sociology 
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SOURCE: New York Times
6/1/2023
Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
Communitarianism, an effort to reconcile the principles of individual rights and collective responsibility, was Etzioni's biggest contribution in a wide-ranging career as a public intellectual.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
4/10/2023
A Scholar Revisits Study of Campus Diversity 2 Decades Later
"Higher education has an extremely important role to play in helping people see things differently and in potentially helping to reduce racial inequality. But this requires cross-race interaction."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/23/2022
Taking a Longer View, the Crime Spike Isn't a Mystery, but Solutions aren't Easy Enough for Politicians
by Patrick Sharkey
Crime is a whole-society problem that is experienced locally; solutions require deep reforms and can't be subjected to the shifting attention of politicians in an election year.
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SOURCE: Dallas Morning News
11/8/2022
Who Is a Christian Nationalist?
by Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead
New survey data says that the growing Christian Nationalist movement is broader than previously believed, and a potential political force in many places.
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SOURCE: College Theology Society
6/14/2021
Family Values, Social Reciprocity, and Christianity
by Stephanie Coontz
Family historian Stephanie Coontz argues in a chapter excerpted here that relationships of care and mutual obligation have been much more complex than the nuclear family.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
5/25/2021
The Professor Who Became a Cop
Patrick Blanchfield reviews "Tangled Up In Blue," Rosa Brooks's account of joining the DC Police Reserve Corps and meditation on the role of policing in society.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/24/2021
Why America’s Great Crime Decline Is Over
Sociologist Patrick Sharkey examines the trajectory of crime in modern America and rejects single-cause explanations.
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SOURCE: Scientific American
3/1/2021
Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests
The study relies on a quantitative method that evaluates the timing of events to approximate a control-group experiment. The mechanism remains unclear, but results suggest BLM protests lead to fewer police killings.
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/27/2021
Lawrence Otis Graham, 59, Dies; Explored Race and Class in Black America
Graham's writing examined the tensions facing wealthy African Americans in a society divided on both racial and class lines.
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SOURCE: N+1
12/12/2020
We Live in a Society
by Gabriel Winant
Despite lamentations that social media have replaced face-to-face social life, those media platforms are increasingly important as sites of human contact and interaction. Anyone seeking political change must recognize this power and organize social networks to supplant it.
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12/13/2020
Review of Robert Putnam’s "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again"
by Walter G. Moss
Robert Putnam's book on the "Great Divergence" toward economic inequality, political polarization and social fragmentation contains ample historical generalization, but asks big questions that it will be worth historians' time to engage.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
11/12/2020
The Professor and the Politician
by Corey Robin
A new book on Max Weber's political thought suggests that prior interpretations of Weber's lectures have dismissed the possibility of collective action.
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SOURCE: Public Books
11/11/2020
America Comes Out
A new book evaluates the origins and political evolution of "coming out" in gay America.
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SOURCE: The Nation
8/25/2020
Scholars of Poverty and Inequality Face Their Own Racial Reckoning
by Nicole Sussner Rodgers and Deadric T. Williams
Social scientists have long entertained the theory that persistent Black poverty results from in-group cultural deficiency. Now the field of poverty studies faces a growing rebellion of scholars who call this victim-blaming.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/14/2020
We Need Social Solidarity, Not Just Social Distancing
by Eric Klinenberg
To combat the coronavirus, Americans need to do more than secure their own safety.
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10/20/19
Can Studying Human Evolution Help Us Understand Impeachment?
by David P. Barash
What The Goodness Paradox can teach us about the importance of enforcing societal norms.
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SOURCE: LA Times
8-13-13
Joseph Margulies: Invoking God in America
Joseph Margulies is a professor at Northwestern University Law School and the author of "What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity."In one recent week, time took two heroes. So far as I know, the legendary civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers and the esteemed public intellectual Robert Bellah never met. They lived on opposite ends of the country and traveled in different circles. But they were connected in an important, symbolic way, and their passing within a few days of each other provides the occasion to reflect on their common lesson for modern American life.
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SOURCE: NYT
8-7-13
Robert Bellah, sociologist of religion who mapped the American soul, dies at 86
Robert N. Bellah, a distinguished sociologist of religion who sought nothing less than to map the American soul, in both the sacred and secular senses of the word, died on July 30 in Oakland, Calif. He was 86.His death, from complications of recent heart surgery, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Elliott professor emeritus of sociology.Throughout his work, Professor Bellah was concerned with the ways in which faith shapes, and is shaped by, American civic life. He was widely credited with helping usher the study of religion — a historically marginalized subject in the social sciences — into the sociological fold.“Modern America has a soul, not only a body, and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time,” Steven M. Tipton, a professor in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, wrote in an e-mail on Monday....
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SOURCE: WaPo
6-1-13
‘History Detectives’ host’s collection of black propaganda posters subject of Philly exhibit
PHILADELPHIA — A new exhibit created by a University of Pennsylvania professor and host of a popular public television show examines how wartime propaganda has been used to motivate oppressed populations to risk their lives for homelands that considered them second-class citizens.“Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster,” opens Sunday and continues until March 2 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lectures, film screenings and other programming will be rolled out over the course of the exhibit’s run.The exhibit’s 33 posters, dating from the Civil War to both World Wars and the African independence movements, are part of the personal collection of Tukufu Zuberi, a Penn professor of sociology and African studies and a host of the PBS series “History Detectives.”...
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