Forum Fridininum

Elaine Howard Ecklund published an interesting blogpost on the religiosity of scientists on SSRC’s The Immanent Frame weblog. The post is based on research she already has published about in Social Problems (54:2, 2007). She however does not talk about her research findings too much, but instead argues how universities could better facilitate the public discussion on religion and science. A must read for anyone interested in religion, which probably involves all of you who made it here and read this post And of course congratulations to Elaine about being asked to publish on such a prestigious weblog.

For those really interested: I had an interesting discussion two years ago on this subject here: http://religionresearch.org/marten/2005/01/13/anthropologists-are-secularists/ and here http://religionresearch.org/marten/2005/01/14/real-scientists-also-secular-or-not/

Conferencing is mainly: meeting people and getting new ideas. The most important harvest of the SSSR 2007 conference is new people I know, and this must-read list. Succesful conferences last weeks, instead of days…

Bader, V. 2007. Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

Byrnes, T. A., en P. J. Katzenstein. 2006. Religion in an Expanding Europe.

Ecklund, EH, en JZ Park. 2007. Religious Diversity and Community Volunteerism Among Asian Americans. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 46, no. 2: 233-244.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. 2007. Religion And Social Justice for Immigrants.

Jeung, R. 2005. Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches.

Kniss, F. L., en P. D. Numrich. 2007. Sacred Assemblies and Civic Engagement: How Religion Matters for America’s Newest Immigrants. Rutgers University Press.

Olupona, J. O. K., en R. Gemignani. 2007. African Immigrant Religions in America. New York University Press.

Thomas, William Isaac, en Florian Znaniecki. 1958. The Polish peasant in Europe and America,. New York: Dover Publications.

I’ve been to an interesting session at the SSSR conference 2007 about the process of academic publishing. Several editors and publishers of JSSR and Oxford University Press presented their thoughts on the subject. Some tips & don’ts on how to get your work published. Read the rest of this entry »

A funny and helpful list of free software for the poor social scientist:

The Harvard’s impoverished social scientist guide to free software

Thus, the very experience of the weakening of the foundations of religion becomes the starting point for the reconsideration of European religious heritage with reference to two specific aspects: firstly, the possibility of redefining autonomy on the basis of Judeo-Christian concepts of otherness and mutual relations, rather than as merely the liberal affirmation of an individual’s autonomy in his or her private life; secondly, the issue of dominion over nature, which might be considered, in the light of the Judeo-Christian concepts of the Creation, as something other than raw material and a source of revenue. In my opinion, the question of the “European soul” is best addressed by considering these two aspects, not by referring nostalgically to a religious past that is both glorious and painful but which has, in any case, definitively ceased to exist.

An interesting article by Hervieu Legér in Eurozine

“To see why the pure Hobbesian state is not stable, consider the IPD. Let i, the native, be nasty-never the first to cooperate-so that it alway defects with its clones and its neutral mutants. The invaders are STFT and some nonnasty strategy j. We know that in nontrivial games one can always design a j such that V(STFT,j) > V(ij). So to be uniformly stable, i must punish STFT for doing better with j than it does. But since i is already defecting in every period against STFT, it has exhausted all possible punishments. So no version of i can work. Hence any nasty native can be beaten, and so the corresponding population state of complete defection is unstable.”,
p. 1524, in: Bendor, Jonathan, and Piotr Swistak. 2001. The Evolution of Norms. American Journal of Sociology 106 (6):1493 - 1545.

Naam * Adres * Etniciteit(en) * Institutionele inbedding (bijv. in een groter verband) * Taal * Land van origine

Een mogelijk doel van de databank kan zijn het ontwikkelen van een model op basis waarvan de mate waarin een migrantenkerk bijdraagt aan civiele en publieke participatie beoordeeld / verklaard / voorspeld kan worden.

Stevens2004 suggereert dat een model van “change in ethnic churches” te ontwerpen valt. De religieuze cultuur van de home -en de host country is van belang voor de mate waarin een migranten kerk ethnisch exclusief is (en dus geïntegreerd is? Het is de vraag of Stevens dat ook bedoelt…).

Interesting article by José Casanove, a well known sociologist of religion: Eurozine - article

Zegt de ene vraagstelling tegen de andere:
“En? Heb jij al een conclusie?”
Waarop de andere vraagstelling zegt:
“Nee, er komt geen eind aan.”

SixBillion.org, Life Behind Walls.

An “artistic novel” (e.g. a comic book) by a Iranian woman, about her life in a theocracy. You can view one chapter at the link above.

The description that comes with the book:

In the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Marjane Satrapi’s middle-class parents sent her to boarding school in Vienna. Satrapi returned to Iran in the mid-1980s, as the country continued to fight a bloody war with Iraq. By 1989 she had enrolled in the art program at Iran’s state university. View a student’s life in post-revolution Iran.