith-based services agencies because of the focus on the whole person. Aren’t their ways to allow government support for large faith-based organizations that neither lead to government support for proselytizing nor impede religious organizations from carrying out their missions as they define it?

This balance is the essence of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states: the federal government shall neither establish a religion nor prevent the free exercise of religion. Although it may be difficult to strike this balance, it’s an ideal worth striving for, as religious organizations like Catholic Charities and courageous religious leaders like Eugene Rivers are a fundamental part of civil society, and a virtuous, ordered, and free society needs both an efficient government and a vibrant civil society.”

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Women’s Dignity in the Workplace

Posted on November 27, 2011 by | Comments Off

Published on November, 16, 2011, on the Black, White and Gray blog, my thoughts on what Edith Stein insights offer to women in the professions.

“Although she points out that women’s temperament will likely lead them in greater proportion to certain professions like art, history, and the humanities, Stein insisted that some women will also shine in physics, medicine, politics, and diplomacy. Stein is right on when she says “there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman” (Woman, p. 47).

But beyond saying that women can shine in every profession, Stein calls women to exercise their professions as women: “The participation of women in the most diverse professional disciplines could be a blessing for the entire society, private or public, precisely if the specifically feminine ethos would be preserved” (Woman, p. 49). What does this mean?”

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Civil Religion in America then and Now

Posted on November 17, 2011 by | Comments Off

Published November 9, 2011, on the Black White and Gray blog.

“Yesterday, I discussed with my class Robert Bellah’s famous 1967 essay entitled ‘Civil Religion in America.’ In a time when news commentators and some scholars express concern that there is too much religion in American politics, Bellah’s essay reminds us that religion has always been part of American politics and national discourse.

Referring to John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Presidential Inaugural speech, Bellah remarked that President Kennedy referred to God three times in that famous speech. Bellah then asks, ‘Considering the separation of church and state, how is a president justified in using the word ‘God’ at all? The answer is that the separation of church and state has not denied the political realm a religious dimension. Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life, including the political sphere. This public religious dimension is expressed in a set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that I am calling American civil religion.’”

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Best Selling Books in Sociology of Religion, SSSR 2011

Posted on November 8, 2011 by | Comments Off

Posted on the Black, White and Gray blog on November 6, 2011, my thoughts on recent bestsellers in sociology of religion this year.

“Last weekend at the meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, I perused the book sale, wondering “What are other people buying? What should I be reading?”

On the last day of the conference, I asked Theo, the religion editor for Oxford University Press, to tell me which of Oxford’s books were selling a lot. He pointed at Christian Smith’s Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood, and gave me a knowing look. Oh, yes, I said, all Smith’s books from the National Study of Youth and Religion sell well. Yes, indeed, he replied. If you pick up this book, get ready for a rather depressing read about the dominant culture of some (though clearly not all) youth: hedonism.

Two more books on youth and religion are also selling well, Lisa Pearce and Melinda Denton’s A Faith of Their Own and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America. Both are very popular among my undergrad students, so much so that I have had to put multiple copies on reserve at the library because so many students want to write their research papers using them. Neither should be read if you think your children or youth group attendees are angels; but if you want a sense of what youth culture is really like, pick them up.”

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Moving Forward the Debate on Science and Religion

Posted on November 2, 2011 by | Comments Off

My entry for November 2, 2011, published by Patheos on the Black White and Gray blog.

“As a graduate student, I remember reading Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on Faith and Reason and reflecting on his claim that science, for all of its great advances, is insufficient by itself to answer questions about the meaning of life, questions better left to philosophy and theology. As he wrote, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” Reading Cardinal John Henry Newman’s book The Idea of a University communicated the same message: the intellectual life, the life of a student, a scientist or a university professor, is a search for truth, and all sincere search for truth leads us to God.

If faith and reason are like two wings of a bird, and if the pursuit of scientific knowledge can help us in our search to know God, then why do we read so much about religion and science being in conflict? As I often tell my students, public debates about many topics related to religion are dominated by extremes. As Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund shows in her book Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, two of the most outspoken intellectuals in the religion and science debate, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, do not fully represent the views of either non-religious or religious scientists.”

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The Media and Research on Religion

Posted on October 28, 2011 by | Comments Off

On October 26, 2011, I wrote on the Black, White and Gray blog about how I am teaching students to integrate peer-reviewed research on religion with what they read in the media (newspapers, magazines, and online).

Here’s part of what I had to say. To see the full post, click here.

“This year, for the first time ever, I will allow students to include newspapers, magazines, and online media in their research papers. To do so, however, they must follow several strict guidelines. First, they must only use newspapers/magazines/online sources in addition to (not instead of) scholarly sources. Second, they can only search a limited set of newspapers/magazines/online sources which I as a scholar know provide generally good information on religion. Third, I worked with UNC’s research library staff to discuss with students how to analyze sources for credibility, accuracy and bias.”

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What do We Pray For?

Posted on October 20, 2011 by | Comments Off

On October 19, 2011, I published a piece for Patheos on the Black, White and Gray blog entitled:  What Do we Pray for?

“So one day, I finally asked a woman I had been helping tutor English to, who I call Julia in my book, “Julia, what do you ask for when you pray?” Her reply really surprised me. “Ask for?” she queried me in return. “First, I give God thanks for all the things I have. We have to be grateful because we are God’s children.” But surely, I insisted, you must be asking God to help you? “I pray for others first. I pray for peace in the world; for an end to violence. Only when I’m done all that would I ask for what I need.””

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Who is a a Convert?

Posted on October 19, 2011 by | Comments Off

My October 12, 2011, entry for the Patheos blog Black, White and Gray asked: Who is a Convert?

“Writing in the Wall Street Journal opinion page on September 16, 2011, Religion News Service journalist David Gibson asked, who is stronger in the faith, Converts vs. ‘Cradle Catholics?’ This question is one that often comes up in ordinary conversation among Catholics and sometimes among sociologists. Many prominent sociologists of religion of the last half century, such as Peter Berger and Rodney Stark, have emphasized that choice of a faith rather than ascription makes one more sure of one’s beliefs, and hence more committed.  Although there is much truth in the idea that using one’s free will to adhere to a faith likely strengthens one’s commitment to that faith, we should nonetheless ask, why can’t Catholics born into the faith also “choose” to be Catholic?”

To read the full entry, visit the blog.

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