Oh, they're not quite that bad

We just got an department e-mail today entitled: "Faculty Meeting / Suicide Prevention Training."

Now, faculty meetings are not great joy, but they're not that bad...

(In fact, we'll have a guest speaker talking about suicide prevention for our students)

Paul Newman, role model

As has been widely reported, Paul Newman passed away on Saturday. He lived here in Connecticut (at the other end of the state), and his camp for terminally ill children is just up the road.

Some years ago, I sat down and tried to figure out who I knew of that had lives worth emulating, and Paul Newman was one of the people I came up with, so he's sort of been a role model for me.

Why?

He was married to the same women for 50 years.

He was a success in his chosen career.

He had a wicked cool hobby (race car driving).

He did great things with charitable giving.

Now, I know that he wasn't perfect, and there are things in his life I probably don't want to follow, but he's an inspiration as I try to stay married, be a good sociologist, have fun cycling and hang gliding, and make some sort of difference in the lives of others.

Evaluating surveys on religious research

As you know, I frequently harp on the need to evaluate religious research just as carefully as we do any other research. Ed Stetzer, of Lifeways Research, has posted a nice summary of some of the questions to ask when reading religious research.

There's a lot of things that we need to take on faith in Christianity... but empirical research is not one of them.

Thanks Ben!

What not to do to Letterman

When the time comes for me to be invited on to David Letterman's show*, I'll remember not to stand him up. Watch his response when McCain did it... Make sure to watch the part where Dave is yelling at Katie Couric's interview with McCain. It's hilarious.

* It could happen--he does have stupid human tricks.

Are Christians uniquely irrational?

From a recent WSJ article, Bill Maher said "you can't be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you're drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god."

This article summarizes a recent study done at Baylor that found that "in fact, It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians."

Once again, data and assumptions don't match.

Thanks for the link, Ben!

When workers go bad

In light of the current financial crisis on Wall Street, perhaps the executives under fire should realize that things could be worse for them.

A fall triathlon

Today I completed what I think of as a New England Fall Father's Triathlon. It had three events (hence the tri- in triathlon).

First I went on a nice, long bicycle ride-44 miles-in near perfect weather, sunny in the 60s.

Then, I came home and stacked a pile of firewood.

Finally, I took Floyd to Chuck E. Cheeses to blow through many tokens.

I'm a little tired now, but I do have a feeling of accomplishment!

The best of flights, the worst of flights

My brother John experienced the two extremes of hang gliding this month.

First, he had a magical day when he could catch thermals just about at will. He spent 3 hours flying, and he reached over 10,000 feet!

Here's the footage of it. Wait for the part when he is looking around to make sure that no airliners are going at him (seriously)...



12 days later, he had some problems with launch (somebody helping him messed up), and he had to intentionally crash his glider to be safe. He's okay (other than really scaring his brother), but his glider needs a fair bit of costly repair. Ugh...

Are megachurches impersonal?

A new study from Rodney Stark, at Baylor, finds that:

"Congregants find megachurches offer more personal worship and sense of community than smaller churches, a finding that challenges the conventional wisdom that some large churches are too big to offer a spiritual experience."

Guess they must be doing something right. Maybe those churches that offer the worship and community are those that grow?

Here's the article from the Washington Post.

Thanks for the link, Mark!

Sociology at the amusement park

A couple of weeks ago, I took my two sons up to a big amusement park (this is New England, so unfortunately we don’t have Disneyland). Each summer we try to buy season passes to a different fun place, and this year it was this amusement park. The boys really enjoy the rides and the water park. Me? I kind of have fun being a sociologist and watching what goes on at the park because a lot of what goes on fits with sociological principles. These include:

Social Stratification is a social system that ranks people in terms of a hierarchy. Sociologists usually talk about it in terms of class, caste, and intergenerational mobility. Well, this amusement park had its own class levels. At the bottom were the regular people like my family who just buy a ticket and go on rides. Next up is what they call a “super flash pass.” This pass works like magic. When you go to one of the popular rides, and there is a long line, you show this pass and you get put into a much shorter line for the ride.

Cool, but the “super flash pass” starts at $50. At the highest level is the “very important you” experience. With this you go straight to the start of the line, you get to park your car close to the entrance, you get a private tour of the park (though, I don’t know how private it is with thousands of people around you), and you get a private autograph session with one of the park characters. Okay, as far as I can tell, the characters can’t talk, and they are really alienated teenagers dressing up like cartoon animals for minimum wage, so I’m not sure why someone would pay extra for the autograph of an irritated, silent young person. The price for this highest level of “service”? $250 per person with a minimum of four people. That’s $1,000 to be top dog of the amusement park.

The conflict theory of crime holds that laws are passed to favor the wealthy (I know, you probably find this idea shocking), and it too was in evidence at the park. Being rather cheap, I don’t like paying $15 for the regular parking at the amusement park, so I pay $10 to park at a nearby restaurant that is actually a little closer to the main gate of the park. In speaking with the owner, I found out that the city is working hard to make it illegal to park there for the amusement park. So, if you want a bite to eat at the restaurant, go ahead and park your car. But, if you want to walk 100 yards to the amusement park, forget it.

Why would the city outlaw parking outside the park? Well, it’s a small town, and the amusement park is far-and-away their biggest tax payer. The amusement park makes approximately 1-trillion-dollars-a-day (their concession stands are really expensive), but they also want the less than one-thousand-dollars-a-day that this off-site parking place pulls in. The park, having lots of money, has lots of influence with the city government. The city government, eager to please the park, tries to pass an ordinance that doesn’t make much sense and only harms the average Joe looking to save a few dollars.

Another sociological observation involves the young people we saw at the park. Studies of youth culture note how young people find their own, distinctive ways of doing things, and this culture works best when it is different than what boring-old-people are doing.

Well, walking around the park, I noticed a unique style of dress. Scattered about were clusters of high-school-aged kids who were dressed virtually identically. They all wore oversized athletic shoes and relatively new blue jeans. Around their necks, they wore white t-shirts twisted with a bandana. This bandana was folded so that, if they wanted to, they could pull it up over their mouth to hide their features. (“Hey, you guys want to go rob a train?”). The kids had similar haircuts, and they wore brand-new ball caps, turned about 90 degrees to the side.

Now, these kids carried a bit of an “I’m tough” scowl on their faces and had a tough guy swagger to their walk, but to me they looked downright silly. I honestly thought that they were park characters when I first saw them (“Hi, can I get your autograph for $1,000?”) More than anything they reminded me of little kids dressing up like cowboys, which didn’t fit with the tough persona they were trying to project. Okay, if I were younger, a lot younger, maybe I would think they are cool, so I’m not trying to impose some middle-aged standard of appropriate dress. Instead, these “outfits” they wore illustrate the powerful influence of youth culture.

So there you have it; in addition to offering roller coasters, water rides, and overpriced hot dogs, amusement parks serve up sociology as well.

Originally published in everydaysociologyblog.com.

A philosophical question about cake

Gus had his fifteenth birthday last week, complete with very success surprise party. (He's rather easy to deceive--like his father.

The big question to come out of his birthday, however, was what is the exact definition of a cake.

We were sitting around eating a chocolate cake that had lots and lots of frosting, and we started to wonder how much frosting you could have before it's no longer a cake. So, if it looks like a cake, but it's all frosting, would it still be cake. Floyd and I agreed that an all-frosting pseudo-cake would be a grand thing. Gus was less sure. Cathy was just grossed out at the thought.

Let them eat what may be cake?

Evangelical's reputation is getting better since 1994

I've been posting a lot these past few months about statistics produced by Christian researchers that claim to show that Christians have an image problem and that it's getting worse over time. See here and here.

Inspired by David's comment, here, I used the Roper Center iPoll data base to find survey questions that asked respondents their view of Evangelical Christians. I found eight such surveys.

The question wording usually went something like this: "Would you say your overall opinion of Evangelical, is it very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable." For parsimony, I combined the "very" and "mostly" categories to make the ratings just favorable or unfavorable. For clarity of presentation, I dropped the "don't know " or "haven't heard of" responses, and this is what I found:

For example of interpretation, in 1994, 57% of respondents viewed Christians favorably, 43% viewed them unfavorably.

What should we make of these data? Well, there's no evidence that Christian's reputation in general society is getting worse, and in fact it seems to have gone up since 1994--perhaps with Evangelicals being less associated with politics. If I get ambitious, I'll download the data and separate out the views of non-Christians, but at this level it doesn't look like Evangelicals are suffering from the supposed reputation crisis.

Data sources
1994: Times Mirror
2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2007: Pew
2004: US News and World Report

Showgirls, the conversion

Joe Eszterhas, a well-known Hollywood screenwriter, had a rather dramatic conversion to Christianity. Here is his story, and he motivates it by asking:

Why did God save the life of a man who had trashed, lampooned, and marginalized Him?

Credit cards to China

Usually when we think of evil, it involves chain saws or bank robberies or men lurking in trench coats. Here's a story about some one who has the potential of doing a great deal of harm just doing his job.

Basically, most Chinese buy things using cash. This person, representing a bank's credit card division, is working hard to convince potential customers in China to use credit cards instead. What's the problem he's trying to overcome? "We have this traditional thinking. We don't like to spend more than what we have." Banks can't make much money on credit cards until this don't overspend mentality is overcome.

When I think of all the problems I've had in my life because of credit cards, as well as in others, I cringe to think of someone doing this.

Thanks Adrienne for the story!

A dungeon? (Office pic)

Here's a picture of Jimi's office, and he has to stand on his desk to see it.  I'm not sure, but I think that he's being kept in some sort of dungeon.  Not to worry, though, he has a big-time job in Arizona coming up--bet he'll be a window there!

Getting urban (office pic)

Jeremy gets urban on us. What's impressive is that though he's only a grad student, he gets a window seat! Nice. I didn't get a window seat as a grad student or post-doc, and when I first came here, I spent several years with a window covered by a tree. Jeremy must be doing something right.

A field of dreams (office pic)

Here's Nate's view... a field with an orchard. Nice!

Just better than a brick wall (office pic)

Here's the office view of Elroy. His comment--not as bad as a brick wall.

Just another brick in the wall (office pic)

Upon seeing the picture of the view from my window, my friend Mark Edwards sent me a picture from his office window...


Before we feel sorry for him, though, he lives and works in Corvallis Oregon, a beautiful part of the country (just not out his window).

Any other office views?

My famous wife

My wife, Cathy, is a  historian, and as I talk, she is being interviewed on the radio about a research project that she did on the Hurricaine of 1938.  Needless to say, she sounds great (and I'm not the least bit biased)--telling stories about what happened and how people reacted to it.  Floyd and I are sitting on the couch, hanging on every word!