LeRon Shults and I wrote a book about the long history of human civilization and religion. It uses computational social simulation to reconstruct the deep past and to peer a little way ahead. Ten years in the making, this book represents an incredibly satisfying collaboration with a gifted scholar, and a marvelous friend. Over the years, I have concluded that these kinds of friendships are one of the best parts of the scholarly life. But it’s also cool to introduce a book of this kind. Computational humanities scholars and computational social scientists will naturally be drawn to a book featuring computational social simulations. But the book is for everyone interested in the human journey on planet earth since the birth of civilization, including the roles religion has played along the way. Read more here.
Here’s a link to the full article; the abstract follows below.
This article presents a microsimulation that explores age, period, and cohort effects in the decline of religiosity in contemporary societies. The model implements a well-known and previously empirically validated theory of secularization that highlights the role of “fuzzy fidelity,” i.e., the percentage of a population whose religiosity is moderate (Voas 2009). Validation of the model involved comparing its simulation results to shifts in religiosity over 9 waves of the European Social Survey. Simulation experiments suggest that a cohort effect, based on weakened transmission of religiosity as a function of the social environment, appears to be the best explanation for secularization in the societies studied, both for the population as a whole and for the proportions of religious, fuzzy, and secular people.
Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective provides the first comprehensive treatment of the work of Wesley J. Wildman, one of the most inventive thinkers in the field of religious studies. Scholars with expertise in philosophical, theological, and scientific approaches to the study of religion offer critical and constructive engagements with Wildman’s astonishingly creative and integrative oeuvre. The essays address themes that will be of interest to those concerned with the current state of scholarship on religion from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, ethics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others. The volume concludes with a response by Wildman. Find out more here.
September 26, 2023 – BU Today published an interview with Wesley, focusing on the challenges he faced when transitioning from technical nonfiction to writing fiction. The interview also gives some insight into why Wesley decided to write fiction in the first place, and why he wrote this particular book. It even includes some clues about the next three novels in the pipeline, in case you’re hungry for more.
A graph showing the close match between the UN’s estimated (or, for years after 2020, projected) values for Norway’s population size, number of births, and number of deaths and the values for the same demographic variables as projected by the microsimulation we built.
Accurate projections of population growth or decline are incredibly important for policymakers to plan for the future, making decisions about likely education, healthcare, infrastructure, and environmental needs. At present, most demographic projections such as those produced by the United Nations, rely on the cohort-component method (CCM). CCM is based on a deceptively simple equation specifying that the population at time t + 1 is equal to the population at time t, minus deaths, plus births, plus net migration (i.e. immigration minus emigration). This simple equation grows more complex but also more accurate when the population is split into cohorts, usually of 5 year periods, because then one needs to determine the probabilities of dying, giving birth, or immigrating to a new country for each 5-year cohort. The complexity increases exponentially as one tracks additional demographic factors beyond age and sex (e.g. religious or political affiliation). This paper reports on a microsimulation we created to replicate the United Nation’s CCM projections for the country of Norway. Though they require more raw computing power to run, microsimulations permit greater implementation flexibility and they also force one to specify assumptions that are often only half-conscious, yet have profound consequences on final results. As the graph above shows, our final microsimulation matched the UN CCM’s estimates and projections quite precisely, but this result required the painstaking work of surfacing these tacit assumptions and then determining how to best implement them in the microsimulation.
Here’s a link to the full article; the abstract follows below.
A bar graph showing the relative importance of methodological naturalism and methodological secularism (MNMS) as scholarly values among members in several academic societies dedicated to the study of religion. Scholars associated with the North American Society for the Study of Religion (NAASR) were the most naturalistic and secular in method, while scholars associated with a variety of theological organizations tended to oppose naturalism and secularism as methodological starting points.
Researchers and scholars are typically and rightly identified with the methods they employ: anthropologists with their immersive field observations, archaeologists with their digging tools and dating methods, astronomers with their telescopes, and nuclear physicists with their atom-smashing, matter-creating particle accelerators. Less obvious but arguably as important to each field of research are deeply ingrained values and norms that govern and guide research, often making possible otherwise unlikely forms of cooperation that are essential to fruitful and progressive research. This article provides an analysis of survey data we collected that explores the methods and values that guide research in academic societies dedicated to the study of human religion. While there was considerable convergence across academic societies regarding some values, there were stark differences with respect to whether methodological naturalism and methodological secularism are regarded as important scholarly values.
For other insights that can be gleaned from this survey data about the methods and values that guide the academic study of religion, check out the full article. The abstract follows below.
A co-authorship network showing ten of the largest groups of co-authoring scholars in the academic study of religion.
By nature and by training, scholars tend to be specialists, and this is as true in the academic study of religion as in other fields. Scholars focus on particular religious traditions, in particular geographical and cultural contexts, during particular time periods. And they study these particular religious phenomena using diverse methods, including but far from limited to: textual translation and exegesis, philosophical analysis and argumentation, ethnographic and anthropological observation, sociological data collection and analysis, psychological experimentation, and neuroscientific imaging and analysis. Given this specialization, scholars of religion are often only deeply familiar with a few small niches within the broad and extremely diverse academic study of religion as a whole. However, using modern computing power and the tools of data science, it’s possible to map an entire academic field. This paper provides a bibliometric analysis – i.e. the quantitative analysis of publications – of the academic study of religion, including the relatively recent explosion of publications in the scientific study of religion. Using co-authorship and citations networks, we were able to demonstrate something we already suspected: that there is little cross-pollination occurring between the more traditional humanities and social sciences branches of the study of religion and this newer scientific branch. Such field-mapping exercises are important not only for helping scholars of religion appreciate the breadth and diversity of research about religion, but they can also provide critical insights about where the field is growing and shrinking so that institutions – from religion departments to private funders – can plan accordingly.
Here’s a link to the full article; the abstract follows below:
A diagram of the Disturbed Dreaming Model, showing different possible pathways taking during a night of sleep. Check out the full article for a detailed explanation.
This is an article I published in 2021 (I’m a just a liiittle behind with updates on WW.com, but I’ll be making an effort to catch up in the coming weeks!) with neuroscientist Patrick McNamara and two colleagues from The Center for Mind and Culture, George Hodulik and David Rohr. The article presents a computational simulation of a prior conceptual model of disturbed dreaming published in 2007 by Levin and Nielsen. This publication builds on a prior pilot study using ReScript virtual reality technology to help people suffering from frequent nightmares to gain a sense of control over the frightening images that populate their nightmares. And it leads into the work we’re currently doing examining nightmare disorder among people who are 65 years and older. Eventually, we hope to use ReScript technology to help these elderly nightmare sufferers. Since older people often don’t have the visualization capacities needed to benefit from imagery rehearsal therapy – at present, the most effective non-pharmaceutical treatment for nightmare disorder – ReScript might prove an especially promising therapy for this underserved demographic.
Here’s a link to the full article; the abstract is included below. Check it out and leave a comment if you’re curious about the project!
I was in Frankfurt’s airport a few years ago, just after the Airbus A380 was born. I standing in a section of the terminal with sixty foot glass windows facing an alleyway filled with slowly taxiing aircraft. Thousands of people were streaming by in the terminal behind me. And then it happened. An A380-800 slowly drifted past right in front of me. Humongous. Beautiful. I looked around and to my amazement, nobody else seemed to care. But I was transfixed.
Since then I have watched those behemoths take off – long runway, slow acceleration, and then… the miracle of flight. Awe inspiring!
Airbus A380-800
The A-380 is a bit like my adventure in publishing. It has been in planning for a while and the runway has been long. But it is about to take off.
Dr. Mark Banas thinks so. Take a look at his video account of Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Mark has produced a bunch of good videos and I encourage you to subscribe to keep track of his adventures in communicating religion, and sometimes philosophy, through “Ten on Religion.” See his channel here.
