If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the spring newsletter from the ASA section on Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity. There’s an interesting report on last year’s Chair’s invited panel, on the theme of “moral imaginaries.” Contributors include Ruth Braunstein, Paul Lichterman, Francesca Polletta, and Omar McRoberts, and I wrote an introduction ..read more

I was so pleased when my colleague Wendy Cadge, a sociologist of religion at Brandeis University, approached me to see if I wanted to write a short article for a public audience about the election of Greg Epstein, who identifies as an atheist humanist Jew, as the head chaplain at Harvard University. I’ve known Wendy for decades, and jumped at the chance to write something together that would draw on insights from her research on the chaplaincy movement and my research on anti-atheist sentiment. The result just came out in this piece in The Conversation, an online site that gets academics to wr ..read more

The most recent Economist has, as usual, a helpful chart summarizing Americans’ attitudes towards same-sex marriage, using Pew Center data from 2008 on.  The data show that, for the first time, a majority of Americans approve of same-sex marriage, with the most significant movement (towards more favorable attitudes) occurring among White Catholics and White “mainstream” Protestants. In some ways, this is not surprising; progressive Protestants and Catholics have been engaging in a period of institution-building, hosting workshops, writing blogs, holding conferences, even doing mass-e ..read more

Friends and colleagues, I have been heartened to see so many people sharing resources for those who want to teach about and learn about systemic racism in order to resist it and to bring about change. This is a short post that simply collects links to other resources, and I will update it as I find more sources. Two Google documents have curated collections, one focusing specifically on anti-racism resources for white people. This includes links for parents, popular media/news resources, links to academic books and articles, podcasts, recommended videos, films, and TV series, plus links to org ..read more

We are used to thinking about cultural divisions in the United States in terms of two broad categories which form polar opposites (liberals and conservatives) with moderate Americans “in the middle.” This is the “culture wars” thesis, and many of those who have attacked James Davison Hunter’s original formulation of the thesis in his 1991 book of the same name nevertheless agree with the basic topography he proposed, arguing variously over terminology, the size of the poles versus the middle, or whether the divide is more generalized or issue-specific.In new research forthcoming in The Sociol ..read more

Very excited to announce that Social Problems has accepted our paper using American Mosaic Project data, collected here at the University of Minnesota, analyzing the sources and nature of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. Building on recent work in critical race theory and a theoretical approach to national belonging that focuses on symbolic boundaries, we show that Muslim-Americans are excluded on religious, racial, and civic grounds simultaneously. Nearly half of Americans expressed anti-Muslim sentiment in responding to our survey (fielded in 2014) and we show that while social ..read more