The study of religion, like the study of history and other disciplines, is a spectrum between two methodological poles: humanities methods on one end, and social scientific methods on the other. My own methods tend toward the humanities, both because I’m interested in religious experiences that are often interior and unquantifiable and because I’m better trained in methods like close reading, theology, and exegesis than I am in methods like statistics and demography. But there are questions in the study of religious history that can only be answered through methods that tend toward the social scientific.
So Much for the Protestant Ethic
In Links on 24 May 2011 at 3:34 pmThe New York Times recently published a graphic charting American denominations and religions by college graduation percentage and average income. The most evocative line from the accompanying article: “Overall, Protestants, who together are the country’s largest religious group, are poorer than average and poorer than Catholics.”
Recent Religious News, Rapture Edition
In Links on 21 May 2011 at 8:00 pm
It’s after 6:00 p.m. in my time zone, and the rapture hasn’t come. So there is still time to read Stephen Prothero’s take Harold Camping’s recent prediction of the rapture.
