Social Science Research Council

In the 85th anniversary issue of Commonweal, Mark Jordan reviews The Future Church by Vatican correspondent John L. Allen, Jr.:

The heart of Allen’s study describes ten critical trends the church must navigate if it is to retain market share. Otherwise, “Catholicism won’t rise to the occasion of these new challenges—it’ll be steamrolled by them.” The trends include developments in “the Catholic biosphere” like “Expanding Lay Roles” and “Evangelical Catholicism,” outside influences like Islam and Pentecostalism, and megatrends like globalization, multipolarism, demographics, and ecology. Two concluding chapters describe the author’s methodology for settling on ten trends (he lists another twenty-five that he considered), and offer a “stand-alone summary” of what Allen calls the “upside-down church” he envisions as Catholicism’s future: a universal church dominated by the culture, practice, and theology of Southern Hemisphere Catholics, who already constitute a majority of the world’s Catholics.

Continue reading at Commonweal.

In the Wall Street Journal, Rob Moll discusses the growing number of business missionaries, working outside traditional missionary organizations, as a result of the economic recession:

Faith-at-work movements have been popular at least since the 1857 businessmen’s revival in New York City, in which noon-hour prayer meetings were so full of the city’s professionals that many businesses closed during the gatherings. But churches have typically kept business people at a distance, needing their money but questioning their spiritual depth. With the business as mission movement, that has changed. In 2004, the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism, founded by Billy Graham, featured a track on business as mission. At a recent missionary conference in Hong Kong, Doug Seebeck says mission leaders apologized to the business people present. They had been guilty of asking for their money while keeping them in the foyer of the church, outside of the sanctuary.

Mr. Seebeck is executive director of Partners Worldwide, a Michigan organization that provides mentoring relationships for business owners in the developing world by connecting them with business people in the U.S. Mr. Seebeck was a missionary in Bangladesh and Africa for nearly 20 years, but he saw the limitations of all the good work church people did. Now Mr. Seebeck says, “Business is the greatest hope for the world’s poor.” He sees business profits as consistent with God’s purpose for humans. Profits, unlike activities that are donor dependent, are sustainable. Making a profit, he argues, is a better stewardship of God’s resources than pleading for funds, spending them, and going back for more.

Read the full article here.

Andrew Sullivan commends the LDS church’s decision to support legislation in Salt Lake City banning housing and employment discrimination against homosexuals:

What the LDS church has done in Utah is an immensely important and positive step and places the Mormon church in a far more positive and pro-gay position than any other religious group broadly allied with the Christianist right. They have made a distinction—and it is an admirable, intellectually honest distinction—between respecting the equal rights of other citizens in core civil respects, while insisting—with total justification—on the integrity of one’s own religious doctrines, and on a religious institution’s right to discriminate in any way with respect to its own rites and traditions.

I believe that there are forces of discrimination and bigotry within the Mormon church—and they have recently been ascendant. But that is true of most churches and most institutions. And what I have long observed among Mormons—unlike some other denominations – is also an American decency that tends to win out in the end. I’ve never met a nasty Mormon. They put many Christians to shame in their practice of their faith and the civility and sincerity with which they live their lives. And this decision in Salt Lake City—not an easy or inevitable one—to make a clear distinction between civil marriage and other civil protections is one worthy of respect.

Read his entire post at The Daily Dish.

At the New York Times, Sarah Lyall reports on an ongoing British case that centers on complex questions of Jewish identity, religious freedom (or its impossibility), and definitions of religion. By the end of the year, the British Supreme Court is expected to decide whether a school with Jewish roots had the right to deny a prospective student status as Jewish because his mother does not meet Orthodox standards of Jewishness. Without the preferential admissions treatment that such status carries at the oversubscribed London school, the student was denied admission, and his family cried foul. The case could have ramifications not just for other Jewish schools but also for other religious schools in Britain:

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism—whether one’s mother is Jewish—was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not. The court ruled that it was an ethnic test because it concerned the status of M’s mother rather than whether M considered himself Jewish and practiced Judaism.

“The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act,” the court said. It added that while it was fair that Jewish schools should give preference to Jewish children, the admissions criteria must depend not on family ties, but “on faith, however defined.”

The same reasoning would apply to a Christian school that “refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practicing Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin,” the court said.

Read the rest of the article here.

At Progressive Revival, Paul Raushenbush takes the occasion of the Fort Hood tragedy to point out that American culture and media consistently treat “White, Male, Christians” as a normative individual identity, while members of other minority groups often feel pressure to distance themselves from acts performed by people who look or sound like them:

We who are White, Christian and Male (WCMs) should ask ourselves this basic question: When we heard about the Oklahoma bomber, Columbine, or the shooter at the Holocaust museum—all horrible crimes committed by WCMs did we think to ourselves—’oh, this will reflect badly on me?’

The answer is no. Why? Because still in this country, White, Male, Christians are considered normative and therefore the range of WCM behavior, from very good to very bad, simply represents the wide range of human behavior. I know I have nothing in common with Timothy McVeigh and so does the rest of American society. Unfortunately, people of other races and religions in America do not have the benefit of recognition that there are very good people and very bad people among them. Instead, the actions of one person of a minority group reflects upon the reputation and sense of security and worth of the entire group.

This has to stop.

Read the rest of the piece here.

At Call & Response, Mark Chavez draws upon an April 2008 article by Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski to explain why fewer black congregations tend to have websites than predominately white congregations:

If it’s not because black ministers are older than white ministers, and if resource differences are only part of the story, what else contributes to the digital divide between black and white churches? Another piece of the puzzle, I think, is that the digital divide between black and white churches reflects the digital divide between black and white people.

In an article in the April, 2008 issue of the “American Sociological Review,” Paul DiMaggio and Bart Bonikowski document a substantial race difference in internet use. According to a 2001 survey, 72 percent of whites compared to only 53 percent of blacks reported using the internet. The race difference was even larger when people were asked about connecting to the internet from their homes: 59 percent for whites, 36 percent for blacks. The gap is striking. A majority of whites used the internet from home while nearly two-thirds of African Americans did not.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Any enormous affair with dozens of things going on at any one time inevitably defies summary by a single attendee, and this past week’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal was no exception. Approximately 4,500 scholars, students, journalists, and exhibitors from around the world gathered to share their research, ogle newly-published volumes, and trade professional gossip over hors d’oeuvres. It happened to be the AAR’s hundredth anniversary, which, together with the rarity of taking place outside the United States, lent a special air of festivity. The weather was also uncommonly comfortable—the Californians must have brought it with them.

Considering the international location, it was fitting that this year’s AAR President was Mark Juergensmeyer, who delivered a plenary talk on Saturday evening on “The Global Future of Religion.” Ann Taves, his successor and fellow professor at UC Santa Barbara, introduced him. Juergensmeyer insisted on the need to study religion in a genuinely global context, rather than with the parochialism that can so easily take hold in the field.

Holding the meeting in Canada also helped secure the attendance of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Islamic scholar who has been unable to fulfill previous AAR invitations because his U.S. visa had been revoked on the grounds of an “ideological exclusion provision.” (The restriction was lifted by a federal appeals court earlier this year.) He participated in a plenary panel about “Islam and Modernity”—along with Reza Aslan, Nilüfer Göle, and Robin Wright—and delivered an address, entitled “Contemporary Islam: The Meaning and the Need of a Radical Reform.” The symbolic significance of his presence was widely felt among those of us who remember cancellation notices of his scheduled AAR talks in previous years.

The SSRC’s recent work made its strongest appearance in a Sunday morning plenary panel, presided over by Mark Juergensmeyer and featuring four other Immanent Frame contributors: Charles Taylor, José Casanova, Saba Mahmood, and Craig Calhoun. They discussed Taylor’s landmark book, A Secular Age, and the need for rethinking the category of secularity in light of the vital role religion plays in modern social and political life. A panel the day before, “Reconsidering Civil Religion,” also drew from the SSRC’s work in this area, and included talks by Philip Gorski, David Morgan, Ebrahim Moosa, Craig Calhoun, and Catherine Albanese. Immanent Frame editor David Kyuman Kim, notably, proposed an “elegiac” temperament as an antidote to the imperialistic excesses of American civil religion.

Sunday afternoon saw a series of high-profile plenaries, including a panel featuring Thomas J.J. Altizer, the prophetic, apocalyptic leader of the “death of God theology” movement in the 1960s, and the virtuosic Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. While declaring himself an atheist, Žižek also called himself “unconditionally a Christian,” insofar as he understands Jesus’ teachings to stand for undermining social and ideological hierarchies—the very existence of a God among them. For him, the essence of the Christian message is, “We can totally destabilize the universe.”

Perhaps the highlight of the whole meeting for this attendee, however, came just before that, in a conversation between Cornel West and James H. Cone, this year’s winner of the Martin Marty Award for contributions to the public understanding of religion. Cone reminisced about his upbringing and the remarkable support and setbacks he encountered as one of the first African-Americans to reach the highest levels of academic theology. It was a powerful reminder of the significance that the study of religion has had in the great social upheavals of the last century, and that it should continue to have in the century to come. West dried his eyes at one point, while Cone recalled a picture of them together years back at Union Seminary, and without doubt many of us in the audience were doing the same.

There is room to mention only these few most visible highlights of the conference. But likely the most important new insights came from the hundreds of sessions taking place all along, some with only a handful of scholars and students present. Kathryn Lofton explained to us “how to be a New Atheist” (hint: it involves masculinity); John Lardas Modern joined a conversation about new approaches in evangelical historiography; there were a number of panels, talks, and tours about Montreal’s religious heritage, including a remarkable film, Bonjour Shalom, about Hasidic Jews living in the city’s Outremont district, not to mention sessions on “Science Fictional Asia,” “How Taking Animals Seriously Is Reshaping the Study of Religion,” and a panoply of less surprising topics.

As we look forward to next year’s AAR in Atlanta, Montreal has given us plenty to gnaw on.

In the Los Angeles Times, Edmund Sanders reports on Mt. Kenya’s steadily diminishing ice cap.  Beyond the obvious environmental impact of the melting ice cap (which sits atop Africa’s second tallest peak), the destruction represents a blow to the faith of the many Kenyans who worship the mountain:

The stories of Mt. Kenya’s worshipers put a human face on a brewing standoff between developed countries, which are blamed for contributing to most of the world’s climate change through carbon emissions and other pollution, and developing regions, such as Africa, which is seeking $67 billion a year in compensation for the economic and social costs.

Worshipers of Mt. Kenya have already incorporated the melting ice into their oral traditions, said Jeffrey Fadiman, a San Jose State University professor who spent months on the majestic landmark collecting the oral histories of local tribes.

“Elders see the glacier melting as a punishment for younger people abandoning and violating their traditions,” Fadiman said.

Read the full article here.

In the New York Times, columnist David Brooks points to a “national rush to therapy” in explaining the recent shooting spree by Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood. In the interest of political correctness, he claims, people resisted the mounting evidence that Hasan was in fact a zealot motivated by a deadly religious narrative:

So immediately the coverage took on a certain cast. The possibility of Islamic extremism was immediately played down. This was an isolated personal breakdown, not an ideological assault, many people emphasized.

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

“It denied,” concludes Brooks, “the possibility of evil.”

It goes without saying that when the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month, it had a profound impact on how we imagined the world around us. At the sci-fi blog io9, Chanda Phelan shows that the event also changed the imaginings of apocalyptic fiction:

I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time. … As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that’s to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war’s popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991? That surprised me.

Read more (and see the accompanying chart) at io9.