P Edgell
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 28515 |
|---|---|
| NOME | P Edgell |
| PRENOMES | P |
| SOBRENOME | Edgell |
| ASSINATURA | EDGELL P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0389-9042 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 852 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
There Wasn't A Playbook For This
Using 18 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, this paper highlights how religious congregations made sense of and adapted to the "unsettled time" of 2020, prompted by the onset of COVID-19 and the police killing of George Floyd. These events prompted congregational leaders to adapt organizational routines to accommodate pandemic safety measures, address member demands, and maintain legitimacy in an increa…
The curious transformation of "Critical Race Theory" to "CRT
Varieties of Nonreligious Experience
Religious commitment has long been associated with health and happiness in the United States. However, despite a period of drastic decline in religious affiliation among Americans, much less is known about how nonreligious commitments promote wellbeing. We use novel measures that capture variation among the nonreligious to assess whether aspects of nonreligious experience might replicate religion's health-promoting features. We analyse how wellbe…
Public Religion and Gendered Attitudes
Do religious commitments hinder support for gender equality and contribute to the stalled gender revolution as a social problem? Answering this question requires specifying what kinds of religious commitments affect what specific gendered attitudes. Using a cultural approach to the study of religion, we distinguish personal religious commitments (piety and practice) from public religious commitments (preferences for religious order in social life…
After Restructuring
The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) provided a still-influential framework for the study of American religion that centered the emergence, after World War II, of a left-right religio-political divide driving mobilization around conflicts understood as moral. But in the last 30 years, the landscape of American religion has been transformed by decline in commitment to mainstream religious institutions, especially white Christian ones, and…
What Makes Life Meaningful? Combinations of Meaningful Commitments Among Nonreligious and Religious Americans
Having a sense that one's life is meaningful is related to, but distinct from, happiness, satisfaction, or living a moral life. Scholars across disciplines have investigated the role of religion in providing meaning or questioned whether religious decline prompts a crisis of meaninglessness. We use national survey data (2019, N = 1,326) to identify the overall patterns in what people find meaningful in general and how they spend time in activitie…
Eternally Damned, Yet Socially Conscious? The Volunteerism of Canadian Atheists
Research suggests that people who are religious may volunteer because religion is innately prosocial (i.e., inclination) or perhaps because religious communities provide volunteering chances (i.e., opportunities). Using data from Statistics Canada (General Social Survey, Cycle 33), we explored the relationship between different religious and nonreligious identities and volunteering behaviors, time commitments to volunteering, and organization typ…
Rapport
Can Talk Reveal Nondeclarative Culture? Deliberation Strategies in Talking About Social Controversies 1
Scholars have long debated the kind of cultural information that can be obtained through discursive methodologies. Is it possible to discern implicit, nondeclarative cultural information about research participants from “talk” alone? Using focus group data from the Talking about Social Controversies project, we argue that it is possible to discover limited kinds of nondeclarative culture from talk in sites of situated interaction. We propose the …
I Believe in Taking Care of People
From Politics as Vocation to Politics as Business
Populist movements seek to bolster the power of “the people” and undermine elites. In the United States a businessman, Donald Trump, has convinced a significant portion of the population that he is a man of the people. We answer three inter-related questions about what may be Trump’s biggest “win”: the transformation of populist discourse for a new century. How does Trump embed himself inside his followers’ own deep story? How does he fuse their …
How Americans Talk about Separation of Church and State
This paper draws on data from 12 focus group discussions of a faith-based prison ministry program to examine how ordinary Americans talk about the separation of church and state. The focus groups – conducted in Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Boston – revealed that program supporters and opponents draw on different moral frameworks, with supporters focusing on a framework of care and opponents focusing on a framework of justice. The findings a…
Racial, Religious, and Civic Dimensions of Anti-Muslim Sentiment in America
This paper examines anti-Muslim sentiment in America. Existing research has documented rising hostility to Muslims in Western countries, but has been much less clear about what drives such sentiments or exactly what sort of 'other' Muslims are understood to be. Our interest is in the cultural construction of Muslims as a problematic or incompatible 'other.' We explore the extent, content, and correlates of such views. Building from recent work in…
The Stakes of Symbolic Boundaries
Sociological theories of symbolic boundaries (understandings of who belongs to in-groups and out-groups) and social boundaries (material stratification) argue both are related, but empirical analyses often focus on one or the other. Using survey data from 2014, we replicate and validate earlier research describing patterns in how Americans draw symbolic boundaries against a range of minority groups. We then go beyond this work by demonstrating a …
Christian America? Secularized Evangelical Discourse and the Boundaries of National Belonging
Many scholars argue that evangelical Christian beliefs and traditions are central to dominant conceptions of American national identity, but most empirical studies in this area focus on the activities and identities of evangelical Christians themselves. Missing is an assessment of how evangelical-infused understandings of national belonging shape the views of people outside the white evangelical subculture. We analyze how Americans of all religio…
Seeking Good Debate
The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others
While some research argues that religious pluralism in the United States dampens conflict by promoting tolerance, other work documents persistent prejudice toward religious out-groups. We address this ambiguity by identifying a distinct cultural style that structures Americans’ attitudes toward religious others: support for public religious expression (PRE). Using data from a recent nationally representative survey, we find a strong and consisten…
From Existential to Social Understandings of Risk
Across many social contexts, women are found to be more religious than men. Risk preference theory proposes that women are less likely than men to accept the existential risks associated with nonbelief. Building on previous critiques of this theory, we argue that the idea of risk is relevant to understanding the relationship between gender and religiosity if risk is understood not as existential, but as social. The research on existential risk fo…
Intersectionality and Power
Cultural Schemas of Religion, Science, and Law in Talk About Social Controversies
We analyze cultural schemas of religion, science, and law reflected in the way ordinary citizens discuss contemporary social controversies and assess whether these schemas accord with a modernization narrative or whether people's experiences with each of these institutional arenas lead them to adopt realistic or critical schemas not predicted by modernization accounts. Focus group participants in three metropolitan areas were asked to talk about …
Losing Our Religion
Distinctiveness Reconsidered
Are conservative Protestants distinct in their support for individualistic explanations of racial inequality in America? Past research has generated contradictory findings on this question, along with debates about the best measure of evangelicalism and the factors that moderate religious influences on racial attitudes. Using data from the nationally representative Boundaries in the American Mosaic Project (2014), we examine how structural locati…
An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Election
In the 2016 presidential election, Americans who shared core religious beliefs and salient religious identities, but who differed in racial identification, sharply diverged in their voting patterns. While media accounts emphasized a generic “evangelical” support for Mr. Trump, it was actually White evangelicals and Catholics who supported him in record numbers; people of color in these traditions did not. Thus, the election provides an opportunit…
Work-family conflict among Black, White, and Hispanic men and women
Are there racial/ethnic differences in work–family conflict? Using a nationally representative survey of Americans, we analyze differences in work–family conflict among Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics and then utilize an intersectional approach, disaggregating men and women within each racial/ethnic group. Using structural equation modeling, we find that the usual predictors of conflict – family and work characteristics – have varied effects on wor…
Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders
We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by moral concerns about atheists and in part by agreement with cultural values that affirm religiosity …
"Atheists As "Other
Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious…
A Cultural Sociology of Religion
In this article, I review three contemporary streams of scholarship that are revitalizing the cultural analysis of religion, an approach that dates to the discipline's founding. Research from an institutional field perspective focuses on the institutions that shape religious belief, practice, and mobilization. Work on lived religion, including neo-Durkheimian approaches, focuses on religious experience and contested practices of sacralization. Sc…
Shared Visions? Diversity and Cultural Membership in American Life
Sociological theory and public discourse raise concerns about division, fragmentation, or attenuation in our collective life rooted in, among other things, racial or religious differences, but we know very little about how ordinary Americans imagine themselves as similar to and different from their fellow citizens. In a recent, nationally representative telephone survey (2003, N = 2081) we asked over 2,000 Americans whether the members of ten dif…
Religious Influences on Understandings of Racial Inequality in the United States
How does religion influence the way Americans understand the racial inequality that pervades our society? Only a few studies have explored this question, concentrating on how religious conservatism affects whites' views, and generating conflicting findings. Using data from a national random sample telephone survey (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2003, N = 2081), we find that among whites, both gender and education shape the effects of religious co…
The Politics of Religious Prejudice and Tolerance for Cultural Others
While some research argues that religious pluralism in the United States dampens conflict by promoting tolerance, other work documents persistent prejudice toward religious out-groups. We address this ambiguity by identifying a distinct cultural style that structures Americans’ attitudes toward religious others: support for public religious expression (PRE). Using data from a recent nationally representative survey, we find a strong and consisten…
Beyond the Nuclear Family? Familism and Gender Ideology in Diverse Religious Communities
Religious familism, or ideology about “the good family,” has been central to the culture and practice of local religious communities in the United States. Recent research has suggested that the “Ozzie and Harriet” familism dominant among mainstream religious groups in the 1950s religious expansion has remained formative for many local religious communities in the intervening decades. This research suggests that religious familism shapes how gende…
Religious Influences on Work-Family Trade-Offs
Despite a large body of research on the influences of religion on family life and gender ideology, few studies examined how religion affects work-family strategies. One set of strategies involves making employment or family trade-offs-strategies of devoting time or attention to either work or family in a situation in which one cannot devote the preferred amount of time and attention to both, strategies that may be experienced as making sacrifices…
Racial, Religious, and Civic Dimensions of Anti-Muslim Sentiment in America
This paper examines anti-Muslim sentiment in America. Existing research has documented rising hostility to Muslims in Western countries, but has been much less clear about what drives such sentiments or exactly what sort of 'other' Muslims are understood to be. Our interest is in the cultural construction of Muslims as a problematic or incompatible 'other.' We explore the extent, content, and correlates of such views. Building from recent work in…
From Existential to Social Understandings of Risk
Across many social contexts, women are found to be more religious than men. Risk preference theory proposes that women are less likely than men to accept the existential risks associated with nonbelief. Building on previous critiques of this theory, we argue that the idea of risk is relevant to understanding the relationship between gender and religiosity if risk is understood not as existential, but as social. The research on existential risk fo…
An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Election
In the 2016 presidential election, Americans who shared core religious beliefs and salient religious identities, but who differed in racial identification, sharply diverged in their voting patterns. While media accounts emphasized a generic “evangelical” support for Mr. Trump, it was actually White evangelicals and Catholics who supported him in record numbers; people of color in these traditions did not. Thus, the election provides an opportunit…
Distinctiveness Reconsidered
Are conservative Protestants distinct in their support for individualistic explanations of racial inequality in America? Past research has generated contradictory findings on this question, along with debates about the best measure of evangelicalism and the factors that moderate religious influences on racial attitudes. Using data from the nationally representative Boundaries in the American Mosaic Project (2014), we examine how structural locati…
The Stakes of Symbolic Boundaries
Sociological theories of symbolic boundaries (understandings of who belongs to in-groups and out-groups) and social boundaries (material stratification) argue both are related, but empirical analyses often focus on one or the other. Using survey data from 2014, we replicate and validate earlier research describing patterns in how Americans draw symbolic boundaries against a range of minority groups. We then go beyond this work by demonstrating a …
How Americans Understand Racial and Religious Differences
How can we better conceptualize attitudes about difference in an increasingly diverse, multicultural United States? This article uses data from a recent, nationally representative telephone survey with oversamples of African Americans and Hispanics to analyze attitudes about two prominent sources of distinction in the United States. Race and religion were selected because they tend to be understood in very different ways—race as a social problem,…
Profiles of Anticipated Support
In this article we analyze the role of religion in the composition of Americans' networks of anticipated emotional support. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Religion and Family Life, which contains information on multiple sources of potential emotional support, we use latent class analysis to uncover four different anticipated support profiles, which are organized along two dimensions of variation: religiosity and breadth. We label the…
Public Religion and Gendered Attitudes
Do religious commitments hinder support for gender equality and contribute to the stalled gender revolution as a social problem? Answering this question requires specifying what kinds of religious commitments affect what specific gendered attitudes. Using a cultural approach to the study of religion, we distinguish personal religious commitments (piety and practice) from public religious commitments (preferences for religious order in social life…
Work-family conflict among Black, White, and Hispanic men and women
Are there racial/ethnic differences in work–family conflict? Using a nationally representative survey of Americans, we analyze differences in work–family conflict among Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics and then utilize an intersectional approach, disaggregating men and women within each racial/ethnic group. Using structural equation modeling, we find that the usual predictors of conflict – family and work characteristics – have varied effects on wor…
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion
This Handbook showcases research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a resource for sociologists in general by integrating broader questions of sociology (e.g. demography…
Cultural Schemas of Religion, Science, and Law in Talk About Social Controversies
We analyze cultural schemas of religion, science, and law reflected in the way ordinary citizens discuss contemporary social controversies and assess whether these schemas accord with a modernization narrative or whether people's experiences with each of these institutional arenas lead them to adopt realistic or critical schemas not predicted by modernization accounts. Focus group participants in three metropolitan areas were asked to talk about …
What Makes Life Meaningful? Combinations of Meaningful Commitments Among Nonreligious and Religious Americans
Having a sense that one's life is meaningful is related to, but distinct from, happiness, satisfaction, or living a moral life. Scholars across disciplines have investigated the role of religion in providing meaning or questioned whether religious decline prompts a crisis of meaninglessness. We use national survey data (2019, N = 1,326) to identify the overall patterns in what people find meaningful in general and how they spend time in activitie…
Eternally Damned, Yet Socially Conscious? The Volunteerism of Canadian Atheists
Research suggests that people who are religious may volunteer because religion is innately prosocial (i.e., inclination) or perhaps because religious communities provide volunteering chances (i.e., opportunities). Using data from Statistics Canada (General Social Survey, Cycle 33), we explored the relationship between different religious and nonreligious identities and volunteering behaviors, time commitments to volunteering, and organization typ…
Loose Connections and Liberal Theology
We used a mixed methods approach-including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a survey-to study two innovative Christian contemplative worship services housed in a mainline Protestant congregation in a midwestern city. These services employed boundary-blurring practices designed to attract the 'de-churched'-those who had been involved in a Christian congregation in the past but who had at some point disengaged from organized religion. Though…
I Believe in Taking Care of People
How Americans Talk about Separation of Church and State
This paper draws on data from 12 focus group discussions of a faith-based prison ministry program to examine how ordinary Americans talk about the separation of church and state. The focus groups – conducted in Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Boston – revealed that program supporters and opponents draw on different moral frameworks, with supporters focusing on a framework of care and opponents focusing on a framework of justice. The findings a…
The relevance of place and family stage for styles of community involvement
Community involvement may be a nuanced aspect of individuals' lives, and the place of residence could play a role. In this paper, we created a measure of four different styles of community involvement using cluster analysis, then investigated how education, work involvement, family stage (marriage and parenthood and age of the youngest child), gender, and the local residential community influence the style of involvement for a randomly sampled su…
Making Ends Meet
The 'New Economy' features 24/7 employment, varied work schedules, job insecurity, and lower benefits and wages, which lead to disparities in experiences of security and sufficiency. This study investigates sufficiency concerns in the New Economy; who is having trouble making ends meet? Sufficiency concerns are subjective perceptions that work is insufficient to meet basic needs and that family and work cannot be coordinated in a stable way. This…
In Rhetoric and Practice
Throughout American history, religious institutions and families have been linked together through relationships of dependency and control. Religious leaders and organizations in the United States generally promote norms of stable, monogamous, and faithful marriage; uphold the nuclear family with children as an ideal; and provide a venue for the religious and moral socialization of children. For individuals, religious participation is associated …
Handbook of the Sociology of Religion
This Handbook showcases research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a resource for sociologists in general by integrating broader questions of sociology (e.g. demography…
"Atheists As "Other
Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans' acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious…
Beyond the Nuclear Family? Familism and Gender Ideology in Diverse Religious Communities
Religious familism, or ideology about “the good family,” has been central to the culture and practice of local religious communities in the United States. Recent research has suggested that the “Ozzie and Harriet” familism dominant among mainstream religious groups in the 1950s religious expansion has remained formative for many local religious communities in the intervening decades. This research suggests that religious familism shapes how gende…
Religious Influences on Understandings of Racial Inequality in the United States
How does religion influence the way Americans understand the racial inequality that pervades our society? Only a few studies have explored this question, concentrating on how religious conservatism affects whites' views, and generating conflicting findings. Using data from a national random sample telephone survey (Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann 2003, N = 2081), we find that among whites, both gender and education shape the effects of religious co…
Religious Influences on Work-Family Trade-Offs
Despite a large body of research on the influences of religion on family life and gender ideology, few studies examined how religion affects work-family strategies. One set of strategies involves making employment or family trade-offs-strategies of devoting time or attention to either work or family in a situation in which one cannot devote the preferred amount of time and attention to both, strategies that may be experienced as making sacrifices…
We still don't know if Christianity "Works," much Less why
Journal Article We still don't know if Christianity “Works,” much Less why: Response to Smith Get access Penny Edgell Penny Edgell University of Minnesota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Sociology of Religion, Volume 69, Issue 4, Winter 2008, Pages 445–452, https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/69.4.445 Published: 01 December 2008
Religion and Family
Souls in Transition
Shared Visions? Diversity and Cultural Membership in American Life
Sociological theory and public discourse raise concerns about division, fragmentation, or attenuation in our collective life rooted in, among other things, racial or religious differences, but we know very little about how ordinary Americans imagine themselves as similar to and different from their fellow citizens. In a recent, nationally representative telephone survey (2003, N = 2081) we asked over 2,000 Americans whether the members of ten dif…
Religion and Family
How Americans Understand Racial and Religious Differences
How can we better conceptualize attitudes about difference in an increasingly diverse, multicultural United States? This article uses data from a recent, nationally representative telephone survey with oversamples of African Americans and Hispanics to analyze attitudes about two prominent sources of distinction in the United States. Race and religion were selected because they tend to be understood in very different ways—race as a social problem,…
Making Ends Meet
The 'New Economy' features 24/7 employment, varied work schedules, job insecurity, and lower benefits and wages, which lead to disparities in experiences of security and sufficiency. This study investigates sufficiency concerns in the New Economy; who is having trouble making ends meet? Sufficiency concerns are subjective perceptions that work is insufficient to meet basic needs and that family and work cannot be coordinated in a stable way. This…
A Cultural Sociology of Religion
In this article, I review three contemporary streams of scholarship that are revitalizing the cultural analysis of religion, an approach that dates to the discipline's founding. Research from an institutional field perspective focuses on the institutions that shape religious belief, practice, and mobilization. Work on lived religion, including neo-Durkheimian approaches, focuses on religious experience and contested practices of sacralization. Sc…
Religion and Family in a Changing Society
The 1950s religious boom was organized around the male-breadwinner lifestyle in the burgeoning postwar suburbs. But since the 1950s, family life has been fundamentally reconfigured in the United States. How do religion and family fit together today? This book examines how religious congregations in America have responded to changes in family structure, and how families participate in local religious life. Based on a study of congregations and com…
Profiles of Anticipated Support
In this article we analyze the role of religion in the composition of Americans' networks of anticipated emotional support. Drawing on data from the National Survey of Religion and Family Life, which contains information on multiple sources of potential emotional support, we use latent class analysis to uncover four different anticipated support profiles, which are organized along two dimensions of variation: religiosity and breadth. We label the…
Loose Connections and Liberal Theology
We used a mixed methods approach-including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and a survey-to study two innovative Christian contemplative worship services housed in a mainline Protestant congregation in a midwestern city. These services employed boundary-blurring practices designed to attract the 'de-churched'-those who had been involved in a Christian congregation in the past but who had at some point disengaged from organized religion. Though…
The relevance of place and family stage for styles of community involvement
Community involvement may be a nuanced aspect of individuals' lives, and the place of residence could play a role. In this paper, we created a measure of four different styles of community involvement using cluster analysis, then investigated how education, work involvement, family stage (marriage and parenthood and age of the youngest child), gender, and the local residential community influence the style of involvement for a randomly sampled su…
Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders
We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by moral concerns about atheists and in part by agreement with cultural values that affirm religiosity …
From Existential to Social Understandings of Risk
Across many social contexts, women are found to be more religious than men. Risk preference theory proposes that women are less likely than men to accept the existential risks associated with nonbelief. Building on previous critiques of this theory, we argue that the idea of risk is relevant to understanding the relationship between gender and religiosity if risk is understood not as existential, but as social. The research on existential risk fo…
Intersectionality and Power
Cultural Schemas of Religion, Science, and Law in Talk About Social Controversies
We analyze cultural schemas of religion, science, and law reflected in the way ordinary citizens discuss contemporary social controversies and assess whether these schemas accord with a modernization narrative or whether people's experiences with each of these institutional arenas lead them to adopt realistic or critical schemas not predicted by modernization accounts. Focus group participants in three metropolitan areas were asked to talk about …
Losing Our Religion
Distinctiveness Reconsidered
Are conservative Protestants distinct in their support for individualistic explanations of racial inequality in America? Past research has generated contradictory findings on this question, along with debates about the best measure of evangelicalism and the factors that moderate religious influences on racial attitudes. Using data from the nationally representative Boundaries in the American Mosaic Project (2014), we examine how structural locati…
An Agenda for Research on American Religion in Light of the 2016 Election
In the 2016 presidential election, Americans who shared core religious beliefs and salient religious identities, but who differed in racial identification, sharply diverged in their voting patterns. While media accounts emphasized a generic “evangelical” support for Mr. Trump, it was actually White evangelicals and Catholics who supported him in record numbers; people of color in these traditions did not. Thus, the election provides an opportunit…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (30 obras) · Religion and Society Interactions (26 obras) · Psychology (24 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (21 obras) · Social Psychology (20 obras) · Gender Studies (17 obras) · Religion, Society, and Development (17 obras) · Politics (14 obras)