Robert Wuthnow | |
---|---|
Born | Robert John Wuthnow 1946 Kansas, US |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Consciousness and the Transformation of Society (1975) |
Influences | Robert N. Bellah [1] [2] |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sociology |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Doctoral students | W. Bradford Wilcox [3] |
Robert John Wuthnow (born 1946) is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, where he is also the former chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion. [4]
Wuthnow was born in Kansas [5] in 1946. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Kansas in 1968 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975. His dissertation was Consciousness and the Transformation of Society. While at Berkeley, Wuthnow worked closely with Charles Glock, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah, Guy Swanson, and Gertrude Selznick. Wuthnow's first years at Berkeley were during the widespread protests on campus around the US, which ultimately inspired his dissertation. Glock and Bellah received a grant to study the symbolic—especially the religious—dimensions of the counter-culture movement from the Institute for Religion and Social Change. This four-year project resulted in the edited volume The New Religious Consciousness in 1976. Wuthnow realized that the counter-culture movements were just the most prominent evidence of deeper changes in American culture and used data from the project to argue this in his dissertation, eventually published as The Consciousness Reformation in 1976.
After a couple years as an instructor at the University of Arizona from 1974 to 1976, when he took position as assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University where he is currently.
Wuthnow has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. [6] His current research and teaching focuses on social change, the sociology of belonging, community, rural sociology, religion and politics, and theory. [7]
Wuthnow is editor of The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion and received the first Tufts University Civic Engagement Prize in 2007. [8]
In 2009, Wuthnow received the Warren J. Mitofsky Award for Excellence in Public Opinion Research from the board of directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. [9] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2013. [10]
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods and of qualitative approaches.
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based on the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place, or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. Communitarianism is often contrasted with individualism, and opposes laissez-faire policies that deprioritize the stability of the overall community.
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1973. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department. Later, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard.
The Moral Majority was an American political organization and movement associated with the Christian right and the Republican Party in the United States. It was founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. and associates, and dissolved in the late 1980s. It played a key role in the mobilization of conservative Christians as a political force and particularly in Republican presidential victories throughout the 1980s.
Civil religion, also referred to as a civic religion, is the implicit religious values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places. It is distinct from churches, although church officials and ceremonies are sometimes incorporated into the practice of civil religion. Countries described as having a civil religion include France and the United States. As a concept, it originated in French political thought and became a major topic for U.S. sociologists since its use by Robert Bellah in 1960.
The Economic Ethics of the World Religions is an unfinished book series by Max Weber. Weber's work in the field of sociology of religion began with the book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The book series contains The Religion of China, The Religion of India, and Ancient Judaism. However, his work was left incomplete as a result of his sudden death in 1920, which prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of early Christianity and Islam. The three main themes within the books were: religious ideas' effect on economic activities, the relationship between social stratification and religious ideas, and the distinguishable characteristics of Western civilisation. His goal was to find reasons for the different developmental paths of the cultures of the Western world and the Eastern world, without making value judgments, unlike the contemporaneous social Darwinists. Weber simply wanted to explain the distinctive elements of Western civilisation. Weber also proposed a socio-evolutionary model of religious change where societies moved from magic to ethical monotheism, with the intermediatory steps of polytheism, pantheism, and monotheism. According to him, this was the result of growing economic stability, which allowed for professionalisation and the evolution of an increasingly sophisticated priesthood. As societies grew more complex and encompassed different groups, a hierarchy of gods developed. Meanwhile, as their power became more centralised, the concept of a universal God became more popular and desirable.
Robert Neelly Bellah was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.
Lyndal Anne Roper is a historian. She was born in Melbourne, Australia. She works on German history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and has written a biography of Martin Luther. Her research centres on gender and the Reformation, witchcraft, and visual culture. In 2011 she was appointed to Regius Chair of History at the University of Oxford, the first woman and first Australian to hold this position.
American civil religion is a sociological theory that a nonsectarian religious faith exists within the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history. Scholars have portrayed it as a common set of values that foster social and cultural integration. The ritualistic elements of ceremonial deism found in American ceremonies and presidential invocations of God can be seen as expressions of the American civil religion.
Christian Stephen Smith is an American sociologist, currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Smith's research focuses primarily on religion in modernity, adolescents and emerging adults, sociological theory, philosophy of science, the science of generosity, American evangelicalism, and culture. Smith is well known for his contributions to the sociology of religion, particularly his research into adolescent spirituality, as well as for his contributions to sociological theory and his advocacy of critical realism.
Rodney William Stark was an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912, is a book that analyzes religion as a social phenomenon. Durkheim attributes the development of religion to the emotional security attained through communal living. His study of totemic societies in Australia led to a conclusion that the animal or plant that each clan worshipped as a sacred power was in fact that society itself. Halfway through the text, Durkheim asks, "So if [the totem animal] is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?"
Jeffrey Charles Alexander is an American sociologist, and a prominent social theorist. He is the founding figure in the school of cultural sociology he refers to as the "strong program".
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University is the world's oldest archive of social science data and the largest specializing in data from public opinion surveys. Its collection includes over 27,000 datasets and more than 855,000 questions with responses in Roper iPoll, adding hundreds more each year. The archive contains responses from millions of individuals on a vast range of topics. The current executive director of the center is Jonathon P. Schuldt, Associate Professor of Communication at Cornell University, with a governing board of directors chaired by Robert Y. Shapiro of Columbia University.
Sheilaism is a shorthand term for an individual's system of religious belief which co-opts strands of multiple religions chosen by the individual usually without much theological consideration. The term derives from a woman named Sheila Larson, who is quoted by Robert N. Bellah et al. in their book Habits of the Heart as following her own "little voice" in a faith she calls "Sheilaism".
James Davison Hunter is an American sociologist and originator of the term "culture war" in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Hunter is the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia and the founder and executive director of the university's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is also a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.
Charles Young Glock was an American sociologist whose work focuses on sociology of religion and survey research.
Ann Swidler is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociology, "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies".
In the sociology of religion patchwork religion indicates situations when individual or religious movement forms its own worldview from heterogeneous elements, taken from different religions or individual religious experience. Collected from these elements, this religious world view reminds of a patchwork quilt with a unique pattern. Similar social concepts are syncretism, bricolage and sheilaism.