Ongoing Work
Brian Haggard. “Gatekeepers or Conduits? Christian Ministers’ Relationship with Mental Health Professionals in the Age of Polarization”
Brian Haggard, Rebecca Hicke. “Are You There, God? Annotating Narrative Trends in Christian Fiction”
Landon Schnabel, Brian Haggard, Erika Abbott. “The Stained-Glass Closet: Concealing Doubts and Exaggerating Religiosity in the United States”
Published Work
Abstract: What are the most important questions in the sociology of religion? And how would scholars answer them? This article explores what people consider the most important questions in the field. Sociologists tend to study what we can readily answer with data, but the questions that elicit the most interest turn out to be quite different. They are bigger, broader, and harder to answer empirically. A crowd-sourced poll identified what people consider the most important questions in the sociology of religion, which were then posed to scholars in the field. They provided nuanced and complex answers revealing a diversity of approaches involved in the study of religion. This unorthodox article invites the reader to listen in on dynamic conversations that bring scholars into dialogue with one another, revealing points of consensus, ongoing debate, areas where there are more questions than answers, and directions for future work.