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The year 2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. His plays are read, interpreted, and performed throughout the United States and the world, and from the early seventeenth century onward, the praise bestowed on him is hyperbolic, as if he were superhuman, even divine. Biographies of Shakespeare abound and often are informative, but not about Shakespeare himself, for we know very little...
Nudging is a form of soft paternalism whereby governments manipulate the choice architectures of citizens to steer them toward desired outcomes (including eating better, voting more often, being less aggressive and violent, being more compassionate, living healthier, and leading more fulfilling lives). From the perspective of social activists (including moral entrepreneurs of various stripes), public...
Peter Berger’s The Many Altars of Modernity is considered through the lens of the sociological analysis of race, class, and gender in an effort to show the borderlines between faith and seculairty in the modern world. Berger’s theory is praised for its approach to linking macro- and micro-social processes that confirm the mutual existence of faith and seculaity, but always in historical contexts that...
Contemporary anthropological studies confirm the core premise of Peter Berger’s “two pluralisms” hypothesis: that the most consequential feature of religion and ethics in our late-modern age is not religion’s secularizing decline, but the globalization and co-existence of powerful discourses of secularity and religiosity. Two generations of anthropological research also suggest, however, that the...
In 2011, Japanese-Peruvian Keiko Fujimori (1975- ), daughter of the former president, Alberto Fujimori, almost won presidential elections in Peru. Ollanta Humala (1962- ), who identifies himself as indigenous and as a youth studied in “La Unión,” a Japanese-Peruvian school, defeated her. He had been an army officer; Keiko Fujimori, a congresswoman. She now hopes to win in 2016. This would make her...
Recent discussions of student loan policy ignore the the relationship between risk and social class. Students with weaker academic records and more modest family resources are at higher risk of failing to complete their studies and of being unable to repay their loans. Thus, those who study at for-profit institutions, which enroll large shares of high-risk students, are especially likely to be delinquent...
In the U.S. the Madisonian model remains a relative success story in terms of managing deep pluralism. It’s important to look closely at what have been the sources of American flexibility in handling cases where theological/moral differences may be irreconcilable and accommodations costly, yet workable solutions have still been found. In particular, the example of the conservative Mennonite tradition...
Adam Smith provides adumbrations of Berger’s analysis of religion and political pluralism, as well as additional insights into the dynamics of religious pluralism. Ernest Gellner presents critical emendations of Berger’s exploration of the compartmentalization of religious and secular belief.
Change processes are taking place in different European countries, based on different contextual backgrounds, with diverse motives, actors, and aims, but nevertheless in a way that similarly affects both religious pluralization and secularization. In European societies, religious pluralization is not only a fact, but it also poses a challenge for a better or a new understanding of the different religions...
Drawing on surveys of religion and values in Great Britain, this paper suggests that Peter Berger’s paradigm of two pluralisms can be usefully supplemented by taking account of a third kind of intensified pluralism. This involves the breakdown of the boundaries between religions, and between the religious and the secular, and is therefore a pluralism of de-differentiation. It helps explain many features...
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