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The meaning and significance of the institution of marriage has engendered angry and boisterous battles across the United States. This book uncovers broad cultural anxieties that fuel on-the-ground practices to reinforce a boundary of heterosexual marriage, questioning why marriage has become an issue of pervasive national preoccupation and anxiety.
In the decades following the Second World War, North America and Western Europe experienced widespread secularization and dechristianization; many scholars have pinpointed the 1960s as a pivotally important period in this decline. The Sixties and Beyond examines the scope and significance of dechristianization in the western world between 1945 and 2000. A thematically wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection, The Sixties and Beyond uses a framework that compares the social and cultural experiences of North America and Western Europe during this period. The internationally based contributors examine the dynamic place of Christianity in both private lives and public discourses and practices by assessing issues such as gender relations, family life, religious education, the changing relationship of church and state, and the internal dynamics of religious organizations. The Sixties and Beyond is an excellent contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on the 1960s as well as to the history of Christianity in the western world.
"The Tragedy of Heterosexuality is an exploration of the so-called 'straight culture.'"--
In the past thirty years, polygyny has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies, Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance. These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of polygamies on the ground. The case studies illustrate a continuum of just...
This book pursues possible strategies for synthesising mainly organic compounds, particularly those of interest to the health sector and related industries. Topics covered include addition reactions of aldehydes and ketones; the use of organometallic reagents to form carbon-carbon bonds (eg Grignard reagents); and radical reactions, including selectivity and chain reactions. Retrosynthetic analysis is introduced as a strategy for developing syntheses, along with biochemical pathways. Mechanism and Synthesis concludes with a Case Study on polymers, which demonstrates how chain reactions can be used to build up useful materials with specific properties, such as contact lenses. The Molecular World series provides an integrated introduction to all branches of chemistry for both students wishing to specialise and those wishing to gain a broad understanding of chemistry and its relevance to the everyday world and to other areas of science. The books, with their Case Studies and accompanying multi-media interactive CD-ROMs, will also provide valuable resource material for teachers and lecturers. (The CD-ROMs are designed for use on a PC running Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000.)
In Getting Married, Carrie Yodanis and Sean Lauer examine the social rules and expectations that shape our most personal relationships. How do couples get together? How do people act when they’re married? What happens when they’re not? Public factors influence our private relationships. From getting engaged to breaking up, social rules and expectations shape and constrain whom we select as a spouse, when and why we decide to get married, and how we arrange our relationships day to day. While this book is about marriage, it is also about sociology. Yodanis and Lauer use the case of marriage to explore a sociological perspective. Getting Married will bring together students’ academic and social worlds by applying sociology to the things they are thinking about and experiencing outside of the classroom. This book is a useful tool for many sociology courses, including those on family, gender, and introduction to sociology.
Interpretative Qualitative Research: Agency, Subjectivity, and Experience frames the concerns and processes of standard analytic induction, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interaction in terms of cutting-edge issues for contemporary qualitative research. It is the first book to demonstrate how interpretive paradigms for qualitative data analysis produce research findings that are rooted to significantly different understandings of personal agency and social structures; subjectivity and identity; and, the nature of human experience. Specifically, the book explores the analytical process, interpretative power, and political effects of these three styles of interpretative research. The result is a rich, pedagogical resource that explores not only how data is interpreted but also the kinds of problems, solutions, and questions that can be investigated.
"This edited volume of first-person narratives and empirical studies questions what happens when "male" bodies "do" femininity, the complexities of male femininities, and the conditions under which men engage less with masculinity and more with femininity and the consequences of these practices within a historical moment of gender binary transgressions"--
"In one of the first scholarly examples of Christian premarital counseling, the book explores how religious communities attempt to intervene to emotionally socialize couples into a vision of a covenant marriage which they view as distinct from what they view as the contractual approach in secular society"--
This book provides insights into new developments and persistent traditions in Zen teacher training and education through the use of historical archival research and original interviews with living Zen Masters. It argues that some contemporary Euro-American social values of gender equality, non-discrimination, rationality, ecumenicism and democracy permeate not only the organizational aspects of the Kwan Um School of Zen case study, but soteriological processes and goals of the training more widely. Each chapter showcases the ways important facets of Zen education—from meditation to curriculum development to school management — have absorbed Euro-American cultural and social ideals in both community and educational practices. Giving dedicated scholarly attention and conceptualising new adaptations in transnational Zen communities, it constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature and will appeal to researchers and scholars of religion and education, Asian pedagogies, contemporary Buddhism, transnational Zen, and Zen education.