Background
Nancy Ammerman was born on November 29, 1950 in Joplin, Montana, United States, into the family of B.R. and Mildred (McGranahan) Tatom.
Southwest Baptist University
University of Louisville
Yale University
Southwest Baptist University
University of Louisville
Yale University
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1987
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1990
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1993
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1996
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1998
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2002
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2005
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2006
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2013
Nancy Ammerman was born on November 29, 1950 in Joplin, Montana, United States, into the family of B.R. and Mildred (McGranahan) Tatom.
Nancy Tatom Ammerman received Bachelor of Arts (summa cum laude) at the Southwest Baptist University in1972. Then she got Master of Arts at the University of Louisville in 1977. Finally, Nancy earned Doctor of Philosophy at Yale in 1983.
Nancy Ammerman is at work on a book developing a sociological theory of “lived religion.” It builds on a growing body of research, including her 2013 book, "Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life", (Oxford University Press), which documents the way religion and spirituality operate across the many domains of daily lived experience, as well as her edited 2006 book "Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives" (Oxford University Press).
Earlier in her career, Dr. Ammerman spent many years studying congregations. Her 2005 book, "Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners" (University of California Press) describes how America’s diverse congregations do their work. It was awarded the Distinguished Book award by the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. It followed her 1997 book, "Congregation and Community", which analyzes twenty-three congregations that encountered various forms of neighborhood change in communities around the country.
Her first book, in 1987, was "Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World", a study of an independent Baptist church in New England, exploring the way in which its members make sense of their lives. Attention to resurgent conservatism continued with "Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention", which received the 1992 Distinguished Book award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. There she provided an historical and sociological account of the divisions that faced America’s largest denomination. She also contributed sections on Christian movements for the volumes of “The Fundamentalism Project” of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nancy was the 2004 - 2005 President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the 2000 - 2001 Chair of the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association, and the 1995 - 1996 President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. She is a frequently quoted news source on a variety of topics.
Biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins wonders whether theologians — at least the kind who study things like Adam and Eve’s original sin, even though Adam and Eve never existed — should get the boot from academia.
Nancy doesn’t take a stand one way or the other on her subjects’ beliefs; she merely studies them. And those who don’t take Genesis as literal history outnumber those who do, highlighting what she calls a common misperception among academics.
Quotations:
"[...] the most up lifting finding was the FBI's near total dismissal of the religious beliefs of the Branch Davidians. For these men, David Koresh was a sociopath, and his followers were hostages. Religion was a convenient cover for Koresh's desire to control his followers and monopolize all the rewards for himself. They saw no reason to try to understand his religious beliefs, indeed thought them so bizarre as to be incomprehensible by normal people. The negotiators expressed deep regret at this state of affairs, but could see no alternatives to the way they had come to understand the situation. The tactical commanders had no real regret, seeing the final outcome as unavoidable."
"The efforts by Arnold and James Tabor represented probably the best hope for a peaceful end to the siege. By working within Koresh's biblical system, they had suggested to him an alternative reading of critical passages in the book (Revelation). By this reading, Koresh should have written or recorded his explanation of the seven seals. The prophesied destruction of the true believers would not have taken place, in this reading, for a long time. The Davidians would have been free to leave their settlement and deal with the government to resolve their differences. Koresh evidently took this teaching and began his interpretive writing. In his last letter, written the week before the fiery end, he stated that he intended to come out when it was complete. The FBI, however, did not take this scenario seriously or believe that Koresh would actually write the document."
On July 15, 1972 Nancy married a minister Jackie W. Ammerman, with whom she has a child Abigail Tatom.
