Five Questions to Describe a Christian

Last updated on: April 12, 2012 at 4:32 pm By Bradley Wright

I’m just starting a very exciting research project in which we’re looking to study day-to-day spiritual experiences. This got met thinking about measuring Christian spirituality from an applied, rather than academic, perspective. So, here’s my question. How would you measure the quality of someone’s Christian faith (how good of a Christian they are, how much they live out the faith… not sure how to word it), how would you do it? Specifically, how would you gauge someone’s Christian faith if... Read more

Between Exclusivism and Relativism

Last updated on: April 11, 2012 at 7:15 am By Margarita A. Mooney

By Nicolette D. Manglos While reading Peggy Levitt’s 2009 book on religion and immigration, God Needs No Passport, I was struck by her summary of the four prevailing attitudes towards religion. She describes the academic, well-meaning anti-religionist; the indifferent non-religious average Joe; the Christian exclusivist who fears local mosques and Hindu temples; and the religious relativist, with strong beliefs of his/her own who nonetheless values all traditions as equally valid. It is clear how she feels about each. The first two... Read more

What Makes a Development Expert?

Last updated on: April 10, 2012 at 10:08 am By Bradley Wright

by Amy Reynolds With discussions currently underway, the World Bank is expected to name a new president next week. Three candidates are being considered for the position: Nigerian Finance Minister and managing director at the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Columbian professor and former Colombian Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo; and Dartmouth University President and medical doctor Jim Yong Kim. The two institutions that make up the World Bank—the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association... Read more

12 Curious Statistics about Today’s Young Adults

Last updated on: April 7, 2012 at 9:13 am By Mark Regnerus

I hope to blog next week, or sometime thereafter, on the subject of affordable housing. But it’s just not on paper yet, so in lieu of that, I decided to just crunch some numbers from a very recent nationally-representative survey of 18-39-year-olds in America. Here are 12 interesting (to me, at least) statistics from that survey. What you read below is what a large population-based, random-selection survey says about young adults today. Why these 10? No particular reason. I just... Read more

Time to be present

Last updated on: May 9, 2012 at 1:47 am By Jerry Park

In the rush of the spring semester some professors (ok maybe it’s just me) reach a point of exhaustion. We see the mountain of research analyses that have yet to be completed and shipped to academic journals or to book presses, the ungraded papers, the unmodified lecture notes created back in 2007 (can you believe that was 5 years ago now?). It’s tiring to even think about what’s left to do and what little time we have to do it.... Read more

Who Experiences God’s Presence and How Often?

Last updated on: December 13, 2012 at 3:35 pm By Bradley Wright

Who experiences God’s presence the most often? It turns out that the General Social Survey (GSS), in 2004, included questions from the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale. Coupled with the powerful sampling procedure used by the GSS, it allows for basic analysis of the experience of God’s presence. To start with, here’s a table of respondents’ self-reported frequency of experience God’s presence, as it varies by religious tradition. As you can see, there’s a lot of variation, with Evangelicals and Black... Read more

Testimony from Cuba: The Pope’s Visit was an Oasis

Last updated on: April 23, 2012 at 11:11 am By Margarita A. Mooney

Part 2 in a series. Click here for my podcast interview on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba, hosted by Research on Religion. As I explained in a previous post, I have traveled to Cuba multiple times to visit family members. During my visits, I became close friends with a group of young Cubans who are very active in a parish in Santiago de Cuba. Anxious for news from my friends in Cuba about the Pope Benedict’s visit, I emailed this group of... Read more

Blue Like Jazz: The Anti-Christianity Christian Film

Last updated on: April 3, 2012 at 10:31 am By Bradley Wright

by Gerardo Marti The film Blue Like Jazz premieres nationwide next week on April 13th, a film based on the New York Times bestselling memoir by Donald Miller. True to the spirit of the book, which was subtitled, “Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” the film includes swear words, drinking, a lesbian character, and is open about the hypocrisy found in the Christian church. The adaptation is fun, poignant, and ultimately religious—and that’s what makes this new film so interesting. Don... Read more

In the era of Facebook, just what are congregations for?

Last updated on: April 5, 2012 at 7:25 am By Mark Regnerus

What are congregations for? It’s a simple question at face value, but I think the answer to it is becoming less and less obvious in the West. You could reply with something like, “They’re for collective worship, as they have always been,” and quote me Hebrews 10:25 and be on your merry way to the next blog. But you’ll have oversimplified it and overlooked all the other things that people often hope or wish for, or benefit from, in a... Read more

Pope Benedict in Cuba: There is No Fatherland Without Virtue

Last updated on: April 23, 2012 at 11:12 am By Margarita A. Mooney

Part 1 in a series. Click here for my podcast interview on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Cuba, hosted by Research on Religion. Perhaps by now you have seen one of these images of two ideological opposites, Pope Benedict XVI and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who met for 30 minutes at the end of the Pope’s visit to Cuba in March. If you don’t know the history of Cuban communism or the main themes of Benedict’s writings on liberty, reason and truth, you... Read more