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As an antidote to the considerable confusion about American religion one hears in much contemporary discourse, I present a taxonomy for making sense of the remarkable diversity of religion in the United States.This framework includes the history and demography of many religious groups. After distinguishing between Eastern and Western religions, I sketch the relationships among the three monotheistic religions of the West, all of which have their root in the Biblical figure of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Then Christianity is considered in terms of its three main branches: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a lifetime of observations at sports events, live and on television, and interviews with perceptive long-term fans of the three major men’s professional sports in the United States, this paper suggests some patterns in the emotional styles of players and coaches in professional baseball, basketball, and football. Following Arlie Hochschild, the paper delineates the feeling rules and the display rules of each sports subculture and reports the emotion work by which players and coaches attune themselves to the emotional requirements of their respective sports. Each sport is a subculture with its own emotion norms, its own processes for socialization into emotion roles, and its own opportunities for the tactical use of emotional display. Generally, it is argued that baseball players and managers are permitted the most latitude for emotional expression, football players and coaches, the least, and basketball players and coaches, somewhere in between. Put differently, baseball is the most expressive sports culture, football the most stoic, basketball in between. These differences are observed especially in connection with the activity of questioning or challenging an important call by an official. Attention also is given to the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, to coaches as emotional role models, to college sports as emotional dress rehearsal for the pros, and to variations on the concept of ?game face.? The findings support the idea that human emotions felt by individuals are shaped by social context, and so are never adequately explained in biological or psychological terms alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a very rewarding experiment with using undergraduate students as teaching assistants (UTAs) in 300- and 400-level sociology. The UTAs for each course are recruited from among students who made and A or and A- in the course in the previous semester. The UTAs essentially repeat the course and do additional reading in the field, while helping the professor and helping the students, primarily by organizing review sessions and being available for one-on-one work with students needing help. UTAs register for Sociology 499, 3 units of independent study credit. They read three new books, negotiated with the professor, and write a short paper on each. UTAs write a fourth short paper on the experience of the assistantship, and they schedule a conference with the professor near the end of the semester to review the assistantship. Perhaps the most common comment in open-ended anonymous student evaluations of the assistantship program was that it is good to have UTAs because they provide someone who is easier to approach, less intimidating than the professor. The full paper includes more particulars of the UTA program, including benefits of apprenticeship reported by the assistants and benefits to the professor (especially the opportunity for a deeper kind of educational relationship with a small number of able students). The UTA program facilitates new and mutually beneficial connections between professor and student, between professor and assistant, between assistant and student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]