Is Atheism a Religion?

Just this morning, I stumbled upon an article in the New York Times. Actually, it is less of an article and more of an ongoing discussion, that will at one time be ongoing. At the moment, it's really just a bunch of short opinion pieces by eight or nine different authors from a variety of backgrounds.

While that may sound confusing at best, the topic of discussion is rather interesting: atheism. That's right, they're talking about atheism. Not atheists attacking one religion or another or trying to debunk religion, but rather talking about atheism itself. Specifically, the overarching question being posed on the discussion is "Is Atheism a religion?"

The logic and higher reasoning displayed here
is sure to convert the masses to your cause.

This is interesting, because for all the news headlines that atheists get, usually it is in reference to what they say about other religions, or about conflict between theists and atheists. But these authors, several of whom are atheists themselves, attempt to explain their lack of faith and flesh out their reasons for denying theism. A few criticisms have even been offered, by both theists and atheists themselves, about their religion (or lack thereof).

If anything, this article does show you the sometimes fractured nature of the atheist community, and that they are not all the militant God-haters theists sometimes portray them as.

So anyways, you should check the article/debate out.

If you have a suggestion for an article, please feel free to send them to sociologyws@gmail.com. But please, no more pictures of puppies in cups. We're not getting anything done.

SIP Orals

Greetings all!

As Christmas approaches, it means a lot of things. For Covenant students, it means final exams and (eventually) Christmas break. For Covenant sociology seniors, it also means SIP Orals.

At Covenant, seniors are required to research and write a Senior Integration Paper, which is essentially an undergraduate thesis. Though nowhere near as long and detailed as a graduate thesis, it still gives the student a chance to practice researching and writing a formal research paper in their chosen field(s) of study. At Covenant, it is also the culmination of your studies here.

In addition to the paper, students are also required to give an oral presentation of their topic paper. While the format for these orals varies from major to major, in the sociology department it consists of a short presentation and a question-and-answer session with the presenter.

As a sociology senior myself, I am happy to report that our SIP orals are officially over! Presentations covered a wide variety of topics, including how introverts use technology, serial killers, and the institutions surrounding care for orphans in Africa.

Here are some pictures from the first group of presenters! The others went just this morning, so hopefully pictures of them will be uploaded soon.

Stay Safe for Thanksgiving!

The Covenant College Sociology Department hopes you all have a good Thanksgiving. If you're into that kinda thing, try not to get too stressed out finding the best deals on Black Friday.

We will return after Thanksgiving with more sociological nourishment for you! Until then, stay safe while traveling.

New Website!

!أهلا و سهلا

Welcome! (in Arabic)

Today's post is to inform you that the Covenant College Sociology Department has a new website! Created using Weebly, we hope to eventually use this template as our permanent online base of operations!

You can check out the new website here. On it you'll find pages about our full-time professors, information about the college and department in general, and tons of links to helpful resources. These include blogs, websites, and research tools for the aspiring sociologist.

Check it out!

If you have an idea for an article, please for the love of all that is holy send it to sociologyws@gmail.com. You can find Austin, the author of this post on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. He might be busy chasing a chicken off his porch with a tennis racket, but he'll answer.

A Ringing Endorsement

Hello all!

Today's post is less hard-hitting analysis (sorry to disappoint) and more of an endorsement for another site. Surely you're all aware of the posts we've made about Peter Berger's blog, Patrolmag, and the Aquila Report. Point is, we here at the Covenant College Sociology Department love religion, and the academic discussion of it. It's great.

So here, to continue what is turning into a series, is another religion website to look at. It's called Religion News Service, and you can find the homepage here. Less a news agency, and more an aggregate for religion-themed news from most major faiths around the globe, RNS is a great site to keep up with for the religious or those interested in studying religion from any angle.

A particularly useful feature of this site that I've found is the daily religion roundup. You simply submit an email of your choice, and they send you a daily email that links you to a page on the site. On the roundup page, you can scroll through the headlines and summaries of a number of religion articles form around the web, and follow the links to read the full article if you should so desire. This is useful for those of you that want to stay informed, but don't or can't take five hours out of your day to browse the web.

For those of you readers on the East Coast, stay safe. If you have an idea for an article, please feel free to send it to sociologyws@gmail.com. You can find Austin, the author of this post on Twitter, where he is currently busy being disappointed in the Discovery Channel for this tweet.

Metaphorically Military

Greetings everyone!

This week's post is about the word we use. As I'm sure you're aware, words and language do more than just communicate meaning. They can also communicate emotion, and shape us subconsciously in ways we might not even be aware of.

For example, in her classic book The Argument Culture, Deborah Tannen devotes a section of her studies to the use of military language in everyday life. She says that we in the West (and especially in America) tend to use military metaphors in everyday life. Things like the "culture wars" and "gender wars" are obvious examples, but this practice shows up in more subtle ways as well (If someone were to eat their dinner rather quickly, we might say they "demolished" their food, or something of that nature).

Politics is one arena where this tendency can be seen most clearly. For example, look at the title of this article in the Religion News Service, specifically the phrase "cover his right flank". Cover his right flank? Are we advancing on the enemy? Gaining ground over our opponents? Calling for a temporary cease-fire? Don't these all sound like phrases we might use to describe events happening in the political sphere?

While these may just seem like a nifty metaphor to some, Tannen and others argue that this actually sustains this "argument culture" that we live in, causing us to view everything from an election to an academic debate as a war between two diametrically opposed sides. Everything comes to be viewed in this paradigm of conflict, this battle between right and wrong. Consequently, Tannen argues, we become less inclined to things like compromise and agreement, instead wanting nothing short of total domination for our side of everything from Congress to the Twitter-sphere.

Just something to think about.

If you have an idea for an article, please for the love of all that is holy send it to sociologyws@gmail.com. You can find Austin, the author of this post on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest. But not Facebook. Please. He doesn't have time to check that, as he's too busy preparing for the zombie apocalypse, and the realization that zombies in riot armor is something he hadn't considered before.

Gender, Higher Education, and Visual Sociology

Today's post will be using an article (shocking) from a fellow blog.

The blog is called "Graphic Sociology" and we've referenced it a few times before. It is one of the more prominent blogs out there instructing others in what's called "visual sociology". Put simply, visual sociology takes the stats, figures, and knowledge gained through things like surveys, and puts them into visual displays that demonstrate the concepts or changes the research is trying to explore.

This particular article is about gender and ethnic ratios in American higher education. Specifically, it is about the gains that women (of any ethnicity) have made in higher education in the past five decades.

Here's a sample.

As some of you may disagree that gains have been made, it is important to note that this article was written by a woman. Not that I don't trust your judgment, good readers; I just want to clear up any suspicions of "male apologetics" or bias in the beginning.

So with that in mind, enjoy the article. Click here to read it in it's full.

If you have an idea for an article you'd like to see posted, feel free to email us at sociologyws@gmail.com. But please, stop sending us pictures of albino koalas. We're not getting any work done. They're just too darn cute.