Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

List of Plates.Preface.Introduction.1. Distinguishing Religion and Spirituality: Findings from Kendal.2. Testing the Spiritual Revolution Claim in Kendal.3. Evidence for a Spiritual Revolution: Britain and USA.4. Bringing the Sacred to Life: Explaining Secularization and Sacralization.5. Looking to the Future.Appendices.References.Index.

The spiritual revolution : why religion is giving way tospirituality

The Age of Migration

America’s Changing Religious Landscape

The formation of friendships and alliances is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and likely a crucial component of the cooperative hunting and child-rearing practices that helped our early hominin ancestors survive. Research on contemporary human beings typically finds that strong-tie social networks are fairly small, and reveals a high degree of physical (e.g., age) and social-structural (e.g., educational attainment) homophily. Yet, existing work all too often underestimates, or even ignores, the importance of abstract, symbolic homophily (such as shared identities or worldviews) as a driver of friendship formation. Here we employ agent-based modeling to identify the optimal variable weights influencing friendship formation in order to best replicate the results of existing empirical work. We include indicators of physical and social-structural homophily, in addition to symbolic homophily. Results suggest that the optimization values that best replicate existing empirical work include strong variable weightings of kinship, shared worldview, and outgroup suspicion.

Kevin McCaffree

Papers

Best Friends Forever? Modeling the Mechanisms of Friendship Network Formation

Fission–Fusion as the Central Sustaining Mechanism of Organismality, Part 2

The Evolution of Norms, Values, and Identities

Intuitive Information-Processing

Peter Baehr, The Unmasking Style in Social Theory. New York; Routledge. 188 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 978-1138091764