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In light of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, we offer up this timely podcast from last year on religion and disasters. Prof. Jamie Aten (Wheaton College) shares his experience with Hurricane Katrina and explains how congregations can get prepared for natural disasters and other calamities.

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Is your congregation prepared to help out the community during a natural disaster? Prof. Jamie Aten of Wheaton College and the Humanitarian Disaster Institute discusses why religious congregations are well-suited to provide relief to individuals beset by large-scale tragedies. We discuss how churches offer both short-term and long-term assistance, and why it is important for congregational leaders to know what their ministry and members do well and build a plan around that. This is a great episode for sociologists to understand the importance of religious organizations in civil society AND a conversation that gives practical advice for those folks in the pews who want to help out.

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Do citizens in religiously-active countries prefer to have members of the clergy directly intervene in the politics of their nation? While one might assume they would, Prof. David Buckley (U of Louisville) discovers the opposite finding; religious individuals prefer to see their spiritual leaders less involved in governmental decision-making. Dr. Buckley discusses how religious leaders in such countries already have informal networks of influence and how direct involvement in politics runs the risk of tarnishing the moral authority of clergy and dividing their flock.

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