Why David Petraeus Cheated

Last updated on: November 19, 2012 at 12:59 pm By Mark Regnerus

Yet again the media is alive with speculation about why men in positions of power cheat on their spouses, often at great risk to their careers—indeed, greater risk than men a generation or two ago when cheating seldom became the scandal it does today. Why is this so, given the fact that we’re further than ever from having clear public norms around acceptable sexual behavior? Indeed, it’s odd that the more marriage becomes de-institutionalized in America, the more publicly problematic... Read more

It’s Not Christmas Yet!!!

Last updated on: November 18, 2012 at 5:18 pm By George Yancey

Sometimes you fight battles you know you are not going to win. You fight them because a stance must be made and a position staked out. I fear that this is one of those battles. Just a couple of days after Halloween, Mercedes Benz ran the first Christmas commercial. REALLY? I mean does the commercializing have to begin this soon? Call me crazy but I do not believe in celebrating Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I get the shivers when Christmas... Read more

“Porn in the Title” and Other Insights Gleaned Over Dinner

Last updated on: November 16, 2012 at 1:49 am By Jerry Park

In a recent email interchange, Brad Wright suggested we go out to celebrate our 400 days of posting on Patheos: Black, White and Gray. Brad didn’t know this at the time, but we knew there was a special reason for our gathering. Truth be told, all four of the lead bloggers including Margarita Mooney, Mark Regnerus and yours truly as well as two “regular occasional” bloggers, Amy Reynolds and George Yancey happened to be attending the annual Society for the... Read more

Mastery Goals and Working Out Our Salvation

Last updated on: November 14, 2012 at 8:52 am By Bradley Wright

Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals is a wonderfully interesting book by Heidi Grant Halvorson. A social psychologist, she summarizes the social psychological literature on goal setting with an eye toward applying it to day-to-day life. Grant Halvorson distinguishes between “performance” goals and “mastery” goals. Performance goals are goals in which we prove our abilities in an area, for example getting an “A” in class or running a marathon in a given time. These goals tend to be tied... Read more

When is Suffering Transformative? Sullivan’s “Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty”

Last updated on: November 14, 2012 at 8:39 am By Margarita A. Mooney

According to the women Susan Crawford Sullivan interviewed for Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty, what do homelessness, drug addiction, jail time, unplanned pregnancy and domestic abuse all have in common? They are all part of God’s plan to teach poor, young, single mothers that they are sinners in need of repentance. If a narrative of a judgmental God coming down hard on women who suffered due to their lack of personal responsibility strikes you as a problematic narrative, Sullivan... Read more

When Data Go Bad

Last updated on: November 11, 2012 at 9:15 pm By Mark Regnerus

Imagine if some evangelical social scientists set out 20 years ago to document how the children of “Christian” parents fare in life, and began the task by gathering a small sample of children even before they were born by recruiting married parents who attended Sunday School classes at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, the Wheaton Bible Church outside Chicago, and Saddleback Community Church in Orange County, California—all located in prosperous communities exhibiting above-average social support of families, children, and... Read more

“I Can’t Believe I Did That!” The Role of Shame in Happiness

Last updated on: November 12, 2012 at 9:23 am By Becky Hsu

A little more than a week ago, the molecular geneticist and Buddhist monk Matthieu Richard was dubbed the “happiest man in the world” by researchers at the University of Wisconsin. The criteria for this title was the level of gamma waves produced by his brain, made possible by years of meditation. While meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces an unprecedented level of gamma waves. This research on neuroplasticity says that the brain is moldable—that our mental and physical habits affect neural... Read more

What Two Deaths Taught Me about Doing Fieldwork

Last updated on: November 7, 2012 at 7:54 am By Margarita A. Mooney

On this day 16 years ago—November 7, 1996—I walked in to my office at the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in San Jose, Costa Rica, to find out that my boss, Joaquin Tacsan, had boarded a flight from Port Harcourt to Lagos, Nigeria that had exploded in the air. No one had survived. Joaquin’s death hit me like a ton of bricks. I had recently graduated from Yale and someone told to apply for an internship at the... Read more

The Right to Vote and Political Change

Last updated on: November 6, 2012 at 8:44 am By Amy Reynolds

In my last post, I noted how much I’ve appreciated the chance to read through the American Girls series with my oldest daughter, in part because of the ways it has led to some wonderful conversations about class, race, and culture. As I write this on the eve before Election Day, I cannot help but reflect on the questions of gendered inequality and political change. Political change is rarely an easy or nice process. In this election, I have a... Read more

Democrats: Losing their Religion

Last updated on: November 4, 2012 at 6:13 pm By Mark Regnerus

It’s election week, and we’re inundated with polls, predictions, and predilections, so I’ll keep this short. While I was crunching NFSS data for an unrelated set of analyses, I stopped to dwell on an interesting survey question on perceived change in religiousness. We asked the 2,988 respondents: Compared to today, were you more or less active in organized religion when you were growing up? Given that we’re talking to 18-39-year-olds, and that young adulthood can often exhibit a notable decline... Read more