Faculty members and students from the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences of Lee University participated in the 36th annual meeting of the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology. Attendees included sociologists Dr. Karen Mundy Judkins, Dr. Ben Judkins and senior students Brandon Patterson and Matt Ray.
ACTS participants meet annually to consider questions of faith and the sociology discipline. The conference, held by a sponsoring Christian college, affords Christian sociologists an opportunity to share their research through the presentation of papers and dialogue with other colleagues and students.
Dr. Mundy Judkins said, “Organizations such as ACTS ‘stand in the gap’ between secular institutions and Christian intellectuals. Covenant College and Lee University are a place ‘to come home to’ for those in the academy or graduate school, a place of shared values and warm hospitality.”
The theme of the conference was “Transcendent Meaning: Invisible Religion in the 21st Century,” premised on the work of Thomas Luckmann in his book,“The Invisible Religion,” where Luckmann asserts religion as “symbolic universes of meaning.”
The conference, hosted by the sociology department at Covenant, was founded in 1976 by the late Covenant College professor, Russell Heddendorf, while teaching at Geneva College in Pennsylvania.
ACTS is funded by donations and established a scholarship for graduate students to help defray the cost of attending the annual meeting.
Lee University hosted the ACTS conference in June 1993 and 2000.
For more information on ACTS visit http://www.actsoc.org/default.htm.