Experiencing a relationship with God is widely acknowledged as an important aspect of personal religiosity for both affiliated and unaffiliated young adults, but surprisingly few attempts have been made to develop measures appropriate to its latent, multidimensional quality. This paper presents a new model for measuring relationships with God based on religious role theory, attachment to God theory, and insights from interview-based studies, which allows for a wider array of dimensions than have been considered in prior work: anger, anxiety, intimacy, and consistency. To test our model's internal validity, we use confirmatory factor analysis with nationally representative data. To test its external validity, we (1) use difference-in-means tests across gender, race/ethnicity, geographical region, and religious affiliation; and (2) analyze correlations between our four new dimensions and four other commonly used measures of religiosity, thereby demonstrating both our model's validity and value for future studies of personal religiosity.

This study uses survey data from 17 countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa, along with country‐level indicators, to examine the relationship between religious identity and the odds of completing primary schooling, as a key aspect of socioeconomic inequality. The results reveal a significant and robust schooling disadvantage for Muslims and those of traditional African faiths both relative to Christians at the aggregate level as well as within 13 country samples. This effect is seen in both rural and urban areas and is slightly smaller among men versus women, though it is still large and significant. The effect is also larger in countries in West Africa, with greater Muslim populations, with cooperative church‐state relations, and with mandatory religious education in schools. I interpret these results to indicate greater obstacles to the establishment of the legitimacy of the formal school system among Muslim and traditionalist families and communities, as a still troublesome legacy of the historical links between Christian missionization and the colonial project.

Much social theory tends to emphasize the external goods of social practices, often neglecting the internal goods of those practices. For example, many analyses of religious rituals over-emphasize the instrumental and individualistic ends of prayer and liturgy by describing such religious practices as effective means for achieving external ends like positive emotions, psychological benefits, social status, or social capital. By contrast, we use a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective to analyze the relational goods, such as trust and intimacy, which are expressed and sustained through ritualized social practices. Using ethnographies of Haitian and Ghanaian Christians in the U.S., we demonstrate that prayer and liturgy can also be understood as constitutive-ends practices, practices in which human persons engage to sustain relations with others because there are goods inherent to those relationships. We further argue that in many religious practices, the end goals and the means-i.e. specific aspects of the practice-are inseparable. Our approach to developing theory combines critical engagement with numerous other theorists and also exploring how well various theories can explain the motivations and experiences of participants in the religious rituals where we conducted our ethnographies.

For many U.S. young adults, being resilient to stressful events hinges on making meaning of such events and thereby minimizing their negative emotional impact. Yet why are some better able to do this than others? In this study, which uses an innovative outlier sampling strategy and linked survey and interview data, we argue that one important factor is connection to institutional cultures associated with higher education, religion/spirituality, and the military. Such cultures provide material for the development of cognitive schemas that can be adopted and applied to their stressful experiences, which include narratives of social progress, divine providence, and self‐discipline. Using a metaphor adapted from the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, we argue the resulting schemas have the effect of “expanding the space” of reflexive thought, providing new cognitive material for interpreting stress and supporting resilience. Finally, we argue this framing improves in several ways on the concept of meaning making often used in stress process research.

Goode’s foundational work on the fertility transition identified own-choice marriage as a factor driving fertility decline, part of a widening repertoire of choice pertaining to marriage and childbearing. Yet research supporting this connection in today’s transitional societies is scarce and somewhat contradictory, and it is unclear how other marital traditions, such as consanguineous marriage, shape this relationship. This study evaluates Goode’s theorized connection using pooled Demographic and Health Survey data from Turkey, comparing children ever born, use of contraception, and parity progression across four types of marriage: own-choice and arranged marriage; and marriage to a cousin versus an unrelated spouse. Results are largely consistent with the idea that a move towards own-choice marriage reflects a widening repertoire of choice that also leads to fertility decline. However, they also show that hybrid models like own-choice marriage to a cousin tempers these effects.