Brian Carwana
7.2K posts
@ReligionsGeek
Religions Geek. Speaks on religious literacy & inclusion. Director Encounter World Religions Centre. PhD from UToronto.
American Muslims are a positively selected group in terms of educational attainment, very different I believe from the European situation.
When Gen X was 18-29 years old: 18% identified as non-religious. When Millennials were 18-29 years old: 34% identified as non-religious. Among Gen Z currently: 41% identify as non-religious.
I'm Persian, I'm NOT a Muslim
Sikhs in the USA have found themselves the victims of hate crimes and discrimination because they were thought to be Muslim by bigots. Even then, many of them refused to say "I'm NOT a Muslim.": "It's just not an option for us to throw another community under the bus."
We often discuss diversity in academia - recognising that people's backgrounds may shape the kinds of questions they ask, topics they study. But if academics are overwhelmingly progressive atheists, this creates blind spots. They may be highly functionalist, stressing 'club goods', and ignoring genuine belief in paradise.
When religious families migrate to the west, they may be extremely concerned about liberal temptations. They then face a choice: do they prioritise their kids’ upward mobility or paradise? If the latter, parents may send their kids to religious schools to instil piety. That’s precisely what I find in my research in Britain
📢 New publication! My new article examines how K–12 social studies teachers are actually using the @NCSSNetwork Religious Studies Companion Document (RSCD) for the C3 Framework. The takeaway: Religious literacy has growing support, but teachers need clearer tools and training to bring it into practice. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: The more religious the society, the worse the problems are. And if you don't believe it, consider some of the world's most irreligious societies, like Norway, Netherlands, and New Zealand. They're pretty nice places to live. Now consider some of the world's most religious countries, like Afghanistan and Congo. Those are places that people want to get out of. This is also true in a comparison across American states. The more religious, the more dysfunctional. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What we should wish as Americans is to be neither Afghanistan nor Scandinavia, but to be the United States of America, which as a culture has always done an incredible job of balancing some of the absolute, definite benefits of modernity, including religious toleration, a respect for pluralism, a refusal to simply sort of impose the totality of one religion's theological doctrines on society with an abundant faith in a cosmic purpose for the human race. And obviously there are downsides to religious intensity. Those downsides are often manifested in zealous intolerance. There are also serious downsides to religious indifference, which are often manifested in anomie, drift, and despair. And it is simply the case that if you look across the developed world today, there is a strong correlation between secularization and a kind of loss of faith in human purpose and the human future, manifested most starkly in the declining birth rates that make it extremely unlikely that Dr. Pinker's predictions about the inevitable triumph of secularism and humanism over religion will come to pass, because the secularists and humanists don't seem to be making the basic choices that would enable the continuation of the human race.
Different conceptions of religion, and priorities in life.
One in four people raised Muslim have left Islam, which means that all polls of Muslim opinion substantially understate the degree of Muslim immigrant assimilation since leaving Islam is a type of assimilation. In my post today I document how big this bias...
