I saw this bit of news last week and, of course, didn’t like it too much. KLM, the airline, is discussing plans for passengers to be enabled to select their seatmates, rather than let randomness prevail. I never thought about that possibility, although clearly entrepreneurial souls out there think about such things all the time. While I get it, I don’t think it’s a good idea. But it’ll definitely happen, and it’ll likely spread to other airlines soon. Why? Because people... Read more
In Texas, Christmas time is tamales time. The grocery stores have this festive and somewhat addictive (ok it’s just me) Latino dish which I learned is a celebratory dish from multiple Latin cultures. While it has nothing to do with Christmas, it is often seen as a traditional Christmas dish for many Mexican American households. It got me thinking about whether there are any Asian American Christian contributions to Christmas. When I think about it, I only remember eating traditional Korean... Read more
Over the past several years, the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life has become the go-to place for solid descriptive statistics about all religions, including Christianity. They just realized a report on Global Christianity. The report highlights how Christianity has become a worldwide religion. Here’s the executive summary: A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global... Read more
For much of my adult life, leisure has been something of a bad word. Isn’t what I learned in my years studying at Ivy League schools followed by joining the ranks of university professors that I’m made to do intellectual work, and pretty much 24/7? Until recently, I thought leisure was what I do when I’m too tired to work. After much prodding, I finally read Josef Pieper’s Leisure the Basis of Culture. While clearly upholding the material and spiritual... Read more
Sociologists will an analyze anything people do, no matter how taken-for-granted the activity. ( I suppose that’s why I like it so much–always trying to look at things a new way). For the season, here is an except about from the famous “Middletown” study. Theodore Caplow, and a team of researchers, studied people in Muncie, Indiana (1979) about their gift giving, and they came up with nine unwritten rules for gift giving. 1) The Tree Rule. Married couples with children... Read more
So Christopher Hitchens is dead. Waste no time speculating about his end, or what happened next. It is empirically unknowable. While Hitch’s pen was a sharp one, and I occasionally read his work, I confess I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to his antagonism toward religion, apart from reading the first 60 pages of God is not Great. No new arguments there, so far as I could tell. For a time after the book was released Hitchens took... Read more
Here’s one of my favorite maps. It shows the percentage of Christianity and Islam in each country throughout the world. Looking at it all surprises me just wide the reach is of these two religions that trace their roots back to the same person, i.e., Abraham. Read more
Here’s a provocative study, conducted by psychologists, that concludes that Americans distrust atheists as much (and actually more) than they do rapists. I include it in my “questionable religious statistic” category because, well, it’s a real stinker. It doesn’t work at many levels, including committing a base-rate fallacy. If your car gets dinged by somebody, it’s much more likely to be by a Christian than an atheist, because there are a lot more Christians in the country than atheists (about... Read more
In a previous post I talked some about the non-Christian religious diversity among Asian Americans, and I mentioned some of the research that shows that since 9/11 most white Christian Americans still know little of their non-Christian friends be they Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. Intrepid media makers have tried to address this problem by showcasing life in one of the densely-populated Muslim American areas in the country: Dearborn, MI. The first one (which has been very helpful in the classroom)... Read more
Today after my students in Sociology of Religion took their final exam, I headed to Starbucks to read their evaluations. Just in case I needed a stiff one to get me through their comments, I ordered a dark roast. And then the fun started. Now in my 5th year teaching this class, many of the earlier critiques were gone and all that was left were compliments. I smiled and laughed a few times as I turned over page after page... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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