Happy to share this little piece I wrote for Contemporary Sociology on religion and secularism in Trump's re-election: journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Great thread on writing as thinking. Your LLM can't do this for you. And verb your nouns, folks! Put the action of your arguments into verbs, not nominalizations!

This summer, I developed an AI Policy and Contract for my courses. After incorporating feedback from lots of students, here's the final version. I'm sharing it here in case others would like to adapt it for their own use. Please feel free to adapt and use it. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

The University of Minnesota, Morris provides an amazing liberal arts experience and learning environment that equals or exceeds MN's private liberal arts colleges at a 1/3 or 1/4 of the price. Stop prioritizing 70k/yr institutions. Check out places like Morris! www.startribune.com/university-o...

all the way off

WaPo: We've killed our independence and objectivity, please like our owner NYT: Trump Making Amazing Deals, White House Says; Mamdani Late 4 Times in 6th Grade CBS: We'll censor things you dislike, here's millions of dollars, please let our parent do a merger WSJ: BREAKING: TRUMP-EPSTEIN LETTER!

Andrew Cuomo is afraid he'll lose, so his donors want you to fear me. His SuperPAC just sent out a mailer that artificially lengthened and darkened my beard. This is blatant Islamophobia—the kind of racism that explains why MAGA billionaires support his campaign.

At this point, I would suggest as a general rule that the greater the embrace of this kind of approach to generative AI, the less invested the institution is in students actually learning something or having genuinely meaningful experiences. Students beware. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Co-sign every word of this. I will not use AI in any aspect of my work: teaching, research, or service. Not to write emails or build schedules, not to transcribe interviews or code field notes, not to review manuscripts, and certainly never to assess student work.

New research from me and @profsamperry.bsky.social in @sfjournal.bsky.social finds the more Americans affirm Christian nationalist views the more likely they are to oppose taxation across a range of measures, with findings consistent across multiple datasets. Why might this be?

I told ChatGPT that I wanted to be a philosopher as a kid. And then it said that I was a DEI hire?!?!!?? God, we are fucked.

A completely serious question. When people, and businesses, and institutions with the resources and reputation to stand firm…don’t, where does that leave this country. cc Paul, Weiss. And Columbia. And so many others

these people swore an oath to defend the constitution but i guess that’s just too hard

how do we start a rumor that AI is DEI so they ban it

With his permission, I'm sharing Dean Treanor's response to Ed Martin's letter:

Here’s some accountability: I’ll vote for an inanimate object before I ever vote for Elissa Slotkin again. That’s my personal stance; professionally, I think it’s remarkably ill-advised to chase a “centrist” electorate that no longer exists, in this state or others.

There are two views of US politics right now: 1. The fight is electoral. It implies, wait for thermostatic public opinion to kick in in 18 months 2. The fight is bureaucratic. It implies, stop the pillaging of the economy and the evisceration of the state right now I’m Team 2 all the way

The right: "gun laws won't stop bad people from doing gun violence." Also the right: "bathroom laws will definitely stop bad people from doing sex crimes."

Great working on this article with my smart colleague @drmann.bsky.social. We draw on foundational theory in the soc of religion to showcase striking affinities between contemporary right-wing news and religion. We think this helps explain the power of RW news better than polarization framings.

This one finally broke the camel's back. Join me!

you're free to cover whatever topic you wish, as long as it's the topic I want. that topic? freedom

Some fascinating numbers and trends in the new Pew Religious Landscape Study, which is also the subject of a NYT article this morning. www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...

Books designed to be read only by human eyes are different from books designed to be read by machines, which is why Google will tell you that the phrase “shake my booty” can be found in an 1863 English translation of Don Quixote.

It’s pretty wild that we’re at the point where even capitalists’ interests are more aligned with the general public than current govt actions. Cuts to food stamps hurt Big Ag Cuts to Medicaid hurt pharma and major hospitals Cuts to the pentagon budget??? The whole military industrial complex

Some BIG news: the trailer for my new doc podcast is out today! WHEN THE WOLVES CAME is about how Christian nationalism has divided white evangelical churches, and how one Phoenix pastor & some unlikely allies are at the forefront of a growing resistance. More at open.substack.com/pub/ruthbrau...

1/ I am seeing a lot of comments on the slashing of NIH support along the lines of “universities should just spend their huge endowments.” I’m the last person to cheer on the institutional stratification rising endowments have contributed to. But let me explain why this is not a solution.

There's a new invite from @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social to submit to @sssreligion.bsky.social's 2025 Annual Meeting in your email inboxes. I'm the program chair this year! Wanted to highlight one key quote for #socsky people here interested in religion - we want your cool ideas!

I just discovered, to my horror, that every message I've received from any academic journal has been getting routed to my spam folder for a few months now. If you're a journal editor and I ghosted you about a review, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to.

Looks like the NFL has never heard of the Streisand effect. www.nytimes.com/athletic/612...

Fresh herbs are harvested and bundled by hand. Parsley workers in Ventura County, CA are paid a piece rate of around $2 per crate of 60-65 bundles. The skill and speed of the worker here is remarkable.

I've got a book for you!

a while ago there was some discourse about secularism in left spaces // not welcoming religious elements of left organization meetings. i am a pretty secular person but i really do not think the left can win anything in the US without welcoming religious orgs and religious people

About to teach Randall Collins, Tobacco Rituals and Anti-Rituals. Hadn't read it carefully in years. It blew my doors off - what a fantastic piece of sociology.

Great piece. Moreover, this "moral body" impulse taps into a broader religious/spiritual change. Instead of moral guidance working as sets of rules to follow, it increasingly functions as validation for refining personal choices and identities in particular ways. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/o...

A lesson of Reconstruction is that letting people off the hook for their anti-democratic crimes usually has terrible consequences. While the presidency renders Trump immune from process for now, he shouldn't be above the law as a matter of principle. Total hogwash. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/o...

This is a cool idea. 1) I'm studying how community organizing can adapt to a social world where religious congregations don't provide the organizing base they used to 2) I can't stop thinking about how bureaucratic governance makes us all into box-checkers in nearly every institutional domain

In response to OpenAI’s recent ‘A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT’, Arthur Perret (maître de conferénces, Jean Moulin Lyon 3) writes a line-by-line rebuttal — A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11...

This is such good advice. Every time I've done this, it's been worthwhile. It can make another person's day, and it also makes me feel more connected to my discipline.

An iron cage, indeed. From a standout among the many post-mortems: www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/o...