This is the third and final entry of the blog series about my latest book – So Many Christians, So Few Lions – Christianophobia in the United States. In the first two entries I went over the data used to document Christianophobia. I refer any new readers back to the first and second entries if they want to see the basis of my assertion that Christianophobia is a real factor in our society. I will not take the time here... Read more
This is the second entry of the blog series about my latest book – So Many Christians, So Few Lions – Christianophobia in the United States. I waited until the book was officially out before posting as I anticipated that it will be a little more controversial than my previous entry. Readers can look to the book for a fuller explanation and for more evidence of the processes I will discuss. Last time I looked at contours of the basic... Read more
Over the next three blog entries, I am going to discuss the content of my latest book – So Many Christians, So Few Lions – Christianophobia in the United States. Actually the book has not come out yet, but will officially come out later this month. Obviously the focus of the book will be the nature of anti-Christian attitudes in the United States. In this first entry, I look at the contours of a basic level of animosity towards conservative... Read more
If you have any number of conservative Christian facebook friends then your newsfeed has probably blown up concerning the subpoenas of the Houston pastors. For the rest of you let me briefly fill you in. Several months ago Houston passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. Among other requirements, this ordinance would require public bathrooms to be open to those who identify with that particular gender. A male who identifies as a woman can use the women bathroom. This started a... Read more
Since one of my areas of specialization is race/ethnicity, an important issue I address in my teaching is multiculturalism. Discussing multiculturalism is a good fit for some of the racialized issues that come up in my classes, but almost all teachers of sociology introduce the ideas of multiculturalism in their courses. Multiculturalism is a core principle in much of modern sociology. My guess is that this is not a phenomenon limited to the United States but that sociology, and other... Read more
One of the advantages of blog writing is that at times I can follow up on past research. It becomes possible to address potential criticisms of my work without having to go through the entire process necessary for a peer review article. This is particularly useful when answering the potential issue does not require all of the statistical analysis and literature review normally expected for a research article. The research in question comes from my book Compromising Scholarship. In this... Read more
Calhoun Happiness Project member, Cameron Yick ‘2017, has launched a new student group called Yale Makes. For two hours every Saturday morning, Yale students (and professors!) are invited to Yale’s Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID) to design graphics, make art out of wood, or develop computer animation. Yale Makes builds off Mihalyi Csiksgentmihalyi’s ideas of flow, Bernard DeKoven’s ideas of deep fun, and the Little Platoons idea we discussed at the Yale Happiness Seminar in June. Simply bringing a group... Read more
The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is making a big splash in American Christianity, and so the release of The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity by Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel (Oxford Press, 2014) is noteworthy. This book tackles the difficult task of defining the ECM. Most definitions of religious groups focus on organizational membership, such as denominations, or religious identity, such as being charismatic. The ECM doesn’t fit well with either of these. Marti and Ganiel describe it as a... Read more
When I was in graduate school, I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution. That book probably influenced my thinking of how we accumulate knowledge more than any other book other than the Bible. Basically Kuhn argued that science operates in paradigms that inhibit competing ideologies and theories. Only when it is fairly clear that these paradigms are inadequate to answer the research questions they are supposed to address are they replaced by a new paradigm which answers the... Read more
In talking about one of the recent crises in our world, a friend commented that he/she was trying to refrain from being too political in analysis. Since that time about a week ago, the feminist refrain, “the personal is political,” has been consistently on my mind. When feminists discussed the personal being political, part of the argument is that sexism isn’t just something people (especially women) experience in personal relationships – it’s about the political structures we are a part... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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