The coronavirus pandemic is one of the biggest health crises of our time. In response to this global problem, various institutions around the world had soon issued evidence-based prevention guidelines. However, these guidelines, which were designed to slow the spread of COVID-19 and contribute to public well-being, are (deliberately) disregarded by some individuals. In the present study, we aimed to develop and test a multivariate model that could help us identify individual characteristics that make a person more/less likely to comply with COVID-19 prevention guidelines. A total of 525 attentive participants completed the online survey. The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) show that COVID-19 risk perception and trust in science both independently predict compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines, while the remaining variables in the model (political conservatism, religious orthodoxy, conspiracy ideation and intellectual curiosity) do so via the mediating role of trust in science. The described model exhibited an acceptable fit (χ2(1611) = 2485.84, p < .001, CFI = .91, RMSEA = .032, SRMR = .055). These findings thus provide empirical support for the proposed multivariate model and underline the importance of trust in science in explaining the different levels of compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13548506.2020.1772988

Modeling compliance with COVID-19 prevention guidelines: the critical role of trust in science.

In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, it was widely assumed that society ought to foster the breeding of those who possessed favourable traits and discourage the breeding of those who did not. Controlled human breeding, 'eugenics' as it was labelled by Francis Galton, seemed only good common sense. How did eugenics come to exert such powerful and broad appeal? What events shaped its direction? Whose interests did it finally serve? Why did it fall into disrepute? Has it survived in other guises? These are some of the questions that Diane Paul sets out to answer - questions that have acquired a new urgency in light of developments in genetic medicine. The eugenics movement appeared to be dead - associated with race and class prejudice, in particular the crimes of the Third Reich - or was it just sleeping? Has eugenics returned in the guise of medical genetics? In the last decade, historians have come to understand that support for eugenics was diverse and tenacious, with most geneticists remaining enthusiasts through at least the 1930s. This new historiography emphasises eugenics' broad and persistent appeal and its close association with genetics. In \"Controlling Human Heredity\", Professor Paul aims to bridge the gap between expert and lay understandings of the history of eugenics and thereby enrich the debate on the perplexing contemporary choices in genetics medicine.

Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. By Diane B. Paul. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1995. xii, 158 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-391-03915-6. Paper, $12.50, ISBN 0-39103916-4.)

\"Remaking the Godly Marriage provides a careful and insightful portrait of gender in contemporary conservative evangelicalism that would serve as an accessible text for seminars on gender and religion or contemporary evangelicalism. Most significantly, Bartkowski's focus on how identity and responsibilities are carefully negotiated between men and women takes seriously the sociological claim that gender is relational and thereby fills a gap in the literature on gender in conservative evangelical families.\"-Journal of Religion \"This book is beautifully written and highly engaging. Bartkowski uses finely chosen family- and organizational-level examples to illustrate theoretical points.\"-Gender & Society \"Bartkowski draws from a treasure trove of stories to make evangelicals understandable and alive. Like everyone else, they struggle to create workable ways of being men, women, and families in a changing world.\" -Nancy Tatom Ammerman, author of Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World \"Bartkowski very nicely mixes methods--combining an analysis of evangelical advice manuals, an ethnography of an evangelical congregation, and in-depth interviews with married evangelical couples--to produce an important contribution to our growing understanding of the complexity, ambivalence, and diversity within American evangelicalism.\"-Christian Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill \"Using a deft combination of historical material, textual analysis, interviews and ethnographic observation, Bartkowski unpacks the multiple discourses about, and practices within, marriage and families among evangelical Protestants.\"-Rhys H. Williams, editor of Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality John P. Bartkowski investigates the debates over gender and the family as they are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism. The author asks: Have debates over relations between husband and wife been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities? Through in-depth interviews with evangelical married couples, Bartkowski reveals how these men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith. John P. Bartkowski is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, anthropology, and social work at Mississippi State University.

Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families

tras deemed worthy of funding average $25,000, a small fraction of a typical budget. Grants to writers are more generous, at $25,000 for the Literature Fellowship program, but those go to fewer than one hundred writers each year and are tremendously competitive. There are places in the government procurement process where someone might see a chance to make it rich, but it is hard to see the arts as one of those places. It is not that there are no interesting topics worth writing about. What does analysis rooted in political economy have to say about whether arts councils can ever truly be ‘‘arm’s length’’? If there is to be direct public funding, should there be considerations of ‘‘public decency’’ in the grants process? Is the post-1995 NEA policy of granting to arts organizations, but not individual artists (except for writers) a good one? Should the generous tax treatment of charitable deductions to the arts be subject to greater scrutiny? What should we make of former NEA chair Bill Ivey’s contention that arts policy has been too focused on nonprofits at the expense of the commercial creative sector? What does it mean for arts funding to support diversity? And, is the current fixation on ‘‘creative placemaking’’ at the NEA a worthwhile turn, or the promotion of the flavor-of-the-month with no obvious lasting public benefit? In general there is too little critical thinking about arts policy in the United States (I would suggest that the UK maintains much more lively debate in this particular field), and rigorous analysis unafraid to identify poor program design and/or execution in the cultural world would be welcome. This analysis might even provide support to the case James Bennett wishes to advance: that it is practically impossible to have public support of the arts that does not lead to corruption of the art by politics, or that what potential public good there is in arts support will be captured by private interests. But Subsidizing Culture stays in the shallows, rehashing the many histories already written, and leaves to others the task of exploring the depths of American arts policy. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice, by Ellen Berrey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 352 pp. $27.50 paper. ISBN: 9780226246239.

The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice:

The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science

Are the religious suspicious of science? Drawing on data from 52 nations in the World Values Survey (wave 6) (N = 58,474), I utilize multilevel models to examine the relationship between religiosit...

Are the religious suspicious of science? Investigating religiosity, religious context, and orientations towards science.

Research on the way Protestants interpret the Bible in relationship to science has tended to focus on biblical literalists; less research, however, has examined the heterogeneity of how nonliteralists interpret the Bible. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews with 77 evangelical and mainline Protestants who attend high-SES congregations, we find that members of both groups draw on similar interpretation strategies in discussing the Bible and evolution. Both eschew literal interpretations of the Bible, demarcate boundaries between the Bible and science, and subsume evolution under broader theological beliefs. Mainline Protestants and evangelicals differ in the way they interpret miracles, with mainline Protestants revealing more openness to scientific and social interpretations of the Bible's miracles, while evangelicals emphasize God's authority over nature. Findings show that different strategies are evoked depending on the issue discussed, revealing implications for a deeper understanding of the way different traditions provide resources for interpreting the Bible and its relationship to scientific issues. Finally, findings contribute to a more robust knowledge of boundary work between the Bible and science as institutional and epistemic authorities.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jssr.12245

Narrating and Navigating Authorities: Evangelical and Mainline Protestant Interpretations of the Bible and Science

As new and more effective human reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) rapidly develop, religious voices remain an important part of public discussion about the moral standing of such technologies. Here, we compare how individuals from different religious traditions evaluate disease RGTs (detecting genetic diseases in vitro) when compared to enhancement RGTs, allowing parents to select features of a child. Findings are gleaned from analysis of 270 interviews with individuals from 23 Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious organizations, with supporting data from a national survey of more than 10,000 Americans. We find that respondents engage in clearly defined discursive moral reasoning to evaluate the propriety of disease RGTs while moral intuitions manifest themselves in responses to enhancement RGTs. We argue that schemas provide resources for moral discourses while also shaping moral intuitions expressed through emotions. Our results have implications for how religious people respond to new technologies when their institutional and denominational structures do not have readily discernable moral frameworks to guide responses.

/pdf/moral-schemas-in-articulation-and-intuition-how-religious-506n11s96k.pdf

Moral Schemas in Articulation and Intuition: How Religious People Evaluate Human Reproductive Genetic Technologies†

Scholars have not examined to what extent racial minority students experience inclusion in diversity when they become the largest population on diverse campuses. Comparing the narratives of...

Does diversity include me? Colorblindness and racial triangulation among Asian Americans on two college campuses

Evangelicals have been highlighted at the intersections of religion, science, and education, yet little is known about how evangelicals perceive public science education and how these perceptions compare across racial lines. Here we analyze how African American and white evangelicals view science education through 40 in-depth interviews collected from two evangelical congregations in Texas. Without raising the topic of evolution, we find that African American leaders, white leaders, and white laity engaged in faith-based, evolution-contesting discourse, but African American laity rarely framed science education in faith-based ways. For them, science education was often linked to educational resources or was distant from their lived experiences. Our findings clarify disjuncture and overlap among African American and white evangelicals by exploring perceptions that challenge and affirm the public institution of science education in different ways. Our conclusion stresses the need to examine perceptions of science and education among religious subgroups differentiated along social and historical lines.

/pdf/perceptions-of-science-education-among-african-american-and-xrqrk5xr7f.pdf

Esther Chan

Papers

Are the religious suspicious of science? Investigating religiosity, religious context, and orientations towards science.

Narrating and Navigating Authorities: Evangelical and Mainline Protestant Interpretations of the Bible and Science

Moral Schemas in Articulation and Intuition: How Religious People Evaluate Human Reproductive Genetic Technologies†

Does diversity include me? Colorblindness and racial triangulation among Asian Americans on two college campuses

Perceptions of Science Education Among African American and White Evangelicals: A Texas Case Study