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"For the sociologist Robert Bellah, questions about the meaning and responsibility of human beings in the present emerge out of our self-awareness of our responsibilities to one another and the planet. He places religion as the central social institution through which this is understood. At the time of his passing in 2013, Bellah had begun formulating what would have been his next book, a narrative that demonstrated how the axial age (500 - 300 BCE) legacies have been transformed but are still relevant, for better and worse, in the present age. The modern project, he believed, drew upon axial insights to conceive justice and freedom, but the historically unprecedented technological, economic, and demographic expansion of modernity has produced increasing threats to our precarious interdependence with each other and the entire biosphere. In Challenging Modernity the coauthors of the landmark Habits of the Heart bring together the three unpublished essays that would have been the foundation of Bellah's next book. These include lectures from Notre Dame and Harvard that provide a metanarrative of metanarratives, concluding with a a vision of human aspirations in a morally fragmented world. Next is an engagement with Ian Morris's social development index, which quantifies energy consumption and organizational complexity over time and questions how we as a species can adapt to a rate of change that no biological species has ever faced before. Finally, Bellah's Paul Tillich lecture engages the dialectic of the prophetic and sacramental tradition of religion and what they tell us about the needs of societies to function. The book will include an introduction and conclusion as well as additional essays to provide context. In sum, the book challenges us to engage with the big questions that Bellah left for us. Can the universal insights of the Axial Age be reimagined, renewed, and politically enacted in modern institutions? Can we realize universal human rights and responsibilities? Through deliberating and deciding in common, can we pursue social goods diverse and encompassing enough for all of us to share in order to survive and flourish in practice? We will never know for certain what Bellah would have concluded, but in this book we see him trying to think this through"--

From the 1960s until his death in 2013, Robert N. Bellah was the preeminent figure in the study of religion and society. He broke new ground in mapping the religious dimensions of human experience, from the great breakthroughs of the first millennium BCE to the paradoxes of American civic life. In three final essays, published here for the first time, Bellah grapples with the contradictions of modernity, and seven leading thinkers respond with profound, exhilarating new perspectives on our present predicament.Challenging Modernity critically assesses the modern project to shed light on the tensions between its transcendent aspirations and the perils we now face. Its contributors analyze the roots of the collapse of the political, economic, and cultural institutions that promised perpetual progress but now threaten global catastrophe. Reflecting the range of Bellah's scholarship, they span the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. They extend Bellah's insight that only deep historical, cultural, and religious understanding can help us meet modernity's harrowing challenges by sharing responsibility for the global interdependence of our common fate

Since the Chinese economic reform was realized in the early 1990s, a significant revolution has been launched socially, economically, and politically in China. At present, China is an indispensable actor in the international arena, so that the transitionsdomestically bring about substantial influence on the whole world. Dynamics of Local Governance in China during the Reform takes close look at China's current transformation and its broader implications. Through their thought-provoking essays, thecontributors to this volume dissect China's transformation by examining various topics in the fie

"The importance of the relationship between the United States and the People's Republic of China has only grown since Richard Nixon's epochal visit in 1972. By the early twenty-first century, when the rise of China had become an inescapable fact, most American policy makers and experts saw bilateral ties with China as the most consequential foreign-relations priority for the United States. In recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.-China relationship has rapidly deteriorated-and the whole world has felt the consequences. This book brings together leading China specialists to offer a retrospective on relations between the United States and China over the last half-century and consider what might be next. The contributors-including academics, leaders of China-related nongovernmental organizations, and former diplomats and government officials-analyze the relationship from a range of perspectives: political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural, commercial, educational, medical, and military. They reassess American engagement with China from the late Mao years onward, covering leaders from Deng Xiaoping through Xi Jinping. The contributors highlight not only the accomplishments and hard-won successes of engagement but also the mistakes and misunderstandings, acknowledging the well-earned distrust and genuine frictions that plague the relationship today. Multidisciplinary and comprehensive, Engaging China is a vital reconsideration for a time when the stakes of U.S. policy toward China have never been higher"--