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sociology



  • Who Is a Christian Nationalist?

    by Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead

    New survey data says that the growing Christian Nationalist movement is broader than previously believed, and a potential political force in many places. 



  • Family Values, Social Reciprocity, and Christianity

    by Stephanie Coontz

    Family historian Stephanie Coontz argues in a chapter excerpted here that relationships of care and mutual obligation have been much more complex than the nuclear family.



  • The Professor Who Became a Cop

    Patrick Blanchfield reviews "Tangled Up In Blue," Rosa Brooks's account of joining the DC Police Reserve Corps and meditation on the role of policing in society. 



  • We Live in a Society

    by Gabriel Winant

    Despite lamentations that social media have replaced face-to-face social life, those media platforms are increasingly important as sites of human contact and interaction. Anyone seeking political change must recognize this power and organize social networks to supplant it. 



  • The Professor and the Politician

    by Corey Robin

    A new book on Max Weber's political thought suggests that prior interpretations of Weber's lectures have dismissed the possibility of collective action. 



  • America Comes Out

    A new book evaluates the origins and political evolution of "coming out" in gay America.



  • Scholars of Poverty and Inequality Face Their Own Racial Reckoning

    by Nicole Sussner Rodgers and Deadric T. Williams

    Social scientists have long entertained the theory that persistent Black poverty results from in-group cultural deficiency. Now the field of poverty studies faces a growing rebellion of scholars who call this victim-blaming. 



  • Joseph Margulies: Invoking God in America

    Joseph Margulies is a professor at Northwestern University Law School and the author of "What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity."In one recent week, time took two heroes. So far as I know, the legendary civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers and the esteemed public intellectual Robert Bellah never met. They lived on opposite ends of the country and traveled in different circles. But they were connected in an important, symbolic way, and their passing within a few days of each other provides the occasion to reflect on their common lesson for modern American life.



  • Robert Bellah, sociologist of religion who mapped the American soul, dies at 86

    Robert N. Bellah, a distinguished sociologist of religion who sought nothing less than to map the American soul, in both the sacred and secular senses of the word, died on July 30 in Oakland, Calif. He was 86.His death, from complications of recent heart surgery, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Elliott professor emeritus of sociology.Throughout his work, Professor Bellah was concerned with the ways in which faith shapes, and is shaped by, American civic life. He was widely credited with helping usher the study of religion — a historically marginalized subject in the social sciences — into the sociological fold.“Modern America has a soul, not only a body, and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time,” Steven M. Tipton, a professor in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, wrote in an e-mail on Monday....



  • ‘History Detectives’ host’s collection of black propaganda posters subject of Philly exhibit

    PHILADELPHIA — A new exhibit created by a University of Pennsylvania professor and host of a popular public television show examines how wartime propaganda has been used to motivate oppressed populations to risk their lives for homelands that considered them second-class citizens.“Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster,” opens Sunday and continues until March 2 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lectures, film screenings and other programming will be rolled out over the course of the exhibit’s run.The exhibit’s 33 posters, dating from the Civil War to both World Wars and the African independence movements, are part of the personal collection of Tukufu Zuberi, a Penn professor of sociology and African studies and a host of the PBS series “History Detectives.”...