Help.

Ruben and I, well, frankly...we're struggling. We have a research topic that about which we are extremely passionate and do not want to compromise the substance, but we're experiencing some "technical difficulties" formulating a specific research question and confronting the ethical restrictions.

We want to study how the interaction between religious institutions and politics, whether that be political mobilizations of people from the pulpit (through explicit calls to action or religiously-affiliated community events/involvement) or the way in which believers reconcile or construe their political and religious identity or even the way in which religious organizations use their physical space to interact with the larger community (see the last entry concerning the Western Mosque). We are fascinated by the intersection of religion and politics and feel that Amsterdam is a unique place to study this issue considering its long history of religious tolerance and intolerance and more current affairs. But within this broad framework we are unable to determine a specific question, and we have been encountering some issues while thinking about how to operationalize our subject.

Is a sermon technically public or private property? While it's clearly meant for an audience, it's technically intended to target the congregation.Same goes for religious publications. Beyond this, the social sciences are meant to be objective-- how can we analyze documents and speeches for political and social signals without drawing our own inferences? And how can we ethically question people regarding the two most sensitive issues--religion and politics? Is it appropriate to hand out blind surveys, and what kind of questions should we ask? "How do you construe your political identity: do you think of yourself as a) primarily ____ (Christian, Muslim, Jewish); b) Dutch; c) both equally; d) neither; or e) all/none of the above?" (Don't worry, we are not really thinking of using heinous questions like that, I was trying to illustrate our dilemma).

In short, we need some help. Jessica and Clifford-- what times are available on Friday?