We all want to belong to strong and supportive communities. But can communities be built, or must they arise spontaneously? Won't intervening in the process destroy it? No, says Charles Vogl. Both in his career and as a personal quest, Vogl has been deeply invested in understanding what it takes to bring and keep people together. He's discovered that while community can't be forced, it can be actively encouraged and nurtured. Drawing on 3,000 years of spiritual tradition, Vogl lays out seven time-tested principles that every leader can apply to grow enduring, effective, and supportive communities. The principles are distilled from spiritual traditions, since major religions have built highly diverse communities that have lasted for centuries. Vogl has secularized and universalized these principles so they can enrich a wide array of communities - formal or informal, physical or virtual, and centered on any shared interest. Vogl describes each principle's purpose and provides extensive hands-on tools for creatively adapting them to the style, needs, and inclinations of your particular group. He also helps leaders ensure that their communities remain healthy and life affirming and do not degenerate into rigid cults. This is a guide to bringing friendship, connection, and support to where there had been loneliness, separation, and isolation.

Radical Islam is a major affliction of the contemporary world. Each year, radical Islamists carry out terrorist attacks that result in a massive death toll, almost all involving noncombatants and innocents. Estimates of how many Muslims could be considered followers of radical Islam vary widely, and there are few guides to help determine moderates versus radicals. Observers often sit at the extremes, either seeing all Muslims as open or closeted jihadis or recoiling from any attempt to link Islam with international terror. Both positions are overly simplistic, and the lack of rational principles to absolve the innocent and identify the accomplices of terror has led to governments and individuals mistakenly accepting jihadis as moderate. What is Moderate Islam? brings together an array of scholars-Muslims and non-Muslims-to provide this missing insight. This wide-ranging collection examines the relationship among Islam, civil society, and the state. The contributors-including both Muslims and non-Muslims-investigate how radical Islamists can be distinguished from moderate Muslims, analyze the potential for moderate Islamic governance, and challenge monolithic conceptions of Islam.

Hilde Lindemann Nelson focuses on the stories of groups of people -- including Gypsies, mothers, nurses, and transsexuals -- whose identities have been defined by those with the power to speak for them and to constrain the scope of their actions. By placing their stories side by side with narratives about the groups in question, Nelson arrives at some important insights regarding the nature of identity.

She regards personal identity as consisting not only of how people view themselves but also of how others view them. These perceptions combine to shape the person's field of action. If a dominant group constructs the identities of certain people through socially shared narratives that mark them as morally subnormal, those who bear the damaged identity cannot exercise their moral agency freely.

Nelson identifies two kinds of damage inflicted on identities by abusive group relations: one kind deprives individuals of important social goods, and the other deprives them of self-respect. To intervene in the production of either kind of damage, Nelson develops the counterstory, a strategy of resistance that allows the identity to be narratively repaired and so restores the person to full membership in the social and moral community. By attending to the power dynamics that constrict agency, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair augments the narrative approaches of ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor.

This book provides a political narrative of the rise and fall of the Tudor monarchy - key to understanding the history of the years 1450 to 1660.

The theme is the relationship between the Crown and the aristocracy and how a partnership was created partly by the actions of the Crown and partly by the changing composition and attitudes of the political nation. It begins with the chaos of factional quarrels which was the political life of England under Henry VI in the 1450s and then examines the rebuilding of the strength of royal government under Edward IV, Henry VII and Henry VIII. That government was tested in various ways under Edward VI and Mary, reached its peak under Elizabeth, and declined under James I. The partnership finally broke down in the civil war of the 1640s and the Tudor monarchy collapsed.

This is the life cycle of a political system created out of necessity and fashioned by a mixture of vision and circumstance. After its collapse the Republic failed to create a viable alternative, but the resurrection of the old system after 1660 was more apparent than real.

The Dred Scott suit for freedom, argues Kelly M. Kennington, was merely the most famous example of a phenomenon that was more widespread in antebellum American jurisprudence than is generally recognized. The author draws on the case files of more than three hundred enslaved individuals who, like Dred Scott and his family, sued for freedom in the local legal arena of St. Louis. Her findings open new perspectives on the legal culture of slavery and the negotiated processes involved in freedom suits. As a gateway to the American West, a major port on both the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, and a focal point in the rancorous national debate over slavery's expansion, St. Louis was an ideal place for enslaved individuals to challenge the legal systems and, by extension, the social systems that held them in forced servitude. Kennington offers an in-depth look at how daily interactions, webs of relationships, and arguments presented in court shaped and reshaped legal debates and public at titudes over slavery and freedom in St. Louis. Kennington also surveys more than eight hundred state supreme court freedom suits from around the United States to situate the St. Louis example in a broader context. Although white enslavers dominated the antebellum legal system in St. Louis and throughout the slaveholding states, that fact did not mean that the system ignored the concerns of the subordinated groups who made up the bulk of the American population. By looking at a particular example of one group's encounters with the law and placing these suits into conversation with similar en counters that arose in appellate cases nationwide Kennington sheds light on the ways in which the law responded to the demands of a variety of actors.

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Intersectionality intervenes in the field of intersectionality studies: the integrative examination of the effects of racial, gendered, and class power on people's lives. While "intersectionality" circulates as a buzzword, Anna Carastathis joins other critical voices to urge a more careful reading. Challenging the narratives of arrival that surround it, Carastathis argues that intersectionality is a horizon, illuminating ways of thinking that have yet to be realized; consequently, calls to "go beyond" intersectionality are premature. A provisional interpretation of intersectionality can disorient habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and prototypicality and overcome dynamics of segregation and subordination in political movements. Through a close reading of critical race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's germinal texts, published more than twenty-five years ago, Carastathis urges analytic clarity, contextual rigor, and a politicized, historicized understanding of this widely traveling concept. Intersectionality's roots in social justice movements and critical intellectual projects-specifically Black feminism-must be retraced and synthesized with a decolonial analysis so its radical potential to actualize coalitions can be enacted.

Sherpas are portrayed by Westerners as heroic mountain guides, or "tigers of the snow," as Buddhist adepts, and as a people in touch with intimate ways of life that seem no longer available in the Western world. In this book, Vincanne Adams explores how attempts to characterize an "authentic" Sherpa are complicated by Western fascination with Sherpas and by the Sherpas' desires to live up to Western portrayals of them. Noting that diplomatic aides at world summit meetings go by the name "Sherpa," as do a van in the U.K. built for rough terrain and a software product from Silicon Valley, Adams examines the "authenticating" effects of this mobile signifier on a community of Himalayan Sherpas who live at the base of Mount Everest, Nepal, and its "deauthenticating" effects on anthropological representation.

This book speaks not only to anthropologists concerned with ethnographic portrayals of Otherness but also to those working in cultural studies who are concerned with ethnographically grounded analyses of representations. Throughout Adams illustrates how one might undertake an ethnography of transnationally produced subjects by using the notion of "virtual" identities. In a manner informed by both Buddhism and shamanism, virtual Sherpas are always both real and distilled reflections of the desires that produce them.

Arguably the most transformative force in contemporary society is the commitment to justice through diversity. A prime example is the change justice through diversity has wrought on who enters, teaches and administers the university. It has changed the content of what is taught and the mission statements that define the purpose of higher education. What is rarely defined, however, is justice and how it is related to diversity. If justice is equality, are all differences equal? Are all differences in race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, ethnicity, religion and culture equal? Should such differences be weighted differently and thus hierarchically? On what basis are those differences to be weighted and ranked to ensure equality? Justice Through Diversity brings together a Who's Who of contemporary scholars to explore these questions and others in an attempt to understand one of the central commitments in the modern world.

This core textbook offers a concise and interdisciplinary overview of the relationship between diversity and the media. Focusing on media regulation in democratic societies, each chapter explores how different conceptions of diversity relate to media audiences, media workforces, media outlets and media content. Drawing on research approaches grounded in the political economy of media, political communication, media economics and critical media industry studies, this insightful book analyses a wide range of current and historical examples from the UK, the US and Europe. This far-reaching and inclusive text is an invaluable resource for students and academics from media, communication studies, journalism, cultural studies and sociology backgrounds. Clear and accessible, it will also appeal to members of non-governmental organizations or activist groups involved in media policy and reform.

A minority is a sociological group that does not constitute a politically dominant voting majority of the total population of a given society. This book focuses on a variety of issues which threaten minorities in the United States, as well as the policies put in place by the government to ensure the protection of these people. Topics discussed herein include discrimination cases brought against the USDA; Indian Trust Fund Litigation; federal taxation of Indian tribes and members; disadvantaged small businesses; and others.

Sociological objectivism argues that what defines social deviance is the existence of a real, concrete, damaging or threatening state of affairs. In other words, what turns a state of affairs into a problem is that it actually harms or endangers human life and well-being. Politicians, educators, social workers, law enforcement agents and mental health specialists may claim that an increase in cases of crime, for example, reflects a genuine rise in the behaviour itself. Sharper rises in such rates can naturally lead to stronger societal reactions. Functionalists who adhere to this view, as exemplified by Talcott Parsons and others, considered that customs and institutions that persist over time tend to be those that are good for society because they prohibit harmful activities and encourage beneficial ones that maximise societal preservation. This book explores the dynamics of this social and complex problem.