I spent the weekend in South Texas at a generous friend’s ranch. It just happens to be located in the Eagle Ford Shale. In the handful of times I’ve been there, it keeps getting busier each time. It’s not the place where the average Texan, let alone the average cosmopolitan, would care to put down roots, but it has a beauty of its own if you have the eyes to see. Moreover, there’s a beauty in seeing that Americans still... Read more
The recent blog post by Margarita Mooney on suffering and flourishing got me to thinking. One of the traditions of my faith is the fast. I will be the first to admit that I do not fast as much as I should. But fasting is a type of suffering I believe can contribute to our flourishing. Many people think of the denial of food as their idea of fasting, but fasting also includes the denial of whatever distracts us such... Read more
I’ve been crunching NFSS numbers again, mostly assessing the sexual and relationship behaviors of young adults between ages 23-39. I don’t intend to make much of age-at-first-sex in my next book, but there are some interesting patterns worth noting. Only 18 percent of respondents who reported first sex before age 14 also said their parents were—and are still—married; the same is true of 26 percent who reported first sex at age 14, 31 percent at age 15, 38 percent at... Read more
I have been reading the sociological literature on race and religion, especially multiracial churches. A common observation is that Christian churches are relatively segregated by race and ethnicity. Different scholars have different estimates of the segregation, and it depends on how it’s measured. Among the statistics I’ve read: an estimated 90% of American Congregations draw at least 90% of their members from a single racial group and only about 8% of churches fit the description of multiracial. In reading studies... Read more
The Hastert Center for Economics, Government, And Public Policy at Wheaton College hosted an event last Thursday on the morality of economic growth, co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. The central speaker, Dr. Smith of Gordon College, argued that economic growth should be a moral imperative for Christians, especially if we are concerned about poverty. As a person engaged in economic sociology (and a respondent at the event), I appreciated the fact this conversation was taking place. We need more... Read more
While still recovering from the flu (yes I still got it despite getting a shot last November) I have tried to keep my intellectual capacities running if only through reading and not much writing. In a few days we as a nation will remember the Reverend Martin Luther King and his major contributions to American society. I confess that my awareness of King is not very systematic, and I am reminded every semester how much less each generation seems to... Read more
In preparing for another semester, I am struck yet again by how very little I remembered from my undergraduate classes and, correspondingly, how little my students will probably remember too. In fact, once I give a test on a subject, it’s not uncommon for them to forget much of the material almost immediately. The comedian Father Guido Sarducci makes this point when he proposes a “Five-Minute University” in which students are only taught what they will remember years later, and... Read more
Can bad things really lead to good things? Is it possible for suffering to lead to flourishing? I’m sure many of us have wrestled with these questions either in our own personal lives, in trying to be compassionate with others, or in our academic work. The transformative power of suffering was a major theme of my book Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, yet the topic of suffering, and whether or not suffering can transform... Read more
I commonly teach an introductory sociology course each semester to approximately 200 students. I run it mostly as a lecture, although I regularly ask them questions—including opinion questions—in part because I want them to participate but also because I’d like to know what and how they think. On the first day of class I typically spend about half an hour talking about the kinds of questions we’ll cover over the course of the semester. Among those questions are ones like... Read more
Last year around this time I introduced readers to the way sociologists rank the visibility of their research. With new readers tracking BWG, I’d like to re-introduce some of the basics and then get to list making. One of the major tasks of research university professors is to publish studies that they have been working on between classes, class prep, administrative duties, committee work, grant applications, and the like. Such research usually takes the form of a 30-50 page study... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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