Remember the Andrews University researchers who wanted to hear from LGBT+ Adventist young adults last summer? Nearly 500 people responded, and 310 young adults completed the survey. The researchers are reporting early findings now. On the Spectrum blog this week, Drs. Nancy Carbonell, Curtis VanderWaal, Shannon Trecartin, and David Sedlacek talked with Alita Byrd about […]
Solutions that don’t work for problems that don’t exist
“When you visit a doctor, you probably assume the treatment you receive is backed by evidence from medical research. Surely, the drug you’re prescribed or the surgery you’ll undergo wouldn’t be so common if it didn’t work, right? “LOL” is what The Atlantic writer David Epstein and ProPublica might have preferred to have written after […]
The disease of shame
Correlation isn’t causation, but this is the most hope-building correlation I’ve seen this week. Johns Hopkins researcher Julia Raifman, Ellen Moscoe, and S. Bryn Austin co-published a study of sixteen years of data from more than 26,000 lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) high school students. A key finding? In states that have legalized same-sex marriage, […]
Backstory on the right to discriminate
Why are White evangelical Protestants in the United States so likely to justify discrimination based on religious or moral conviction? Because they’ve done it before. Christians using our religion to shield ourselves from the consequences of our social prejudice isn’t new. It’s also not a personal attack, though that’s little assurance for Muslims, LGBTQ people, […]
Timely research: Who are our neighbors?
Learning to share the public space with those with whom we disagree; learning to overcome humanity’s abysmal record of religious wars, religious ethnic cleansing, and genocide-fueled religious bigotry—these have become some of the most urgent challenges of our time.” —Ganoune Diop, October 2016 Our friends at PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, have published a research […]
Learning from all cases
There are so many ways to arrive at faulty conclusions. When it comes to populations that have undergone trauma, one way to arrive at a faulty conclusion is to learn exclusively from those survive their experiences—taking campus policy advice solely from students who manage to stay in school despite bullying and marginalization, for example. Another […]