On our trek across the mid-Atlantic states recently, I experienced what I might describe as a new awareness of my Texanization (new word, copyright pending). We were at the National Harbor (near Washington DC), a neat plaza-like area flanked on 3 sides by streets and stores and 1 side facing the harbor (I still prefer to say that word like I remember hearing it from locals in South Bend, IN: “hhar-ber”). I was looking down the pier and gazed up... Read more
Part 2 in a series on Women at Work, in response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece in the Atlantic about careers and family. When I was in graduate school, I played in Princeton University’s summer softball league for a team named “Leviathan.” I was one of very few women regulars on any team in the league, a league of not necessarily highly athletic but nonetheless ferociously competitive graduate students. At one game, hot tempers started flaring over someone heckling my team’s pitcher,... Read more
Anyone who has leafed through an airline travel magazine can probably name a number of ways that they stand out from other publications. Flying just this week, I saw many of the same messages I’ve seen in the past. Multiple advertisements promise to help professional and ‘quality’ men find the ‘quality’ women they deserve. Other marketing materials identify the best steakhouses, the best plastic surgeons, or the newest (expensive) sports equipment. This time around, a particular advertisement caught my eye... Read more
Like most of us I can become fixated on a topic and not let it go. Since I am an academic nerd right now that concept is confirmation bias. This is the tendency we have to favor evidence that confirms our previous beliefs. Once we believe something then we look for evidence that proves that our beliefs are correct. We discount evidence that it is incorrect. We see this in sports all the time. A dribbler collides with a defender.... Read more
It’s been a tough week here in Waco. I hope readers of this blog will pardon my tendency to “read sociology” into my personal experience-maybe it’s how I cope sometimes. I’m currently a member of a local church as well as a faculty member at Baylor University. Both of these affiliations reflect an important connectedness one feels with others who also share these same identities. So it was doubly hard to hear on Sunday morning the news that a fellow... Read more
In academics there are a handful of political and cultural issues for which there are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” positions. If you agree with the majority of academics on these issues, great, but if not, you’re going to run into trouble. Mark Regnerus has taken one of these “unacceptable” positions. He conducted a study to compare “how the young-adult children of a parent who has had a same-sex romantic relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional, and relational outcome variables when... Read more
I congratulate Princeton Professor and former Dean Anne Marie Slaughter for her frank piece published in the Atlantic entitled “Why Women Can’t Have it All.” Talking about what keeps people from realizing their dreams of successful careers and joyful families is often taboo (see my previous post on women’s vocation in the world), but Slaughter provides an important personal and sociological reflection on what influenced her to want to spend more time with her family. She also provides useful advice... Read more
A new film premiered at Worldfest-Houston, one of the oldest and largest film festivals in the world, caught my interest. It’s called Hell and Mr. Fudge, a feature length film narrating the true story of a young Bible-belt preacher, Edward Fudge. This curious film takes place in the early 1980s in Alabama and tells the true story of a preacher who changed his mind about hell. Yes, that’s h-e-double toothpicks, as in the place of torment and suffering, the opposite of heaven, the... Read more
Over the past year I have had the privilege to work with the Pew Research Center on developing what I believe is the most rigorous survey sample of Asian Americans. Given the deep pockets that form the financial base of Pew, I had high hopes that this survey would indeed help us pinpoint better what we can know about Asian America. Indeed, this survey, while smaller in sample than the National Asian American Survey 2008 (3,500 compared to over 5,000),... Read more
Part 5 in a Series on Teaching Sociology of Religion Online Yesterday I finished teaching a 5-week online course in sociology of religion. As I remarked in earlier posts in this series, there were many ups and downs. A few things yesterday reminded me that whether I’m teaching online, in the classroom, or a hybrid, my focus needs to be the students. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I’ve taught some amazing students who make everything worth... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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