Barak Obama & pie

I usually have no idea how to translate my religious beliefs into election-time decisions (and I'm usually unconvinced by people who say they can). There are, however, some things that do sway me.  Here's a video of Barak Obama that might just be a "game-changer" for me.

The plural of anecdote is not data

I came across this expression: "The plural of anecdote is not data." I was astounded that in just a few words, it conveyed what takes me a couple of lectures in my social research methods class. It also summarizes concerns I have with various pieces of research about Christianity.

So much in short sentence. Maybe it will become a t-shirt slogan popular with sociologists.

Self-presentation in the presidential race

This week was the 63rd annual Alfred Smith dinner. Both McCain and Obama were there, and, as per tradition, it was a light, funny evening. John McCain, in particular, was hilarious. Here's the clip:



Here's what I don't get. In the debates and speaking, John McCain often comes across as mean and cranky--his personal style in the debates has been commonly critiqued. I thought that's who he was, but it's clear that when he loosens up he's funny, intelligent, and charming. Why doesn't he put this forward in his presidential campaign.

Obama, in contrast, was funny (by not as funny as McCain), but he seemed to be the same person as on the campaign trail.

Maybe it's a republican thing, for I remember thinking the same thing about Bob Dole when he ran against Clinton. After he lost, he did a Visa commercial (and other things) that presented him in an entirely differently light.

Wishing well in pond (pic)

I'm just now getting around to processing some of the pictures that I took in spring. Here's a fun reflection in a pond.

The Pope on the financial crisis

From a story in the London Times, the Pope casts the financial crisis in terms of the gospel.

"Pope Benedict XVI today said that the global credit crisis shows that the world's financial systems are "built on sand" and that only the works of God have "solid reality".

Opening a Synod of Bishops in the Vatican the Pope referred to a passage from St Matthew's Gospel on false prophets, saying ''He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand''."

***

Have American pastors being saying things like this? If so, I've missed it (but I do miss a lot). It's almost unAmerican to see any good in people losing money.

Monet in a Connecticut pond (pic)

Here's a picture that a friend took. Isn't it beautiful! The colors and shapes work so well that I asked if I could post it here. I've been tramping in the woods a lot this past week or two, and I haven't found anything close to this nice. Wow.



Thanks Susie Huang!

Feeling and display rules for pastors

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on feeling and display rules, it occurs to me that being a pastor with a lot of these rules.

Feeling rules are emotions that pastors are supposed to feel. Maybe joy? Love for the lost?

Display rules: Emotions that pastors are supposed to display, even if they are not feeling them. Maybe interest in people telling them about their lives?

What do you think? Do pastors have a lot of these rules? If so, what are they?

Feeling and display rules of emotion

When most of us think of work, we think of things like trading our time for money or maybe doing something physically difficult. It turns out, according to a large body of social psychological literature, that work can also involve emotions. That’s right, what you feel, and how you show it is “work” that is just as much of your life as your job at the local fast food restaurant.

Here’s how it works (pun intended). When we weren’t looking, society made up a bunch of rules about our emotions. Some of these rules, called feeling rules, govern what we’re supposed to feel in a given situation. For example, when you get married or graduate from college, you’re supposed to be happy, and people will be concerned if you’re otherwise. What if your wedding pictures all show you wide-eyed in terror? (Oh, wait, that was me). Other rules, called display rules, regard what emotions you present to others. With these rules, it doesn’t matter what you’re really feeling, you just have to show the right emotions. For example, when I teach, I don’t mind knowing that some of the students are bored out of their skulls, but I don’t want them showing it with loud yawns and constant eye-rolling.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s remarkable how many roles in society require serious emotion work. Most jobs, for example, pay you not just to do the official work, but they also pay you to do it with the right emotions. A classic example is being a physician. Part of being a doctor is poking, prodding, cutting, and doing all sorts of things to people that is very uncomfortable. In doing it, doctors have to maintain an emotionally-neutral, professional demeanor. What if the doctor is doing something that’s very uncomfortable for you, and they start laughing. Or, maybe they say “oh gross.” My guess is that doctor will start losing patients really quickly.

Likewise, in another example, a study of flight attendants found that they were explicitly trained in the emotions they are supposed to show to airline passengers. Despite being jammed in with hundreds of cranky people, packed together for hours with the same recycled air (you can tell I’m not a big fan of commercial airlines), flight attendants are supposed to be pleasant and cheerful. That’s their job, to smile with each passenger’s request, and if they can’t do the emotions well enough, they might be fired.

An event last summer illustrates the power of emotion work, as it defined an international news story. In Southern Italy, two cousins, aged 12 and 13, went for a swim. They got caught up in a dangerous riptide, and they drowned. This was a tragedy, as any death of a child is, but what made it newsworthy was clip_image002the reaction of people on the beach. When the bodies were brought ashore, they covered them with a blanket, with the girls’ feet sticking out, waiting for the girls’ family and authorities. At first a crowd gathered around, but after not too long, the crowd dispersed and went back to their activities—sun bathing, talking on their cell-phones, having lunch and frolicking in the water—all this just a few meters away from the bodies. Eventually police officers carried away the girls’ bodies on stretchers, walking past sun bathers enjoying the nice day.

There are strong emotion rules in a situation like this. When young people are harmed, we are supposed to feel sadness, even grief. This is a feeling rule. At the very least, we’re to show proper respect and be solemn, a display rule. What we’re not supposed to do, however, is to just go about our business. The crowd violated these rules, and even though it caused no material or physical harm, their perceived indifference caused an international outcry. “The incident also attracted condemnation from the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe. ‘Indifference is not an emotion for human beings,’ Seppe wrote in his parish blog. ‘To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.’”

To complicate matters, the girls were Roma (formerly termed “gypsies”) and the surrounding beach-goers were Italian. There is considerably tension between the Italian authorities and the Roma minority, with the authorities accusing the Roma of increasing levels of street crime, and the Roma charging discrimination. The situation of these two girls, and the crowd’s reaction, exacerbated these tensions.

This event, and the furor it caused, illustrates the power of emotion rules. Society holds us accountable not just for what we say and do, but for how we feel as well.

Originally posted on everydaysociologyblog.com

Use vs. utilize

A good friend is in the English department here at UConn, and she's English as well which I think means that she really knows the language. In a discussion about something else, she brought up this gem...that the words "use" and "utilize" have different meanings.

To "use" an object employs it for its intended purpose.

To "utilize" an object is to employ it for an unintended purpose.

Her example: you use a lampshade to cover a light. You utilize it as a party hat on your head.

As I get older, I think I'm more interested in the meanings of words (though, not that I use them any better), so this was cool. However, part of me wonders if everyone else already knows stuff like this, and I'm just catching up.

Do you already know how to properly utilize the word use?

A precious parenting moment--not

Last week I took 8-year-old Floyd to join the local swim club. Gus, his older brother, did it for years, so we're pretty familiar with it. Other than parents having to sit and watch the practice, it's a good deal.

Well, Floyd decided that he did not want to go because he was feeling shy and he was sure that he'd be the worse swimmer there. I tried to finesse the situation, but that got no where fast. So, I explained to him that he had to try it ("why!") and that he'd probably really like it ("no I won't!"). So, I pretty took him there, and he alternated between tears and pouting.

We get to the pool, and I introduce myself to the coach. Floyd is sort of hiding behind me, and I explain that the coach that Floyd was interested in taking swim lessons. At that point, Floyd stepped out from behind me, pointed at me, and with a loud, very indignant voice, said, "no I don't, he's forcing me to."

The coach gave me a polite, embarrassed smile, and I started trying to figure out it takes the state Department of Children and Families to respond to these kinds of situations.

(Floyd ended up loving it and has since forgiven me).

Fall in Mansfield (pic)

Why, yes it is fall here in New England. How could you tell?

Gender & religion in the US

Last week I posted a table regarding wealth and religion from a Pew Study. Here's an interesting table from the same study regarding gender. Men and women differ in their assessment of the importance of religion more in the US than any other country measured. Here are the nine countries with the biggest gender gap.

I'm so used to U.S. Christianity involving more women than men that I'm surprised that it's different elsewhere.

Why, do you think, the US has such a big gender gap?

Today is my birthday!

Today is my birthday--I turn the big "46". I'm okay being in my 40s, but I think 50 is going to be a bear.

A good birthday story: In our courtship, Cathy threw me a surprise birthday party. She got me out of the house by saying we were going out for ribs (my favorite), and then she "forgot" her billfold at my house, so we had to go back. I walked in the door, and a dozen+ people shouted birthday greetings. My response... I turned to Cathy asked "does this mean I don' t get ribs."

My new favorite election site

For whatever reason, I'm following this election much more closely than I have previous presidential elections. Usually this means reading realclearpolitics.com and pollster.com, but I've recently discovered another website, fivethirtyeight.com, that makes the other sites look overly simplistic.

538 not only averages across polls, but it weights them by their sample size and accuracy in predicting previous votes.

It also runs various simulations using a variety of projections on what will happen in the election. Based on these (10,000!) simulations, here is what 538 currently predicts for the electoral college vote:

Thanks Richard for the link!

What, a neutral presentation of Christianity?

I recently attended a talk here on campus where a professor discussed his/her fieldwork about Christianity in an aboriginal community. His/her talk took a nicely neutral tone--talking about what happened but not passing judgment on the validity of Christianity--and the Christians involved were evangelicals (gasp). I appreciated this because most the discussions of Christianity that I hear on campus include some form of eye-rolling or judgment.

Well... that was just the speaker, and the other professors in the audience didn't go along with his/her neutrality. One audience member asked her why she didn't "problematize" the issue by casting it as bad Christianity (boo!) pushing aside the indigenous beliefs (yeah).

Another faculty member was even more dramatic. S/he expressed bewilderment that so many of the people in this indigenous group turned to Christianity when it was clearly a "dumbass religion" (his/her words) that everyone new was wrong.

What was the groups reaction to his judgment? None, really. Imagine, though, if he had cast the indigenous religion in those terms. It would have been a front-page story in the campus newspaper.

I'm not arguing for equal vulgarity for all, rather I'm rolling my eyes at the lack of objectivity and moral neutrality among so many academics when it comes to Christianity.

Here's a question. Am I off-the-mark wanting academics to be neutral in discussions like this?

George W. Bush sings U2

I love this video....

Bitten by karma

Awhile ago, I was talking to a family member, and he had just returned from an 8-mile bicycle ride and was feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Me being the supportive family member, in a give-them-crap sort of way, commented that Floyd too is proud when he bicycles that distance--Floyd being my 7-year old son.

Well, this zinger came back to haunt me last week. I was talking to my sister, who is the real athlete in the family, and I was telling her that I am planning to ride a metric century (i.e., a 64 mile ride), and I hoped that I could finish it. Susie also being very nice, got excited about it and commented that she had been on one herself a couple of years ago and really enjoyed. As we talked about her ride, it came to light that she did it with two of her children, who were in elementary and middle school at the time. Ouch... You would think that I would learn.

Verbification run amok

Last week I attended a talk given in one of our humanities departments. About halfway through, I realized that the talk and the questions from the gallery contained an inordinate amount of verbs that used to be only nouns. For example, we don't cast an issue as a problem, rather we problematize it.

Now I wanted to be snarky (now that's a good word!) and tell them that I enjoyed lunchifying while they were lecturizing, but I make up so many words out of ignorance that I'm not in a place to criticize others.

Here's my question: why? What purpose does this serve? My guess is that it's a way of showing expertise, sort of like hypercorrections.

Any thoughts?

A youngest child's birthday wish

Floyd turned the big "08" on Sunday, and when we asked him what he wanted for his birthday, the first thing that he said was something we had never even considered.

You see, he has mentioned more than once that he's tired of being bossed around by everyone. (Cathy, me, and Gus--who is 7 years older than Floyd).

As such, he decided that he wanted to be boss of the family this one day, so... on Sunday, he got to make all the decisions. He decided when we'd eat and what we'd eat. What constituted appropriate table manners (just about everything), and a bunch of other decisions.

Once when Gus asked him to get off the computer, Floyd yelled: "you can't tell me what to do, I'm the birthday boss!"

He was very, very happy.

Relgion and global wealth

Here's an interesting table from a Pew study (and found in this article). This graph shows a strong linear trend such that the richer the country, the less importance its citizens place on religion except for--you guessed it--the U.S.

In terms of religious importance, we're pretty much middle-of-the-pack among the countries that they studied, but we're very high for our high economic level.

Any thoughts about why?