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Diverse college campuses have been conclusively associated with a variety of positive outcomes for all students. However, we still know very little empirically about how student diversity directly impacts the core task of the university: classroom learning. While students vary based on race along a broad spectrum of experiences and backgrounds, we have yet to establish how those varying backgrounds might impact the ways students engage with course material. In this study, I examined student journals in order to understand how race influenced the ways students engaged with course material and found that black students are much more likely than their white student peers to find connections between course material and daily life, a central task of the sociological imagination. The results of these findings are important for sociologists in particular and educators in general as we seek to maximize the effects of increasingly diverse educational settings.

Institutionally organized religious life in the United State is undergoing a dramatic transformation. While individual beliefs and practices remain relatively stable, institutional affiliation and participation has declined dramatically. In this article, we explore the religious \"Dones\"—those who have disaffiliated with their religious congregations but, unlike the Nones, continue to associate with a religious tradition. Drawing on a unique dataset of 100 in-depth interviews with self-identified Christians, we explain the \"push\" and \"pull\" factors that lead a person to intentionally leave their congregations. We find that a bureaucratic structure and a narrow focus on certain moral proscriptions can drive people away, while the prospect of forming more meaningful relationships and the opportunities to actively participate in social justice issues draw people out. From these factors, we show that an \"iron cage of congregations\" exists that is ill-suited to respond to a world where religious life is increasingly permeable as people enact their spirituality outside traditional religious organizations. We conclude by questioning whether the spiritual lives of the Dones are ultimately sustainable without institutional support.

Universities are under increasing pressure both internally and externally to demonstrate student learning outcomes generally and in the liberal arts and social sciences specifically. Internally, students and others often complain about the lack of direct connection between what they learn in the classroom and what happens, or what they perceive happens, in the real world. In addition, universities are often required to demonstrate to state and federal authorities the value of liberal arts and social science education. In this study, we use in-depth interviews to demonstrating the value of an Applied Research Center (ARC) to help communicate value to stakeholders, close learning gaps, and foster university-community partnerships. Our findings suggest that an ARC can play an integral role in reinforcing student learning outcomes, increasing student career success, and establish disciplinary value to a variety of constituents.

Racial diversity is understood to play an important role for all students on the college campus. In recent years, much effort has gone into documenting the positive effects of this diversity. However, few studies have focused on how diversity impacts student interactions in the classroom, and even fewer studies attempt to quantify contributions from students of different races. Using Web blog discussions about race and religion, the authors uncover the differences in contributions black and white students make to those discussions. The implications of these findings are important for scholars interested in how diversity impacts student learning, and for policymakers advocating on behalf of affirmative action legislation.

Gen Z sees gap in support ofLGBTQ+ rights among faith groups It's no secret that the young people born in the late 1990s and the first decade of this century are proving to be an activist generation, taking deeply to heart causes such as Black Lives Matter, gender equity, racial justice and environmental justice. Generation Z is coming of age at a time when the majority of Americans support gay rights, about half a decade after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. [...]supporting LGBTQ+ rights could be an opportunity for faith groups to earn the trust of Gen Z. If faith groups can work toward taking concrete action to dismantle the systems that perpetuate the discrimination LGBTQ+ people continue to experience, it could make the difference between a generation that proceeds into adulthood turned off by institutions or a generation willing to pursue relationships within faith communities and allow faith leaders to walk alongside them.

In the Fall of 2006 I had the opportunity to spend a week with a group of people who were trying to rethink what religious training might look like in a relatively new kind of church called the Emerging Church. The group of 25 practitioners and thinkers that I was with was committed to avoiding an overly programmatic approach to ministerial training and education. They had all come from traditional church backgrounds and grew distasteful of rigidity of those traditions. It is not, I admit, an uncommon story in the history of religion. How many religious movements have been borne out of a dislike of traditions which failed to reflect the desires of a changing society? The history of the Christian church is littered with attempts of varying success to reform and reshape existing church models with the Reformation marking the most notable attempt in this direction. What marked this particular effort as unique, however, was that the group viewed the source of their frustration not with the particular traditions themselves, but from the way those traditions were maintained.

The waning utility of popular church-sect typologies requires a new and more flexible framework for studying religious organizations and innovation therein. Here, we posit that religion’s shape and change is best observed through a more nuanced examination of the social sources of innovation – including external environments, entrepreneurialism, social movements, and social networks – and measured via transformations in leadership, membership, and structure. Sociologists of religion thinking about organizations would do well to frame their conversations less in terms of narrow typologies and more in terms of the conditions that give rise to new behaviors, that increase the likelihood of innovation, and that ultimately impact the diffusion of innovation.