Social Thought & Research
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! ! Social Thought & Research Vol. 33, 2014 Managing Editor KEVIN MCCANNON University of Kansas Co-Editors ANDREA GÓMEZ-CERVANTES University of Kansas DANIEL RYAN ALVORD University of Kansas BROCK TERNES University of Kansas Staff CHELSEA BAILEY JAKE LIPSMAN Cover Art: The image of a wind farm in Spearville, KS captures the idea of resilience conveyed in this volume of STAR. In the foreground, a derelict windmill, once used for pumping water vital for agriculture, rests silently in a cemetery—a symbol of a bygone era. But the modern wind turbine used to generate electricity for the area, towering in the background, suggests that communities we assume to be in decline continue to thrive. Photo used by permission, J.S. Aber. http://geospectra.net/kite/ks_wind/ks_wind.htm Editorial Advisory Board ROBERT J. ANTONIO University of Kansas ROSLYN WALLACH BOLOGH CUNY-College of Staten Island JASON CAPPS Seattle University GORAN DAHL Lund University, Sweden DAVID EKERDT University of Kansas ERIC HANLEY University of Kansas SHIRLEY A. HILL University of Kansas STEPHEN KALBERG Boston University CHANGHWAN KIM University of Kansas LIZ LEGERSKI University of North Dakota LEWIS A. MENNERICK University of Kansas MEHRANGIZ NAJAFIZADEH University of Kansas EBENEZER OBADARE University of Kansas HAROLD L. ORBACH Kansas State University DAVID N. SMITH University of Kansas MURRAY E. G. SMITH Brock University-Ontario, Canada WILLIAM G. STAPLES University of Kansas MARY K. ZIMMERMAN University of Kansas ISSN: 1094-5830 Social Thought & Research (STAR) is published annually. You may contact the journal at: EDITORS SOCIAL THOUGHT & RESEARCH Department of Sociology University of Kansas Fraser Hall, Room 709 1415 Jayhawk Blvd. Lawrence, KS 66045-7556 Email: [email protected] Subscription Rates for 2015-2016 Individuals: $30 Institutions: $50 Subscriptions for addresses outside of the United States, add $10 for postage. All payments should be made to Social Thought & Research. Back issues of STAR are available for $30 each. Manuscript Submissions: Format: Submissions should include: a cover letter with author contact information, including an email address; a cover page, including the title of your manuscript, keywords, and a 200-word abstract; and one Microsoft Word compatible manuscript. If a manuscript is considered for revision and resubmission, STAR will advise authors regarding additional format. Please see our website for additional details. Submissions: Cover letter, cover page, and manuscript should be submitted as attachments in an email to [email protected]. There is presently no fee for submitting articles or book reviews to STAR. Inquiries: Inquiries from authors or concerning business matters, subscriptions, change of address, advertising rates, and claims should be directed to the above address. TABLE OF CONTENTS VOL. 33, 2014 On the Cover J.S. Aber Acknowledgements INVITED 2013 CARROLL D. CLARK LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Interview with Robert Wuthnow Prepared by Daniel Alvord and Kevin McCannon....................3 FEATURED ARTICLES ON RESILIENCE Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University America’s Heartland: A Case for Social Resilience?..............21 Margarita Mooney, Yale University Narratives, Religion, and Traumatic Life Events Among Young Adults..............................................................45 Maggie Grieves, Marina Adler, and Robin King To Preserve the Mountains and the Community: Indigenous Ecotourism as a Sustainable Development Strategy.............................................................83 FEATURED ARTICLE AND INTERVIEWS ON SOCIAL INEQUALITY INVITED 2011 CARROLL D. CLARK LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Interview with Lane Kenworthy Prepared by Carrie Wendell-Hummel and Andrea Gomez-Cervantes.....................................................117 INVITED 2012 CARROLL D. CLARK LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Interview with Mary Waters Prepared by Daniel Alvord and Kevin McCannon................125 FEATURED ARTICLE ON RELIGION AND ECONOMIC INEQUALITY Lisa A. Keister and David Eagle, Duke University Religion and Inequality: The Role of Status Attainment and Social Balance Processes................................................141 BOOK REVIEWS Pamela Rooks, The University of Kansas Connecting Social Problems and Popular Culture: Why Media is Not the Answer (2013) by Karen Sternheimer ...........................................................175 Emily Jones, The University of Kansas Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move (2013) by Maxine Leeds Craig...............................................................179 Acknowledgements The editors of Social Thought and Research would like to thank all of the individuals involved in the production of Volume 33: Elizabeth Kanost (copyediting), Melissa Myer (graphics design), and Shane Willson (typesetting) for their help in formatting this volume for publication, as well as the kind donation of the cover photo by J.S. Aber. We also want to thank the graduate students, faculty, and staff in the Department of Sociology at The University of Kansas for their continued support of STAR, including their technical and editorial expertise and advice. We want to thank all of our anonymous reviewers for their time spent reviewing the submissions to this volume. We are indebted to Dr. Wuthnow and Dr. Mooney for their support of STAR. And as always, we thank all the authors who submitted their work for Volume 33 for their patience, diligence, and effort put into drafting and finishing their work for publication. INVITED 2013 CARROLL D. CLARK LECTURER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS ! INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT WUTHNOW INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY: DANNY ALVORD University of Kansas KEVIN MCCANNON University of Kansas Dr. Robert Wuthnow is the Gerhardt-Andlinger 52 professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His works focus on social and cultural change. His work has appeared in the top journals of sociology, and he is the author of several books and edited volumes, such as The Consciousness Reformation, Small Town America, The Structuring of American Religion, After the Baby Boomers, and many more. Dr. Wuthnow joined us to discuss his book, Red State Religion: Faith and Politics in America’s Heartland. ALVORD: Robert Wuthnow, thank you so much for joining us today. I really, really appreciate it. You’ve written so prolifically on such a wide range of topics: religion, politics, and small towns. But to start with, I’m sort of interested to hear how you would describe your sociology: what are the main themes that sort of connect everything that you do? WUTHNOW: Well I think it’s understanding one theme that runs from the beginning to now, over a number of years, it would be an interest in social change. That, of course, is pretty abstract and it leads into a number of different topics, but I remember distinctly as a graduate student at Berkeley, when I first kind of realized that I was interested in social change. I was in a class with Charles Glock, and he was interested in social change. And I remember that he drew a line on the blackboard, a sloping line, with a question mark on it, “Is this society changing for the better, or for the worse?” He was certainly convinced that it was changing. Me, having just arrived in Berkeley from Kansas, I knew what he was Social Thought and Research, Vol. 33 Social Thought & Research talking about. I had a sense that things were changing. At least they were for me. And so, not to spell out the whole trajectory, but I got interested in changes that were happening in the ‘60s to some extent, 1970s, so forth, having to do with reactions to the Vietnam War, counterculture on campus, changes in religion, spirituality, new religious movements. And then, kind of took a long detour for ten years or so writing a book based on European history over four centuries (so that was certainly on social change). Then I came back to the US as a focus, looking at the development of the religious right, changes in religion, that I call the restructuring of religion. And then more recently, I’ve been really focusing on how common people, ordinary people, people whose voices rarely make it into the media, are experiencing change in their communities. In terms of smaller communities, Midwestern communities, many of those communities are declining in population, so they are confronting that, and other communities, such as certainly some of the ones between here and Kansas City, are growing rapidly, so they are experiencing a different kind of change. ALVORD: So you touched on it a little bit, but in what other ways does your biography play into the development of what you became interested in? WUTHNOW: Well, yes, as I mentioned, my biography, I mentioned that I had been a student here at KU before going to Berkeley as a graduate student, but I was raised in a very small community, a rural farming community out in the middle of Kansas. And frankly, for about the first twenty years of my life I figured that’s where I would spend all of my life. Had it not been for the fact that my father died when I was a freshman in college, I probably would’ve done that. I would have found something to do so that I can go back and be close to my parents and live in a small town. When it became evident to me that that was just out of the question, I spent most of my time here at KU trying to figure out what on earth I was going to do. And finally, I remember watching a professor one day pacing back and forth in front of the class and lecturing from his notes and a light bulb went on in my head and I said, “I could do that!” So I was then kind of drawn into the social sciences, I didn’t know which one, but I finally realized that 4 Interview with Robert Wuthnow sociology was one that was possible to get into without too much advanced preparation. And it was also just wildly interesting in terms of the topics that one could study. So over the years, yes, I have focused mostly on sociology of religion, but I kind of fell into that almost by accident because that’s not what I had planned to focus on in graduate school.