Best Selling Books in Sociology of Religion, SSSR 2011

November 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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.

Nearly all the copies of my UNC colleague Charles Kurzman’s book The Missing Martyrs: Why There are so Few Muslim Terrorists were gone from the Oxford display [Read more...]

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Moving Forward the Science & Religion Debate

November 2, 2011 By 2 Comments

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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Heard in the Hallways at SSSR

October 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

I just returned from the annual  meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, where among other things, I met with “collabloggers” Regnerus, Park and Wright. I wanted to share some quick highlights of the meetings, topics you I will likely elaborate on more on this blog.

No one in recent memory who sat next to me on a plane has ever known the sociology, theology or philosophy authors I tend to read in flight, but this time was an exception. Shortly after takeoff, I pulled out a book by Henri Nouwen, and I was quite surprised when the 40-something year old gentleman next to me said he had heard of Nouwen and the organization, L’Arche, that forms the setting and inspiration for much of his writing. Turns out that gentelman is  the pastor of an Evangelical church and a chaplain for a major-league baseball team. We chatted about what Nouwen’s insights into the human condition have to offer the rich and famous on the field and those struggling in today’s economy. I hope he reads our blog every once in a while, and I promise to write more about Nouwen sometime soon.

“Hey, I’ve seen your blog, nice job.” I heard that many times from people I didn’t know and people I do know; thanks for noticing, reading us, and introducing yourselves to us :) And don’t forget to “share” us online if you like us!

If you got to talk to me for more than 5 minutes, you probably heard me talk about [Read more...]

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The Media and Research on Religion

October 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Well, it looks like there is a ranking for everything. A USA today report recently ranked colleges for how well they use social media.

The report is informative, yet focused mostly on social media as outreach, rather than social media as a research tool. In the several years I  have taught undergraduate sociology of religion, I have realized that students get most of their information–including information about religion–from the internet. Although it is my job as a scholar to lead them to scholarly books and articles on religion, how can I as a scholar learn to embrace social media as a research tool for my students?  How can I teach my students about the strengths and weaknesses of using the media–including social media–as a research tool?

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 [Read more...]

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