I'd expect that if you looked at religious studies majors instead, you wouldn't see any especially unusual marriage patterns.
I think even possibly more of a contributor than quantity is "theology major" is a much bigger part of a person's self-identity than "business major". The "business major" (like "communications major") often acts as a neutral default for "I don't know what I really want to do with my life but I still need to get my 4-year piece of paper."
The next highest majors are Agriculture and then Architecture. How does that fit into your just-so-story?
Philosophy/ReligiousStudies is the 8th most extreme outlier, right after Liberal Arts.
Further, the article isn't about majors of students getting married, it's about majors of graduates getting married.
Theology is the study of religion. You don't need to believe in religion to study it. I knew several theology students at university and none of them were religious.
Do you think people studying Greek mythology are more likely to believe in Zeus?
That’s “Divinity” you’re thinking of
Theology is just looking at the Study of God, god, or gods, depending on your schools background and faculty. If you go to an interfaith program like Harvard’s it is very different from going to study theology at Liberty University.
Masters of Divinity is the study of the actual execution of the faith organization, that be a Church if Christian, Temple if Buddhist and etc. That’s covers from Theology, Nonprofit taxes, Counseling, and more.
You may be thinking of religious studies. Theology is basically the study of Christian beliefs about Christianity. Or more generally the study of what people within a specific religion believe / practice.
Religious studies is an actual academic field, theology is not.
In some contexts, scholars pursue theology as an academic discipline without formal affiliation to any particular church (though members of staff may well have affiliations to churches), and without focussing on ministerial training.
In some contemporary contexts, a distinction is made between theology, which is seen as involving some level of commitment to the claims of the religious tradition being studied, and religious studies, which by contrast is normally seen as requiring that the question of the truth or falsehood of the religious traditions studied be kept outside its field. Religious studies involves the study of historical or contemporary practices or of those traditions' ideas using intellectual tools and frameworks that are not themselves specifically tied to any religious tradition and that are normally understood to be neutral or secular.
There is a difference between theology and religious studies.
Now, since this website has plenty of international visitors, we should probably endeavor to be more specific and aware of potential differences, but there's definitely a heavy American bent to the visitors.
And, in America, Theology and Religious Studies are quite different.
http://www.ats.edu/ is one of the larger accreditation programs in the US for Theology, and you'll notice two very important bits right on the front page:
"The Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (ATS) is a membership organization of more than 270 graduate schools that conduct postbaccalaureate professional and academic degree programs to educate persons for the practice of ministry and for teaching and research in the theological disciplines."
and
"ATS membership is open to schools in the Christian and Jewish faiths."
Practice of ministry, and open to Christian and Jewish faiths. This is very different from the type of theology program you are talking about. Your theology programs are our religious studies. Our theology programs are primarily focused on Judeo-Christian beliefs and preparing people to work as ministers in that field.
The point was their search result led you to a lot of very respected institutions where these professors have chairs. Your search result does not.
I’m not sure how strongly correlated the study of theology is with personal strong identification of a particular theological belief.
https://familyinequality.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/spouse-...
Even then, I think a lot of that is just observational bias from the life situation of people in their early twenties, which is when people often start to settle down. So the most inclined to settle down just happen to be in college.
That's unnecessarily harsh and probably wrong.
In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities). So you've got faith, evidence, and convincingness, and their followers find it difficult to talk.
2) We are obviously talking about students whose majors are titled 'theology', not your own personal definition of the word.
I think your argument is trailing off into absurdity here.
If a department from a reputable university like Oxford calls itself the theology department, you're telling me that they're wrong and they aren't actually a theology department, they're something else instead? Do you think we should let them know their mistake?
If Harvard was founded a hundred years earlier they'd likely call their chemistry degree a bachelor's of alchemy, yet we'd all understand that they had just retained the name for historic reasons. Does anyone actually use the word theology to mean the secular academic study of religion?
> Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries.
Or see what theology departments have to say about it:
https://www.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxford/field/field_document...
See also that even though Harvard has a theology school, they don't actually offer undergrad degrees in theology: https://college.harvard.edu/academics/fields-study/concentra...
It's really no different than going to medical school, where you can take a class on homeopathy and probably even do a concentration in complementary and alternative medicine, but they sure as hell aren't going to offer degrees in either of those.
I really don't see how that supports what you're saying. If theology was regarded as equivalent to homeopathy (which is a comparison you could only make if you were completely ignorant of theology), then Oxford would not be offering degrees in "theology and X" any more than they offer degrees in "homeopathy and X".
See also lots of other references to theology degrees that you could easily find by googling:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/subjects/what-c...
Your comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of what you claim to be talking about. Theology was one of the most prestigious subjects taught in the original medieval universities (many of which are the most prestigious contemporary ones, e.g. Oxford), and continues to be taught in them today.
Theology's existence in universities is easy verify: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...
Biblical studies Systematic theology and ethics History of religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) Religion and religions (Contemporary Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Hinduism)
Within my choice of words, I would call this religious studies. I'm reserving theology for when you focus on a specific religion, and the idea is that that religion is actually true (as opposed to studying many religions like you'd read many authors in an English degree.) Still, if Oxford disagrees with me about the dictionary then it is probably me who is abusing language. ;)
I'd say so. Esoteric personal definitions for established terms, even if they make a lot of sense to you, don't typically lead to productive discussions. It's probably best not to wade into one, correcting people, unless you actually understand the vocabulary.
Your claim that Anthropology belongs due to "plenty of material evidence" comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) meeting your level of sufficiency; your claim that Theology does not belong likewise comes down to a certain amount of evidence (ie, presented conditions) NOT meeting your level of sufficiency. In other words, if one were to start from the presupposition that God didn't exist, your claim Theology does not belong would be true. Starting from the presupposition that God does exist, your claim would be ludicrous. Theology takes the second presupposition; in the light of the worldview of those who accept that presupposition, it belongs.
Your claim here is not infrequently made. But university departments frequently hold specific viewpoints. We can see cherished categories of ideas in the past; it is harder to see weighted ideas within the era we live.
>>Learning new theology is quite close to learning anything else, but research is very different!
Classics is the study of what was written and what they meant by it; they can't be polled. English/Literature is also looking at what an author wrote and what they meant by it (sigh: excluding postmodernism). French/German/Latin/etc grammar is looking at what words signify when placed in certain orders. The Philosophy department does not need to conduct experiments or observations. If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
>>In fact, there's also a little gap inside the universities, between people who primarily rely on evidence (the sciences), and people who primarily rely on being convinced (the humanities).
Relevant:
https://xkcd.com/435/ - https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-bb61a9b12a5047d3ca4f28...
https://xkcd.com/903/ (the ALT text)
https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/62872775579482112...
http://pintswithaquinas.com/comicstrips/the-error-of-scienti...
It's assumed that they became dominant somehow, usually by being convincing. It's almost tautological.
>If your criteria for valid university disciplines was limited to their developing new lab or field research, multiple departments are impacted.
Well, classicists do sometimes dig in to new documents, although rarely. Likewise, literature has a constant stream of new material, if they ended up with a model that perfectly predicted everything that was said about the human condition before 1980, it'd be falsified in a few days by some new paperback on the self-help shelf. Evidence doesn't necessarily have to come from experiments, only observations. see: astronomy.
However, those fields (not astronomy, but English and Classics) in my exposure have, like philosophy, mainly have been run on the convincingness of arguments. So, one side of the divide has evidence, and the other side primarily relies on writing convincing arguments.
>Links about scienceism.
Truthfully, I never said evidence was better than convincingness (although I do think it is), but decades of hardline scienceists have trained everyone to think that saying "evidence" means you don't value philosophy. It would be a bit funny if I didn't, because I don't think any "evidence" has come up once in this entire discussion. How could it? We're on the convincingness side of the branch right now.