Search Results for: Pew

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Is the Decline in Christianity Overstated by the Pew Survey?

Steven Ramey’s post originally appeared on the Huffington Post Friday and is republished here. “Christians Decline Sharply as Share of Population” is a big headline of the Pew “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” report published this week, but the data in the survey tells us more about changing ways that people respond to surveyors. Therefore, the consternation …

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Creatio Ex Nihilo: Pew Forum and the “Nones”

Originally posted on the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog New analysis suggests that almost 1 in 5 people in the United States have no religious affiliation! Media coverage has sensationalized the publication of this analysis from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and various church and institutional leaders have presented explanations for the …

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The Stakes are High, in Australia

Responding to census questions is not simply reporting already self-evident identifications. The process of asking the questions creates those identifications and the groupings that organize the census data. The current census effort in Australia, scheduled for today, illustrates this point quite clearly. Due to the increasing number of respondents reporting “No religion” on the voluntary …

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Directed Hearing

Boos and chants of USA! interrupted both political conventions over the past couple of weeks, generating significant comment and analysis. The FiveThirtyEight live blog (one source that I perused) noted that the prevalence of the chants and interruptions varied between different parts of the convention halls and on different broadcasts. While this illustrates the problem …

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The Sun Never Sets on the Study of Religion

Lots of scholars of religion are focused these days on studying such things as implicit religion, the Nones, or almost any other so-called worldview that people might be said to work with or inhabit (e.g., many are hot on the trail of secularism). What I find interesting about all this is the way in which …

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Is Your Group Oppressed?

“A war against Christianity,” a friend on Facebook asserted, as he pointed to examples in the United States and around the world. The shooting at Umpqua Community College recently and the various occasions when ISIS has executed people identified as Christians provided prime examples. Others making similar claims point to shifts in US policy, including …

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When the Census Creates Fear

Are Muslims taking over India? Recently released data from the 2011 Census of India generated various headlines, from the alarmist assertion that the percentage of the population identifying as Hindu has declined to the calmer emphasis on the slowing growth in communities identified as Muslim. One Hindu nationalist organization provocatively asked in response to the …

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The Brilliance of Containing Whiteness

Recently I’ve been enjoying reruns of 3rd Rock from the Sun on Hulu. For readers unfamiliar, this NBC sitcom ran from 1996 to 2001 and focuses on four aliens that came to earth in the 1990s to do anthropological research on our species. The humor of the show is of course based on cultural misunderstandings as the …

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Identity in Law and in Practice: An Interview with Simon Tam of The Slants (Part 1)

Last week the Edge posted a brief piece on the case of the Portland-based rock band The Slants, and their effort to register their band’s name, and thus brand, in the US. And then we got a comment — it turned out to be from the band’s bass player and founder: Over the next couple …

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Reading is Magical . . . And Problematic

Turning various groups of symbols (on a page or computer screen) into an image or meaning in our own minds is a fascinating process. Jasper Fforde, the UK novelist, expressed it this way in The Well of Lost Plots, After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the …

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