Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF TRUST -- One. Trust, Role Segmentation, and Modernity -- Two. Agency, Civility, and the Paradox of Solidarity -- Three. Trust and Generalized Exchange -- PART TWO: THE REPRESENTATION OF TRUST AND THE PRIVATE SPHERE -- Four. Public and Private in Political Thought: Rousseau, Smith, and Some Contemporaries -- Five. The Individual, the Rise of Conscience, and the Private Sphere: A Historical Interpretation of Agency and Strong Evaluations -- Six. Spheres of Value and the Dilemma of Modernity -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

"This book offers a comparative analysis of religious education and state policies towards religious education in seven different countries and in the European Union as a whole. Most of the cases studied have not been presented previously in the English speaking world. The comparative contextualization of the different countries studied here, Muslim majority, Orthodox Christian, Jewish and secular (or laic) is also new. The challenge addressed by the book's different studies, is quite simply if religious education can itself be a vehicle for civic enculturation and the creation of ties of belonging and meaningful solidarity across different ethnic and religious communities in the contemporary world. In many of the countries studied, the state and the program of state-making was associated with one religio-ethnic community and then the question remains if religious education that privileges that religious community can provide such shared terms of meaning for members of different communities. This is the challenge faced by such countries at Bulgaria, Israel, Malaysia and in a slightly different way (facing not religious diversity but ethnic difference), Turkey. The case of Cyprus, by contrast, is one of a country actually split along lines of ethno-religious difference. Additional studies of the connection between religious education and the terms of citizenship in the EU, France and the USA provide important contrasts to the challenges facing us as we seek to educate our citizenry in an age of religious resurgence and global politics"--

The importance of being ambiguous -- Interlude : ambiguity, order and the deity -- Notation and its limits -- Interlude : the Israelite red heifer and the edge of power in China -- Ritual and the rhythms of ambiguity -- Interlude : crossing the boundaries of empathy -- Shared experience -- Interlude : experience and multiplicity

Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into being its own ne

All societies contain some image or vision of their own perfection—of life, both individual and collective, free of the burdens of history and death. In the history of civilizations, these visions have often served as a fulcrum of radical change and social transformation. Just as often, they have served as the ideological underpinnings of more abortive movements of social change. Moreover, in the lives of individuals and groups, they have often led to a renunciation of the world and its concerns in search of a more private wholeness, in a life of contemplation and retreat.

From time out of mind, people have killed, maimed, and
oppressed one another in two sorts of conflicts: over material
interests (real estate, slave labor, agricultural surplus, war
booty, and so on) and over what Max Weber would have
termed "ideal interests" (conflicts over ultimate meanings,
salvation, principles of justice, definitions of social order).
Barrington Moore's classical and landmark study, Social
Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in
the Making of the Modern World (1966), explored the first
mode of conflict in the making of modern nation-states. All
social scientists are forever in his debt for that effort. It ranks
as one of the most important contributions to the fields of
comparative and historical sociology.