Conversation, Congregations, and the Cape

Just returned from a fruitful meeting as part of the Congregational Studies Team including Steve Warner, Nancy Ammerman, Bill McKinney, Larry Mamiya, and Jim Nieman, with fellows Orit Avishai, Lynne Gerber, and Tricia Bruce, and special guest scholar John Bartkowski.  What a fine group! 

Having known some of this group for about 10 years (and nearly everyone since beginning my professorate at Davidson), I see a difference in the relationships among this group.

Image via Wikipedia

I arrived at Cape Cod on Sunday and came home Thursday -- nearly four days of fourteen-plus hours of conversation each day on religion and congregational life in the US and abroad.  We met informally around breakfast, kicked up conversations at our conference site next to the coast morning and afternoon, taking breaks to have lunch and dinner in Hyannis.  Visits to sites, including a large, Brazilian Pentecostal Church and their charismatic pastor. More informal meetings late into the night.

Such immersive conversation gives opportunity to think about the nature of "conversation" among scholars.  And how rare it really is.  While long-time relationships happen among some scholars, given the discussions of this week I can be fairly confident in saying that most scholars don't have opportunity for warm, relational, and consistently constructive encounters with others in their field.

Conversation among scholars is generally a polite affair, accomplished at receptions or before or after conference sessions.  Usually short, amiable, and generally quite distant.  Scholars have a nice way of getting along with each other (for the most part) even if they radically disagree.  But a "distant respect" is quite different from a "caring respect" that genuinely imbues the interactions among the people I was around this past week.

Not that disagreements or even outright arguments don't happen--they do.  And not that this team exists as some form of romanticized utopia.  That's not my view, and not my point.  Instead, my observation from these past few days is that there is a different level of scholarship that occurs among active researchers who respect and trust each other.

Image by tonyhall via Flickr

The people I was around this week are all very strong people, brilliant in ways I cannot properly specify, yet quite human in ways that can be so disarming.  We tease and play, at the same time reveal aspect of each others thoughts and published work not commonly recognized. Most importantly, our interactions reveal sides of each other's scholarship that are both formed and unformed, with "set" ideas alongside ideas that are continuing to be reshaped.  Here is a group in which uncertainty is welcome as each of us find our way through the difficulty of thinking that is still so very fluid.

As scholars, so often we work alone, careful of who we tell about our ideas.  Direction for many of our projects is not quite there.  It can be unsettling to be so unsure of ourselves today when we can look at our cv's and have such solid evidence of quality publications from our past.  Can we complete more good work? Can we get the help we need as we find our way? And will people still respect us when we admit we just might not be so clear on what we're doing?

Yet admitting uncertainty among those who respect both us as a person and the messy process of research is perhaps the most productive activity to be found in scholarship.  I'm glad to have a group that allows this to happen for myself.  And I hope I can be that person for others because the future of good scholarship can only be found if we avoid overconfidence and accept the feedback of others before we become only distantly caring and rigidly brilliant.

Hacker Ethics and Higher Learning: The Moral Clash Determining the Future of Education

Special thanks to Joe Creech and the good people of the Lilly Fellows Program for an enjoyable time of conversation on the nature of "place" in our professional lives as scholars in higher education. 

I'm just recovering from a very full conference schedule with the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts annual conference held this year at Valparaiso University.  My warm thanks are extended to the many new friends and colleagues I met over several meals and dozens of conversations.

It was an honor to be invited to give a keynote address along with two other notable scholars.

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The conference revolved on the notion of "place" in higher education and, appropriately, there was a scholar of art and architecture, a theologian working on issues of globalization, and myself, a sociologist who pays attention to religion and social change. I focused on the transformation of higher learning welling-up from the cumulative transformations in digital connectivity.

My talk revolved around two moral orientations, two moral "codes" if you will, that are clashing (rather than converging) in higher education today.  The first code is the formative retreat ethic that stresses the moral imperative of creating a cloistered space of education that works toward discipline and even piety. Our institutions of higher education have an underlying moral orientation: a formative retreat for the cultivation of virtuous adults. I speculate that the stronger the religious orientation of the college, the stronger the formative moral imperative of the institution.

On the other hand is a new ethic, a Hacker Ethic, that emphasizes openness, free access, and utter playfulness. The Hacker Code, Hacker Ethics, and Hacker Culture – these are terms I use heuristically to describe a nascent, overarching ethos that has fueled the development of our increasingly “connected” (I mean digitally, online, networked connected) lives from the 1950s until now. Various principles are involved (I give several lists and descriptions in my talk), and much of it centers on digital connectivity.

What I stressed to this esteemed group of scholars and administrators is that higher education is caught in a larger transition. Banks, phone companies, and our local and federal governments are all firmly committed to open internet connectivity. For example, the federal government just announced at the end of September that while we can still physically mail our returns, more people are e-filing and, as a cost cutting measure, the federal government will no longer mail tax forms, but we must access them online. Examples could be multiplied many times over.

Our schools are dominated by this connectivity as well – Barry Wellman on twitter recently wrote, “Student finds it impossible to go cold turkey off the grid because official announcements & research materials are only online.” The internet is not just a tool of knowledge and business but has become something much more.

Image via Wikipedia

We submit grades online, our students register for courses online, use electronic course reserves (72% of professors use course management systems), answer questions, set calendar appointments, distribute departmental information and committee reports, and even submit journal articles and whole book manuscripts. Increasingly we post syllabi and study content, we skype into meetings, we blog and tweet (about one-third of professors as far as I can find a statistic) our results.  Administrators are pushing internet connectivity to solve certain problems and scholars are using internet connectivity to solve others.

It took me a while… but I soon saw that there was a new set of ideals being promoted. What fuels the development of these new digital realms is not just clever innovation but a new morality, what’s been called the Hacker Ethic. Hackers represent those who were taking advantage of the new spaces and new possibilities opened by the creation of new structures. It’s an entire moral orientation.

Although you can't see the Power Point slides emphasizing different points, here's part 2 of 4 parts of the keynote available on YouTube:

More on the "Hacker Ethic" can be found in part 3.

I'm grateful for the time at Valpo and a new set of conversations.  Certainly there are many others who understand these dynamics far better than I do and can speak far more articulately about them.  But this was my chance to package my best understanding of the things that affect my life and work everyday.  And I'm convinced they are propelling more substantial changes that threaten our traditional understandings of higher education in unanticipated ways.

2011 Summer Research Seminar: Congregations and Social Change

Congregations and Social Change:

Adaptation and Innovation among Religious Communities
June 27 - July 22, 2011

I will be directing a research seminar at Calvin College next summer. This is an open invitation:

Seminar Description

This research seminar will closely examine the ongoing relationships between congregations and processes of broad ranging, societal change. By incorporating a historical sensitivity and scholarship rooted in a sociological perspective, the seminar will continually connect societal arrangements with adaptation, reaction, innovation, and experimentation in congregational beliefs and practices. The focus will be on congregations of all types (whether church, synagogue, temple, or mosque) and encourages a look at both interpersonal dynamics (beliefs, micro-exchanges, small group interaction, etc.) as well as more macro-level phenomena (globalization, technological shifts, political systems, etc.).

The analytical perspectives on congregations can include --

• singular case studies, particular historical periods,
• whole denominational networks (Mormon wards, eastern orthodox churches, Jewish synagogues, mosques and Islamic centers as well as Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Zoroastrian and other religious temples and missions),
• types of congregations (small, rural, independent, mega, etc.),
• regional centers (Southern California, Manhattan, Chicago Metro), and
• any other appropriate and manageable arena of analysis.

The seminar also welcomes any aspect of congregational life that can be examined in relation to social change, for example,

• changes or comparisons of liturgical design,
• formation and negotiation of political identity,
• mobilization tied to extra-congregational organizations or social movements,
• creation of age-targeted ministry (twenty-somethings to retirees),
• incorporation of creative arts,
• negotiated relationships between religious and civic service structures or public agencies,
• adoption of online social networking or use of new media and technology,
• management of multiethnic/multiracial dynamics,
• etc, etc.

Seminar participants will read sociological and historical literature, engage ethnographic methodology commonly employed in contemporary research, and discuss their own work toward creating a community of scholarship oriented around common concerns. Ideally, each participant will produce a polished piece of writing as a result of the seminar, eg., completing a conference paper, journal article, dissertation chapter, book chapter, or publishable mass-media article. As participants work on their own congregations and social change research during the seminar, they will receive guided feedback in a supportive environment. Housing, daily lunch with other scholars, library access, and a small research stipend is provided for seminar participants.

Who May Apply

This research seminar is most intended for current and recent doctoral students in fields related to religious and organizational studies (sociology, anthropology, history, ethnic studies, folklore, and others). While the seminar is designed toward social science-oriented scholars holding, or advanced to candidacy for, the terminal degree in their field (typically the PhD), I eagerly welcome humanities-oriented scholars as well theologically-oriented participants from seminaries and divinity schools. To the extent possible, I will select a group diverse in gender, ethnic, confessional, and disciplinary backgrounds, and with a variety of research sites (i.e., the confessional and/or social identities of the communities they plan to study). I also plan to choose among applicants a mix of participants ranging from doctoral candidates through recent doctorates in tenure-track positions and scholars working on their first or second books to mid-career scholars retooling with defined projects.

See Calvin Seminars for more information

on the director, guest speakers, and application process.

Application information is at the bottom of the page. Deadline is January 14, 2011.

Reading, Reading, and More Reading

I'm on my way out with family for the Labor Day Weekend, and as on other longer trips the biggest decision to make is not what to wear, it's what to read. I have a stack (okay, I actually have several stacks) of books to get through, a mix of personal and "business" reading, covering vast realms of fiction (literature, poetry, graphic novels) and nonfiction (history, philosophy, biography, social sciences, and more) that I hope to complete in the next year or two or five....

As I look at my own stack(s) of books and deciding what to take on our family trip, I'm reminded of how much I appreciate the opportunity I have to CHOOSE what I have to read. As a scholar, there is certainly a mix of "want to" and "have to" reading, but overall I devour writing that attracts my interest and my fascination while avoiding or skimming those that are more obligatory.

But as I'm writing this, I am also reminded that my professional duties occasionally assign me to read a less-than-satisfactory tome. Even so, I almost always find that what I had never intended to read becomes just as or even more valuable to me as something I had intended to read a long time.

For my students this semester, reading is more "forced" on them -- I'm thinking of several of them who are no-doubt slogging through dozens and even hundreds of pages this Labor Day Weekend in preparation for next week's classes.

One set of students is beginning James Cone's remarkable Malcolm and Martin in America, a book that will further prepare our understanding of Barack Obama's presidency and help place it in the context of other modern African American leaders and the political circumstances they faced.

Another set of students is making their way this weekend through Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a book that has had it's reputational ups & downs but which sociologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion will at least reluctantly agree with it's significance for developing analytical conceptions of religious & social life.

One student is reading through Karl Marx's Grundrisse, a is sort-of a thick, rough draft of Das Kapital that weighs in at well over 800 pages.

And another student is beginning to work through Max Weber's masterful writings collated in Economy and Society -- one of my personal favorite books of all time.

As they make their way through these readings I hope my students will have the same experience I often do: required reading may not have been my personal preference, but in the end these readings become among the most memorable and thought-shaping of my life. The unfamiliarity and uncertainty involved in such texts stimulates a close attention to the words that "beach reads" and bestsellers rarely demand. In addition, the need to talk and write about such texts with other "smart" people cultivates an engaged standpoint that encourages us to draw out (and sometimes tear out) the unstated implications of found in these works.

So as I leave behind my stack(s) of books this weekend, I wish my students with their own growing stack(s) of "to read" books well with the hope that they will have a positive and even transformative experience. What may have been "required reading" today may very well someday be considered "must-read" in the near future.

Heidegger and the Quandary of Insider/Outsider Roles in Religious Research: A Methodological Note

This week afforded me a bit of reading and reflection through Heidegger’s Being and Time as part of my ongoing attempt to grow in my scholarship.

As an ethnographer, I regularly immerse myself in religious communities both short and long term -- see a recent post at Duke Divinity blog about a recent church visit -- and as such am regularly confronted with what was introduced to me as “the insider/outsider problem of religion.” The dilemma centers around a core question: Who is best able to understand religion, the committed or the agnostic? More important, what are the challenges and solutions for achieving a satisfactory understanding of religion (not just for scholars, but for everyone) considering one’s stance? My first attempt to answer this question is printed in an extended appendix of my first book A Mosaic of Believers. But reading that now, and continuing to think on the issue, I’m finding my framing of both the problem and the answer to be much too glib.

My methodological answer is essentially that immersion in a religious community along with a simultaneous immersion in a scholarly community allows scholars enough “distance” to reasonably comment on issues and concerns of scholars without being unredeemably caught up in the interests and pretensions of any particular religiously committed sphere. It’s a serviceable answer, passes muster for the pragmatic work most social scientists do every day.

Yet I continue to find the issue to be important, not the least of which is that I consider myself to be a religiously committed person. I am not entirely comfortable with the notion of a self that is caught in a back-and-forth motion, swinging between two blatantly idealized communities, and sustaining an assurance that I am able to not only keep these things in check but to truly believe that the doing of such a thing accurately represents our lived experience as researchers.

Looking back on my experience in doing the work of two ethnographies in the past ten years, I find my resonance, my “affinity,” to the churches I studied to contain more complexity than I usually have the time or the patience to consider. Not only did my stance as a sociologist create some tensions with in first study of Mosaic, but then my later relationship to the energetic Prosperity/Word of Faith church Oasis (another article here) produced entirely new ambiguities as many aspects of the religiosity found there does not entirely lie with all my religious sympathies. Especially at Oasis, the boundaries of being an “insider” became so fluid (usually in considering all aspects of figuring out to what degree am I part of these people) that I no longer found the neat division between “insider” and “outsider” I wrote about in my appendix to be so helpful – and that perhaps my articulated stance is dangerously misleading to my scholarship.

This week I’ve been taking a trip through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (with help from Magda King) and am once again captured by his articulation of “authenticity” or “owned-ness” of our selves. Heidegger sees our humanity as ever-always caught up in the doing-of-things as we continually project ourselves into the world. But Heidegger’s important nuance is that we “fall” into the world by being so-easily enrapt in the an everydayness among fellow beings such that we don’t ever stop to consider the wider implications of what we are doing (descriptive) or, especially, the possibilities of who we may become (prescriptive) should we grasp onto our available limits within our finitude.

His point is especially important to me as a researcher. Looking back at my initial answer to the question of the “insider/outsider problem,” Heidegger suggests that I may be leading a dis-owned, inauthentic existence in my methodological approach because I merely “fall” into the ways of being within these two communities. On the one hand I take on the lifeways of a religious community, and on the other hand articulate, translate, commiserate with the lifeways of a scholarly community, with my work constantly going back and forth across the in-between void in my person juxtaposing two seemingly “isolated” positions in an endless array until a satisfactory product (Book! Tenure! Career!) resolves itself -- which then propels into a new cycle.

It’s Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and “owned-ness”/"disowned-ness" that’s got me. He’s profoundly right that our normal day-to-day life, even as highly self-aware scholars, is to be caught up in our ways without question. It’s one of the liberating aspects of being historians and sociologists – we come to see through distance how embedded human beings are in the structures of their world without their being conscious of it. And it is the privilege of scholars that we self-consciously reflect on ourselves and our various apprehensions in order not to "fall" easily prey to facile pretensions of what we think we know. I strongly value this primary privilege of scholarship, the ability to embrace our self-reflexivity in productive ways, and I fear that my first answer to the study of religion misleads the earnest task of becoming a more-wholly-self-possessed person who is accomplishing the uniquely human task of carefully considering all the potentialities for yielding insights and knowledge in our world.

Heidegger's point becomes even more salient when I consider the dominating aspects of institutionalization – that human beings ritualize ways of being and knowing in such easy, non-problematic ways. I come to this: If religious scholarship is simply learning to engage the institutionalized spheres of “religion” on the one hand, and then articulate them within the institutionalized spheres of “scholarship” on the other, then we “fall” into highly ritualized ways of being that radically limit the potentialities for our work. Here I will quickly mention Courtney Bender’s wonderful new book The New Metaphysicals (see current dialogue at Immanent Frame) which thoughtfully engages the issues of institutionalization in religious life and in scholarship in a fresh way. The book has got me thinking about a lot of things (It is a wonderful conversational read), and it seems to fit this particular dynamic well. Her focus on “practices” is strategic, and it is perhaps this approach I must absorb even moreso since it appears to allow Bender to be far more “self-possessed” than I feel at the moment.

In the end Heidegger stimulates my courage to consider how it is that I regularly constitute my world not merely in my role as "scholar" but as a full person. I no longer wish to maintain a pretense of bounded areas which do not touch one another, especially when I am fully aware that it is “me” (the “I am”) who is engaged in my whole life. Rather than "fall" into a false sense that I am merely receiving and recording on the one end, then resolving and reporting on the other, knowledge in such simple-minded ways, I'm thinking that f I am to continue to grow as a scholar I must take much better possession of my own self and extract whichever awareness with accompanying conceptualizations as best I can so as to more fruitfully participate in truly authentic dialogues with my colleagues and other "beings" around me. It is hopefully taking the best aspects of the best conference sessions with the most stimulating, original, and engaged minds which I've witnessed at conferences and seminars over the years and accentuate that to a much higher degree into my work with friends, neighbors, and (dare say) even my own self.

So, with more historians of American religion engaging in ethnographic practices I thought it might be worthwhile sharing these few preliminary thoughts here. Whether it is Heidegger or the resources from the historian’s craftbox or somewhere else I'm missing, I am in need of a much different conversation on the ability to sustain an “owned” scholarship of religion that respects our ongoing engagement with the world that maximizes the creative potential of our as-yet-unyielded insights.

Crossposted at the ever-stimulating Religion in American History blog.

Yes, It's Summer, and I'm Already Planning for the Fall

Summer hit hard this year - kids coming out of school, several deadlines looming, a stack of books to read, talks to prepare, papers to edit, some phone calls and emails to make, work around the house...you get the picture. I can't decide if my summer highlight so far was a wonderful visit talking with several scholars of race and religion at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, or a weekend working with a chainsaw, sweating out the humid Carolina heat, cutting down trees in my backyard -- I must say hacking through those stubbornly hard limbs and hearing them crackle and crash on the ground was strangely satisfying.

(FYI, this picture is not me, but you get the idea.)

Sitting at my desk, I'm once again caught between celebrating finished projects and making progress on new ones. This alternating back and forth weave is part of the rhythm of academic life I'm still getting used to. Now that I have things through "the pipeline," I can read a just published article on one side of my desk ("how pretty! how nicely written! how did I do that?") to the mangled notes and stuttering drafts forming on my computer desktop. That weird sense of something complete versus something so haphazardly unformed is disorienting, but I'm getting there. Part of life I suppose, whether academic or not.

I find some refuge in a series of books I'm reading: combination of fiction (Devil's Dream by Madison Smart Bell at the moment), non-fiction (An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought by Stefanos Geroulanos, among others), and another trip through the Christian Scriptures (this time working with notes from a beautifully bound newly published 4th Edition Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV I received as compensation for reviewing a manuscript for Oxford earlier this year). Refuge because these are bounded material things with a clear beginning and ending which place no demand on me yet stimulate my imagination in a hundred directions.

I also find refuge in playing around a bit more than usual this summer. As a family we've take a few trips to Carowinds, our local roller-coaster & water park, and seen a few movies. I'll admit to sleeping in a bit more than usual and lingering in bookstores a bit more than normal. More fun is coming with a trip to New York City in August and a family visit down to Georgia before school starts.

As to Fall 2010, a few things coming around. September will feature a new conference of emerging church-type leaders in Durham, NC, called "Big Tent Christianity" (I'm going by memory here) that looks to be a very strong showing of several people central to the movement. For me, it's a two-hour drive to experience of being with some very friendly people who are working through some very interesting questions about what needs to be kept and what needs to be thrown out of contemporary Christianity, so the conversation ranges between theology, ethics, anthropology, and a whole lot of good eating. One thing I appreciate about this crowd is the value for conversation - long conversation, not easily wrapped up and quickly solved questions, and lots of "let's throw it on the wall and see if it sticks" kind of speculation.

September also features the theological conversation regularly planned by Emergent Village. This year, the focus is on global theology and diversity, with scholars coming from an array of what sociologists call "social locations" to try to jar Western-shaped Christianity out of its blind spots. {CORRECTION: The Emergent Village dialogue is November 1-3!! see link for more info... h/t Steve Knight.}

In October I'll be speaking at the 20th anniversary conference for the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University, and I may try to sneak in time with current Lilly Fellows meeting a couple days before the conference so I can get a good "fix" among historians of American religion (I really envy the work of these historians), picking their brains on all the things I wish I had the time and expertise to study and paying attention to the sheer intelligence that will surely be in the room.

October will also be one of the best conferences of the year with the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Loads of good things already slated for the program this year, with the meetings being in Baltimore, Maryland. Never been there, so hope to catch the best of what's available to experience while catching up with a few friends.

The American Academy of Religion meetings are in Atlanta this year. It's a bad time for me, with the SSSR meetings happening the exact same weekend, but I might make it for a day or two. {CORRECTION follow-up: With the Emergent Village Theological Conversation happening same place/same time, I may be able to pop back & forth...hmmm...}

And by that time, I hope to be moving to the home stretch of courses for the fall, especially my experimental course titled "Race, Religion, and Barack Obama" -- a new course that uses the life and presidency of Obama to highlight sociological issues on the interplay of race and religion in American society.

Sabbatical Ends - New Year Begins

Well, I'm coming off of being on sabbatical from Davidson this year. That meant few responsibilities at the college, yet taking on other commitments elsewhere. Far from a quiet year at home, this past year was one of the "fullest" schedules I've ever had.

Image by Joits via Flickr

The "Year of Research and Rest" really kicked-off with a seminar headed by the esteemed Steve Warner, professor of sociology at University of Illinois, Chicago, and hosted through the Seminars in Christian Scholarship program at Calvin College (see Michael Emerson's very cool seminar coming 2010). Michigan is so pleasant in the summer, and our family enjoyed connecting with old friends as well as making new ones. It was great to see other colleagues who visited as "guest lecturers" as well. Nice job, Steve! Especially memorable is a morning service led by Steve and his lovely wife Anne Heider at Calvin's chapel (pictured on the right). I'm looking forward to a reunion of sorts with the team at the annual meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Denver later this year.

While in Grand Rapids, I had a nice interview for the show Inner Compass broadcasting through PBS. That was fun.

Image via Wikipedia

From there, it was off to Houston.

Special thanks to the Humanities Research Center at Rice University who hosted my stay in Fall of 2009. My colleagues there in Religious Studies and Sociology (with my fellow "HRC Fellows" alongside) provided sustained kindness and camaraderie.

I completed several projects at Rice (including a forthcoming article titled "Ego-Affirming Evangelicalism" in Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review and made significant progress on my book manuscript for Oxford). And my students in my Race and Religion Seminar were great - pleasure to have wide-ranging, immersive conversation on issues both personal and public.

Happy to see my new book Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church published last October. Reviews are just starting to come in - so far, so good! Thanks to colleagues using the book in their class (see Dr. Walt Bower's review at Barnes and Noble.com). Students seem to relate to the "Hollywood angle" while sneaking in some sophisticated sociological theorizing. Relevance structures and teaching - that's how we roll...

Although it was back to Davidson for Spring, it really was more of a launch point for a schedule full of speaking, traveling, and consulting in a mix of academic and congregational contexts. Thanks to Bill McKinney, I've enjoyed getting to know the community at the Pacific School of Religion. These are my California kin-folk who are so willing to embrace a wide-ranging dialogue on the future of American religion. Scott Thumma and Warren Bird provided an opportunity for me to join a team of scholars studying the "megachurch phenomenon" using extensive data they've collected. Our time at the Innovation Gathering in Dallas (notes & audio here) was productive and fun. More coming from that project, including presentations in Denver and a possible edited book.

Image by >>>WonderMike<<< via Flickr

Thanks also to Bayside Church in Granite Bay, a huge center for new-style evangelicalism in Sacramento, and to the American Baptist Church General Executive Council, for each hosting a set of conversations focused on an overlap between their questions and my own research concerns.

In addition to continuing projects, I am excited about a new ethnographic project started this past year on political identity. I found a fascinating congregation in Charlotte, NC, that strives to negotiate the conservative-liberal political dimension in a way that reveals significant trends happening in Obama-Age American Christianity. Special thanks to leaders and members who have been interviewed so far -- their rich experiences contribute to all of us understanding the new changes occurring at the intersection of politics and religion in the US.

In the midst of all that, my first book is coming back to get some fresh attention. With a new preface, a second edition of my book A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church will arrive sometime in early Fall. Nice to see a slim, affordable edition available for students, church leaders, and anyone interested in where religion may be headed.

There's no way to represent all the happenings this year. So many new friends, so many exciting projects, so many relationships that continue to deepen. I'm looking forward to another exciting year!

Much Thought - Little Reflection

I've had a lot of things to think about -- and such little time to reflect on it all.

Image via Wikipedia

A leisurely summer has proven elusive this year.

A scattering of commitments both personal and professional have me traveling here and there, going from one meeting to another, bouncing from book to website to article and back to book, with writing accomplished for several venues -- but not here.

I'm caught between thoughts, between commitments, between considerations of various sorts (just turn on the evening news any day from the past several weeks), and it looks like it will be another month or so before I can get back into the swing of fully committed, sustained thinking.

Ah well.

Now I see the growing attraction of Twitter. 140 characters. Once a day or so. Everybody's happy.

As for the rest of the season, I am looking forward to a course I am leading looking at church, religion, and social change at PSR in Berkeley that is only days away. I'll then attend the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association in August. I'll also attend the Association for the Sociology of Religion meetings.

And I've signed up for a conference in September featuring the great theologian Jurgen Moltmann. His theology is particularly attuned to the vast currents of social change that occurred in the 20th Century.

After all that, the coming Fall should find me with a few more experiences, a few projects behind me, and a few more hours to spare for the projects before me (kids will be in school) so as to allow some uninterrupted moments to work out a few thoughts.

Seminar Course in Berkeley - Catalyzing Creative Leadership

The summer is in full gear for me between conferences, writing, interviews, family vacation, and preparation for a summer course to be held at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

View of San Francisco Bay from Berkeley. Image via Wikipedia

If you are interested in auditing a stimulating class or looking for a fun way to earn credit for a seminary degree, join us in August in the Bay Area --

Catalyzing Creative Leadership for the Emerging Church

Instructor: Gerardo Marti, PhD
Date and Time: August 3-7, 2009; 8:30 am -12:30 pm
Units: Audit ($330.00)
2 Continuing Education Units ($355.00)
1.5 semester hours (general--$636.00; current PLTS/PSR student--$523.00)

Description: This course explores the relationships between culture and the emerging church and the implications of these relationships for effective spiritual leadership.

Image by >>>WonderMike<<< via Flickr

In addition to references to church history and biblical scriptures, the course continually connects societal arrangements with contemporary innovation and experimentation in congregational beliefs and practices.

By incorporating scholarship rooted in a sociological perspective, the course also looks more generally to the ongoing changes and negotiations that the Christian Church always makes in relation to the broader world.

syllabus instructor bio

Registration is at the PSR site.

On Interdisciplinarity at the Religion and American Culture Conference

Quick post: Over at the Religion and American History blog, you can find more discussion about the Religion and American Culture conference from last week.  

I added my own first thoughts on how the conference addressed the effort by scholars to cross between academic disciplines.  What are the possibilities for a productive interchange between disciplines that study American religion?  The question turns out to be more significant than I anticipated.  

One challenge for any conference on interdisciplinarity involves highlighting scholars who have made outstanding advancements in their own discipline --

To be an outstanding scholar very often means confounding the prevailing wisdom of a particular field. When professional boundaries are breached, scholars are forced to address issues and concerns often taken for granted by their own colleagues. Further, when these scholars achieve notoriety, they are caught up in debates (often defending their work) arguing and addressing issues within their own discipline. So when these scholars give 15 minute presentations catching people up to “the state of the discipline,” they end of talking about issues that lie at the very center of their own fields.

There's much more, along with several comments.  Read the full post at the Religion and American History blog.

Complexities of Race, Complications of Interdisciplinary Research, and Coordinating Sensitivities: Religion and American Culture Conference

By the time the session on “Race, Ethnicity, and Religious Pluralism” rolled around, my laptop had completely died. But I made a few notes on this last substantive session, a session that was both interesting and varied, with perspectives that were not readily connected to each other but important nonetheless.

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Rudy Busto from the department of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (hey Rudy, you can thank me later for spelling it out) made a strong case that the terms “race,” “ethnicity,” and “religious pluralism” are commonly thought of as analytically similar (if not synonymous with one another).

Then, he quickly showed what scholars of race/ethnicity readily understand -- that any notion of interchangeability among these terms is not only ludicrous but also (and more importantly for my own perspective) not useful for drawing out critical dynamics that need explaining -- not just assuming -- in our work.

One of the more important differences in these terms is how “race” emphasizes power relationships while “ethnicity” tones down the discussion toward differences in background, lifestyle, etc. From my own perspective, the use of "ethnicity" draws on alternative theoretical perspectives and can point out other conflicts and ironies that exist in relation to discussions of religion.

For me, what Busto shows is how analytic concepts are powerful, yet constraining, for highlighting aspects of the human experience. Bringing these perspectives into productive tension is required.

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Helen Rose Ebaugh, sociologist from the University of Houston, spent time describing the rise of a stream of scholarship she helped to pioneer, an area referred to as “Religion and the New Immigrants” (her book is connected here).

In talking about the process of a new research arena emerging, Ebaugh demonstrates the importance of scholars working with large funding sources to organize research initiatives drawing attention to particular phenomena. In her experience, interdisciplinarity strengthens broad scale research.

But she also showed how potentially powerful coordination of results can fall flat. Funding sources “move on” with other priorities, and scholars get pressured to publish their own papers in various venues – a quicker “pay off” in academic rewards in comparison with the effort and the burden of waiting on people with disparate perspectives from various fields to put things together.

In short, while it’s exciting to stimulate new, interdisciplinary knowledge, it’s disappointing when the results are short-circuited due to pressures inherent to the academy.

David Wills, from the department of history at Amherst College, spoke about the issues of race and pluralism from the standpoint that combines a sociological approach that appreciates the dynamics of contemporary phenomena with historical approaches that put together longer strains of historical sensitivities.

Underlying Wills remarks is an answer to the question of whether sociology and history can be brought into a productive partnership. Well, yes, of course it can; his own teaching and research does this all the time.

Jokingly referring to himself as the last speaker of the last panel, it was an appropriate ending for the thematic sessions.

19th Century Evangelicals, Religious "Nones," and Anybody Can Talk about Religion: Religion and American Culture Conference

On Saturday afternoon, the conversation began with reflections on American Religion as it relates to Politics, Secularization, and the Public Square...

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Daniel Walker Howe, from the department of history at UCLA and Oxford University (and recent Pulitzer prize winning writer of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) provided a historical overview of the reversals among Evangelicals and the way in which they are related to the Republican party.

Howe reminded the group that Evangelicalism was a dominant, organized, and transformative influence in American society in the early 19th century.

Yes, Higher criticism and the intellectual winning over of Darwinism in the early 20th Century effectively split American Protestantism between those that accommodated these approaches and those that rejected them. But until that time, Evangelicals affiliated with the state, supported strong government to provide education and strong structure and tariff protection as well as temperance legislation against liquor.

For Howe, the repeal of prohibition in the early 20th Century turned Evangelicals against the state. That’s when Evangelicalism became “conservative.”

Mark Silk from the department of religion at Trinity College came out strongly against interdisciplinarity, yet spent much of his time talking about the religious narrative of “religious nones.” He speculates that the research that found a doubling of the proportion of “nones” in American society gained so much attention because it runs counter to our new understanding of the post-9/11 world which has raised the level of religious awareness and discourse to extremely high levels.

Indianapolis City Market nicolernorman Flickr

At the end of our conversation this survey research there remained an outstanding question: What is the meaning of religions “nones”?

Answer: Hmmm, well... there's a great deal of ambiguity. Silk says there is much more research desperately needed to tease out the implications of this emergent, yet unclear, category of analysis.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a very interesting and very articulate professor from the University at Buffalo Law School, spoke persuasively about the difficulty of being a “scholar” of religion.

“It’s not that there is no religion in the academy,” she said, “but that it is everywhere, and that we have no control of how religion is discussed.”

As a legal scholar, she consistently finds that the fact she has a religious studies degree doesn’t matter, it does not lend any particular weight to her opinions. All Americans talk about religion. Anybody can talk about religion. The most important aspect of this for scholars is that it is difficult to help the general public appreciate that there is need for a level of expertise to talk about religion today.

She asserts that it’s not that the study of religion is not important to people, but rather that the study of religion requires training.

Humility, Aesthetics, and the Failure of Connecting American Historians to Sociology - Religion and American Culture Conference

Dear readers -- a gentle reminder that these brief snippets from last week’s American and Religious Culture Conference in Indianapolis are not summaries as much as my own brief notes of interesting and useful comments from a very, very full agenda. Philip, I hope the panelists's written remarks will be made available to us soon!

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Courtney Bender, sociologist from the department of religion at Columbia University, launched into a further discussion of interdisciplinarity. She articulated that disciplinarity is a good thing, yet because academic fields are so heterogeneous (so many debates within, so much theoretical depth to discover), we must understand the unique challenges of working across disciplines.

We live in a world that works fast and we are pressured to do things very quickly. But interdisciplinary work requires us to slow down, take time to make connections, and take on a very different “discipline” of doing two different things. To become interdisciplinary, we must master a different way of waking up in the morning and learn to habitually ask different questions, routinely approaching reality with a different set of lenses.

Interdisciplinarity should also make us humble and modest. (Nervous laughter from these academics.) Although scholars who work across disciplines at first seem heroic as those brave people who bridge the gap and have interesting insights because they boldly move between areas, it is more true that once you get in these conversations you find how much you really don’t know. You quickly find out other people know so much more than you do!

Even when we find ourselves among scholars who think of us as quite different because of the broadness of our engagement, we must recognize that interdisciplinary scholars are often forced to “cherry-pick” arguments from other disciplines. Although we may come to know some things here and there, we should be warned that this does not make us arbiters or brokers between disciplines.

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Carol B. Duncan from the department of religion and culture at Wilfrid Laurier University works between sociology and cultural studies and has interacted with scholarship from America, UK, France, and the Caribbean. Her own work exists at the intersection of Diaspora studies, Popular culture, and studies of Black Church culture.

Overall, Duncan emphasized the importance of engagement with narrative structure and content -- including actively drawing on insights from artists, writers, and visual cultures.

Duncan described her exposure to novelist Zora Neal Thurston and is now able to incorporate humanistic insights utilizing aesthetic sensibilities. Such appreciation not only sophisticates and enlivens her thinking but also counters the routine approach to human beings she sees in social scientists who view human beings as ahistorical, individual agents.

Finally, David Hall from the Harvard Divinity School revealed that social historians with sociological views exist in Britain, but not in the United States.

Curiously, once American historians start down the path of meaning and uncovering meaning, their work is not connected to sociological concepts but rather anthropology and literary studies. Why is that? Hall speculates that perhaps sociology got set aside in the “cultural turn” but still finds it odd since Continental and British historians certainly engage sociology.

I may add my own speculation as to the failure of American religious historians to more fully draw on sociological insights. Stay tuned...

Religious Repertoires, Institutional Rewards, and Epistemological Divisons - Religion and American Culture Conference

Still enjoying Downtown Indianapolis, in particular walking by the river last night and having dinner and conversation with friends. As the conference continues today, I want to catch you up to the sociologists who spoke in the late afternoon...

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Penny Edgell, a marvelous sociologist from the University of Minnesota, spoke about the need to understand religion in a manner that does not constrain us to describing “religion” as a whole, and challenged us to find conceptual ways that accommodate a broader, more flexible, and ultimately more useful manner of discussing the great diversity of religious dynamics in the world.

In particular, Edgell talked about the importance of articulating “religious repertoires.” This involves actively recognizing how we human beings carry out moral projects which lend power to a moral vision to do what is right, ultimately that enable us to follow through on moral imperatives.

In short, rather than talking about capital R "Religion," she emphasizes talking about religious repertoires as fields of practice that include ways of categorizing the world as well as embodied religious practices. By bringing in the word “moral,” she stresses our discovering the embodied, ritualized sense of how we are to act in the world.

Jerry Park, sociologist at Baylor University, shifted focus to describe the difficulty all of us find in connecting seemingly related ideas from different fields.

He illustrated his point with an example from Asian American religion; in his case it was the difference between published work about Asian American religion from a seminary professor and work from a researcher rooted in sociological methodology. While the two researchers appeared to be looking at the same "thing," they actually paid attention to very different dynamics, considered different types of "data" as appropriate, carried different assumptions, and formulated very different conjectures, explanations, and speculations. Park expresses confidence in the possibility to connecting these two realms of question and response.

However, he ultimately suggests that institutional reward structures among academics tend to keep researchers (their work, their dialogue, their relationships) separate. Scholars are pressured to do their work in particular ways, publish in particular venues, and appease particular biases in order to achieve legitimacy (and steady employment) in our disciplines.

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Rhys Williams, a sociologist becoming the new department chair at Loyola University Chicago, shifted the conversation about interdisciplinarity again.

Williams asserts that the "gap" within sociology is greater than the "gap" between sociology and other disciplines. In particular, he articulates that the differences between quantitative and qualitative sociologists are based in different epistemological orientations.

The quantitative/qualitative division does not create epistemological division; rather, the division is symptomatic of significant differences in assumptions among scholars: how do people behave? What we can actually learn about human beings? How do we best to express our new knowledge? This realist/interpretive difference constitutes a fundamental, intra-disciplinary gap.

For Williams, disciplinary lines are good. Rather than deterring knowledge, they indeed enhance and accelerate knowledge. I think he means disciplines achieve their cumulative insights by continuing a set of conversations over a shared set of questions over a long time.

Such rooted knowledge (which takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to master) is to be preferred over poor scholarship that often occurs when academics try to work outside their discipline. By implication, this means not only that scholars should clarify and strengthen the grounds of their own inquiry but also exercise great caution before straying into other fields, especially without sensitivity to different sets of concerns, debates, and perspectives inherent to all disciplines.

Defining What a Scholar Does

Read a post by Amanda French, not quite an English Professor (yet), but still a "scholar."

Amanda French is seeking a tenure-track position. Until then, she considers herself largely undefined. She writes, "Recently I’ve claimed 'digital humanist,' though that term is arcane and hard to define. I define it as 'someone with a humanities degree who’s interested in computers.'”

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So, she blogs about her identity.

In the midst of talking about her recent engagement blogging about Facebook's Terms of Service, Dr. French writes,

One label that I secretly like a lot and hope to deserve is “scholar,” and that’s what scholars do, I think: find out and tell the truth. Journalists do that too (ideally), but scholars get a lot more time to do it than journalists do, and scholars can seek out the truth about stuff that very few people care about at the moment.

We scholars, bless us, can be as verbose and sesquipedalian as we like, and we can duck the current daily frenzy and spend our days humming through frenzies long turned to dust. That was my very favorite part of graduate school. While I was writing my dissertation, I got my investigation on, big time. Such fun.

And then I also had fun finding a way to write the truth in a way that was accurate, fair, compassionate, and interesting.

The trick is always to balance the desire to be witty or shocking or alliterative or otherwise attention-grabbing with the mandate to be correct and thorough and just. Get out of balance one way, and you’ve got a tabloid; get out of balance another, and you’ve got a 1040 form. As a scholar, I want to be, oh, let’s pull a phrase out of the air, “engaging and authentic.”

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And I think Dr. French makes observations in this post that I've wrestled with myself in my professional work.

Distinguishing between the "journalist" and the "scholar," she hits on the investment of skill and time put into ideas, questions, and issues beyond fleeting hot-button topics of the day. And the balance between "tabloid" and "1040" is spot on.

I'd like to think of myself as a "scholar" too. Despite the frustrations and misunderstandings, there is a satisfaction at being dedicated to the pursuit of truth and using that truth to expand the boundaries of our too-often-mundane humanity.

And beyond the technical achievement of producing knowledge, the goal of being "engaging and authentic" seems about right.

A Week in Berkeley - Course in Creative Leadership

I've just accepted an invitation to return to the Pacific School of Religion, a seminary affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union which happens to be the largest and most diverse partnership of seminaries and graduate schools in America. I will teach a one-week intensive course on leadership.

Gothic inspired architecture on PSR's campus - Image by >>>WonderMike<<< via Flickr

I am happily returning to Berkeley the first week of August 2009. The course details are below, and more detail is available on PSR's summer session webpage.

Catalyzing Creative Leadership for the Emerging Church
Instructor: Gerardo Marti, PhD
Date and Time: August 3-7, 2009; 8:30 am -12:30 pm
Course School Ownership: PSR

Units: Audit ($330.00)
2 Continuing Education Units ($355.00)
1.5 Semester Hours (General - $636.00; Current PLTS/PSR Student - $523.00)

Description:

This course explores the relationships between culture and the emerging church and the implications of these relationships for effective spiritual leadership.

In addition to references to church history and biblical scriptures, the course continually connects societal arrangements with contemporary innovation and experimentation in congregational beliefs and practices.

By incorporating scholarship rooted in a sociological perspective, the course also looks more generally to the ongoing changes and negotiations that the Christian Church always makes in relation to the broader social world.

Northern Coast of California - Image via Thinkin

Trust me, this will be an enjoyable week together, so if you can make it over to Berkeley -- a wonderful city during a beautiful part of the year in California's fantastic Bay Area -- please join us!