|
Showing 1 - 25 of
45 matches in All Departments
Biblicism, an approach to the Bible common among some American
evangelicals, emphasizes together the Bible's exclusive authority,
infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency,
self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. Acclaimed
sociologist Christian Smith argues that this approach is misguided
and unable to live up to its own claims. If evangelical biblicism
worked as its proponents say it should, there would not be the vast
variety of interpretive differences that biblicists themselves
reach when they actually read and interpret the Bible. Far from
challenging the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Smith
critiques a particular rendering of it, encouraging evangelicals to
seek a more responsible, coherent, and defensible approach to
biblical authority.
This important book has generated lively discussion and debate. The
paperback edition adds a new chapter responding to the conversation
that the cloth edition has sparked.
Everyday Knowledge and Uncommon Truths: Women of the Academy is a
thirteen chapter volume which draws on the life experience and
varied backgrounds of academic women from the United States,
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The book addresses a variety of
issues pertaining to women’s home lives, education, teaching,
research, writing, and activism. To provide diverse perspectives on
women’s experiences of being and knowing in and outside the
academy, contributors draw on a range of critical approaches
derived from feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical
education theory, discourse theory and analysis, narrative inquiry
and life histories. Lately, there has been considerable interest by
women in the academy in a discernment process involving an
examination of the historically, politically and culturally
situated nature of their knowledge of the world, their work in the
academy and other activities in which they engage. These
examinations, especially in the form of narrative inquiry, life
histories and deconstructive language practices such as discourse
analysis, figure prominently in breaking silences and giving voice
to the many tensions that women experience in the academic
workplace and other settings.
A woman is incomplete without a man, motherhood is a woman's
destiny, and a woman's place is in the home. These conservative
political themes are woven throughout teen romance fiction's sagas
of hearts and flowers. Using the theory and interpretive methods of
feminism and cultural studies, Christian-Smith explores the
contradictory role that popular culture plays in constructing
gender, class, race, age and sexual meanings. Originally published
in 1990, Becoming a Woman through Romance combines close textual
analyses of thirty-four teen romance novels (written in the United
States from 1942-1982) with a school study in three midwestern
American schools. Christian-Smith situates teen romance fiction
within the rapidly changing publishing industry and the important
political and economic changes in the United States surrounding the
rise of the New Right. By analysing the structure of the novels in
terms of the themes of romance, sexuality and beautification, and
the Good/Bad and Strong/Weak dichotomies, she demonstrates how each
has shaped the novels' versions of femininity over forty years. She
also shows that although romance fiction is presented as a
universal model, it is actually an expression of white middle class
gender ideology and tension within this class. This high readable,
comprehensive and coherent work was the first to combine in one
volume three vital areas of cultural studies research: the
political economy of publishing, textual analysis, and a study of
readers. The first full-scale study of teen romance fiction,
Becoming a Woman through Romance establishes the importance of the
study of popular culture forms found in school for understanding
the process of school materials in identity formation.
Everyday Knowledge and Uncommon Truths: Women of the Academy is a
thirteen chapter volume which draws on the life experience and
varied backgrounds of academic women from the United States,
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The book addresses a variety of
issues pertaining to women’s home lives, education, teaching,
research, writing, and activism. To provide diverse perspectives on
women’s experiences of being and knowing in and outside the
academy, contributors draw on a range of critical approaches
derived from feminism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, critical
education theory, discourse theory and analysis, narrative inquiry
and life histories. Lately, there has been considerable interest by
women in the academy in a discernment process involving an
examination of the historically, politically and culturally
situated nature of their knowledge of the world, their work in the
academy and other activities in which they engage. These
examinations, especially in the form of narrative inquiry, life
histories and deconstructive language practices such as discourse
analysis, figure prominently in breaking silences and giving voice
to the many tensions that women experience in the academic
workplace and other settings.
A woman is incomplete without a man, motherhood is a woman's
destiny, and a woman's place is in the home. These conservative
political themes are woven throughout teen romance fiction's sagas
of hearts and flowers. Using the theory and interpretive methods of
feminism and cultural studies, Christian-Smith explores the
contradictory role that popular culture plays in constructing
gender, class, race, age and sexual meanings. Originally published
in 1990, Becoming a Woman through Romance combines close textual
analyses of thirty-four teen romance novels (written in the United
States from 1942-1982) with a school study in three midwestern
American schools. Christian-Smith situates teen romance fiction
within the rapidly changing publishing industry and the important
political and economic changes in the United States surrounding the
rise of the New Right. By analysing the structure of the novels in
terms of the themes of romance, sexuality and beautification, and
the Good/Bad and Strong/Weak dichotomies, she demonstrates how each
has shaped the novels' versions of femininity over forty years. She
also shows that although romance fiction is presented as a
universal model, it is actually an expression of white middle class
gender ideology and tension within this class. This high readable,
comprehensive and coherent work was the first to combine in one
volume three vital areas of cultural studies research: the
political economy of publishing, textual analysis, and a study of
readers. The first full-scale study of teen romance fiction,
Becoming a Woman through Romance establishes the importance of the
study of popular culture forms found in school for understanding
the process of school materials in identity formation.
First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor and
Francis, an informa company.
Despite the crucial role of religion in most societies, religious activism remains largely uninvestigated. Based on empirical evidence, this book also addresses many theoretical issues arising in the study of social movements.
Popular fiction continues to be the object of both academic and
political interest as educators seek to understand the role
literacy plays in constructing the gender, class, race, ethnic,
age, sexual and national subjectivites of youth. This book focuses
on the role of teen romance fiction in the construction and
reconstruction of femininity internationally. Developed in the
United States amid the conservative political restoration of
Reganism, teen romance fiction condenses and articulates the long
standing fears and resentments of conservative groups regarding
feminism and women's growing independence and political power.
Drawing on multidisciplinary approaches from cultural studies and
feminist theories, psychoanalysis, semiotics, reader research, and
critical theory, these essays signal the complexity of the world
wide teen romance novel phenomenon and the political character of
women's literacy. The book is aimed at undergraduate and
postgraduate students of literacy, women's studies, sociology of
education and cultural studies.
First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor &
Francis, an informa company.
In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that
sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question.
Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately "capture
our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of
the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages
might have called our 'souls' or 'hearts.'" Building on Smith's
previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations
intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they
do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human
social life and social structures? Smith argues that our actions
stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human
goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all
human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to
realize these ends-a failure that can result in varying gradations
of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in
philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith's ambitious book
situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to
understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.
The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual
lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad
of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading
role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual
lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of
their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith
transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs,
feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian
Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of
religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book
reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents
in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down
the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with
religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the
country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally
representative surveys of American parents about their religious
parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs
informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to
their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent
religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how
parents have been influenced by their experiences as children
influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view
their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church,
synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks
of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian
Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and
Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has
transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents
today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious
faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical
evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains,
providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that
will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in
the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious
educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.
How parents approach the task of passing on religious faith and
practice to their children How do American parents pass their
religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of
traditional religion and an increased interest in personal
"spirituality," Religious Parenting investigates the ways that
parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their
kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on
their children's religious lives, yet parents have been virtually
ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned
religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz
and Michael Rotolo explore American parents' strategies,
experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious
transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span
religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around
the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical,
Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim,
Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive
diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to
socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is
important for the foundation it provides for becoming one's best
self on life's difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource
for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an
afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious
professionals', to ground their children in life-enhancing
religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of
purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological
assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of
highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same "cultural models" when
passing on religion to their children. Taking an extensive look
into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious
Parenting uncovers parents' real-life challenges while breaking
innovative theoretical ground.
How parents approach the task of passing on religious faith and
practice to their children How do American parents pass their
religion on to their children? At a time of overall decline of
traditional religion and an increased interest in personal
"spirituality," Religious Parenting investigates the ways that
parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their
kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on
their children's religious lives, yet parents have been virtually
ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned
religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz
and Michael Rotolo explore American parents' strategies,
experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious
transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span
religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around
the country. Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical,
Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim,
Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive
diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to
socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is
important for the foundation it provides for becoming one's best
self on life's difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource
for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an
afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious
professionals', to ground their children in life-enhancing
religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of
purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological
assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of
highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same "cultural models" when
passing on religion to their children. Taking an extensive look
into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious
Parenting uncovers parents' real-life challenges while breaking
innovative theoretical ground.
A groundbreaking new theory of religion Religion remains an
important influence in the world today, yet the social sciences are
still not adequately equipped to understand and explain it. This
book advances an innovative theory of religion that goes beyond the
problematic theoretical paradigms of the past. Drawing on the
philosophy of critical realism and personalist social theory,
Christian Smith explores why humans are religious in the first
place-uniquely so as a species-and offers an account of
secularization and religious innovation and persistence that breaks
the logjam in which religious scholarship has been stuck for so
long. Certain to stimulate debate and inspire promising new avenues
of scholarship, Religion features a wealth of illustrations and
examples that help to make its concepts accessible to readers. This
superbly written book brings sound theoretical thinking to a
perennially thorny subject, and a new vitality and focus to its
study.
More than a decade ago, a group of researchers began to study the
religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. They tracked
these young people over the course of a decade, revisiting them
periodically to check in on the state -and future- of religion in
America, and reporting on their findings in a series of books,
beginning with Soul Searching (2005). Now, with Back-Pocket God,
this mammoth research project comes to its conclusion. What have we
learned about the changing shape of religion in America?
Back-Pocket God explores continuity and change among young people
from their teenage years through the latter stages of "emerging
adulthood." Melinda Lundquist Denton and Richard Flory find that
the story of young adult religion is one of an overall decline in
commitment and affiliation, and in general, a moving away from
organized religion. Yet, there is also a parallel trend in which a
small, religiously committed group of emerging adults claim faith
as an important fixture in their lives. Emerging adults don't seem
so much opposed to religion or to religious organizations, at least
in the abstract, as they are uninterested in religion, at least as
they have experienced it. Religion is like an app on the ubiquitous
smartphones in our back pockets: readily accessible, easy to
control, and usefulbut only for limited purposes. Denton and Flory
show that some of the popular assumptions about young people and
religion are not as clear as what many people seem to believe. The
authors challenge the characterizations of religiously unaffiliated
emerging adults -sometimes called "religious nones"- as undercover
atheists. At the other end of the spectrum, they question the
assumption that those who are not religious will return to religion
once they marry and have children.
Sexting. Cyberbullying. Narcissism. People-and especially the
media-are consumed by fears about the effect of social media on
young people. We hear constantly about the dangers that lurk
online, and about young people's seemingly pathological desire to
share anything and everything about themselves with the entire
world. Donna Freitas has traveled the country, talking to college
students about what's really happening on social media. What she
finds is that, while we focus on the problems that make headlines,
we are ignoring the seemingly mundane, but much more widespread,
problems that occur every day. Young people, she shows, feel
enormous pressure to look happy all the time-and not just basically
content, but blissful, ecstatic, inspiring and successful in their
personal, professional, and academic lives-regardless of how they
actually feel. Of course, these young adults are not that happy, at
least not all of the time, and the constant exposure to the
seemingly perfect lives of other people on social media only makes
them feel worse. What's more, far from wanting to share everything
about themselves, they are terrified of sharing something that will
come back to haunt them later in life. The rise of social media has
brought about a dramatic cultural shift: the need to curate a
perfect identity online that often has little to do with reality.
The consequences, Freitas shows, can be very real. Drawing on an
online survey and in-person interviews with students from thirteen
campuses around the U.S, Freitas offers a window into the social
media generation and how they use Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter,
and other online platforms. She presents fascinating insights about
how these people are consciously creating alternate identities for
themselves, while also suffering from the belief that the other
people they encounter online really are as perfect as their
profiles appear. This is an eye-opening look at the real world of
social media today.
|
Natalie Note (Hardcover)
Carly Chrite; Illustrated by Arthur Lin; Contributions by Christian Smith
|
R596
Discovery Miles 5 960
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
Did you know God loves to color too?...His crayon box is full of
glorious colors that even helped make you This book is very unique.
It was made by the Smith Family, a multi-ethnic, homsechooling
family to help kids learn the majesty of God's colors and how He
took loving care to color us each in our own special, beautiful
shade of skin color. The book was Illustrated by the author's
entire family, from his four-year-old daughter to his twin
eight-year-old boys and even his precious wife. Your kids will love
this book It's all about God and His big crayon box that colored
the world and everything we see. But it's much more than that. It's
about a God who loved us and created us and colored us too for His
special purpose. Children will love the idea that other kids helped
illustrate the pictures for this book. Additionally, there is a
page that can be personalized with your child's photograph so they
can visually see just how important they are to God
|
|