Sociological research on the American population's views of science and religion has recently burgeoned, but focuses primarily on Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals. Our study advances understandings of how Americans of non-Christian faiths, namely Judaism and Islam, perceive the relationship between science and religion. We draw on in-depth interviews (N=92) conducted in Orthodox Jewish, Reform Jewish, and Sunni Muslim congregations in two major cities to elucidate how respondents' respective traditions help them frame the relationship between science and religion. Findings demonstrate that members of these religious communities distance themselves from the pervasive conflict narrative. They rely on religious texts and historical traditions to instead articulate relationships of compatibility and independence between science and religion, while developing strategies to negotiate conflict around delimited issues. Elaine Howard Ecklund 2Findings push the social scientific study of religion and science beyond a specifically Christian and conflict-oriented focus.

We examined family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration as potential patterns of an extreme outcome of a lonely death: bodily remains that remain unclaimed and are left to the state. This paper combines a unique dataset—Los Angeles County's records of unclaimed deaths—with the Vital Statistics' Mortality data and the Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine 1) whose remains are more likely to become unclaimed after death and, 2) whether population-level differences and trends in family isolation, economic hardship, and long-distance migration explain the differences in the rates of unclaimed deaths. We employ multivariate Poisson models to estimate relative rates of unclaimed deaths by social and demographic characteristics. We find that increases in never married, divorced/separated, and living without family were positively associated with rates of unclaimed deaths. Unemployment among men and poverty among women was associated with higher unclaimed deaths. Long-distance migration was not associated with more unclaimed bodies.

Much research on women’s religious participation centers on their abilities to act within constricted institutional spaces. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how African American Muslim women use the mosque as a physical space to enact public performances of religious identity. By occupying, protecting, and appropriating spaces in the mosque for meaningfully gender-specific ways of engaging Islam, the women further a project of religious self-making that bonds African American Muslim women together. In their maneuverings of different forms of physical space as a sisterhood, the women enable themselves to resist gender, economic, and racial oppression. This study reveals that even within men-dominated religious organizations with limited symbolic and material spaces for women, women participants successfully exert agency over their own religious experiences.

Physical disorder is fundamental to how urban sociologists understand the inner workings of a neighborhood. This article takes advantage of ethnographic and historical research to understand how, over time, participants in an urban mosque in South Central Los Angeles develop patterns of meaning-making and decisionmaking about physical disorder. I examine how specific negative physical conditions on the property came to exist as well as the varied processes by which they changed-both improving and worsening-over the community's long history. Contrary to dominant "social disorganization" and "broken windows" theories that argue disorder is always a destructive force, I find that members saw specific signs of physical disorder as links to their collective past as well as placeholders for a future they hoped to construct. I then analyze how these shared imaginings shaped the ways members responded to physical problems in the present. The strength of this "contextualizing from within" approach is that attention to context and period allows researchers to better theorize why communities may or may not organize to repair physical disorder.

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