Showing titles in Sociology

It's not your imagination: civilized human society is collapsing. Communities no longer work toward a common good; children are no longer our first priority; businesses no longer value hard work; arts and skills have been lost; and gender is decided by the individual, not biology. We cannot reverse national and global trends, says professor Anthony Esolen, but we can build communities that live up to humanity's promise and responsibility.

The call to make the world a better place is inherent in the Christian belief and practice. But why have efforts to change the world by Christians so often failed or gone tragically awry? And how might Christians in the twenty-first century live in ways that have integrity with their traditions and are more truly transformative? In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers persuasive answers to these questions.

Religion is at the heart of man’s societies. ‘For a long time,’ Durkheim writes early on in his book, ‘it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin.’ Durkheim decided to examine how and why this phenomenon functioned and evolved - by looking specifically at simple societies and their religions, rather than at religions in more complex or developed societies.

Religious involvement has been declining in the West for decades—and, though men have historically outnumbered women among the disaffiliated in the U.S., a greater share of the young adults leaving religion today are women. A young, secular Kelsey Osgood would have been surprised to hear that she would be among those moving in the opposite direction. And yet, after the conversion to Orthodox Judaism that transformed her life, she began to wonder about the other contemporary women who, like her, had been startled to find a home in organized religion.

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.

In TechGnosis - a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword - Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah.

Through a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 people and an additional 200 face-to-face interviews, Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith probed the grassroots of white evangelical America. They found that despite recent efforts by the movement's leaders to address the problem of racial discrimination, evangelicals themselves seem to be preserving America's racial chasm. In fact, most white evangelicals see no systematic discrimination against blacks. But the authors contend that it is not active racism.

"Forty-four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next 50 years," writes Sam Harris. "Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this...should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."

We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us. The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe.

In his reflections on God, Jesus, suffering, and liberation, James H. Cone relates the gospel message to the experience of the Black community. But a wider theme of the book is the role that social and historical context plays in framing the questions we address to God as well as the mode of the answers provided.

In this explosive new book, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values, arguing that most people are simply mistaken about the relationship between morality and the rest of human knowledge. Harris urges us to think about morality in terms of human and animal well-being, viewing the experiences of conscious creatures as peaks and valleys on a "moral landscape".

Now updated with a new introduction by number-one New York Times best-selling author Marianne Williamson, the 20th anniversary edition of Healing the Soul of America shares her timeless, visionary message of political healing. This is a time, according to Williamson, for Americans to return once again to our first principles, both politically and spiritually. Here, Williamson draws plans to transform the American political consciousness and encourage powerful citizen involvement to heal our society.

Everybody seems to take it for granted that the world is getting more secular - that faith is doomed by modernity. Scientists, secularists, and atheists applaud the change; religious believers lament it. But here's the thing: They're all wrong, and acclaimed author Rodney Stark has the numbers to prove it. The Triumph of Faith explodes the myth that people around the world are abandoning religion.

A guidebook for living a life without religion, combining sociological insight and personal inspiration. Over the last 25 years, "no religion" has become the fastest growing religion in the United States. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have turned away from the traditional faiths of the past and embraced a secular - or nonreligious - life, generating societies vastly less religious than at any other time in human history.

This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book includes a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining its enduring influence.

In this first volume of his book series The Evolution of Meaning, Dempsey introduces a theory of meaning based in thermodynamics and information processing.

Politics are being transformed by religion, namely in China - within the next 30 years, one-third of this potential superpower could be Christian. If this religious transformation occurs, China would be one of the largest Christian nations in the world.

God is seen as the ultimate authority figure, the one who makes the rules and controls everything about our lives through his divine plan. But what if you learned none of that is true? What if it wasn’t God, but mere men laying claim to his authority who actually make the rules and keep you under control for their own gain? Lies Upon Lies is a candid and fast-paced examination of the ways in which kings and rulers throughout history have forced belief in God upon their subjects in an effort to consolidate their power. We travel from the reign of the Egyptian pharaohs to the Catholic ...

Recent polls report that 96-percent of Americans believe in God, and 73-percent believe that angels regularly visit Earth. Why is this? Why, despite the rise of science, technology, and secular education, are people turning to religion in greater numbers than ever before? Why do people believe in God at all?

Hypnotism. Human sacrifice. Sexual perversion. Mass suicide. For millennia, people have been enthralled by graphic descriptions of terrible rites performed by the religious other. The Penguin Book of Cults compiles the most notorious and uncanny of these true accounts.