Associate Professor of Sociology Jaime Kucinskas co-authored a chapter in The Shape of Spirituality: The Public Significance of a New Religious Formation (Columbia University Press, 2024), edited by Dick Houtman and Galen Watts.
“6 Lagged Identities and the Underestimated Civic Significance of Spirituality” was written with Evan Stewart of the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Timothy Dacey of Salem State University. In it, they discuss a spiritual cultural lag effect, in which some spiritual practitioners may not associate their spiritual practices with civic and political engagement, but they do as much civic activity as religious counterparts. They say that by contrast, religious practitioners may overestimate their civic involvement due to longstanding voluntarism tied to American Christian religiosity.
