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Happy to be involved with the Religion and Diversity Project.  It is a 7 year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative (MCRI), hosted at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario.  This project brings together 36 team members from 24 universities, with Lori G. Beaman, University of Ottawa, as the Project Director on this research initiative. 

I was an "on air" expert in a television special on tattoos and tattoo culture for the History Channel.  For the show I had a tattoo done in the Inuit technique by Colin Dale from Copenhagen.  The special is called Ancient Ink.

I had a great time in California giving my Google “Techtalk.” The presentation I gave is now online for everyone to see! Click here for the link to Turning Cyberspace into Sacred Space: Examining the Religious Revolution Occurring on the World Wide Web. 

Introduction

After working in the jewelry industry for several years, I had the opportunity to return to school and pursue a university education. Initially I began studying early Christianity, but my interest continued to be drawn toward religion and contemporary culture. I found it fascinating that we were living in a modern and so-called secular world, yet religious influences continued to have enormous impact upon the social realm. Despite many sociologists declaring that religious beliefs, practices, and institutions were losing their ability to affect the social world and would eventually disappear or become insignificant, I believed the opposite was occurring. Namely, that religion continued to play a significant role in the lives of a majority of the population, influencing the political, economic, and social spheres of the Western world. Although church participation patterns may fluctuate, trending towards considerable decreases over the last fifty years, quantitative data demonstrates that people continue to believe in some form of "Ultimate Reality" that transcends the mundane realm. My goal is to study these beliefs from a sociological perspective, examining how religious manifestations thrive outside of traditional church institutions, and the impact this has upon our contemporary social world.

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