Christian Smith (sociologist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion and culture, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society [1] at the University of Notre Dame. Smith’s research focuses primarily on religion in modernity, adolescents, American evangelicalism, and culture.
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[edit] Biography
Smith received his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 1990 and his BA from Gordon College in 1983. Smith was a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 12 years before his move to Notre Dame.
[edit] Bibliography
Author, co-author, and editor of numerous scholarly books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and research reports, Smith was most recently awarded Christianity Today’s 2005 Distinguished Book Award for the book he co-authored with Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005, Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. A complete listing of Christian Smith’s work can be found in his Curriculum Vita.[2] A selection of Smith’s books includes:
- Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005), with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Oxford)
- Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (2003) (Oxford)
- The Secular Revolution (2003) (California)
- Christian America?: What Evangelicals Really Want (2000) (California)
- Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (2000), with Michael Emerson (Oxford)
- American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (1998), with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink (Chicago)
- Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (1996) (Chicago)
- The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (1991) (Chicago)
[edit] Theoretical Contributions
Smith’s larger theoretical agenda has been to move culture, morality, and identity to the center of sociological theorizing generally and the sociology of religion specifically. Smith’s early work on social movements emphasized not only structural political opportunities but also personal moral motivations for participation in social movement activism. In his work on American evangelicals, Smith developed a “subcultural identity” theory of religious persistence and strength in the modern world, and highlighted the immense cultural complexities within conservative Protestantism. The Secular Revolution emphasized the centrality of culture, agency, and moral vision by religiously hostile actors in the secularization of American public life. Moral, Believing Animals’ anthropology underscored the morally-oriented, narratological, and epistemically anti-foundationalist condition of human personhood. Smith’s more recent work on the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. adolescents emphasizes the interplay of broad cultural influences, family socialization, and religious motivations in forming teenager’s life outcomes. Behind and contributing to these sociological emphases are the philosophical works of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, a critical realist philosophy of social science, and an interpretive-hermeneutical understanding of sociology.
