http://www.asanet.org/documents/press/pdfs/AM_2013_Bean_Martinez_News_Release.pdf
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Monday, September 2, 2013
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Study Finds That the Number of Protestant Americans Is Declining - NYTimes.com
Study Finds That the Number of Protestant Americans Is Declining - NYTimes.com
Now, more than one-third of those ages 18 to 22 are religiously unaffiliated. These “younger millennials” are replacing older generations who remained far more involved with religion throughout their lives. “We really haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Gregory A. Smith, a senior researcher with the Pew Forum. “Even when the baby boomers came of age in the early ’70s, they were half as likely to be unaffiliated as compared with young people today.”
Monday, October 8, 2012
One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says - The Washington Post
One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says - The Washington Post
The study presents a stark map of how political and religious polarization have merged in recent decades. Congregations used to be a blend of political affiliations, but that’s generally not the case anymore. Sociologists have shown that Americans are more likely to pick their place of worship by their politics, not vice versa.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Friday, December 9, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Daily Number: Jesus Christ's Return to Earth - Pew Research Center
Daily Number: Jesus Christ's Return to Earth - Pew Research Center
By the year 2050, 41% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ definitely (23%) or probably (18%) will have returned to earth. However, a 46%-plurality of the public does not believe Christ will return during the next 40 years. Fully 58% of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth in this period, by far the highest percentage in any religious group. Only about a third of Catholics (32%) and even fewer white mainline Protestants (27%) predict Christ's return to earth by 2050. One-in-five religiously unaffiliated Americans also see Christ returning during the next four decades. Americans with no college experience (59%) are much more likely than those with some college experience (35%) or college graduates (19%) to expect Jesus Christ's return. By region, those in the South (52%) are the most likely to predict a Second Coming by 2050.
Monday, September 27, 2010
FOXNews.com - Lawsuit Claims College Ordered Student to Alter Religious Views on Homosexuality, Or Be Dismissed
FOXNews.com - Lawsuit Claims College Ordered Student to Alter Religious Views on Homosexuality, Or Be Dismissed
"[Augusta State University] faculty have promised to expel Miss Keeton from the graduate Counselor Education Program not because of poor academic showing or demonstrated deficiencies in clinical performance, but simply because she has communicated both inside and outside the classroom that she holds to Christian ethical convictions on matters of human sexuality and gender identity," the 43-page lawsuit reads.
News: The New Clash of Rights - Inside Higher Ed
News: The New Clash of Rights - Inside Higher Ed
Now a new issue is emerging that involves a similar set of players and issues: public universities, anti-bias rules, and the rights of gay people and Christian students. On Tuesday, a federal judge upheld the right of a counseling program at Eastern Michigan University to kick out a master's student who declined to counsel gay clients in an affirming way -- as required by the university program and counseling associations. The judge found that the university was enforcing a legitimate curricular requirement -- namely that counseling students learn to work with all kinds of clients in ways that did not judge their values or orientations.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Burqa Bans, Halal Debate: Is French Secularism Anti-Islam? - TIME
Burqa Bans, Halal Debate: Is French Secularism Anti-Islam? - TIME
"The 1905 law establishing secularism describes it as a measure to protect individual citizens' freedom of religion and faith by rendering the state totally neutral to — and disconnected from — religious matters," says Jean Baubérot, a professor emeritus of sociology and expert on secularism at Paris University's École Pratique des Hautes Études. Baubérot notes that secularity was initially meant to reduce the Catholic Church's influence on society by tasking the state with removing religious instruction from public schools as part of a general effort to relegate questions of faith to the private sphere. "Now we frequently see secularists urging the state to intervene in the private religious affairs or practices of people or organizations," Baubérot says. "Increasingly, secularity resembles what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a 'civil religion': the values and dogma of a state that individual citizens must submit to — or be made to respect."
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor - Congregations Gone Wild - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Contributor - Congregations Gone Wild - NYTimes.com
The trend toward consumer-driven religion has been gaining momentum for half a century. Consider that in 1955 only 15 percent of Americans said they no longer adhered to the faith of their childhood, according to a Gallup poll. By 2008, 44 percent had switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found. Americans now sample, dabble and move on when a religious leader fails to satisfy for any reason.
In this transformation, clergy have seen their job descriptions rewritten. They’re no longer expected to offer moral counsel in pastoral care sessions or to deliver sermons that make the comfortable uneasy. Church leaders who continue such ministerial traditions pay dearly. A few years ago, thousands of parishioners quit Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minn., and Community Church of Joy in Glendale, Ariz., when their respective preachers refused to bless the congregations’ preferred political agendas and consumerist lifestyles.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
FOXNews.com - Anne Rice Quits Christianity -- 10 Thoughts On Jesus and the Church
FOXNews.com - Anne Rice Quits Christianity -- 10 Thoughts On Jesus and the Church
In a posting on her Facebook page, she said, “I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or being a part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”
Monday, June 28, 2010
The Associated Press: Court: Christian group can't bar gays, get funding
The Associated Press: Court: Christian group can't bar gays, get funding
The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld the lower court rulings saying the Christian group's First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college's nondiscrimination policy.
"In requiring CLS — in common with all other student organizations — to choose between welcoming all students and forgoing the benefits of official recognition, we hold, Hastings did not transgress constitutional limitations," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the 5-4 majority opinion for the court's liberals and moderate Anthony Kennedy. "CLS, it bears emphasis, seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings' policy."
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a strong dissent for the court's conservatives, saying the opinion was "a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country."
"Our proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate,'" Alito said, quoting a previous court decision. "Today's decision rests on a very different principle: no freedom for expression that offends prevailing standards of political correctness in our country's institutions of higher learning."
Thursday, April 22, 2010
birth rate of religious fundamentalists of practically any stripe is far above replacement level
BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Thinking Allowed, 07/04/2010
The idea that modernity leads to a lessening religious belief is being abandoned by theorists in America and Europe. Figures like Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling argue that increasingly religion seeks to impinge on science, and now the first systematic study of European cultural groups predicts that fundamentalists of all religions are out-breeding moderates and atheists, and will eclipse them quite soon. In Israel the Ultra Orthodox will form the majority as soon as 2050. Since the birth rate of secular people in the West is way below replacement level (2.1), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists of practically any stripe is far above (roughly between 5 and 7.7 children per mother), through the sheer force of demography, academic Eric Kaufmann claims they will become a much bigger force in the Western World. Is that inevitable? Should people be worried?
Laurie Taylor discusses the anxieties of atheists and the predictions of demography with three theorists of different perspectives.: The Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, Tariq Ramadan; Eric Kaufmann, Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher and author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God; A Work of Fiction.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
No Supreme Court hearing for mom who asked to read Bible to son's class / The Christian Science Monitor
No Supreme Court hearing for mom who asked to read Bible to son's class / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Chief Judge Anthony Sirica in a 2-to-1 decision handed down in June by the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals. “But a reading from the Bible or other religious text is more than a message and unquestionably conveys a strong sense of spiritual and moral authority,” he wrote. “In this case, the audience is involuntary and very young. Parents of public school kindergarten students may reasonably expect their children will not become captive audiences to an adult’s reading of religious texts.”
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
American Religious Identification Survey
The Graduate Center, CUNY
American Religious Identification Survey
Principal Investigators
Professor Barry A. Kosmin & Professor Egon Mayer Study Director
Dr. Ariela Keysar
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the dedicated professional collaboration of ICR - International Communications Research Corp. (Media, PA). Our thanks go especially to John DeWolf, Christopher Dinardo, Dale Kulp and their associates, who provided matchless and untiring collegial assistance in all phases of sampling, data collection, and data file preparation, further enhancing the fine reputation for quality research they had established in carrying out the National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) 1990.
This study was made possible by the generous support of the Posen Foundation.
List of Exhibits
1. Self-Described Religious Identification of U.S. Adult Population - 1990 and 2001
2. Household Membership in Church, Temple, Synagogue, or Mosque for Selected Religious Groups
3. Outlook of U.S. Adult Population: Religious or Secular
4. Outlook of U.S. Adult Men and Women: Religious or Secular
5. Outlook of U.S. Adults by Age: Religious or Secular
6. Outlook of Selected Race & Ethnic Groups of U.S. Adults: Religious or Secular
7. Switching In and Out Reported by Adults for Selected Religious Groups: Number of Adults by Current and Prior Religious Identification
8. Marital Status of Adult Population by Selected Religious Group
9. Percentage Divorced or Separated by Selected Religious Groups, 1990-2001
10. Percentage of Mixed Religion Families in Selected Religious Groups
11. Age and Gender Patterns of Selected Religious Groups, 2001
12. Age and Gender Patterns of Selected Religious Groups, 1990
13. Race and Ethnic Patterns Among Selected Religious Groups, 2001
14. Political Party Preference by Selected Religious Group
15. Distribution of Selected Religious Groups by State
Sunday, October 5, 2008
BYU research finds less pot use by religious kids - Salt Lake Tribune
BYU research finds less pot use by religious kids - Salt Lake Tribune
BYU research finds less pot use by religious kids
A correlation is also found for tobacco and alcohol, but not for the use of harder drugs
By Brian Maffly
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Launched: 10/02/2008 11:18:34 AM MDT
Brigham Young University sociologists analyzing survey data about drug use found that teens who are religiously active are half as likely to smoke marijuana or cigarettes or drink alcohol.
The findings, to be published this month in the "Journal of Drug Issues," suggest that kids' participation in religion counteracts the powerful pressure to smoke pot when their friends are getting high.
"After we accounted for family and peer characteristics, and regardless of denomination, there was an independent effect that those who were religious were less likely to do drugs, even when their friends were users," said co-author Stephen Bahr, a professor in BYU's sociology department. "The power of peers is less among youths who are religious, meaning if you are religious, the pressure from peers to use drugs will not have as much effect."
The researchers based their findings on an analysis of two data sets - a national longitudinal study that has tracked more than 13,000 students since the 1990s, and a survey of about 5,000 Utah teens Bahr conducted about a decade ago.
While most sociologists agree that peer pressure is a major determinant in the choices teens make, there has been widespread disagreement about whether religion plays a role in teens' choice not to use drugs. The Bahr study affirms the argument that faith plays a role not just in marijuana use, but also for alcohol and tobacco -
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even when kids' friends are puffing and drinking.
"We found it with heavy drinking, smoking tobacco - across the board, religiosity had a dampening effect both in Utah data, which is what you would expect, but we also found it nationally," said co-author John Hoffman, also a professor of sociology.
But the authors added a few cautionary notes. First, the study does not conclusively draw a causal link between religion and kids' drug choices. Moreover, the religion correlation was weak for heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and other hard drugs.
"We tried to look at more illicit drugs, but we didn't find a statistically significant effect, although it pointed in the same direction," Hoffman said. "It could be that once kids get involved in these types of drugs, religiosity doesn't do much for them."
The researchers also found that religious fervor within the community has little effect on teens' drug behavior.
"Previously, it was thought that if someone grew up in a religious community and went to church, then the community's religious strength would make a difference," Bahr said. "We basically found that this was not the case. Individual religiosity is what makes the difference."
bmaffly@sltrib.com
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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