Since 1954, American churches have faced a difficult decision: either say nothing about the moral issues that drive their religion or face losing their tax-exempt status. This fundamentally unsound choice falls down upon them due to an Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") regulation that prohibits religious organizations from commenting on the moral attributes of a candidate for political office.1 ...

Identification with a social group can operate as a powerful heuristic, allowing an individual to easily make political judgments. But, a person can identify with multiple groups, which may be mobilized toward different political ends. How do opinions and behaviors change when a person’s identities are in competition with each other, creating cross-pressures? The Evangelical Immigration Table (...

The relationship among religion, education and social mobility in Scotland is analysed statistically using the Scottish Household Survey of 2001. The large sample size allows much greater statistical power for this purpose than any previous source, and thus allows a more reliable assessment of claims that the stratifying effect of religion in Scotland may have declined. The questions investigat...

The psychological and socio-economic implications of digital technologies call for scholarship that engages questions about the nature of human consciousness, the construction of the self and the ethics of technical development. In this article, I outline a framework for an approach called contemplative media studies. This approach incorporates several different scholarly threads, namely: via c...

A critical feature of the national movement for quantitative literacy (QL) is the development of a strong networking component supported by common vision and direction. To this end, much can be learned from the role of networking in the national movement during the past two decades to change the undergraduate curriculum in mathematics. In particular, aspects of calculus reform and subsequent ef...

In four large, nationally representative surveys (N = 11.2 million), American adolescents and emerging adults in the 2010s (Millennials) were significantly less religious than previous generations (Boomers, Generation X) at the same age. The data are from the Monitoring the Future studies of 12th graders (1976-2013), 8th and 10th graders (1991-2013), and the American Freshman survey of entering...

Since at least the sixteenth century, the areas of the present day regions of Harar and Wallo have been important centres of teaching and diffusion of Islam as well as of preservation of Islamic culture and education. Preachers and scholars from these areas played a decisive role in the introduction and dissemination of the faith in the country, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu...