A native Californian, C. Scott Littleton received his B.A., M.A.,and Ph.D from UCLA, and has taught anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles for many years. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at UCLA in1957. In 1991 he received The Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award, given annually to a distinguished member of the Occidental College faculty. Heâs also received grants from the John Randolph and Dora HaynesFoundation (1963), the American Council of Learned Societies (1972, 1978), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1983), and The American Philosophical Society (1983). In 1960-61, he was a Haynes Foundation-Town Hall Fellow.

He is considered an expert in comparative mythology and folklore, as well as in traditional Japanese culture, having lived and taught in Tokyo on several occasions. Littleton is the author of 8-9 scholarly books, including The New Comparative Mythology (3rd Edition, University of California Press, 1982), From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reinterpretation of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table,and the Holy Grail (paperback edition, Garland Publishing Inc., 2000), and Understanding Shinto (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and numerous articles in professional journals.

He has also researched the mythological dimensions of the UFO phenomenon, and his article "Divine Rebels, Alien Dissidents: Does the Mythology Surrounding Lucifer, Prometheus, and the Ancient Mesoamerican Deity QuÃÂtzalcoatl Reflect a Pro-Human Faction in the 'Alien Raj'?" has appeared in UFO Magazine. He has authored one science fiction novel. His latest book, 2500 Strand: Growing Up In Hermosa Beach, California, during World War II  is scheduled for release within the next few weeks.  Visit Dr. Littletonâs website.

Visit Dr. Keough's website and blog.

In traditional Japanese Ryu there are no belts to represent promotions, and Hiroshi Yachigusa did not believe in awarding certificates to denote achievement. Though not his custom, in 1989 he granted Gary Moro to the rank of Kyoshi (instructor).

During his martial arts career, Kyoshi Moro has also studied various other martial arts, including Karate, Judo, Kenpo, Arnis, and two forms of Kung Fu. Though he has over 30 years of training in the martial arts, he still considers himself a student of them. Always interested in learning new information, Gary Moro continues to attend numerous martial arts seminars each year, exposing himself to different arts, philosophies, and martial technique.

Some of the instructors he has trained with formally are: Neil Laughin (Judo), Joseph Wong (Long Fist Kung Fu), Michael Daivs (Serrada Eskrima), Ralph Castro (Kenpo), Joseph Halbuna (Kajukenbo), Kenneth Leung (Kung Fu) Tobias Johnston (Karate/Kobudo), Joseph McCullan (Western Boxing) and Kyong Lee (Kuk Soo Won). 

Visit Kyoshi Moro's website and blog.

Jason Sokol grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of basketball. He attended Oberlin College, and double-majored in History and Philosophy. Jason graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1999 with Highest Honors in History. From 1997 to 2000, he worked variously for the Springfield Union-News, the New Haven Advocate, and The Nation. Jasons writings on American history, politics, and race have appeared in those publications, among several others.

 He received his doctorate in American History from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Leon Litwack. His dissertation would become the basis for There Goes My Everything. Jason moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2005 and served as a Non-Resident Fellow at Harvard? W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. In that capacity, he worked on assorted television projects dealing with African-American History.

Jason is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. He lives in Ithaca, New York, with the playwright Nina Louise Morrison.

Jason was recently named one of America's "Top Young Historians" by the History News Network.  Visit his website.

Professor Richardson is a Southerner who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. She joined the English Department faculty at UC Davis in the fall of 1998.

Her scholarly essays have appeared in journals such as American Literature, The Mississippi Quarterly, and the Forum for Modern Language Studies. She is the co-editor, with Jon Smith, of the new book series, The New Southern Studies, at the University of Georgia Press.

Professor Richardson regularly gives lectures and serves on panels at national conferences. Professor Richardson recently completed a two-year term on the Executive Council for the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, and also serves on that organization's Publication Committee. Most recently, she was elected to the Southern Literature Discussion Group in the Modern Language Association (2006-09).

In addition to being a scholar, she is an artist who makes mixed-media appliquà art quilts. Her body of art work will be featured in an upcoming exhibition in Montgomery, Alabama, which will be accompanied by a catalog and site online.  Visit her webpage.

Tanya Biank is a Fulbright scholar and graduate of Penn State University. She holds a bachelorâs degree in journalism and was a member of the University Scholarâs program.

Tanya comes from a family of combat veterans and active-duty service members. During her fatherâs thirty-year career in the Army, she grew up on military posts throughout the world and considers the Army home. As an Army brat and Army wife,Tanya understands, appreciates and respects military families. She is frequently interviewed about military family life issues and speaks regularly to both military and civilian groups about the military.

  As a journalist specializing in the military, Tanya writes about the military lifestyle and has traveled around the world with troops. She has appeared on several national television and radio shows discussing military issues. Her coverage of the 2002 Fort Bragg Army wife murders led to Congressional inquiries and changes in Army programs and policy,

Her book, Army Wives: The Unwritten Code of Military Marriage (St. Martinâs Griffin, May 2007) is the basis for the Lifetime Television series drama, ARMY WIVES starring Emmy winner Kim Delaney (NYPD Blue) and Catherine Bell (JAGappears Sunday nights at 10 PM on Lifetime and is produced by Touchstone Television and the producers of Greyâs Anatomy, The Mark Gordon Company. Tanya serves as a show consultant.  

Tanyaâs book âArmy Wivesâ was originally published in hardcover as Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives (St. Martinâs Press, Feb. 2006).Tanya is a columnist for Military.com and LifetimeTV.com. She is a regular contributor to several military-related publications including Military Spouse Magazine, Military Officer Magazine, CinCHouse.com and the Better Business Bureauâs Military Line.

She currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband Michael, who is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army assigned to the Pentagon. The couple has an infant son. Visit her website.

Barbara Bisantz Raymond is an adjunct professor, adoptive mother, and writer. She has received two awards for feature writing from Women in Communications, and was an author of a child care section that won the National Magazine Award for Public Service. She contributed to The Handbook of Magazine Article Writing, and has written for The New York Times, USA Today, Working Mother, Parents, Writer's Digest, Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall's, and Ladies' Home Journal. She lives in New York City.Visit her website.

R. Keith Sawyer is one of the country's leading experts on the science of creativity. He studies creativity, everyday conversation, children's play and everyday social life. He is particularly interested in group dynamics and collaboration. He is the author of numerous books including Pretend Play as Improvisation (1997), Creating Conversations (2001) and Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (2006). His topics of research include business innovation, organizational dynamics in work teams, children's play and preschool, artistic and scientific creativity and language and conversation research.  Visit his website.

Ann Fessler is a Professor of Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and a specialist in video-installation art. She won a prestigious Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, at Harvard University, to complete her extensive research for this book. The original video-installation project out of which this book grew traveled to museums around the country. She is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the LEF Foundation, Boston; the Rhode Island Foundation; the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities; Art Matters, New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. Her award-winning short videos have been screened widely at festivals and in gallery installations. Visit her website.

Cora Daniels is an author and award-winning journalist. Her work has appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, Essence, O: The Oprah Magazine, USA Today, Heart & Soul, FSB: Fortune Small Business, and Savoy. She has been a staff writer at Fortune and an editor at Working Mother magazine and is currently a contributing writer for Essence. A sought after expert on diversity and business issues she has served as a commentator on ABC News, CNN, CNBC, BET, NPR, and the Charlie Rose Show. In 2002 she spearheaded Fortune's first ever search for the 50 most powerful Black executives in America. In 2005 her much acclaimed Fortune cover story The Bravest Generation, about the original Black corporate pioneers, created national attention for this overlooked part of civil rights history.

As an author Cora has been called "dynamic", and "perceptive" and "a powerful voice from the younger generation." Her first book, Black Power Inc., was dubbed "thought provoking" by the Washington Post and a "must read" by Black Issues Book Review. Her much anticipated second book, Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless (Doubleday) will be released March of 2007.

Cora is a native New Yorker and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Yale University with a BA in history and has a masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University.   Visit her website .

Joe Bageant writes an online column that has made him a cult hero among gonzo-journalism junkies and progressives. He has been interviewed on Air America and comments on Americaâs long history of religious fundamentalism in the BBC/Owl documentary The Vision: Americans on America. Until recently he worked as a senior editor for the Primedia History Magazine Group. Bageant and his wife recently downsized their lives in America so that Joe could spend half the year in Belize, where he writes and sponsors a small development project with the Black Carib families of Hopkins Village.  Visit his website.

Julian Sher is an award-winning writer and investigative journalist, TV producer and author of five books including Angels of Death: Inside the Biker Gangs Crime Empire, which has been translated into four languages and sold in seven foreign countries. He wrote and directed the New York Times-CBC TV investigation called Nuclear Jihad which recently won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize.

His freelance writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN.com, the Toronto Globe and Mail and Walrus, Canada's leading current affairs magazine. His Web page, JournalismNet,is ranked among the top ten journalism sites in the world by Google. He lives in Montreal, Canada. Visit his website.

Sue Palmer is a writer, broadcaster and consultant on the education of young children. She is a regular contributor to the Times Educational Supplement and other journals, and author of more than two hundred books, TV programs and software for 3 to 12 year-olds including the popular skeleton materials, used in over 10,000 schools. She is also a popular speaker, addressing thousands of teachers each year across the UK and around the world, and acts as an independent adviser to many organizations, including the Department for Education and Skills and the BBC. In 2006 she published Toxic Childhood, about the impact of contemporary lifestyles on child development. Visit her website .

Dr. Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D., is a mom, professor, and community activist. Her acclaimed work on girls social and psychological development has consistently broken new ground and challenged old perceptions. 

 She is the co-author, with Carol Gilligan, of Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, a 1992 New York Times Notable Book of the Year that helped spark an international debate about the lives of girls and redefine our understanding of female development.  Dr. Brown has written three other acclaimed books on girls social and psychological development: Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls' Anger, Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls, and most recently Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers Schemes (with Sharon Lamb; 2006 winner of a MS Books For A Better Life Award.

Dr. Brown received her doctorate from Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology. She is Professor of Education and Human Development at Colby College in Maine and co-creator of the nonprofit Hardy Girls Healthy Women  She has also consulted for numerous film and television projects, including shows on PBS, and Fox Childrens Network. 

Dr. Brown lives in Waterville, Maine with her partner Dr. Mark Tappan and their twelve-year-old daughter, Maya. Visit her website.

Sam Binkley is professor of sociology at Emerson College. His research and teaching interests focus on questions of identity formation in the context of contemporary cultures of consumption with a focus on the role of lifestyle movements, from the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s to contemporary anti-consumersit movements. He has also published in the Journal of Consumer Culture; the Journal of Material Culture; Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies; Consumption, Markets and Culture; Cultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research. Visit his blog.

 He has authored numerous scientific articles and book chapters on materialism, values, and goals, among other topics. His books include, The High Price of Materialism, Psychology and Consumer Culture, (co-edited with Allen D. Kanner. 

Katherine Parkin is an assistant professor of History  at Monmouth University.  She received her B.A. in History and Sociology/Anthropology from Lake Forest College and her Ph.D. in History from Temple University (2001). The American/Popular Culture Association awarded Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America ( University of Pennsylvania Press ) the 2006 Emily Toth Award for best book in feminist popular culture.  Visit her webpage.

Caroline Moorehead wrote a column on human rights first for The Times and then for the Independent (1980-91) and made a series of TV programmes on human rights for the BBC (1990-2000). She has written the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1998); and has helped to set up a Legal Advice Centre for refugees in Cairo, where she has also started schools and a nursery. Currently she works as a volunteer on the legal team for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, while also continuing to review and write on human rights in many different papers. Her books include Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life, and  Selected Letters of Martha Gelhorn.

Christopher Noxon has worked as a costumed character at Universal Studios, a speechwriter for Michael Milken, and a music supervisor for the television series, Weeds. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and GQ.  He lives with his wife and three children in Los Angeles.  Visit his website www.christophernoxon.com and the Rejuvenile website.

 James L. Baughman became Director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of  Wisconsin-Madison in 2003. An Ohio native, he earned his B.A.at Harvard, and his M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. While earning his doctorate, Baughman worked for Facts on File, the Kirkus News Service and WNET-TV.

Baughman has been a member of the UW faculty since 1979,teaching the history of mass communication and news and editorial writing. He has also been a lecturer in the History Department. Baughman was awarded the UW's Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003 for his efforts in the classroom and the Wisconsin Alumni Association's Ken and Linda Ciriacks Alumni Outreach Excellence Award in 2005.

Baughman has written extensively on the history of the American news media and broadcasting. He is the author of three books, Television's Guardians: The Federal Communications Commission and the Politics of Programming; Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the Modern American News Media; and Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Broadcasting, and Filmmaking in America since 1945. He has recently published a book on the rise of television during the 1950s (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Baughman was a member and chair of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and was chair of the Erik Barnouw Award Committee of the Organization of American Historians, which honors outstanding historical documentaries.

Harriet A. Washington has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. As a journalist and editor, she has worked for USA Today and several other publications, been a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and has written for such academic forums as the Harvard Public Health Review and The New England Journal of Medicine. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards for her work. Washington lives in New York City. Visit her website.

Maia Szalavitz is a journalist who covers health, science and public policy. She is co-author, with Dr. Joseph Volpicelli, M.D., Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania, of Recovery Options: The Complete Guide: How You and Your Loved Ones Can Understand and Treat Alcohol and Other Drug Problems (John S. Wiley, 2000). She is the co-author of The Boy Who Was Raised as A Dog and Other Stories from A Child Psychiatrist's Notebook, co-written with Dr. Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD. Her second book, Help at Any Cost, an investigation into boot camps and tough love programs, was published by Riverhead Books in February 2006. Visit the STATS website.

Sharpley-Whiting is Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French at Vanderbilt University where she also directs the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and serves as Director of the W.T.Bandy Center for Baudelaire and Modern French Studies. A graduate of Brown University (1994), she is the 2006 winner of the Horace Mann Medal, an award given annually to a Brown Graduate School alumnus or alumna who has made significant contributions in his or her field inside or outside of academia. She is the first humanities professor to receive this distinction. 

She lectures widely throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean Basin, and Africa. The author of four books, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998), Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears and Primitive Narratives (1999), Negritude Women (2002), she has also co-edited three volumes, including Fanon: A Critical Reader (1995), Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions (1996), and The Black Feminist Reader (2000). She is currently on tour with Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop. This years dialogue is on Gender and Hip-Hop: Does Hip-Hop Hate Women?  She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

 Kristin, a Quaker, is married to a Navy chaplain who served with the Marines in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her latest book, While They're At War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront is an in-depth portrait of military spouses in wartime. Her critically praised memoir, Driving by Moonlight: A Journey Through Love, War, and Infertility, details her own experience during her husband's deployment to Afghanistan following 9/11, as well as her struggle with infertility. She has participated in the Marine Corps' Key Volunteer family support program and Compass, the Navy's spouse mentoring program.  

Kristin is a member of the National Military Family Association, the National Writers Union, and Military Reporters and Editors.

Visit her website.

David Schmid is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the University at Buffalo's English Department, where he teaches courses in British and American fiction, cultural studies, and popular culture. Born and raised in England, he received his B.A. from Oxford University his M.A. from the University of Sussex, and his Ph.D. from the Modern Thought and Literature program at Stanford University.

He has published on a variety of subjects, including celebrity, Dracula, crime fiction, and African-American literature anthologies. He is the author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005, and he is currently working on two book-lengths projects: Mean Streets and More: Space in Crime Fiction and The Scarlet Thread: A History of Homicide in American Popular Culture.

He received the Reuben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations for the best-published article on the family in 1993, 1999, and 2001. He received the Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award from the American Association of Family and Conciliation Courts in 2002, the Distinction in the Social Sciences Award from Pennsylvania State University in 2003, and a Distinguished Career Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association in 2006. View his webpage

Joanie-Farley-Gillispie, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco and Marin Counties, where she works for juvenile justice. She is a Certified National Trainer, APA HIV Office of Prevention and Education (HOPE), and has taught law and ethics for mental health providers. Visit her website.

Rachel Rubin is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature.  Visit her web page.

Jeffrey Melnick is associate professor of American Studies at Babson College. He is the author of A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song and Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South.  View his web page. 

Cris Beam is a journalist who has written for several national magazines as well as for public radio. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University and teaches creative writing at Columbia and the New School. She lives in New York.  Visit her website.

Sara Miles is the author of How to Hack a Party Line: The Democrats and Silicon Valley and co-editor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan and the anthology Opposite Sex. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Out, The Progressive, La Jornada, and Salon, among others.  She has written extensively on militar affairs, politics, and culture. The Founder of St. Gregory's Food Pantry, she lives in San Francisco, California with her family. Visit her website.

Journalist and former Salon com. columnist Mary Roach has written for Outside, GQ, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She writes the humor column "My Planet" in Reader's Digest and is contributing editor for the science magazine Discover. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Ed. Visit her website.

John Higgs has spent 10 years writing and producing in a wide range of media, making him the only man who can boast of producing both a long running series for BBC Radio 4 and a best selling videogame for the PlayStation 2.

He created the innovative historical and geographical quiz show X Marks The Spot for BBC Radio 4. The series has now been running for eight years. Videogames that he has produced include Crash and Burn, and ATV: Quad Power Racing 2, which has sold over three quarters of a million copies.

In between these very different endevours he has worked extensively in television and animation, writing and producing programmes including Audrey & Friends, Pen Monkeys, and TooMuch TV, for which he earned a Best Children's Entertainment Programme BAFTA nomination. He has written for publications including The Guardian, The Independent and Mojo, and is a judge in two categories for the BAFTA Games Awards. He has a degree in Computer Science.

He lives in Brighton with his partner and two children. Visit his website.

Peniel E. Joseph teaches in the Department of Africana Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook. The recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation, his work has appeared in Souls, New Formations, and the Black Scholar, and he is the editor of a forthcoming anthology entitled, The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil-Rights Power Era. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit his website.

Mark Regnerus is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, 2000, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and a faculty associate at the university's Population Research Center. He is the author of over 25 published articles and book chapters.

Winner of the Best Article Award twice from the American Sociological Association's section on the Sociology of Religion, Regnerus is also a collaborator on the National Study of Youth and Religion, and Principal Investigator of a NIH grant entitled, "Race, Religion, and Adolescent Sexual Norms and Conduct." He is currently co-investigator (along with Weinreb) of the NIH-funded Malawi Religion Project, is an editorial board member of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, and a council member for the American Sociological Association's Section on the Sociology of Religion.

Results from his published research have been featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, Detroit News, Time Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, and Christianty Today, among other media outlets. He lives in Austin with his wife Deeann and two children. Visit his website.

]]> Sex and religion and teenagers Tue, 10 Apr 2007 04:31:00 GMT http://socialscience.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=201921# deborah@psychjourney.com 00:52:30 teens and religion, teen sexual behavior, religion and teen sexuality, sexual education for teenagers, sociology of religion Psychjourney Clean http://socialscience.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=200846# Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, interviews Mr. Joe Massengale author of Six Lessons for Six Sons: An Extraordinary Father, A Simple Formula for Success published by Three Rivers Press.  This is part two of a two part interview.

Boxer, preacher and businessman, George Forman says about our guest, Mr. Joe Massengale, "The lessons Joe Massengale learned back in the piney woods around Marshall, Texas, and gave to his sons to take into the world are some of the same ones I hope my children, my congregation, the kids in my youth center and my customers get from me."

Entrepreneur Joe Massengale is the owner of Joe's Expert Tree Service. Visit his website.

Boxer, preacher and businessman, George Forman says about our guest, Mr. Joe Massengale, "The lessons Joe Massengale learned back in the piney woods around Marshall, Texas, and gave to his sons to take into the world are some of the same ones I hope my children, my congregation, the kids in my youth center and my customers get from me."

Entrepreneur Joe Massengale is the owner of Joe's Expert Tree Service. Visit his website.

Hella Winston was born and raised in New York City. A Magna Cum Laude graduate of Barnard College with a B.A. in Religion, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

In addition to her work on Hasidic Jews â drawing upon what has been hailed as unprecedented field work among the Satmar and Boboz sects â Winston has also been involved in extensive Sociological research and writing in other areas, including the Sociology of Education, the Sociology of the Professions, and the interaction between culture and identity.

She is the co-author of âChildren of the Digital Divide,â with Paul Attewell, which appears in an edited collection entitled Disadvantaged Teens and Computer Technologies (Waxman, 2002). The paper reflects some of the fruits of a two-year, NSF-funded ethnographic study of the influence of computers on the academic achievement of disadvantaged youth. She is also working with Cynthia Fuchs Epstein on a study of the process of identity formation among Public Interest lawyers. Winstonâs writing has also appeared in Lilith magazine, New York Newsday, and The East Hampton Star.