Product Description: "Our Search for Meaning" is both reliable and readable, an excellent combination commending it to students and educated laymen alike. The living faiths, offering real alternatives in a world grown small and compelling every thinking person to make a personal choice, are presented with sympathy and scholarship...read more

Product Description: Book by Kohler, Gernot

Product Description: The threefold purpose of this book is to examine Newman's though, using methods from the comparative study of religion; to examine a classic Western theological response to the problems modernity poses for religion; to analyze the adequacy of Newman's response to questions about the relationship among religions and the religious potential of human beings...read more

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This volume seeks to contribute to an interdisci­plinary, comparative, and historical study of Western welfare states. It attempts to link their historical dynamics and contemporary problems in an international perspective. Building on collaboration between European-and American-based research groups, the editors have coordinated contributions by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians. The developments they analyze cover a time span from the initiation of modern national social policies at the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The experiences of all the presently existing Western European systems except Spain and Por­tugal are systematically encompassed, with com­parisons developed selectively with the experi­ences of the United States and Canada. The devel­opment of the social security systems, of public expenditures!and taxation, of public education and educational opportunities, and of income inequal­ity are described, compared, and analyzed for varying groupings of the Western European and North American nations. This volume addresses itself mainly to two audi­ences. The first includes all students of policy problems of the welfare states who seek to gain a comparative perspective and historical under­standing. A second group may be more interested in the theory and empirical analysis of long-term societal developments. In this context, the growth of the welfare states ranges as a major departure, along with the development of national states and capitalist economies. The welfare state is interpreted as a general phenomenon of modernization, as a product of the increasing differentiation and the growing size of societies on the one hand, and of processes of social and political mobilization on the other. It is an important element of the structural convergence of modern societies — by its mere weight in all countries — and at the same time a source of divergence by the variations within its institutional structure. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In search of an explanation of how a sense of ethnic identity evolves to create the concept of nation, Armstrong analyzes Islamic and Christian cultures from antiquity to the nineteenth century. He explores the effects of institutions--the city, imperial polity, bureaucratic imperatives of centralization, and language divisions--on the development of ethnicity...read more

Product Description: The book centres around a major theme: the first 'confrontation' between the Supreme Ultimate (or T'ien) of the Confucian cosmological order and the Christian anthropomorphic God as conveyed to the Chinese literati by the Western missionaries.

Based on conversations with hundreds of Americans, this volume reveals the self-understanding of Americans as a people and as a nation

Book by Blount, Roy, Jr.