Sociologists may be studying religion more, treating it as an independent variable

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik reports on a new study that suggests the sociology of religion has been getting more attention recently, and, particular, more attention as an independent variable:

The new study on sociology arrives as a working paper of the Social Science Research Council, based on analysis of 587 sociology journal articles on religion, published between 1978 and 2007. The paper — by David Smilde, a professor of sociology, and Matthew May, a graduate student, both at the University of Georgia — finds much that would encourage scholars who want to see more research on religion. But the paper also raises questions about whether American sociologists may be too narrowly focused on some religious groups over others, and over the impact of outside funding, which is growing.

Jaschik provides background, a helpful summary, and some reaction from scholars in the field.

This article could provide the basis for a faculty conversation on changes in academic interest in religion and the (problematic?) role that outside funding may play in these changes.

“Economics is a lot like theology…”

It is slightly off-topic for this blog, but let me recommend the article “Misleading Indicators: How U.S. economists missed the Great Recession” by Notre Dame economist Charles K. Wilber, published in America. Here’s a teaser:

Economics is a lot like theology, despite the former’s claim to be a science. Theology uses self-evident first principles from revelation or natural law and then, through the use of intermediate principles and judgments, evaluates real world issues. Economics uses an abstract model constructed from similarly axiomatic assumptions about how the world works, such as the principles that people are motivated by self-interest, that wants exceed resources or that resources are mobile and fungible. From these principles, economists then develop economic policies, with appropriate regard for real world exceptions to their models.

The problem for both theologians and economists lies in going from the general to the specific. I cannot speak for theologians, but economists are seldom trained in the specifics of how the real world works. Instead, a graduate student in economics spends all of his or her time learning mathematics, statistics and general theory. These tools are then used to develop policy by finding a data set somewhere and applying the given tools to yield an answer.

Purge of Iranian Universities for “un-Islamic” teachings?

The New York Times reports that “there is growing concern within the academic community that the government will purge political and social science departments of professors and curriculums deemed ‘un-Islamic,’ according to academics and political analysts inside and outside Iran.”

Recent speeches by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “suggest that the study of secular topics and ideas has made universities incubators for the political unrest unleashed after the disputed presidential election in June.”

Recommended Reading: The Soul of the American University

George M. Marsden is one of the foremost contemporary historians of American Evangelical Christianity. In his The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994), Marsden offers an intellectual history of America’s leading universities intended to answer the question,

How was it that distinctively Christian teaching could be displaced so easily from the central and substantive role that it had held in American higher education for over two centuries and in the universities of Christendom for many centuries before that? [p. 31]

Marsden’s  detailed and magisterial account of the intellectual transition from “Protestant Establishment” to “Established Nonbelief” rewards careful study. Interestingly, however, it is not his impressive historical account that has gained the most attention but rather his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” in which, given the history that he has recounted, Marsden argues against perpetuating the “strong prejudices against traditional religious viewpoints” found in today’s academy.

Recommended Reading: The Making of the Modern University and the Marginalization of Morality

When discussing religion on campus, it helps to know some history about institutional developments and rise of the modern university, about intellectual shifts in the natural and social sciences as well as in the humanities, about the rise of academic disciplines with professional standards and guilds, about the battles that established the American version of academic freedom and professional responsibility, and about the discrimination against minority groups, especially against religious minorities.

Intersecting all these historical developments is the question of the character formation of students—a primary goal of American higher education from its founding to the present day. One of the best ways to understand this intersection is to read Julie A. Reuben’s The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. (The University of Chicago Press, 1996). As always, I offer only a sketch with the hope that it will entice you to take on the whole book.

Recommended reading: Higher Ed and Religion between the American Civil War and World War I

The modern American college and university system has its origins in the period between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. This period saw the growth of new institutions—especially the research university—and the transformation of old institutions such as the antebellum college.

This time period also saw a new, subdivided, and secular curriculum replace the unified, Protestant (or even Deist) arrangement of learning that was designed to form students in Christian morality and inform them about the harmony between nature and nature’s God. One of the best books on this transformation is Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, 2000). I can sketch only some of its contours.