2025 AWARD WINNERS

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Distinguished Career Award

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Phillip S. Gorski, Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology
Yale University
Committee: Michèle Lamont (Chair), Lauren Valentino, and Paul Joosse

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Outstanding Book Award

Wes Markofski. Good News for Common Goods: Multicultural Evangelicalism and Ethical Democracy in America. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Committee: Shai Dromi (Chair), Jeffrey Guhin, and Matthew Andersson

What is the relationship between evangelical Christianity and democracy in America? In Good News for Common Goods, sociologist Wes Markofski explores how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing race, poverty, inequality, politics, and religious and cultural difference in America's increasingly plural and polarized public arena. Based on extensive original research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and public service organizations across the country-including over 90 in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents-Markofski shows how the varieties of public religion practiced by evangelical Christians are not always bad news for non-evangelicals, people of color, and those advancing ethical democracy in the United States.

Markofski argues that multicultural evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, it also calls for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.

Honorable Mention: Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz. Morality in the Making of Sense and Self: Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiments and the New Science of Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention at ASA 2025 (Matthew Hollander, Jason Turowetz, Shai Dromi, Dana Moss)

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Outstanding Published Article

Chaeyoon Lim and Dingeman Wiertz. 2024. “Civic Lessons That Last? Religiosity and Volunteering on the Way to Adulthood.” American Sociological Review 89(4):684–707.
Committee: Candice Robinson (Chair), Yongren Shi, Joshua Doyle, and Barbara Kiviat

Recent religious declines in the United States are for a large part driven by the growing number of Americans who were raised religiously but left religion in the transition to adulthood. Nonetheless, their views and behaviors may still be influenced by their religious upbringing. We explore such legacy effects by examining how changing religiosity during the transition to adulthood influences volunteering among young adults. Analyzing panel data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we estimate two types of effects: effects of cumulative religious trajectories in youth, and effects of religiosity in youth that are not mediated by religiosity in adulthood. We find that histories of religious involvement shape volunteering in adulthood, but the precise nature of such effects varies across dimensions of religiosity and types of volunteering. Religious service attendance in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood mostly indirectly, through influencing religiosity in adulthood, and exclusively for activities organized by religious groups. By contrast, religious identification in youth promotes volunteering in adulthood also through other channels, and its effects on secular volunteering may persist even when people are not religious in adulthood. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of ongoing declines in religiosity in the United States.


Honorable Mention: Minjae Kim, Oliver Hahl, Ethan Poskanzer, and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan. 2024. “When Truth Trumps Facts: Studies on Partisan Moral Flexibility in American Politics.” American Journal of Sociology 130(1):193–240.

Outstanding Published Paper Award at ASA (Chaeyoon Lim, Dana Moss, Joshua Doyle)

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Outstanding Graduate Student Paper

Christine Delp, University of Minnesota. "Cultural Critics as Moral Reputational Entrepreneurs: Controversy, Metaethical Discourse, and Authority in the Documentary Field."
Committee: Max Besbris (Chair), Lingxiao Chen, and Joyce Kim


Honorable Mention: Ludovico Genovese, Columbia University. "Neighborhoods, Ethnic Diversity, and Inter-ethnic Cooperation: Quasi-experimental Evidence from a Refugee Dispersal Policy in Sweden."

Past Winners