Carl Bowman
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Carl Bowman (born 1957) is an American sociologist, who is widely recognized for his studies of Anabaptist religious groups and is perhaps the foremost expert on the social and cultural history of the Church of the Brethren.
The author of various books, chapters, and monographs, Carl Bowman is perhaps best known as the author of "Brethren Society: The Cultural Transformation of a Peculiar People" (1995)[usurped]. His analysis of Brethren history was characterized by Donald F. Durnbaugh, preeminent Brethren historian, as one that would "shape the interpretation of Brethren history for many decades." Bowman conducted the 1985 Brethren Profile Study, the first nationally representative survey of Brethren during the twentieth century, and served for many years as Contributing Editor to "The Brethren Encyclopedia, Volume IV" (2005).
On the broader topic of Anabaptist religious groups, Bowman co-authored "On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren" (2001) Archived 2006-08-13 at the Wayback Machine with Donald Kraybill. He was a Research Fellow at Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and directed the Brethren Member Profile 2006, the second nationally representative survey of Brethren in the United States.
Bowman was Chair of the Department of Sociology at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia, from 1988 until 2007. He has served as Director of Survey Research for the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture since 1995. Bowman has designed social surveys on political and moral culture that were fielded by the Gallup Organization and was a statistical software consultant for SYSTAT Software.
