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To identify the dominant cultural models among parents transmitting faith to their children, we find few methodological guidelines to guide coding and analysis of semi-structured interviews. We thus developed a three-phase procedure for our research team. Phase-one follows Campbell et al. by unitizing on meanings rather than words/pages, including creating decision rules documents, keyword lists, and summary memos. We provide empirical support for the reliability of those procedures and contribute by adding final validity checks into phase one and a new set of second-order coding procedures as phase two and phase three, as suggested by Miles and Huberman, to transform theme analysis into patterned findings. Phase two codes the latent patterns underlying the phase-one thematic codes. Phase three quantifies phase-two codes into matrices. Although time intensive, other researchers can apply these procedures to produce transparent, auditable findings.

The task undertaken in this paper is to discover a means by which the practice of literary criticism can derive an imperative for activism that confronts and changes the social conditions it critiques. The case of Karl Marx’s use of world literature in his critique of capitalism and the state, set within the history of the development of continental philosophy, is explored through a close-reading of its interterxtuality. Particular attention is paid to Marx’s use of quotations from and allusions to world literature, including Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe and Heine, to register the harmful inversions caused by an economy based on money and commodities. If literature registers the contradictions of its time in its form and content, then the urge to resolve those contradictions sits restless in literature. When Marx inserts literature into his theoretical texts, he transfers into his text the impulse of the contradiction to resolve itself. Similarly, literary criticism is well-placed to unfold clear, obvious and necessary logic which leads to activism.

There has been a long and variegated tradition within literary studies of critics reading and interpreting Shakespeare under the influence of the ideas of Karl Marx. Some of them have called themse...

The Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC) offers professional development opportunities through its diverse perspectives, experiences, lessons, tools, and resources. In short, the culture of DMAC is rich and prolific. We find it difficult, then, to settle on any one characteristic that best represents what DMAC affords concerning professional development and scholarly methods. DMAC's values are skills, knowledges, and capacities that work together to form a complex exchange of professional possibilities. It is a complex endeavor. With this complexity in mind, our article explores the culture of DMAC as a circulating culture of diversity. Our multivocal essay traces keywords we associate with DMAC and its capacities for professional development. Our keywords include access, assemblage, assets, community, conversations, intensity, novice, and participation.

[Extract] American sociology has not taken and does not take religion as seriously as it needs to in order to do the best sociology possible. Despite religion being an important and distinctive kind of practice in human social life, both historically and in the world today, American sociologists often neglect religion or treat it redtionistically. We explore several reasons for this negligence, focusing on key historical, conceptual, methodological, and institutional factors. We then turn to offer a number of proposais to help remedy American sociology’s negligence of religion, advance the study of religion in particular, and enhance sociology’s broader disciplinary capacity to improve our understanding and explanation of human social life. Our purpose in this analysis is to stimulate critical and constructive discussion about the significance of religion in human life and scholarly research on it.

My book, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005), co-authored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, follows over hundreds of pages a variety of topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued diversions and digressions. But what does the bigger picture of the religious and spiritual lives of US teenagers look like when we stand back and try to put it all together? Here we re-summarize our observations in venturing a general thesis about teenage religion and spirituality in the USA, tentatively advancing this thesis as something between conclusive fact and mere conjecture. We suggest that the de facto dominant religion among contemporary teenagers in the USA is what we call ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’ (MTD). This ‘religion’, which emerged from hundreds of interviews with US teenagers, consists of a God who created and orders the world, watching over human life on earth. This God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, but does not need to be particularly involved in their lives, except when he is needed to resolve a problem. Being happy and feeling good about oneself is the central goal in life. When they die, good people will go to heaven. These tenets form a de facto creed that is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth, but is also more than a little visible among black and conservative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers and even many ‘non-religious’ teenagers in the USA. Note that no teenager would actually use the terminology ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deist’ to describe himself or herself and very few would lay out the main points of its creed so clearly and concisely. Rather, it is our summarizing term for the religious viewpoint that emerged from hundreds of interviews on matters of religion, faith, and spiritual practices. While quotes illustrating MTD are aplenty, suffice it here to examine merely a few that are representative of this religion’s core components.

A wide-held assumption is that increased religiousness is associated with stronger perceptions of a conflict between religion and science. This article examines this assumption using four distinct questions asked on the third wave of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). Results indicate a variety of viewpoints for constructing the relationship between science and religion, rather than a simple conflict-compatibility continuum. Further, findings suggest that increased religiousness among emerging adults is associated with a stronger agreement in science and religion’s compatibility, rather than conflict. Incorporating New Age or non-Western spiritual tradition and a strict adherence to fundamentalist Christian doctrine are associated with complex configurations of beliefs on the relationship between religion and science. Collectively, the findings among emerging adults contradict traditional assumptions about how religious experiences influence beliefs, suggesting that such social factors may influence beliefs and attitudes uniquely at different points in the lifecourse or across generations. More broadly, the findings speak to the ongoing debate about the extent to which differing social experiences may produce consistent or discordant sets of beliefs and values, and in turn how particular configurations may impact strategies of action across a range of life domains.

Previous research on charitable giving has identified a significant relationship between political conservatism and greater financial giving to charitable causes. Yet that research has not adequately explored the important role of religion in that relationship, nor differences in financial giving targets (i.e., religious congregations, noncongregational religious organizations, and nonreligious organizations). Support for competing theories concerning political ideology, religious practice, and charitable financial giving is assessed using data from the Panel Study on American Ethnicity and Religion (PS-ARE). For both religious and nonreligious giving, the effect of political ideology is completely mediated by participation in religious and civic practices. These findings support recent arguments on “practice theory” in cultural sociology and suggest that it is less the effect of ideology than of active participation in religious, political, and community organizations that explains Americans’ financial giving to religious and nonreligious organizations.

How might the social scientific study of religion (SSSR) benefit from adjusting some of its journal article publishing standards and practices ? This article builds onfive presuppositions about the purpose and nature of good sociology in order to advance five specific proposals for changes in how we write, review, and make use of journal articles in the field. Those proposals concern the publishing of descriptive empirical research notes, meta-analysis review essays, detailed methodological information, arguments about causation, and analytical emphases on the substantive power of variables rather than mere statistical significance. The purpose and expected result of these proposed publishing adjustments is to increase the quality, value, and cumulative nature of the scholarship produced in the SSSR.

I thank my respondents for their feedback on my essay and David Yamane for providing the opportunity of this exchange to clarify issues and hopefully move forward our understanding of significant matters in our field. It is important, after considering the details of my respondents' reactions, first to step back to gain some larger perspective on the original nature and purpose of the essay in question. As to genre, my essay is a theoretical thought piece, intended to float ideas that may offer useful approaches and perspectives for future research in the field. I agree with the editor that such thought pieces deserve a hearing in our joumals, alongside more standard articles, because they hold the potential to contribute in their own way to our self-reflexivity as schol ars and creative reflection on alternative perspectives in our field. As to argu ment, to reiterate, I believe that the sociology of religion needs to develop a stronger empirical research program examining how religious beliefs and prac tices generate for adherents subjective experiences involving emotional respons es which help to reinforce people's commitment to those religions. Exactly how and why that happens (assuming the suggestion itself has any merit) is an open empirical question, but one that is currently neglected and I think well worth investigating more seriously in the future. The specific case that I took up in my essay as an example of how this might work was Christianity, a multifaceted case the argument about which could of course be developed and complexified well beyond what my short essay offered. I suspect that this proposed research agenda would also prove fruitful if applied to most other religions, although the specifics of the analytical stories to be told will no doubt vary by the religious tradition and sub-tradition being studied. As to style and tone, my essay was intentionally written with a strong feeling of sub jective experience and affect, in order to create something of an aesthetic corre spondence between the theoretical argument and the tenor of the prose. My pur pose was to give some sense of the phenomenological perspective embedded in my argument, which necessarily introduces subjectivity and affect into our under standing and explanation. This purposeful discursive move I made explicit in the seventh sentence of my essay's abstract, which stated, "I also reflect the subjec

Human beings subconsciously adapt their behaviors to a communication partner in order to make interactions run smoothly. In human-robot interactions, not only the human but also the robot is expected to adapt to its partner. Thus, to facilitate human-robot interactions, a robot should be able to read subconscious comfort and discomfort signals from humans and adjust its behavior accordingly, just like a human would. However, most previous, research works expected the human to consciously give feedback, which might interfere with the aim of interaction. We propose an adaptation mechanism based on reinforcement learning that reads subconscious body signals from a human partner, and uses this information to adjust interaction distances, gaze meeting, and motion speed and timing in human-robot interactions. The mechanism uses gazing at the robot's face and human movement distance as subconscious body signals that indicate a human's comfort and discomfort. A pilot study with a humanoid robot that has ten interaction behaviors has been conducted. The study result of 12 subjects suggests that the proposed mechanism enables autonomous adaptation to individual preferences. Also, detailed discussion and conclusions are presented. © 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 20110711

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 (SGMA) set a goal to achieve sustainable management of California's groundwater resources by 2040, yet it left many of the details of its implementation to be worked out through subsequent regulations. Arguably, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) developed the most important of these regulations this year regarding how the state should evaluate local Groundwater Sustainability Plans. Despite their importance, these regulations have received little media attention or independent review. Here, we offer our independent analysis of a key aspect of the regulations, focusing on the role of science, data, and models that will be critical for SGMA's material and institutional success. In particular, we draw on our previously published research regarding sustainability metrics (Christian-Smith and Abhold 2015), the role of stakeholders (Dobbin et al. 2015), and the importance of good governance (Kiparsky et al. 2016). We conclude with a series of general principles for ensuring scientific transparency.

Why has Christianity as a religious tradition survived for two millennia? What makes Christianity "work"? Many social scientific answers to related questions focus on structural forces shaping religion and on factors that explain variance across belief and practice. This article takes a dif ferent approach, seeking to explain the ongoing existence of the phenomenon itself before analyzing variance within it. The idea is to address basic causes of what exists as distinct from more superficial causes of variation within it. To do so, I take a phenomenological approach that focuses particularly on emotions, seeking to explicate the recurrent, characteristic, and subjective experiences of many Christians that help to explain their ongoing commitment to and involvement in the faith. I also reflect the subjective focus on emotions in the tone of the article, which introduces a strong sense of subjec tive experience and affect. By complementing typical sociological analyses of religious variance with this kind of causal analysis of its existence, this article seeks to expand our range of explanation and understanding in the sociology of religion.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the perceptions of and approaches to mathematical proof of undergraduates enrolled in lecture-based and problem-based “transition to proof” courses. While the students in the lecture-based course demonstrated conceptions of proof that reflect those reported in the research literature as insufficient and typical of undergraduates, the students in the problem-based course were found to hold conceptions of and approach the construction of proofs in ways that demonstrated efforts to make sense of mathematical ideas. This sense-making manifested itself in the ways in which students employed initial strategies, notation, prior knowledge and experiences, and concrete examples in the proof construction process. These differences were also seen when students were asked to determine the validity of completed proofs. These results suggest that such a problem-based course may provide opportunities for students to develop conceptions of proof that are more meaningful and robust than does a traditional lecture-based course.

American sociology has long documented and theorized persistent inequalities between religious communities in the United States; in addition, socioeconomic inequalities between religious groups have played an important role in many sociological theories about religion and society. Since the publication of numerous important works published in the mid-20th century, however, the social stratification of American religion has been a curiously understudied topic. This research note is an attempt to update our descriptive knowledge about socioeconomic inequalities between American religious groups. Using General Social Survey data to track educational, income, and job status inequality over a 16-year period, from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, we find that socioeconomic inequality in the American religious system has been quite persistent and stable, suggesting that significant mobility within this system in the mid-20th century may be declining, thus producing a more stable system of stratification.

A large body of empirical studies shows that religion often serves as a factor promoting positive, healthy outcomes in the lives of American adolescents. Yet existing theoretical explanations for these religious effects remain largely disjointed and fragmented. This article attempts to formulate a more systematic, integrated, and coherent account of religion’s constructive influence in the lives of American youth, suggesting nine key factors (moral directives, spiritual experiences, role models, community and leadership skills, coping skills, cultural capital, social capital, network closure, and extra-community links) that cluster around three key dimensions of influence (moral order, learned competencies, and social and organizational ties). Several decades of social scientific studies have shown that religion is often a factor in the lives of American adolescents, influencing their attitudes and behaviors in ways that are commonly viewed as positive and constructive. Across a number of areas of concern, various measures of religiosity are typically associated with a variety of healthy, desirable outcomes. This article is an attempt to theorize systematically why religion might have such an influence in the lives of American adolescents. Within the relevant bodies of literature, individual publications normally suggest causal mechanisms explaining their particular findings. Altogether, these many studies are very helpful, but as a whole they present the contemporary researcher with a disjointed and fragmented account for religious influences in the lives of American teenagers. In the following pages, I attempt to synthesize some of what we know from these and other informative studies into a more coherent, systematic account of how and why religion exerts significant positive effects on American youth.

Acknowledgements, About the Contributors, Introduction: Correcting a Curious Neglect, or Bringing Religion Back In, Part One: Preexistent Organizations and Leadership, Chapter 1. The Black Church in the Civil Rights Movement: The SCLS as the Decentralized, Radical Arm of the Black Church, Chapter 2. Radical Islamic Insurgency in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979, Part Two: Religious Ritual and Insurgent Consciousness, Chapter 3. Pastoral Mobilization and Contention: The Religious Foundation of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, Chapter 4. Religious Rituals of Resistance and Class Consciousness in Bolivian Tin-Making CommunitiesPart Three: Mobilization and Repression, Chapter 5. Popular Religion, Protest and Revolt: The Emergence of Political Insurgency in the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran Churches of the 1960s-1980s, Chapter 6. Church Leadership, State Repression, and the 'Spirit of Involvement' in the South African Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1983-1990, Part Four: Symbolic Worlds and Activist Identity, Chapter 7. For God and the Fatherland: Protestant Symbolic Worlds and the Rise of National Socialism in Germany

To further understanding of Americans' explanations for racial inequality, and the implications these explanations have for reducing black-white socioeconomic inequality, we explore the role of religion. We argue that the cultural tools of a religious subculture shape the rationale for racial inequality. Examining white conservative Protestants, who comprise nearly 25 percent of white Americans, we identify religious cultural tools we call “accountable freewill individualism,” “anti-structuralism,” and “relationalism.” Based on these, we hypothesize that white conservative Protestants explain inequality in more individualistic and less structural terms than other white Americans. We also expect them to emphasize perceived dysfunctional social relations among African Americans in their explanations. Using the 1996 General Social Survey and qualitative data from 117 in-depth interviews, these hypotheses are clearly supported. Religion, it appears, has an independent effect on explanations of racial inequality. Based on these findings, we suggest that rationales for racial inequality are not mere defenses of socioeconomic privilege, but, more fundamentally, defenses of identity, culture, and worldview.

Drawing on Connell's notion of gender projects, the authors assess the degree to which contemporary evangelical ideals of men's headship challenge, as well as reinforce, a hegemonic masculinity. Based on 265 in-depth interviews in 23 states across the country, they find that rather than espousing a traditional gender hierarchy in which women are simply subordinate to men, the majority of contemporary evangelicals hold to symbolic traditionalism and pragmatic egalitarianism. Symbolic male headship provides an ideological tool with which individual evangelicals may maintain a sense of distinctiveness from the broader culture of which they are a part. At the same time, symbolic headship blunts some of the harsher effects of living in a materially rich, but time poor, culture, by defusing an area of potential conflict, creating a safe space within which men can negotiate, and strengthening men's material and emotional ties to their families.

We report the findings of our research on differing levels of movement involvement by focusing on participation in a high-risk/cost campaign mobilized by Nicaragua Exchange, a solidarity organization in the U.S.-Central America peace movement of the 1980s. Our data confirm the importance of relational ties in high-risk activism, yet raise questions about the relevance of biographical availability and the unique functions of organizational ties. We argue that McAdam's model is an important advance in our understanding of the factors that facilitate high-risk/cost activism, yet its micro-structural approach does not sufficiently account for human agency and individual abilities to negotiate and overcome barriers to activism.

Since the rise of the religious right, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying conservative Protestantism. Not only do conservative Protestants (CPs) make up at least a quarter of the US population; they differ from many Americans in gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, political orientation, and other ways as well. In fact, religious factors often predict people's political views better than do either class or gender, even though the latter two have received far more attention in the scholarly literature ( Manza & Brooks 1997 , Kellstedt et al 1996b ). Unfortunately research in this area has been hampered by imprecise measurement and poor understanding of the various movements grouped together as CPs. This has muddied statistical results, stifled theoretical development, and blinded researchers to promising areas of analysis. Thus, in this chapter we first discuss the history and distinctive qualities of the various CP movements, then we use these insights to propose better survey measures, and finally we apply this knowledge to several substantive areas (i.e., gender-role attitudes, childrearing styles, tolerance, the “culture wars,” the religious right, and the reasons for the religious vitality of CP groups).

Many jobs, in different sectors of the economy, are required to manage, deliver, and treat the freshwater required to satisfy our commercial, institutional, industrial, agricultural, and domestic needs for goods and services. A range of sustainable water strategies to address twenty-first-century water challenges have emerged that reach far beyond the conventional water sector. Growing attention is being given to sustainable measures such as low-impact development, water reuse, watershed restoration, water conservation and efficiency, and many other proven and promising practices. As the country shifts to more sustainable water management, new services, occupations, and markets are emerging. In addition, over the next decade there will be a need for major investments in the nation’s aging infrastructure for wastewater, stormwater, and drinking water along with ongoing operation and maintenance jobs to sustain that infrastructure. Many of these jobs are eligible for public funding and have been the focus of increased funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and other federal and state policies. However, information is needed to help local, state, and federal agencies; utilities; companies; unions; and nonprofit entities adopt strategies that maximize job creation and other potential benefits of these practices.

In order to understand the character and moral lives of college students today, it is necessary to set an examination within a larger framework of the macrosocial and cultural forces that have developed emerging adulthood as a relatively new and important phase of the American life course. Also helpful are identifying some of the key social-structural features of standard college life in the United States today, which exert significant influences on college students. In the midst of considering how to address issues of morality and character among college students, it is also necessary to explicitly name our assumptions and beliefs about what is good for human persons, what a good human life looks like, and then consider the role that college life may play in nurturing or hindering its achievement. Interrogating our own assumptions about what is normal and good for youth and college students is helpful. This essay concludes by commending an approach of “realistic care” as superior to the alternatives.

What might the sociology of education contribute to our broader understanding of crucial issues related to schools and education, viewed from the perspective of someone, like me, who is not directly involved in that field but still interested in these matters? Much of my own research in recent years has focused in the sociology of religion and morality, and I bring those concerns to the present question. When I survey the sociology of education, it seems to me that the field could improve its research in at least four significant areas.

Latin America is undergoing a period of intense religious transformation and upheaval. This book analyzes some of the more important new discoveries about religious movements in the region. It examines important shifts such as the expansion and politicization of Protestantism, the ongoing transformation of the Catholic church, the growth of Afro-Brazilian religions, and the genuine pluralization of faith.

Sociologists, historians, and other social observers have long considered the secularization of American public life over the past hundred and thirty years to be an inevitable and natural outcome of modernization. This groundbreaking work rejects this view and fundamentally rethinks the historical and theoretical causes of the secularization of American public life between 1870 and 1930. Christian Smith and his team of contributors boldly argue that the declining authority of religion was not the by-product of modernization, but rather the intentional achievement of cultural and intellectual elites, including scientists, academics, and literary intellectuals, seeking to gain control of social institutions and increase their own cultural authority. Writing with vigor and a broad intellectual grasp, the contributors examine power struggles and ideological shifts in various social sectors where the public authority of religion has diminished, in particular education, science, law, and journalism. Together the essays depict a cultural and institutional revolution that is best understood in terms of individual agency, conflicts of interest, resource mobilization, and struggles for authority. Engaging both sociological and historical literature, The Secular Revolution offers a new theoretical framework and original empirical research that will inform our understanding of American society from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The ramifications of its provocative and cogent thesis will be felt throughout sociology, religious studies, and our general thinking about society for years to come.

How should we understand ourselves as humans, as a species? And how ought scientific discoveries in biology, genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology change our understanding of humanity, human nature, or the human condition? This book consists of an Introduction and thirteen chapters that address these kinds of questions concerning human self-knowledge from different disciplinary perspectives. The underlying approach is that human being is so complex and rich that no single viewpoint is sufficient to capture its depth, therefore different perspectives must contribute their own insights for a more adequate, composite picture. Included in this book are contributions from history, philosophy, genetics, evolutionary science, neuropsychology, archaeology and palaeoanthropology, and theology. Most of the contributors to this volume are interested in the religious or spiritual dimension of humanity, and some explicitly engage the question of how science and religion do and may learn from each other (the publisher is a broadly-minded Christian press). The larger story that emerges from this volume is that ‘traditional’ views of human persons as ineliminably moral, divinely created, having souls or spirits, perhaps created ‘in God’s image’, and so on, are largely not incompatible with what modern science is telling us about human origins, capacities, psychology, and constitution. All of the authors seem to embrace a neo-Darwinian evolutionary perspective, not a ‘young earth’ creationism. Yet all are largely friendly to the idea that religion and science are not ‘at war’ with each other. Instead, the book takes a ‘compatibilist’ view of the relationship between religion and science, which I myself find to be sensible. Different chapters take on different pieces of the larger puzzle, ranging from the nature of aesthetic experience in human consciousness, to the

In this article I derive a contemporary theory of consciousness from Thomas Reid’s philosophical psychology. His work on this subject agrees with much in current cognitive studies, but little effort has been made to interpret it in modern terms.1 This is attributable in part to Reid’s own failure to state his views in a precise manner. As a matter of historical fact, Reid may not have clarified his position enough for us to determine textually that he would agree with the details of some particular modern analysis of consciousness. The general account of cognition he provides is quite rigorous, however, and its highly systematic, relational framework lends itself to further specific development.2 What I will claim here, then, is that his theory remains consistent under the following interpretation and that there is at least some significant textual support for it.3

Much has been made of religious influences on a variety of human behaviors and outcomes. However, some researchers choose to attribute religious influences to selection effects or underlying personality traits. They suggest scholars should pay more attention to what underlies religiosity than what effects it may have. This manuscript engages the fundamental debate about the real influence of religious participation and salience in people's lives. We consider in this study the implications of selection effects for studies of religious influences, first by examining previous research evidence, and second by our own exploration of the effects of religion on three diverse outcomes during adolescence -family relations, health, and delinquency. The evidence suggests that two common measures of religiosity are indeed subject to selection processes, but that this does not appear easily to alter or diminish their independent effects. There is also evidence for a strategic inclination to be more religious, but this too fails to mitigate religious influences. Finally, skepticism in the form of reciprocal effects appears more plausible than selection effects.

Which Americans remain in the religious communities and traditions within which they were raised? Which move to different traditions within their own religion, switch to different religious traditions altogether, or become non-religious entirely? And what social factors influence these outcomes and processes? This article engages the extant literature on religious retention and switching by using measures of religious tradition self-identification, instead of denominations, and by highlighting the dissimilarity of social factors predicting retention and switching for different traditions. Analysis of the 1996 Religious Identity and Influence survey shows that different social factors influence different groups of people in diverse religious traditions in dissimilar ways. The discussion attempts to theorize these findings.