Showing titles in Sociology

Even though a growing number of Americans don’t believe in god, many remain reluctant to say so out loud. Kate Cohen argues that not only is it rewarding for those of little faith to announce themselves, it’s crucial to our country’s future. As she details the challenges and joys of fully embracing atheism—especially as a parent—Washington Post contributing columnist Kate Cohen does not dismiss religion as dangerous or silly. Instead, she investigates religion’s appeal in order to explain the ways we can thrive without it.

At the core of this book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism's violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism.

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.

A survey of the various ways--often unrecognized and overlooked--whereby Christianity has impacted the world, making the world a better place and enriching our everyday living.

Many bemoan the decline of the church. We hear a steady stream of reports about how droves of people, especially younger generations, are abandoning Christianity. But new research shows that unchurched Americans are surprisingly more receptive and open to the Christian faith than is commonly assumed. Researcher and practitioner Rick Richardson unveils the findings of the Billy Graham Center Institute's groundbreaking studies on the unchurched.

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.

The Theft of America’s Soul is a prophetic wake-up call for all who desire to see our nation thrive, challenging listeners to exchange these 10 lies for truths that will bring peace of mind, harmony, and prosperity back to our country - an invitation to experience the life-giving, peace-filling, wholly-transforming love of God. Phil Robertson, patriarch of A&E’s Duck Dynasty and one of the most recognized voices of conservative Christianity in America, believes that little by little, America has allowed the lines of morality, decency, and virtue to be erased.

In Biblical Critical Theory Audio Lectures, Part 1 Watkin draws a winsome vision for biblical cultural engagement in which faithfulness to Scripture and sensitivity to culture walk hand in hand. If Christians want to speak with a fresh, engaging and constructive voice within our culture, we need to press deeper into the core truths of the Bible.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 in the so-called "burned-over district" of upstate New York, which was producing seers and prophets daily. Most of the new creeds flamed out; Smith's would endure, becoming the most significant homegrown religion in American history. In American Zion Benjamin E. Park presents a fresh, sweeping account of the Latter-day Saints.

As president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Utah’s first territorial governor, Brigham Young (1801-77) shaped a religion, a migration, and the American West. He led the Saints to Utah, guided the establishment of 350 settlements, and inspired the Mormons as they weathered unimaginable trials and hardships. In this new biography, historian Thomas G. Alexander draws on a lifetime of research to provide an evenhanded view of Young and his leadership.

"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."

Finding one's calling is not just about finding something we can do - it is about finding what we can't not do. "Let your life speak" is a time-honored Quaker admonition to live one's life as witness to the deepest truths one knows. But as Parker Palmer explains, those words can also mean "listen to your life, and let it tell you what your truth is."

The inspiring story of evangelicals in Cincinnati struggling to bridge racial divides in their own church, their community, and across the nation.

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.

Recent years have seen a growing recognition of the role that White Christian Nationalism plays in American society. As White Christian Nationalism has become a major force, and as racial and religious attitudes become increasingly aligned among whites-for example, the more likely you are to say that the decline of white people as a share of the population is "bad for society," the more likely you are to believe the government should support religious values-it has become reasonable to wonder which of the adjectives in the phrase "White Christian Nationalism" takes precedence.

Why You Think the Way You Do traces the development of the worldviews that underpin the Western world. Professor and historian Glenn S. Sunshine demonstrates the decisive impact that the growth of Christianity had in transforming the outlook of pagan Roman culture into one that—based on biblical concepts of humanity and its relationship with God—established virtually all the positive aspects of Western civilization.

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious "histories" offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of Western history.

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.

The headlines are clear: Religion is on the decline in America as many people leave behind traditional religious practices. In this follow-up to her critically acclaimed book Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass argues that what appears to be a decline actually signals a major transformation in how people understand God. The distant God of conventional religion has given way to a more intimate sense of the sacred with us in the world.

As the author of many classic works on science and philosophy, Richard Dawkins has always asserted the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm it has inflicted on society. He now focuses his fierce intellect exclusively on this subject, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.