Check out what's new at
Hartford Institute! 

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OLDER NEWS:

Has interfaith worship increased since 9-11? The July quick question has the answer.

Congregations tend to worry about their finances. Read our latest newsletter to find out more.

We just released a new megachurch report on over 400 churches. We also did a major update to the online database of megachurches. Additionally we posted data about the over 1200 megachurches in the US.

Megachurches are clustered in specific areas throughout the U.S. Find out where in the May 2006 quick question.

Are more or less women entering seminaries today? Our January quick question

Will you attend church on Christmas day? Read our December quick question to find out what others are doing.

Do you pay your pastor enough?  Read the October quick question to find out

Faith and Family in America Survey
This nationwide survey on religion and the family was conducted for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research Inc. and is the basis of a four-part Religion & Ethics Newsweekly series called "Faith and Family in America." View our other "Religion and the Family" links.

Tell us what you think! We've received a grant to redesign the Hartford Institute web site and would like your input. Send an email with your thoughts and ideas to sthumma@hartsem.edu.

Dr. Scott Thumma has released his much anticipated book "Gay Religion." Edited with Edward R. Gray, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Emory University, this book looks at the diversity of religious practices among Lesbian and Gay persons in the United States. Read more about the book on this site. 

Thanks to many of our site visitors, we were able to make a large amount of changes and additions to our megachurch database.  We now list over 800 congregations, many with web address and size.

The December quick question asks: Do Americans Bowl Alone or Together? Two Perspectives on Civic Engagement. 

David Roozen, Institute director, and soon to be HIRR member James Neiman also have a book coming out with Eerdmans entitled Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times which is based on the denominational level data from the Organizing Religious Work Project. 

We've added more sociology of religion online articles including several presented at the annual meeting for the Association for the Sociology of Religion in August 2004 such as:

Morality, Mystery, Meaning, and Memory: Decoding Audience Perceptions of Television and New Religiosity Wendy K. Martin, Canada

Who Am I: Identity Tensions among Chinese Intellectual Christians Jianbo Huang

Methods for exploring primordial elements of youth spirituality  Michael Mason, Australia

Dying a Martyr’s Death: The Political Culture of Self-Sacrifice in Contemporary Islamists  
Babak Rahimi, Italy

Long and short term values: the different function of long-term church relationships and one-off experiences  Per Pettersson, Sweden

Religious Conversion to Christianity Among Students from the People’s Republic of China: A Comparative Study   Yuting Wang, Notre Dame

Everything You Know is Wrong: 
How Globalization Undermines Moral Consensus  George Van Pelt Campbell, Grove City College

Think you know a lot about your interfaith neighbor?  Read the September 2004 Quick Question to find out. 

We've updated our Denominational Research Resources with new links on the United Methodist Church.  There is also new research data on the UMC on the Faith Communities Today website.

Our August 2004 Quick Question focused on American Muslims and their involvement with public life.

Do church growth consultations work?  Find out by reading our June 2004 Quick Question.

We've added more sociology of religion online articles and have repaired many links to articles that may have been broken.   

Read the May 2004 Quick Question on what lay people want in their pastors.

We have revised and updated our popular Pastoral Search and Church Planning Inventories.  This survey and reporting procedure helps congregations gain valuable information during crucial times in the life of their church.  The new products can be seen in the Congregational Resources section of this site. 

Associate Faculty member Adair Lummis conducted extensive research on judicatories and the complete findings are posted on this site.

Read the latest Robert Bellah article we have posted entitled Is There a Common American Culture?  which was published in a 1998 edition of The Journal for the American Academy of Religion.

We just added a new bibliography of Megachurch books, articles and other writings.  This bibliography will continue to be expanded as time allows.  Related to our megachurch material, we have also added a more extensive summary of what makes a megachurch. 

We now have quite a few full texts of out-of-print books on the Institute site. Two recent additions include:

Women of the Cloth: A New Opportunity for the Churches (1983) 
by Jackson W. Carroll, Ph.D., Barbara Hargrove, Ph.D., Adair T. Lummis, Ph.D.

A Study of Doctor of Ministry Programs (1987)  
Reported by Jackson W. Carroll and Barbara G. Wheeler and based on research by Jackson W. Carroll, Adair T. Lummis, David A. Roozen, and Barbara G. Wheeler with special financial studies conducted by Badgett Dillard and Anthony Ruger.

Four excellent papers were given at the Institute sponsored New England Religion Discussion Society (NERDS) meeting.  The papers can be read on our site.

A very significant new resource has been added to the web site -- the online version of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society.  The book’s publisher AltaMira graciously granted permission to post this reference volume, published in 1998 and edited by William Swatos, on the HIRR site in its entirety.   

Does Religion Shape Movie Viewing Habits for Teens?  Find out by reading our April 2004 quick question. 

The Faith Communities Today (FACT) site features several new summaries of research findings including a .pdf version of the most recent book from the research which focuses on Interfaith findings and comparisons within the study.  

Extensive increase to the section on Judicatory religious life with new research and articles 

Several new resources on the topic of faith-based social service including, the November 2003 Quick Question about How Do Faith-Based Social Services Incorporate Religion? and the September Quick Question What is the Religious Meaning in Faith-Based Social Service?

We added another entire book from Institute faculty member David Roozen entitled Changing the Way Seminaries Teach: Globalization and Theological Education (1996) by David A. Roozen, Alice Frazer Evans, Robert A. Evans
The book is a critical analysis – successes, failures and learnings; and concrete examples of innovative courses and faculty reflection on mutuality, contextuality and global economics -- of 12 seminaries.  This book develops the first systematic organizational theory of seminaries for assessing bridges and barriers to change.