Career and research Positions held Īfter completing his PhD, Stark held appointments as a research sociologist at the Survey Research Center and at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Stark played high school football with another individual who would go on to have a distinguished academic career, Alvin Plantinga, an influential Christian philosopher who taught at Calvin College and Notre Dame. He worked as a journalist for the Oakland Tribune from 1959 until 1961, then pursued graduate work, obtaining his MA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and his PhD, also from Berkeley, in 1971.
He spent time in the United States Army, before graduating in journalism from the University of Denver in 1959. Stark was born on July 8, 1934, and grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota, in a Lutheran family. He twice won the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, for The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (1985, with William Sims Bainbridge), and for The Churching of America 1776–1990 (1992, with Roger Finke). Stark had written over 30 books, including The Rise of Christianity (1996), and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome. At the time of his death he was the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.
Rodney William Stark (J– July 21, 2022) was an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington.
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