People often talk about how religious a country the United States is, and compared to many European countries this is the case. The map below, based on Gallup data collected from 2006-2008, however, shows that there’s considerable variation in religiosity worldwide. There are interesting patterns by wealth, type of religion, and continent. Source Read more
My wife spent this past weekend on a silent retreat—her first. Despite what it sounds like, such retreats are not entirely silent, of course. There is spiritual direction, a variety of instruction, a book-on-CD playing during meals, and daily Mass. But you’re not expected to talk, to spend time networking, making or renewing friendships, or trying to seem interesting. It’s like the opposite of going to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (and probably no shortage of Christian... Read more
Here’s an interesting article from yesterday’s New York Times. It describes what it calls “New Evangelicals”… basically Evangelical Christians who value social justice. Quoting Scot McKnight, it describes this group as follows: “A sizable portion of evangelicals have left the right, so to speak, in what the theologian Scot McKnight called “the biggest change in the evangelical movement,” nothing less than the emergence of “a new kind of Christian social conscience.” These new evangelicals focus on economic justice, environmental protection and... Read more
In earlier posts I’ve shown how difficult it is to get a good survey of religion among Asian Americans, and I’ve shown what we sort of know about the actual religious prevalence of this racial group. The one group I have neglected to mention are the religiously-affiliated non-Christians. In the following pie charts I illustrate data using the Pew Religious Landscape Survey 2008 of the estimated distribution of major world religions for the entire sample and within the Asian American sample. As you... Read more
Part 4 in a series on deconversion. Going into this study of deconversion, I figured that interactions and relationships with non-Christians would be an important cause for people leaving. After, we’re sociologists, and we study how peer and friend relationships affect so many things. However, in the narratives themselves, there were surprisingly few references to non-Christians leading the writers away from faith. We counted only eight in the fifty testimonies that we read. For example, one writer had a non-Christian... Read more
At the end of her talk to a packed house at Trinity United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday, December 2, Sister Helen Prejean (whose work on death row was made into the award-winning film Dead Man Walking) lifted her arms out wide and said, “What does the Gospel of Jesus say? We have to show compassion for the victims of murder on one side of the cross and for the perpetrators of murder on the other side... Read more
A problem with moral standards, whether rooted in Christianity or otherwise, is how to express them in a cultural context. That is, are we doing something because we think it’s right to do or because it’s socially-normative behavior. (And I realize that the two need not be separate). As such, sometimes we understand the morality of behavior more clearly when it goes against cultural expectations. Here’s a story from NPR several years ago that illustrates it. It tells of how... Read more
Since becoming Catholic last Spring, I’ve had opportunity to think about what’s been gained by swimming the Tiber, as well as what’s been lost—by which I mean things about my former religious life and culture that Catholics just don’t understand or do. My post a few weeks back about the absence of a contemporary Catholic music scene was one of those. This post is about an addition: the confessional. I admit I anticipated this part of Catholic life with some... Read more
I was talking with a good friend about deconversion, and we commiserated that it’s a depressing topic. He told me of one of his favorite conversion stories, which I had read years ago and loved for its power and authenticity. It’s from the autobiographical writing, in Traveling Mercies, of Anne Lamott. She was going through a very tough time in her life, addicted to cocaine and alcohol and just having had an abortion of a child conceived in an affair... Read more
So I still haven’t answered the question about whether there was a more prevalent Asian American Christian community in college. My focus on this topic isn’t just a nostalgic obsession; it had apparently been a major observation just around the time I graduated and had a strange resurgence about a decade later. The first major attention that appeared in academic circles came from Asian American Studies scholar Rudy Busto way back in the 1990s where he reported that the Asian... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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