Retired Professor of Sociology, Hope College
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Don Luidens served on the faculty at Hope College from 1977 to 2014, serving as Sociology and Social Work Department chair from 1987 to 2002. His research has focused on the mainline Protestant community, with special emphasis on the Reformed Church in America. Among other research endeavors, Don represented the RCA in two Lilly funded projects, Faith Communities Today (FACT) and the Organizing Religious Work (ORW), both under the auspices of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. He is co-author of Divided by a Common Heritage: The Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America at the beginning of the New Millennium (Eerdmans), Vanishing Boundaries: Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Westminster/John Knox) and co-editor of Rethinking Secularization (University Press of America), Reformed Vitality: Continuity and Change in the Face of Modernity (UPA), and Reformed Encounters with Modernity: Perspectives from Three Continents (Media-Com of South Africa). His articles have appeared in The Review of Religious Research, The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, as well as Church Herald, Perspectives, Christian Century, and Reformed Review. Most recently, Don has studied the role of sports as a central factor in the identity of American collegians. This has involved an NCAA-funded study of ex-athletes at many private colleges. During the 2004-2005 academic year he worked at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana on a project looking at college athletic recruitment.