Homosexuality: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish issues; a fishbone tale

Homosexuality is compared to a fishbone caught in the church's throat that the church can neither eject nor swallow entirely. Authors in all denominations are questioning traditional church stances influenced by the model of clinical pastoral education. Most major denominations have made policy statements on homosexuality. Four such stances discussed here highlight some of the common issues denominations face in their reexamination of the subject. Homosexuals struggling for full acceptance in the church must confront the classical understanding of the human being and human sexual differentiation as these concepts have traditionally influenced the churches.     

Proletarianization with polarization: Industrialization, globalization, and social class in Turkey, 1980–2005

This paper analyzes the social class structure of Turkey during the latest wave of economic globalization in four dimensions: by sector of employment, with the Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portocarero (EGP) class schema, by occupational group, and in terms of informal employment. Since 1980, when Turkey opened to the global economy, the Turkish social class structure changed significantly. During this period, Turkey became a significant exporter of mostly low-technology, but also increasingly medium- and high-technology, manufactured goods. I contend that this economic globalization and industrialization contributed to a dual process of proletarianization and polarization. Proletarianization occurred through a transition from Turkey's agrarian tradition, a relative decline of the public sector, and an expansion of classes who sell their labor without workplace authority. Polarization entailed the growth of private-sector entrepreneurial, professional and managerial classes, and a simultaneous expansion of the informal sector. There were also differences between sexes. The share of manufacturing employment and the low-skilled labor classes expanded at rates much higher among women than among men, contributing to more rapid proletarianization.     

Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers’ use of educational credentials

Although a robust literature has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic and social rewards remain less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the returns to formal schooling yet little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials. In this article, I analyze how elite professional service employers use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Contrary to common sociological measures of institutional prestige, employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top four) rather than selective university affiliation. They restricted competition to students with elite affiliations and attributed superior abilities to candidates who had been admitted to super-elite institutions, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, a super-elite university affiliation was insufficient on its own. Importing the logic of university admissions, firms performed a strong secondary screen on candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments, favoring high status, resource-intensive activities that resonated with white, upper-middle class culture. I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of educational credentialism to suggest that (a) extracurricular activities have become credentials of social and moral character that have monetary conversion value in labor markets and (b) the way employers use and interpret educational credentials contributes to a social closure of elite jobs based on socio-economic status.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Knot yet</Emphasis>: minimum marriage age law,marriage delay,and earnings

Despite the historical highs for age at first marriage, little is known about the causal relationship between marriage delay and wages, and more importantly, the mechanisms driving such relationship. We attempt to fill the void. Building on an identification strategy proposed in Dahl (Demography 47:689–718, 2010), we first establish the causal wage effects of marriage delay. We then propose ways to distinguish among competing theories and hypotheses, as well as the channels through which marriage delay affects wages. Specifically, we take advantage of their different implications for causal relationship, across gender and sub-populations. We reach two conclusions. First, we find a positive causal impact of marriage delay on wages, with a larger effect for women. Comparison of IV and OLS estimates suggests that the observed relationship between marriage delay and wages is attributed to both selection in late marriages and true causal effects. Second, we find strong evidence that the positive, causal effects are almost exclusively through increased education for both men and women.     

Immigration,ethnicity, and housing—Success hierarchies in Israel

The study assesses housing hierarchies among immigrants in Israel by investigating three different but complementary paths: homeownership, crowding, and access to housing goods. Data from the most recent Israeli census in 1995 (the 20% version file) allows us to classify the immigrant population by 46 countries or areas of origin, each meeting the criterion of having a minimum of 100 sample cases. I controlled for several confounding factors: immigration characteristics, community of residence, demographic and human-capital variables, household composition, and housing characteristics. The results of multivariate analyses suggest that membership in approximately half of the immigrant groups has a statistically significant effect on homeownership. Representing very different origin groups from developing countries in Asia and Africa, as well as developed areas in Western Europe and America, most of the effects are negative relative to the reference group of Polish Jews. The pace of home acquisition is fastest among immigrants from several former Soviet republics and slowest among Syrian and Ethiopian Israelis. A better ethnic hierarchy was found for the other two characteristics, crowding and housing goods, with immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe being at a disadvantage. Many of these gaps close as immigrants purchase housing and gain tenure in Israel. The pace of advancement, however, is not uniform. I speculate that the differences in pace reflect structural characteristics, cultural background, and immigration processes, as well as absorption policy, which were not fully indexed by the census data. The discussion addresses broader implications of the findings for ethnic differences and social stratification in immigration countries.     

<Emphasis Type="Bold">Neighborhoods,Schools, and Academic Achievement: A Formal Mediation Analysis of Contextual Effects on Reading and Mathematics Abilities</Emphasis>

Although evidence indicates that neighborhoods affect educational outcomes, relatively little research has explored the mechanisms thought to mediate these effects. This study investigates whether school poverty mediates the effect of neighborhood context on academic achievement. Specifically, it uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, counterfactual methods, and a value-added modeling strategy to estimate the total, natural direct, and natural indirect effects of exposure to an advantaged rather than disadvantaged neighborhood on reading and mathematics abilities during childhood and adolescence. Contrary to expectations, results indicate that school poverty is not a significant mediator of neighborhood effects during either developmental period. Although moving from a disadvantaged neighborhood to an advantaged neighborhood is estimated to substantially reduce subsequent exposure to school poverty and improve academic achievement, school poverty does not play an important mediating role because even the large differences in school composition linked to differences in neighborhood context appear to have no appreciable effect on achievement. An extensive battery of sensitivity analyses indicates that these results are highly robust to unobserved confounding, alternative model specifications, alternative measures of school context, and measurement error, which suggests that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are largely due to mediating factors unrelated to school poverty.     

Abortion,Family Planning,and Population Policy: Prospects for the Common‐Ground Approach

For the past several decades those engaged in shaping the Program of Action documents at international conferences on population have muted their voices when the topic of abortion has been raised. In a desire to side‐step entanglement in a bitter debate over the morality of abortion, great care has been taken to define “family planning” in ways that explicitly exclude abortion. The “common‐ground” approach to treating abortion can be summarized in two directives found in all contemporary international population documents: “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning”; and all governments should work “to reduce the recourse to abortion through expanded and improved family‐planning services.” This article has three goals: first, to examine the appropriateness of these directives with respect to what is currently known about the relationship between abortion, family planning, and population policy; second, to trace how this “contraception‐only” definition of family planning became de rigueur at international population conferences; and third, to discuss the prospects for the emergence of a more appropriate “common‐ground” approach to abortion and population policy.     

Exercise,Eating Patterns,and Obesity: Evidence from the ATUS and Its Eating &; Health Module

Time spent eating and exercising can impact quality of life measures such as general health and risk for obesity. This article links data from the American Time Use Study and the Eating and Health Module to explore exercise and eating patterns for varying age groups, over different times of day, and by self-reported health status. Younger Americans who did some exercise were more likely to engage in higher impact sports. Older Americans who exercised were more likely to do so in the morning. Americans who reported being in excellent health spent more time exercising than other self-reported health groups, regardless of their sex or age.