All around us, we face requests for help. Colleagues may ask us for advice, friends may need a listening ear, a social service organization may be raising funds or looking for more volunteers, and an elderly family member may need our care. Social scientists have found that religious people are more likely than non-religious people…
As faith communities in the United States grow increasingly more diverse, many churches are turning to the shared parish, a single church facility shared by distinct cultural groups who retain their own worship and ministries. The fastest growing and most common of these are Catholic parishes shared by Latinos and white Catholics. Shared parishes remain one…
Question: Why don’t young Chinese Americans go to church? Lying at the intersection of America’s most nonreligious ethnic group and America’s most nonreligious age demographic, young adult Chinese Americans (aged 25-40) are one of the most secular groups in the United States. That is, they are the most likely to be unaffiliated with any institutionalized religion.…
Question: I hear a lot about people being “spiritual, but not religious.” What does that mean? “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious” is a common refrain in contemporary conversations. Many people seem eager to claim a connection with something they can call “spiritual,” but wary of the beliefs, traditions, and communities they think of as…
The focus of this site is the study of congregations, understood in the most basic sense as local religious assemblies. But concepts of “the congregation,” “congregational,” and “congregationalism” have both more precise and more contested meanings. As a form of “church polity,” congregationalism holds the local religious assembly to be the source of earthy ecclesiastical…