Research On Religion | John F. Kennedy

Posts Tagged ‘John F. Kennedy’

Melissa Matthes on Sermons after Tragedies

Tags: assassinations, civic education, forgiveness, funerals, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, mourning, Pearl Harbor, political theology, Reinhold Neibuhr, September 11, sermons, World War I, World War II

With the 12th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks upon us, we examine how clergy respond to national tragedies in their sermons. Prof. Melissa Matthes — associate professor at the US Coast Guard Academy — talks about a research project she is conducting that involves reading hundreds of sermons from a variety of priests and pastors following such tragic events as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the JFK and MLK assassinations, and the events of 9/11/01. We explore the content of these sermons and how they have changed over time.

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Gerald De Maio on the Electoral Religion Gap

With the election season heating up, we revisit the issue of whether religion plays a role in voting behavior in the United States. Prof. Gerald De Maio (Baruch College, CUNY) discusses his collaborative research with Louis Bolce on the “religion gap” in American politics. This research indicates that those who attend church more regularly, or who hold more orthodox religious views, tend to vote much differently than seculars. De Maio and Bolce’s research also shows how the media has failed to pick up on this electoral divide while touting other “gaps” — e.g., gender, age, soccer moms — that are much less salient when it comes to predicting election outcomes. We speculate how the “religion gap” will play out in the November 2012 elections.

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Corwin Smidt on Religion, Elections and the God Gap

Tags: Barack Obama, Catholicism, Democrats, elections, God gap, John F. Kennedy, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, modernists, Mormonism, religion and politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin, tea party movement, traditionalists

Corwin Smidt (Calvin College and the Henry Institute) discusses the role that religion plays in national elections with a focus on the 2008 presidential campaign. We explore whether the “God gap” disappeared in the 2008 presidential contest and whether religion will play a role in the 2010 mid-term elections for Congress. (To download, right click on the download button and choose “save target as…”).

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