Crisis talk is the currency of the mass (and niche) media, and it can lead to a mentality that is paradoxically anxious (always attuned to the next crisis) and numbed (unable to distinguish the crises that lead to serious and long-term problems from those of momentary urgency — or the events that are merely outrageous or scandalous).  Sometimes a crisis becomes a turning point, for an individual or a group, but for this to happen, there needs to have been an already-established potential, and openness to the possibility of a new direction, an awareness of the problems and tensions in old approaches.

Susan Jacoby is, indeed, a “spirited atheist,” and a very smart one.  Her most recent post for On Faith,the religion blog that is a joint venture of Newsweek and The Washington Post, is biting, and one of the best statements I’ve seen in opposition to the “mamma grizzly” feminism of Sarah Palin et alia.

You have to hand it to Sarah Palin. She knows how to make a splash.

I was surprised at the fuss that erupted when Ms. Palin started giving speeches calling for “mama grizzly” feminists on the Right to organize and . . . (okay, so the “and” is a bit unclear to me). But to organize, anyway, and take back the feminist label. (A good overview from a range of perspectives is available at The Week’s website.)

To understand how religious support fits with other aspects of individuals’ lives, we performed a 2-step analysis. First, we used a statistical technique called latent class analysis that can analyze patterns of responses across survey questions; using this technique, we could understand how religious sources of emotional support were combined with other sources into an overall profile of emotional support. 

Robert Putnam, the influential political scientist, has argued that religion undergirds the well-being of individuals and promotes healthy, strong communities, because it provides “social capital” -- relationships of trust and care-taking. Religious capital can be either bridgingcapital, which links individuals to others who are socially (racially, economically, ideologically) dissimilar, and bridging between the world of the congregation and the larger social context. Or it can be bonding capital, which primarily builds relationships of trustwithin the congregation among those who are probably very similar in terms of race, education, and income.

The recent release of a new report by the Pew Forum, “Religion Among the Millennials,” caused the usual stir in the news media. The Millennials are a preoccupation of people my age and above, and generally the tone of media attention is, well, rather parental. The implied questions are, “What are they thinking?” and “Why is it so hard to understand them?”

The originating and continuing impetus behind sociological inquiry into religion has been a sense that religion is “at odds” with modernity, continually undermined by ongoing rationalization. Secularization theory was modified and elaborated, but remained essentially unchallenged until the late twentieth century, when a conjunction of theoretical developments and a world-wide revival of religious identification and public religious discourse led to a reconsideration of the secularization thesis. The most influential statement in opposition to the secularization perspective in sociology has been the market theory of religion, including both a strict rational choice account and a “new paradigm” account that uses the market as a metaphor for the voluntarism, pluralism, and choice characteristic of religion in modern societies.