Rodney Stark Sociology 10th Edition Ebook

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Sociology 10th Edition. Rodney Stark is a renowned scholar and researcher, and is recognized as one of the foremost sociologists working in the field of sociology of religion. Professor Stark has published more than 140 articles and 27 scholarly books that have won numerous awards and acknowledgements, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination. This text, considered to be a living classic among introductory sociology texts, is written by Rodney Stark- a major sociology researcher and scholarly author. The text introduces students to the methods and theories of sociology using Rodney Stark's hallmark 'Over the Shoulder of a professional sociologist' approach that addresses students.

Born	July 8, 1934 (age 86) Jamestown, North Dakota, United States
Nationality	American
Education	BA, journalism, University of Denver, 1959 MA, sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1965 PhD, sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1971^[1]
Occupation	Professor of Social Sciences
Employer	Baylor University
Website	Homepage, Baylor University rodneystark.com

Rodney William Stark (born July 8, 1934) is an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. He is presently the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.^[1]

Rodney Stark Sociology 10th Edition Ebook 2nd Edition

Stark has written over 30 books, including The Rise of Christianity (1996), and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome.^[2] He has twice won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, for The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (1985, with William Sims Bainbridge), and for The Churching of America 1776–1990 (1992, with Roger Finke).^[3]

Early life and education[edit]

Stark was born in 1934^[3]^[4] and grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, in a Lutheran family. He spent time in the United States Army, before graduating in journalism from the University of Denver in 1959. He worked as a journalist for the Oakland Tribune from 1959 until 1961, then pursued graduate work, obtaining his MA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and his PhD, also from Berkeley, in 1971.^[1]

Career and research[edit]

Positions held[edit]

After completing his PhD, Stark held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. After teaching as Professor of Sociology and of Comparative Religion at the University of Washington for 32 years, Stark moved to Baylor University in 2004, where he is co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion.^[2] He is an advocate of the application of the rational choice theory in the sociology of religion, which he calls the theory of religious economy.^[3]

Stark–Bainbridge theory of religion[edit]

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Stark worked with William Sims Bainbridge on the Stark–Bainbridge theory of religion,^[3] and co-wrote the books The Future of Religion (1985) and A Theory of Religion (1987) with Bainbridge. Nowadays their theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of the more explicit recourse to economic principles in the study of religion as later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.^[5]^[6]

Rodney Stark Sociology 10th Edition Ebook Edition

Criticism of secularization theories[edit]

Stark has been one of the most vocal critics of theories of secularization. In 1999, he published an article entitled “Secularization, R.I.P.”^[7] that became both famous and controversial.^[8] He expanded his theory in subsequent works, claiming that statistical data does not support the theory of a decline of religion in modern societies. Although it is true that the forms and practices of religion change, the idea of a decline called “secularization,” Stark argued, derives from faulty quantitative analysis and ideological preconceptions.^[9]

On the growth of Christianity[edit]

Stark has proposed in The Rise of Christianity that Christianity grew through gradual individual conversions via social networks of family, friends and colleagues. His main contribution, by comparing documented evidence of Christianity's spread in the Roman Empire with the history of the LDS church in the 19th and 20th centuries, was to illustrate that a sustained and continuous growth could lead to huge growth within 200 years. This use of exponential growth as a driver to explain the growth of the church without the need for mass conversions (deemed necessary by historians until then) is now widely accepted.

Stark has suggested that Christianity grew because it treated women better than pagan religions. He also suggested that making Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire weakened the faithfulness of the Christian community by bringing in people who did not really believe or had a weaker belief. This is consistent with Stark's published observations of contemporary religious movements, where once-successful faith movements gradually decline in fervor due to the free rider problem.

Criticism of anti-Catholicism[edit]

While not a Roman Catholic himself, Stark believes that Anti-Catholicism is still a dominant force in the American media and the academia. Particularly in his book Bearing False Witness (2016), he has argued that an anti-Catholic prejudice has poisoned the historical debate on the Crusades, the Inquisition and the relations of Pope Pius XII with Nazism, creating an “anti-Catholic history” that is at odds with contemporary academic research, yet is still taught in schools and promoted by mainline media.^[10]

On the theory of evolution[edit]

In 2004 The American Enterprise, an online publication of the American Enterprise Institute, published an article by Stark, 'Facts, Fable and Darwin,' critical of the stifling of debate on evolution. Stark criticized the 'Darwinian Crusade' and their 'tactic of claiming that the only choice is between Darwin and Bible literalism.' Though not a creationist himself, he believes that though 'the theory of evolution is regarded as the invincible challenge to all religious claims, it is taken for granted among the leading biological scientists that the origin of species has yet to be explained.' He suggests that governments 'lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth.'^[11] Groundwater engineering notes pdf template.

Personal religious faith[edit]

In their 1987 book A Theory of Religion, Stark and Bainbridge describe themselves as 'personally incapable of religious faith'.^[12] While reluctant to discuss his own religious views, he stated in a 2004 interview that he was not a man of faith, but also not an atheist.^[13] In a 2007 interview, after accepting an appointment at Baylor University, Stark indicated that his self-understanding had changed and that he could now be described as an 'independent Christian.' In this interview Stark recollects that he has 'always been a “cultural” Christian' understood by him as having 'been strongly committed to Western Civilization.' Of his previous positions he wrote: 'I was never an atheist, but I probably could have been best described as an agnostic.'^[14]

Selected works[edit]

Books[edit]

Christian Beliefs and anti-Semitism (1966) with Charles Y. GlockISBN978-0060323554
American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment (1968) with Charles Y. Glock ISBN978-0520017566
The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (1985), with William Sims BainbridgeISBN978-0520048546
Sociology (1985) an introductory college sociology text that has been through ten editions as of 2007. 10th: (2006) ISBN0495093440
A Theory of Religion (1987), with William Sims Bainbridge
Religion, Deviance, and Social Control (1996), with William Sims Bainbridge
The Churching of America 1776-1992: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (1992), with Roger Finke; 2nd edition under name The Churching of America 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (2005)
The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (1996) ISBN978-0691027494 or How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (1997) ISBN978-0060677015
Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (2000), with Roger Finke. University of California Press
One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (2001), ISBN978-0-691-11500-9
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Description, reviews, & contents. (2003), ISBN978-0-691-11436-1
Exploring the Religious Life (2004) ISBN0-8018-7844-6
The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005), ISBN0-8129-7233-3
The Rise of Mormonism (2005), ISBN0-231-13634-X
Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome (2006)
Discovering God: A New Look at the Origins of the Great Religions (2007), ISBN978-0-06-117389-9
God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (2009) ISBN978-0061582615
The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (2011), ISBN0062007688
America’s Blessings: How Religion Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists (2012)
How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (2014), Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISBN1610170857
Religious Hostility: A Global Assessment of Hatred and Terror (2014), with Katie E. Corcoran
A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China (2015), with Xiuhua Wang. ISBN978-1599475172
The Triumph of Faith: Why The World Is More Religious Than Ever (2015) ISBN1610171381
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History (2016) ISBN1599474999
Reformation Myths: Five Centuries of Misconceptions and (Some) Misfortunes (2017) ISBN0281078270
Why God?: Explaining Religious Phenomena (2018) ISBN1599475537

Articles[edit]

John Lofland and Rodney Stark. Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective American Sociological Review of 1965. (an early and influential conversion theory based on field work among Unification Church members)^[15]
'A Taxonomy of Religious Experience' in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1965
Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge (1979) 'Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements'Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18, no 2: 117-33
Rodney Stark. 'On Theory-Driven Methods.' pp. 175–196 in The Craft of Religious Studies, edited by Jon R. Stone. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Stark, R., “Fact, Fable and Darwin” in One America, September 2004; Part 1 in [1] and Part 2 [2], as printed in Meridian Magazine, 2005

Notes[edit]

^ ^a^b^cCurriculum vitae, Baylor University.
^ ^a^b'Rodney Stark'. Baylor University. 15 March 2013.
^ ^a^b^c^dAndré Nauta, 'Stark, Rodney', Encyclopedia of Religion and Society, 1998.
^'Stark, Rodney', Encyclopedia.
^Alan E. Aldridge (2000). Religion in the contemporary world: A sociological introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 95–97. ISBN9780745620831.
^David Lehmann, 'Rational Choice and the Sociology of Religion', in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 181–200.
^Stark, Rodney, “Secularization, R.I.P.”, Sociology of Religion, vol. 60, 1999, pp. 249–273.
^Gonçalves, Arnaldo M., “Why Is Stark Wrong on His Criticism of the Secularization Theory?”, SSRN, January 29, 2016.
^ Zielińska, Katarzyna, “Concepts of religion in debates on secularisation”, Approaching Religion,vol. 3, no. 1, 2013, pp. 25–35.
^CORKERY, Ann, “A Baptist Scholar Debunks Anti-Catholic Historical Hogwash”, ‘’National Review, July 25, 2016.
^Rodney Stark, 'Fact, Fable, and Darwin', The American Enterprise, September 2004.
^Lehmann, p. 183.
^StarkArchived 2013-10-29 at the Wayback Machine, JKNIRP, The National Institute for the Renewal of the Priesthood, 2004.
^'A Christmas conversation with Rodney Stark'. Center for Studies on New Religions. 25 December 2007.
^James T. Richardson (1998). 'New Religious Movements'. Encyclopedia of Religion and Society.

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