Search results

A growing religious-environmental movement is working to reconcile environmental thought and practice with the mission and ministry of religious organizations. We examine two leading interfaith social change organizations and identify key strategies they routinely employ to create shared meaning and alignment between environmentalism and faith. They reframe stewardship in religious organizations by (1) highlighting and interpreting environmental themes in sacred texts and scriptures, (2) celebrating and fostering mutual awareness of environmental action by faith-based organizations, and (3) providing resources and creating linkages between clergy and lay leaders across religious congregations. By emphasizing moral and spiritual rationales for the adoption of resource-saving products and behaviors at both the congregational and household level, these networked organizations help shift the perception of global climate change from an insurmountable problem to one that is being addressed in cooperation with similar others. Our investigation reveals organizational actors deeply engaged in growing moral calls for political action to address climate change and underscores the need for more socially realistic models of technology adoption and behavior change.

The sexual lives of religious youth and young adults have been an increasing topic of interest since the rise of abstinence-only education and attendant programs in many religious institutions. But while we know a lot about individual-level rates of sexual behavior, far less is known about how religious organizations shape and mediate sexuality. We draw on data from observations with youth and young adult ministries and interviews with religious young adults and adult leaders from Muslim, Hindu, and Protestant Christian groups in order to examine how religious adults in positions of organizational authority work to manage the gender and sexual developments in the transition to adulthood among their youth. We find three distinct organizational styles across the various religious traditions: avoidance through gender segregation, self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, and a classed disengagement. In each of these organizational responses, gender and sexuality represent something that must be explained and controlled in the process of cultivating the proper adult religious disposition. The paper examines how religious congregations and other religious organizations oriented toward youth, work to manage the gender and sexual developments in their youth’s transitions to adulthood. The paper draws from a larger project that is studying the lived processes of religious transmission between generations.

Data were extracted from (a) ethnographic observations of youth programming at religious organizations; (b) ethnographicobservations with families during their religious observances; (c) interviews with adult leaders of youth ministry programs. The sample includes Protestant Christian, Muslim, and Hindu organizations and families.

The paper presents three organizational approaches toward managing sex and instilling appropriate gender ideas: (a) prescribed avoidance, in which young men and women are segregated in many religious and educational settings and encouraged to moderate any cross-gender contact in public; (b) self-restraint supplemented with peer surveillance, in which young people are repeatedly encouraged not only to learn to control themselves through internal moral codes but also to enlist their peers to monitor each other’s conduct and call them to account for violations of those codes; and (c) “classed” disengagement, in which organizations comprised of highly educated, middle-class families do little to address sex directly, but treat it as but one aspect of developing individual ethical principles that will assist their educational and class mobility.

While the comparative sample in this paper is a strength, other religious traditions than the ones studied may have other practices. The ethnographic nature of the research provides in-depth understandings of the organizational practices, but cannot comment on how representative these practices are across regions, organizations, or faiths.

Most studies of religion and youth sex and sexuality either rely on individual-level data from surveys, or study the discourses and ideologies found in books, movies, and the like. They do not study the “mechanisms,” in either religious organizations or families, through which messages are communicated and enacted. Our examination of organizational and familial practices shows sex and gender communication in action. Further, most existing research has focused on Christians, wherein we have a comparative sample of Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.

When post-secondary education (PSE) in Africa is viewed in terms of growth rather than total enrolment the region tops the list of impressive trends. Between the years 1985 and 2005 the countries of sub-Saharan Africa experienced the largest growth of PSE involvement of any region with total enrolment increasing fourfold. The insatiable student demand is being met by a proliferation of large-scale and small-scale religious denominations establishing post-secondary education. The current chapter provides a categorical, multi-levelled analysis of the growth of religious providers in sub-Saharan Africa. Particular attention is given to the activities and rationales of stakeholders who play a part in the establishment and continued operations of religious PSE. Using Marginson and Rhoades’s (2002) glonacal agency heuristic, the networks between stakeholders and their varying degrees of influence on regional PSE are described and discussed. The findings suggest that PSE in the region is being widely provided by small-scale denominations establishing religious training institutions. But the influence of this PSE is mainly limited to local communities.

Social movement scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the process of “bridge building” in social movements – that is, the process by which activists attempt to resolve conflicts stemming from different collective identities. However, most scholars assume that social movements primarily attempt to resolve tensions among activists themselves, and thus that bridge building is a means to other ends rather than a primary goal of social movement activism. In this chapter, I challenge these assumptions through a case study of a “bridging organization” known as Bridge Builders, which sought as its primary goal to “bridge the gap between the LGBT and Christian communities” at a Christian university in Nashville, Tennessee. I highlight the mechanisms by which Bridge Builders attempted to facilitate bridge building at the university, and I argue that Bridge Builders succeeded in bridging (a) disparate institutional identities at their university, (b) “structural holes” between LGBT- and religious-identified groups at their university, and (c) oppositional personal identities among organizational members. As I discuss in the conclusion, the case of Bridge Builders has implications for literatures on bridge building in social movements, cultural and biographical consequences of social movements, and social movement strategy.

Purpose – In this chapter, we advance research on the socioeconomic ranking of religious groups by using both income and wealth to document the rankings of the six major religious groups in the United States – Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, black Protestants, and the religiously unaffiliated – during 2001–2007, a period marked by both catastrophic economic losses and widespread economic gain.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Drawing from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), we provide descriptive statistics to explore the socioeconomic differences among the six major religious groups. In addition, we note their ownership rates and changes in wealth and income during 2001–2007.

Findings – Overall, these findings point to enduring stratification in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on median net worth, leading into the Great Recession, the six major religious groups ranked in the following order: Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, the unaffiliated, and black Protestants. At the same time, these findings point to the upward mobility of white Catholics, who increased their income and made the greatest increase in net worth between 2001 and 2007. These data also suggest a decline in the socioeconomic status of the religiously unaffiliated as compared to previous studies.

Research implications – These findings illustrate the degree to which certain religious groups have access to wealth and other resources, and have implications for how the years leading into the Great Recession may have influenced households’ vulnerability to financial shocks.

Originality/Value – We use both income and wealth to examine whether different religious groups experienced any changes in income and wealth leading into the 2008 economic downturn.

Recent hurricanes, dust storms, and wild fires have presented great learning opportunities that have largely been missed, yet still may stimulate improvements in currently dominant policies driving settlement of large numbers of Americans into places exposed to fire, dust, and flood. Equivalent opportunities led to large and beneficial alterations in policy during the administrations of Presidents Hayes, Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, when changes sprang from recognition that federal subsidy programs and land allocations channel settlement. Induced by public policies acting like magnets under the tables of their lives, millions of Americans, like iron filings, have been migrating into increasing peril of fire and flood; it is not only possible to slow this down, but even to encourage settlement away from areas recurrently subject to natural disaster. Tax-payer subsidies, systematically contrived in the Cold War period to disperse the older industrial centers lest they be readily obliterated by Soviet nuclear weapons, are still in place, though the Cold War has thawed, and the world now presents challenges toward which Cold War policy is not only inept but making matters worse.

Barack Obama has had considerable support among scholarly circles since his win in the Iowa primary in early 2008. A segment of the Association of Black Sociologists (ABS), “Black and Progressive Sociologists Obama Working Group (BPSOWG),” was particularly active during the 2008 campaign. The purpose of this chapter was to determine if the level and type of activism among this group differed from other progressive groups of sociologists.

The data for this study were collected from a web-based survey administered to approximately 800 professional sociologists in the United States. The survey consisted of items that focused on the extent to which respondents supported the Obama campaign for the presidency and the extent to which they were satisfied with and/or agreed with his policies during first two years of his presidency.

The response rate for the survey was 40% (N=305) and 96% of respondents (N=293) submitted surveys with complete information. Over two-thirds of participants were members of the American Sociological Association Section on Race and Ethnic Relations and 5.5% of respondents identified themselves as members of the BPSOWG. A slight majority (53.6%) of study participants were females and the largest two racial groups making up the study population were whites (47.1%) and African Americans (36.1%). Most of the respondents provided support for President Obama during his first campaign, including financial contributions (66%).

Sociologists who responded to the survey were generally positive about Barack Obama as a candidate and a President. However, the subtle differences between groups about Obama administration policies and the use Presidential power highlighted key areas in which diverse coalitions for progressive change are needed.