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Toyin Falola

"Christianity and Social Change in Africa is the most comprehensive look at the African encounter with Christianity in recent years. The book's themes are drawn from the pioneering work of J.D.Y. Peel, building on his creative explanation of the African experience of Christianity. The volume covers a broad range of themes, including religious expansion, the rise of Pentecostalism, and the use of new media and technologies to convert people and reform believers. The various manifestations of religious impact run through all the chapters, covering aspects of culture, politics, the economy, and the landscape. The volume also explores the success of Africans in exporting Christianity to other parts of the globe, a phenomenon that has redefined both the message and meaning of this religion."--Jacket.

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Donald N. Levine

This book is a masterful account of the social science enterprise by one of its most accomplished practitioners. Moving from the origins of systematic knowledge in ancient Greece to the present day, Donald Levine offers a richly detailed, ingeniously organized introduction to the cornerstone works of Western social thought. Visions has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part One, Levine presents the ways sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives - or life stories - that build upon each other, in an effort to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present. In Part Two, Levine offers his own narrative, a dialogue among the strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian, and American. Clearly and concisely, he tracks the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Levine maps the web of a visionary statements from which social science has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science to proceed in vastly different ways. In Part Three, Levine sets the crisis of fragmentation in social science against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.

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Ronald Inglehart

Ronald Inglehart argues that economic development, cultural change, and political change go together in coherent and even, to some extent, predictable patterns. This is a controversial claim. It implies that some trajectories of socioeconomic change are more likely than others - and consequently that certain changes are foreseeable. Once a society has embarked on industrialization, for example, a whole syndrome of related changes - from mass mobilization to diminishing differences in gender roles - is likely to appear. But industrialization is not the end of history. Advanced industrial society embraces yet another set of values, de-emphasizing the instrumental rationality that characterized industrial society. Postmodern values then bring new societal changes, including democratic politic institutions and the decline of state socialist regimes. To demonstrate the powerful links between belief systems and political and socioeconomic variables, this book draws on the World Values Surveys, a unique database that looks at the impact of mass publics on political and social life. It provides information from societies representing 70 percent of the world's population - from societies with per capita income as low as $300 per year to those with per capita incomes one hundred times greater and from long-established democracies with market economics to authoritarian states.

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Howard L. Harrod

The power of religion to preserve individual and group identity is perhaps nowhere more evident than among Native American peoples. In the Becoming and Remaining a People the author shows how the oral traditions and ritual practices of Northern Plains Indians developed, how they were transformed at critical points in their history, and how they provided them with crucial means of establishing and maintaining their respective identities.