The conflict between religion and media has deep roots

A recent report into the place of religion in public life presented a gloomy picture of the relationship between media and religion. Whilst media misrepresentations usually concern Muslims, the most vocal complainers are Christians. Abby Day argues the reason for this may lie in more fundamental, ancient and even ontological concerns

Non-religious Christians

Scholars who recently rejected secularisation theses on the grounds that they were insufficiently defined or contextualised now seem to be accepting with unseemly, uncritical haste, the new, in vogue notion of the post-secular. Scholars seem tempted to drop the term ‘post-secular’ into their papers and presentations as if it is a generally accepted and understood term. It is not and nor, as this paper will argue, is it plausible unless applied to a limited and specific range of phenomena. Far from disappearing, religion is often used publicly as a marker of group identity. This is not a return to religion, or a resurgence in spirituality, but a fluctuating form of contextualised religious identity. Christian nominalists may not believe in God or Jesus, at least if belief is understood as ‘faith’. It would be incorrect, however, to dismiss them as ‘unbelievers’, or their nominalist beliefs as not having essential or substantive reality. They believe in many things, usually related to ‘belonging’. By closely examining people’s sense of Christian ‘belonging’, we find other more subtle, interwoven ‘belongings’ related to, for example, history, nation, morality, gender, and ‘culture’

Textbooks for teaching the sociology of religion

The sociology of religion, a vibrant sub-discipline of sociology, is popular amongst students taking degrees in Sociology, Theology, and Religious Studies. Teachers are often not sociology specialists and seek a standard text to help with classes. Others, who specialise in sociology, have usually no background in the study of religion. His review surveys the field of books recommended by teachers and students and finds few to wholly recommend. The author calls for texts to be more inclusive, less dogmatic, and more directed to best pedological practice

Towards increasing diversity in the study of religion

The study of religion needs to be enriched by more diverse voices. The author argues that some progress has been made, but more needs to be done, particularly through collaborating with those most frequently muted. The challenge is to not simply to include those outside the traditional bastions of white, male privilege in the global north, but to actively widen the current reach to make an impact on how knowledge is actually created and shared. Initiatives such as liberating and de-colonizing the curriculum are discussed, with particular reference to the study of religion

Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion: Shaping Belief and Belonging, 1945-2021

Mocked, vilified, blamed and significantly misunderstood – the ‘Baby Boomers’ are members of the generation of post-WWII babies who came of age in the 1960s, wanting to reject religion, ban bombs, burn bras, get high, dance to the music and give peace a chance. Their parents of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly their Anglican loyal flower-arranging, scone-baking, tea-making, church-attending mothers, raised their Boomer children to be church-attenders and respectable, not the half-hippy/ half brokers they became, spurning religion and raising their Millennial children to be the least religious generation ever. The Baby Boomers were the last generation to have been routinely baptised and taken regularly to mainstream, Anglican churches. So, what went wrong - or, perhaps, right? This book is the first to offer a sociological account of the sudden transition from religious parents to non-religious children and grand-children, focusing exclusively on this generation of ex-Anglican Boomers. Now in their 60s and 70s, the Boomers featured here make sense of their lives and the world they helped create. They discuss how they continue to dis-believe in God yet have an easy relationship with ghosts. When they turned from the Bible and Sunday School lessons to pursue their inner truths, replacing prayer with contemplation, meditation and silent reflection, they did not, as theologians are wont to argue, fall into an immoral self-centred abyss, but forged different practices and sites (whether in ‘this world’ or ‘elsewhere’) of meaning, morality, community and transcendence. This study is important to reveal much about failed religious transmission and sudden religious decline, and about the Boomer mothers who were, perhaps, not as pure and pious as they let on. It is important to see how those mothers nourished their Boomer children’s inner rebels to subtly licence them to incite a cultural and spiritual revolution. This maternal ‘enabling ambivalence’ may have nudged the Boomers into becoming the tipping point in a century of religious change. This book by leading sociologist Prof. Abby Day is the sequel to her 2017 critically acclaimed The Religious Lives of Older Laywomen: the Last Active Anglican Generation: OUP) which studied the then-oldest active Anglican generation of laywomen. This new book helps answer the question she asked of the older women at the time: why have your children not followed you? Their answer was often: ‘not sure - why don’t you ask them!’. Day’s new book draws on recent research made possible through generous research leave and funding by Goldsmiths, University of London. She shows that Baby Boomers are a pivotal generation between the godly and godless, whose beliefs and practices have determined the health and wealth of churches and wider society for generations to come. Through international research including original interviews capturing the Boomer’s own stories and conversations, oral history accounts and a review of significant surveys the book explores what happened to a suddenly de-churched generation of Baby Boomers, raised in the 1950s, coming of age in the 1960s, and now in their 60s and 70s. To address specifically the question of religion change and rapid decline, the book focuses tightly on those Baby Boomers who, as children of Anglican church-attending parents, were baptised and confirmed as Christians yet subsequently turned away permanently from church attendance and Christian beliefs. The Boomers studied here are ex-Anglicans from, primarily, the UK. This is a story of loss, renewal, redemption and ‘truth’, providing new answers to old questions and developing theoretical frameworks to help explain one of the most significant movements in religious decline nationally and internationally

Como escribir artículos académicos-científicos publicables

El famoso escritor de ciencia-ficción Ray Bradbury lo dijo muy bien: “Si usted escribe cien cuentos cortos y todos son malos, eso no significa que usted ha fracasado. Uno fracasa sólo cuando deja de escribir”. El texto de Ray Bradbury es una de las interesantes citas de este artículo que invita a los académicos a escribir. En él se analizan las razones más comunes que dan los profesores para publicar sus trabajos y, por su puesto, los motivos más frecuentes que aducen para no publicar.  Pero, en el fondo, todos los profesores quieren hacerlo. Sin embargo, cuando piensan en un trabajo sesudo para una revista científica, los asalta una multitud de dudas. De ahí que este artículo, de manera ordenada, presente una completa y sencilla guía del proceso que suele seguirse, respondiendo las preguntas que surgen inevitablemente. Por ejemplo, ¿Cuál es el objetivo que se busca con el tema del artículo? ¿Qué se entiende por calidad y cómo se aplica a un escrito destinado para una revista científica? ¿Quién hace la evaluación y cual es su papel? ¿A quiénes va dirigido el artículo y qué esperan? Finalmente, ¿cómo es posible garantizar su aceptación? Posteriormente, se hace una descripción completa del cúmulo de tareas que es necesario realizar para lograr “un artículo perfecto en siete días”: la estructura, el primer borrador, la elaboración de un abstract y la revisión

Anthropology of Ministry

A chapter in an edited collection - The Study of Ministry, This chapter The chapter explores anthropology as a discipline committed to exploring what it means to be human. In so doing, it privileges the human, or social, over the apparent divine. An anthropology of ministry may contrive to do both, to hold in comfortable tension this world/other world

Sacred communities: contestations and connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries