Sociology of religion

Background, I go to one of the most religious schools in America, which has made me very anti- religious, but I understand the function of religion, and I have a comprehensive understanding of Christianity. I am taking a sociology of religion course next semester. I looked at the syllabus and most of the books we are reading were written by Christians, and approach the discipline through a evangelical thought.

Looking for any introductory book, that includes the study of other religions outside of Christianity would be appreciated. Yeah, just looking for a book.

Hello! I am a senior in college, and I am taking a class on Sociology of Religion. I have to do a paper on a religion that is not my own. As an atheist, that gives me all the options, and I chose to write my paper on the Satanic Temple instead of the more typical religious groups found in the Bible belt. I have to interview one or two chapter heads and one or two members of TST. The interviewees will be anonymous, referred to only by their initials in my paper. My goal with this paper is to present TST as a legitimate religious option in a class where many are choosing Abrahimic religions to study. My local TST fb groups have been difficult to reach or get a response, so I am coming to Reddit to find victims... I mean volunteers. Would anyone be willing to help me with this project? 😁

I'm a PhD candidate and I have some funding to create this.

I'm thinking a ~weekly channel reviewing a scientific study. Let's make the science more accessible to the people who are interested in it!

So let me know your thoughts and ideas and I will incorporate them...

Infant mortality rates (IMRs) are high in the U.S. compared to other developed countries. But, religion has been neglected in prior research on IMRs despite faith communities’ longstanding advocacy for children and families (and a well-established link between religion and adult health and mortality). Does the presence of religious organizations in a community influence infant mortality? And, does the presence of some religious groups lead to poorer outcomes while the presence of others leads to better outcomes? I will be back to answer your questions at 10 am PT (1 pm ET), I look forward to hearing your experiences and insights, ask me anything!

Proof

https://www.pdx.edu/research/ginny-garcia-alexander-reddit-iama-june-25-2018-0

https://www.pdx.edu/sociology/ginny-garcia

Hi r/sociology! I've been interested in sociology and the study of society for more than two years, and I'm seriously considering going into sociology for research. However, I haven't yet had research experience in sociology - I have done some research in biology, but I'm not sure on how similar life sciences research and social sciences research is, especially considering that in sociology, most studies appear to have large sample sizes of a population and study their attributes extensively. With the sociology of religion being of particular interest to me (with sociolinguistics being a close second), I was wondering how I should best approach such a project.

Here's a post from USC's Religion Dispatches website that makes ties from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens to the Quebec mosque shooting via the shooter's Facebook likes. It has been shared more than 1,500 times on Facebook: http://religiondispatches.org/atheisms-dark-side-aiding-the-trump-agenda/

A selection:

"Given the trajectory of their intensifying assault on Islam—which is singled out as a uniquely barbaric religion—it should not surprise us when Dawkins and Harris share admirers with the likes of Trump, Le Pen, and other nationalists who are leading a crescendo of ethnic tension. While Dawkins, Harris, and other New Atheists (most famously the late Christopher Hitchens, also one of Bissonnette’s 'likes') have preached a secular gospel of scientific rationality and hostility toward religion, their harshest criticism has been reserved for Islam."

In my opinion, it's a piece unworthy of a read or response. However, the sheer number of social shares made me feel I had to write something to combat the nonsense: https://halconick.blog/2017/03/05/professor-attempts-to-tie-criticism-to-murder-and-bigotry-via-facebook-likes/

I couldn't get my response placed anywhere aside from my own blog, but I find the best solution for detestable writing to be more writing. Perhaps some of you feel the same way and have your own response.

ISBN: 978-90-04-36879-8

DOI: 10.1163/9789004368798

URL: https://brill.com/view/title/32114

I only need the introduction and the chapter by Christophe Monnot, but wouldn't mind access to the whole book either. Thanks a lot in advance to anyone who takes the time, I appreciate it!

So for my sociology minor, i’m currently in the sociology of religion. last semester i had the sociology of death and dying. in D&D, there was a chapter that discussed the afterlife and the various views on it which of course is linked to religion. in my religion class we were talking about how religion effects our lives as well as our deaths. now i journal a lot and write a lot in general as well, so when i have a deep thought i immediately have to jot in down. so after class i was thinking, is religion really all that bad? i’m more of an atheist myself but came to this conclusion, i just had to share this thought with someone so what better way than to do so than reddit. i’m also working on a paper for this class that involves how religion has or has not shaped my life. i’d also like input from various people that could help me elaborate on the concept of why choose faith over fact and as well as just your overall opinion on religion and my journal entry as well. this is what i had journaled:

august 22 2018 tuesday

i realized that if there is a god or god(s) or a single higher power of some sort idk, then i think they would enjoy their/it’s followers to do more of the good teachings throughout daily life and just do the righteous thing thru and thru. like more so while we’re alive rather and use our time more wisely rather than just getting by in order to gain in the afterlife. but then i figured that there’s a.) if a positive afterlife is destined and for certain in someone’s mind, then perhaps they will think always be “saved” or “accepted” and bend the rules and do bad things. yes we all fuck up but there’s a spectrum. some people do crazy shit or stupid shit time and time again and still think a god will accept them. so is it useless? is there too much negativity and temptations all around us? if god is real, god can’t accept everybody and that’s just that. not everybody can be saved. my god would be able to always love those people but they dont always have to like those people. people will pray to a god and preach yet do nothing to serve it’s meaning and purpose throughout, as far as we know, the one and only chance we have at life. so then i got to b.) because A made me sad. if some people are so fucking sure that there is an afterlife and they will receive a positive outcome because they think they deserve that. then isn’t that nice to have? that means there’s a good chunk of people out there doing good things. just because, they doing go

I fully understand why they shouldn't be part of the base/substructure since neither could be considered a subset of the means of production or the relations of production, but nonetheless it seems as if they don't belong in the superstructure. From my understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong), the base includes all of the economic factors which help shape a society's superstructure (which is, for all intensive purposes, just kinda treated as cultural fluff in Marxist theory), while the superstructure, in turn, helps maintain the base, whether it's hierarchal or egalitarian. But I feel like science and religion are engaged in the kind of feedback loops with the base that something like art, for example, just isn't. We know from Marx's writings about religion that it seems to further hierarchal relations of production by acting as an "opiate of the masses" and subduing the proletariat to the point where they'll blindly bend to the will of the bourgeoisie. The newly stratified society then discourages secularism for this reason, allowing the situation to spiral into a form of state-run religious mind control. On occasion, ideology and/or nationalism can take over the position of religion in the loop I described above, but out of these three, religion seems to do it in the most prevalent fashion. And the affect of science on the means of production is not only stated by Marx, it's just obvious, especially since, as some futurologists and theorists have noted, the most feasible path from the present-day situation to a massive labor surplus seems to be technology in the form of automation and AI. The workers in this situation, now free from the threat of material scarcity, would have much more time to innovate within their cooperatives, which would keep the wheel turning. This could finally lead to an upper-stage communist society if a dictatorship of the proletariat is truly established (or an advanced dystopia if the proletariat are left unemployed while the bourgeoisie reap profit). Considering the negative potential and positive potential of religion and science, respectively, I struggle to understand why these remain in their current place in Marxist sociological models. I can't think of a way in which the scenarios I've described could be seen as 'maintaining' the base, nor can I think of a way in which something like law or art could be as impactful as science or religion. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the terminology, the details, or just

Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Masters of Mankind Or, Losing My Religion

When Neo chose the red pill in The Matrix, sociologists watching were no doubt sure he was in for a culture shock. Nothing would be the same for him. His fictional experience is reflected in the experience of Jehovah’s Witnesses who reject their religion. This is such a widespread shorthand for the struggle of ex-Witnesses that it appears all over the Reddit boards devoted to them. “I took the red pill,” they say, or, “I got red-pilled” by contact with some feature of the outside world that caused such a break in their worldview that they could not continue holding the beliefs they are required to as Witnesses. This is what happened to me. I’ll tell you about it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Millenarian Christian denomination founded in the late 19th Century alongside similar American religions like Seventh Day Adventists and the Mormons. They were a minor sect until the early 1970s, when a combination of the beginnings of the Neoliberal Program depriving the population of their wealth and political power, and the Church promising its new converts that the end was almost surely going to come in 1975 drove them to exponential growth. I’ve lost exact track since I left 14 years ago, but they currently have something like nine million members worldwide, and four million in the United States. Jehovah’s Witnesses are not exactly a cult, but they have a lot of the features of cults: they control their members with a pretty severe form of indoctrination—thought control—and by limiting their association with outsiders and their ideas. My mom joined up when I was two, right about 1977, when their growth was most pronounced, and I was raised in their eschatology.

One of the central doctrines of the church is that God is going to kill everybody who’s not a Witness in Armageddon, but real soon. Like within six months. They’ve been saying this since their 1975 prediction failed. Supposedly it’s just for God to do this, because those who aren’t Witnesses were offered the chance to accept the “truth” and be saved. This is the point of their door to door preaching work. Since they rejected God, by rejecting the Witnesses at their door, they deserve to die. This had always seemed a touch absurd to me, but indoctrination is a marvelous thing, it can bulldoze those kinds of doubts. However, when I was 27, the elaborate immorality of this idea really became clear to me. For a number of years after this, aft

Hello, i'm currently undergraduate in sociology but haven't seen some much of sociology of religion, unfortunately is not on optional courses either. What are the reference texts on this area?

If so can anyone tell me how his exams are? Not really sure how to study for this thing and would like any incite from anyone whose taken him in the past!! thanks for any help!

And do Catholics over-represent in law as a field in general?

İ need a PhD dissertation suggestions. My interest area is relationship btw Politics, religion, modern state, ideology. İf you help me i will be appriciated. Thank you in advance.

I myself am a sociologist of religion. Almost everything I do has a religion bent to it. In my somewhat limited experience, it does seem like sociologists of religion believe that they are underappreciated or even marginalized. The rest of sociology is said to be committed to dated versions of secularization theory, so they either mistakenly think religion is irrelevant or they have other biases against religion.

This certainly used to be true. Religion used to be treated as pathological, seen with much disdain, and assumed to be irrelevant and on a quick path for further irrelevancy. The empirical turn in the sociology of religion however showed us that religious people were as rational as anyone else, reaped mental benefits, and religion appeared to be good for society in several other areas. Furthermore, sociologists met religious resurgences and highly salient public displays of religion from the 70s onward with an incapability to study it, because they neglected religion, assuming it was going away.

But, we call this the old paradigm for a reason don't we? Are sociologists really stuck in the 1960s and earlier? I'm just not sure how much I see this perspective explicitly stated.

When I talk to people outside of my sociology of religion bubble, what I mostly see is indifference. They don't find it hard to believe that religion matters. They might be surprised to learn about studies that make religion look good, but it is an emotionally neutral kind of surprise. Journals might tell us things like "this is good, this is interesting, but this is what religion journals are for," which is evidence of marginalization to some extent. But is this unique to the sociology of religion? If I were to use the articles that dominate AJS, ASR, and Social Forces as evidence, I would imagine that this is how every sociologist specializing in anything other than inequality, health, gender, or race is feeling lately.

On the other hand, some anecdotal evidence suggests that we might still be marginalized. Tales of "strange" peer reviews that carry ideology still abound. Some, without evidence of foul play, insist that something just isn't right in a study that might make religious populations happy (preemptively, I feel it necessary to note that sociologists of religion did not turn a blind to the Regnerus situation). Plus, when the big journals decide that sociology of religion fits, it seems to some of us that they'll put in not-so-unique findings rehashing secul

Hey fellow sociologists!

So I'm currently stuck on a project I have for my sociology of religion class. I've successfully completed my first part which was an autobiography about my religious background, etc. Now I'm stuck on part 2. I need to tie together my autobiography with historical data (1950s-present) and tie in two interviews (parent/grandparent) to build on a theme. Since I grew up with little to no exposure to religion, I'm thinking of focusing on a theme of science being a lens to see the world.

Basically my interview I plan on asking if my relatives remember any historical moments, times when they weren't as religious. I'm not sure about the historical part.

I'm not looking for someone to do this for me, but any kind of feedback or pointing in a direction would be awesome.

So I have no religion but I find it very interesting that in 2016, with science, information and whathaveyou, people still believe in religion.

I was wondering if there's a nonfic, maybe social study book about why people have religion in our modern times that you could recommend?

Thanks a bunch!!!

When Neo chose the red pill in The Matrix, sociologists watching were no doubt sure he was in for a culture shock. Nothing would be the same for him. His fictional experience is reflected in the experience of Jehovah’s Witnesses who reject their religion. This is such a widespread shorthand for the struggle of ex-Witnesses that it appears all over the Reddit boards devoted to them. “I took the red pill,” they say, or, “I got red-pilled” by contact with some feature of the outside world that caused such a break in their worldview that they could not continue holding the beliefs they are required to as Witnesses. This is what happened to me. I’ll tell you about it.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are a Millenarian Christian denomination founded in the late 19th Century alongside similar American religions like Seventh Day Adventists and the Mormons. They were a minor sect until the early 1970s, when a combination of the beginnings of the Neoliberal Program depriving the population of their wealth and political power, and the Church promising its new converts that the end was almost surely going to come in 1975 drove them to exponential growth. I’ve lost exact track since I left 14 years ago, but they currently have something like nine million members worldwide, and four million in the United States. Jehovah’s Witnesses are not exactly a cult, but they have a lot of the features of cults: they control their members with a pretty severe form of indoctrination—thought control—and by limiting their association with outsiders and their ideas. My mom joined up when I was two, right about 1977, when their growth was most pronounced, and I was raised in their eschatology.

One of the central doctrines of the church is that God is going to kill everybody who’s not a Witness in Armageddon, but real soon. Like within six months. They’ve been saying this since their 1975 prediction failed. Supposedly it’s just for God to do this, because those who aren’t Witnesses were offered the chance to accept the “truth” and be saved. This is the point of their door to door preaching work. Since they rejected God, by rejecting the Witnesses at their door, they deserve to die. This had always seemed a touch absurd to me, but indoctrination is a marvelous thing, it can bulldoze those kinds of doubts. However, when I was 27, the elaborate immorality of this idea really became clear to me. For a number of years after this, after my doubts about the justice of such an idea had caused me to leave,