I\u2019ve mentioned before<\/a>, I believe I\u2019m the last postdoc or student who had the opportunity to work with him. I don\u2019t want to exaggerate our connection; he didn\u2019t come into the office that much, and my memories involve a handful of meetings. As he was independently wealthy both from his textbook sales (as a former journalist he knew how to write, and disdained academic gobbly-gook) and his wife\u2019s business, he could have retired decades ago, but he kept working even as his health started to decline.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA lot of anecdotes are being passed around online about Rodney Stark right now, so I\u2019ll give mine. I had an idea for a paper that had the potential to be controversial and I was worried about what the mainstream sociologists would think; in our conversation I mentioned that I wasn\u2019t of the X school of thought (I forget the exact context), and he immediately responded \u201cwell, I\u2019m of the screw you school of thought!\u201d And that, in addition to his copious use of \u201ccomplete horsesh**!,\u201d pretty much sums up the man. Following that lead, I continued to just research what I wanted, and while that didn\u2019t lead up the well-tread, conventional academic path, I\u2019ve ended up in a professional space and with a life that\u2019s better than my wildest dreams in graduate school, and I think Rod would be proud of me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRod wanted to be a man of faith, but like many he couldn\u2019t quite bring himself to believe despite tasting the goodness of religion. I would have loved to have been there a few moments after he drew his last and realized that the God he had spent half a lifetime defending did, in fact, exist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRod, until we meet again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I was recently informed that Rodney Stark passed away. For the uninitiated, Rodney Stark was a force of nature in the sociology of religion. His interests ranged from early Christianity to UFO movements, and agree with him or not, he was a giant in every field he engaged. His theories helped shape the strategies of the Church\u2019s research division for a while, and he always had a soft spot in his heart for Latter-day Saints.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t win any popularity contests in sociology as an institution, but frankly that\u2019s more to his credit in a field that doesn\u2019t brook a lot of heterodoxy (either ideologically or in terms of subject matter). He blazed his own path and didn\u2019t care one wit what others thought; he was a true iconoclast, and people will read Rodney Stark years after his more mainstream contemporaries are footnotes to footnotes.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve mentioned before, I believe I\u2019m the last postdoc or student who had the opportunity to work with him. I don\u2019t want to exaggerate our connection; he didn\u2019t come into the office that much, and my memories involve a handful of meetings. As he was independently wealthy both from his textbook sales (as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":43489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/unnamed-2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43488"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43493,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43488\/revisions\/43493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n