Ongoing Work
Racial and Religious Diversity in the U.S.
I am working on the American Mosaic project, a study of how racial and religious identities influence conceptions of citizenship and American identity with colleagues Joseph Gerteis and Douglas Hartmann. You can read about one of our papers -- a study of Americans' attitudes toward atheists -- in the Star Tribune or in Newsweek or The Wilson Quaterly.
Recently, there was an interesting article in Science about religions and the origins of pro-social behavior that cited our AMP work. Check it out here.
Religion and Family
The first is a study of how congregations have adapted to changes in work and family. What model of “the family�? are congregations organized around? What moral discourses about family life do they promote? How do religious institutions fit – or not fit - with contemporary men’s and women’s lives after a period of rapid social change in work and family?
Click here to read an interview transcript describing this research; the interview was used as background for two episodes of Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (Oct. 28 and Nov. 18, 2005.) You can also listen to an interview given on Midmorning with Kerri Miller (Dec. 29, 2005), or read about this work in CLA Today or the Star Tribune.
New Projects
Religion and Rationality -- the Formation of Legal and Scientific Consciousness
Mainstream American religion is organized around two imperatives – to do “what is right,�? and to do “what is caring.�? And yet some would argue that late modernity is pervaded by a kind of rational-legal logic that underpins the market, the law, the state, and science.
In such a context, there are elaborate demands placed on individuals to construct the self as a rational, competent social agent. How do religious communities and institutions provide individuals with the tools to understand and act within the highly rationalized institutions that shape late modern life?
I am planning a collaborative project with my colleague at the University of Minnesota, Kathy Hull, that will focus on the relationship between religious belief and the formation of scientific and legal consciousness. How do religious beliefs shape what is understood as a “legal�? issue and views of the authority or legitimacy of the law? How do people reconcile religious beliefs with secular law when these appear to conflict? How do people use religious values to guide or justify their political and legal views in the context of a socially sanctioned ideology of the separation of church and state? And to what extent are the views of everyday religious believers influenced by the discourses of organizations and interest groups that address legal questions from an explicitly religious perspective? We will also ask how religion shapes scientific consciousness, including knowledge about and attitudes toward such issues as environmental management (e.g. biodiversity, recycling, sustainable agriculture) and genetics (human cloning, the choice of personality and physical traits for one’s children)? When presented with vignettes which dramatize the need to make a choice regarding one of these issues, how does religion shape both the individual’s understanding of the science involved and their narrative of the appropriate relationship between science and social policy?
To see a list of publications . . .