Prominent crosses Christian congregations feature outside, inside, and online

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Working on some recent research involving religious buildings and also celebrating Easter yesterday, I was reminded of how many Christian churches feature crosses. Here are several local examples of church exteriors:

Not all churches have crosses on the outside. Some congregations want to avoid looking like a church and this could include eschewing traditional features like crosses or steeples. But many do feature crosses on the sides of buildings, on roofs, and on signs.

Similarly, if one were to walk into Christian churches, crosses are often present. They may be behind an altar or hanging on a side wall or incorporated in art or a bulletin.

And in looking for religious congregations online, I found many also feature crosses in the images they use. For example, in Facebook profile pictures and cover images, many Christian congregations feature a cross somewhere. In searching for congregations, a cross is a very common image one will find on social media and websites.

For these congregations that feature crosses, they likely see it as part of their theological foundations and part of their message of who they are. Christians are people of the cross and they share that image with the world. Whether one finds a congregation in a storefront, a school, an older religious building, or an online space, they are likely to find a cross somewhere and often prominently displayed.

Rapid population growth in Florida and Texas now slowing?

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What happens if communities in Texas and Florida are now not growing as fast as in recent years?

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Fewer Americans are moving to boomtowns in Florida and Texas – once red-hot destinations that saw surging populations and soaring home prices.

Tampa, FL, had a net inflow of just 10,000 residents last year, according to fresh data from Redfin. That is less than a third of the 35,000 in 2023…

Meanwhile, Dallas – one of several Texas cities that boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic – saw a net inflow of around 13,000 residents in 2024, also down from 35,000 the year prior. 

Americans had previously been drawn to Sun Belt cities due to their warm weather, low tax rates and affordable housing compared to coastal cities.

But that appeal is fading fast. The cost of living has jumped, thanks to rising mortgage rates, skyrocketing home prices, and higher fees for insurance and HOAs – particularly after a string of natural disasters.  

Several long-term consequences come to mind in addition to the effects on the local real estate markets:

  1. Growth is good in the United States for a place’s status. To not grow – or even to level off – is considered bad. These places will be viewed as less desirable overall if they are not rapidly growing.
  2. How does this change local planning and revenue projections? Imagine you see growth going at a particular pace for a certain time. If that growth does not occur, there could be major changes in budgets and land use. (Whether these possibilities should have been factored in is another matter; who would have factored in a global pandemic?)
  3. What other places will take over as being the fast-growing places? Will places in Arizona or Idaho (or the West more broadly) look more attractive? Or perhaps just population growth as a whole slows in ways that few American places are growing quickly?

Beat the lottery odds by buying all the lottery tickets

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I have used a similar example in Statistics class when learning about the central limit theorem: for a better chance to win the lottery, buy more tickets to get closer to certainly winning.

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Bernard Marantelli had a plan in mind. He and his partners would buy nearly every possible number in a coming drawing. There were 25.8 million potential number combinations. The tickets were $1 apiece. The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million.

Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set up shop in a defunct dentist’s office, a warehouse and two other spots in Texas. The crew worked out a way to get official ticket-printing terminals. Trucks hauled in dozens of them and reams of paper.

Over three days, the machines—manned by a disparate bunch of associates and some of their children—screeched away nearly around the clock, spitting out 100 or more tickets every second. Texas politicians later likened the operation to a sweatshop…

Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually.

How representative sampling works: get a large enough sample with characteristics that mirror that of the larger population and you can have confidence that the sample results are within several percentage points of results if you measured the same things for the whole population. And as your sample size increases, you get closer and closer to the characteristics of the whole population.

Buying one lottery ticket means the buyer has really small odds of winning. Super small. Buy more tickets and the odds of winning increase. Buy nearly all the tickets and your odds go way up. Buy them all and you win.

It sounds like the gamblers above compare the cost of buying all the tickets to the jackpot and go all in when there is a large enough gap. But the central limit theorem suggests they could drastically increase their odds without buying every ticket; might that be worth it financially?

Could American suburbs not be a “hollow imitation of the place they aspire to be”?

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A common critique of American suburbs – and numerous other American places – is in a review of the recent film Holland:

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The town thus becomes representative of people like her, it’s merely a hollow imitation of the place they aspire to be in, but comes nowhere close.

The critique of the suburbs means that the suburbs are not what they say they are, that the American Dream of single-family home ownership, middle-class life, and success is more illusion than reality.

I have also heard this critique applied to retail spaces, Disney World, and resorts. They project one image but they are not what they seem. They are real places – you can walk around, you can buy things, etc. – but not real at the same time. They lack authenticity. (This might imply there are places that are authentic, not imitations. They are what they are. This is another matter.)

Are there suburbs that are real places, where the facade is not a facade, that feel like what they actually are? Or suburbs that are honest about the challenges they face alongside the possibilities they might offer? How accurate is the narrative that the American suburbs are inauthentic or is this more prevalent in cultural works?

Castle houses and McMansions

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How might a large suburban house that looks like a castle fit the definition of a McMansion?

The home is large, roughly 12,000 square feet. It has lots of rooms and amenities:

The five-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bath house, which is in the 3000 block of Lincoln Street, features a master-bedroom suite that takes up about 2,500 square feet. The listing says the house is 12,000 square feet.

It has a wine cellar, a movie-screening room, room for a pool table and a Ping-Pong table, a bar and an exercise area, all in the basement, an outdoor swimming pool, and a four-car garage.

This is the first trait of McMansions: they are large. I have suggested that being over 10,000 square feet should be considered mansions as they are beyond McMansions.

The other primary trait that might connect this home to McMansions is the architecture. It is a suburban home intended to look like a castle. Is it a pastiche or gimmick? How about the quality of the construction?

The walls average more than 20 inches thick, and there is 10-inch reinforced concrete between the floors.

Perhaps the builders were serious about making this a castle? This may not be the builder-designed cookie-cutter home that McMansions are often said to be; this could be a house more carefully designed to look outside and inside like a castle.

Thus, I am inclined to suggest this is not a McMansion castle. It is a mansion castle designed in a more coherent way.

Finding “the perfect day” from American Time Use Survey data

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A recent study looking at how Americans spend their time led to this model for the perfect day:

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That’s Best Day Ever = 6 hours with family + 2 hours with friends + 1.5 hours of extra socialising + 2 hours of exercise + 1 hour of eating and drinking – with less than 6 hours of work, indulging in only 1 hour of screen time, and a 15-minute commute.

That sounds like a busy day. Imagine this list of activities were given to a random sample of Americans: how many would see it as perfect or close to that? Or is this list more of a collection of things Americans tend to like but not everyone would see as a great combination?

So imagine instead a company or destination that promises to put together perfect days for different types. A day for the book-reading introvert. A day for the 8 on the Enneagram. A day for the hard-charging athlete. A day for the ENTJ. A day for the aspiring social influencer. And so on.

Or imagine a movie that featured numerous people in different settings living out their perfect days. Perhaps such a movie would need more drama but the contrast between the different perfect days could be interesting to see.

The American suburbs shaped religion more than American religion shaped the suburbs

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I have been studying and writing about religion in the American suburbs for about ten years now. After recently publishing a book on evangelicals embracing suburbia – Sanctifying Suburbia – and more recently also looking at a variety of religious traditions over time in the Chicago suburbs, I had this thought:

This is a broad statement. But if I were to put the two social forces side by side – suburbanization in the United States and religion (and all that entails) in the United States – I would come down on suburbs affecting religion more than the opposite. Here is a couple of ways to think about:

  1. As religious groups have moved to the suburbs, whether Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, or others, they often have to adapt to suburban settings.
  2. How much do religious congregations, organizations, and adherents in suburbia shape community life or social life at the structural level (beyond individuals, small groups, some social networks, more micro level)? Another way to put it: if these religious groups were not present, how different would suburban life be?
  3. The reasons Americans love suburbs and the way of life involved therein can override religious values and concerns such as loving their neighbor, serving the good of the whole community, and pursuing religious and spiritual goals.

I am going to keep thinking about this claim and may write more about it. Even as religion has served to provide meaning and structure for many humans and societies across time and space, suburbia is a powerful place and ideology.

US a nation of aspiring readers

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New survey results suggest Americans want to read:

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According to the poll, 82% of respondents think reading is a useful way to learn about the world, 76% say reading is relaxing and a whopping 98% of respondents with children in their household want their children to “develop a love of reading.”

Reading is “certainly aspirational,” said Mallory Newall, vice president of Public Polling at Ipsos. “We certainly want to be a reading nation.” And yet 51% of people read a book in the past month, according to the poll. In comparison, about 80% of people watched streaming services, used social media or watched a short-form video.

Interestingly, respondents who classify themselves as readers are also more likely than non-readers to consume other forms of media. So it’s not necessarily a direct competition between, say, reading and scrolling on your phone. When asked about the “reasons you don’t read more,” “other life activities” was the most common answer, which could mean anything from doing chores to sleeping to hanging out with friends…

But for many Americans it’s not going to take precedence. When asked what they’d do with one extra hour of leisure time, the top of the list is spending time with family. Below that is a tied race between watching TV, reading and exercising.

This can happen in many areas of life: we might have a high regard for something but day to day life does not reflect these ideals. Think New Year’s resolutions: stated goals but maybe short on follow through.

So if someone wanted to promote more reading among adults in the United States, where would they start? One could appeal to people’s aspirations – but they already think highly of reading and do not necessarily read a lot. Is it about making it easier to read (more affordable, more accessible, more compelling texts, etc.)? Or helping people meet their other interests – spending time with family, as noted above – so they can then read? Or making reading cool?

Small N and big percentage change, Paul McCartney and Wings edition

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I saw this headline earlier this week: “Paul McCartney’s Wings Album Soars More Than 5,000% In Sales.” For an artist who has sold millions of albums over 60 years of making music, this sounded important. But here are the details of the story:

According to Luminate, Venus and Mars sold 2,500 copies in the U.S. in the most recent tracking week. That’s a strong number for a reissue of an album that’s been around for decades — and especially notable given how little it moved just a week prior. In the previous frame, the set couldn’t even manage 100 copies. That means that from one span to the next, the Wings title enjoyed a sales spike of 5,435%.

The Venus and Mars surge can be attributed to a recent reissue that targets McCartney’s most devoted supporters. The full-length was re-released on vinyl in a half-speed remastered form, which may not sound like a major change, but it was enough to grab the attention of collectors and audiophiles alike. While the music remains largely the same, the format offers improved sound quality and a what must be a unique listening experience.

What happened is that this album was reissued on vinyl. This pushed sales of the record up. But it went from under 100 copies sold to 2,500 copies sold. This is a big percentage increase but not a big figure. 2,500 records moved in one week is less than a drop in the bucket in numbers of popular music sold after World War Two.

The headline is technically correct. Sales jumped over 5,000%! Sales spiked for Paul McCartney! Is it a meaningful change? No. Barely any records were sold in either week. Maybe plenty of people will click on this story because of the shocking statistic in the headline – I did – but there is not much news here.

This is what happens when you have a small number of cases overall. A small shift in numbers either way, up or down, can lead to a really big percentage change.

How flat Chicago is

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In some American cities, you can see mountains. Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver. What you see (and experience) in Chicago is flat land. How flat? Here is one way to approach it:

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According to “A History of Beverly Hills, Chicago,” a 1926 University of Chicago thesis by Cora DeGrass Heinemann, that Far South Side neighborhood, which now goes by Beverly, “is the highest land in Cook County.” That’s because the Blue Island Ridge, a glacial moraine, winds through it.

In the Dan Ryan Woods, a forest preserve that adjoins Beverly to the north, a historical marker for Lookout Point says the spot was “used as a signal station on [the] main highway of Indian travel.” Lookout Point offers a fine view of downtown Chicago, but at 660 feet above sea level, it’s not quite the highest spot in the city. That’s a little farther south, at 91st Street between Claremont and Western, where the land rises to 670 feet.

By contrast, the city’s lowest point, the lakefront, is at 577 feet. The lesson here: With less than 100 feet between its highest and lowest elevations, Chicago is one flat city.

This is some variation in elevation, almost 100 feet. I wonder if there are additional factors that help hide changes in elevation:

  1. An urban landscape. Lots of buildings and activity might distract from elevation changes.
  2. Chicago is not just any urban landscape; there are plenty of tall buildings. A ten-story building is roughly 100 feet tall and there are plenty of these across Chicago. Such buildings could help a 100-foot difference seem small in comparison.
  3. Gradual elevation changes. This could be from the natural landscape and/or the smoothing effects of development over decades.
  4. The location of the highest point is away from the center of the city. How many people pass by this location regularly compared to other parts of the city with less variation in elevation?

So Chicago is relatively flat – and other factors could contribute to the sense of flatness.