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[Editor’s Note: The following presentation was delivered at a Convocation on Small Christian Communities held at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, on August 2, 2002.]
My title somewhat alarmed Bernard Lee, SM, because he thought it might take me too far away from problems of Small Christian Communities in North America into speculations about the world situation. I will have something to say about the world, but I do plan to stick closely to the topic of this conference, which is how do Small Christian Communities relate to Church and society in North America. My title, however, is meant to remind us of the problem of scale. In an era of megachurches that provide everything from ballet lessons, to car washes, to fast food, Small Christian Communities might seem to be unimportant. In an era of global markets, the World Wide Web, and American military and political domination of the world, even megachurches don’t seem very important. But in the greatest empire of the day, Paul’s little church in Corinth wouldn’t have appeared very important either, though what Paul started in Corinth has lasted far longer than the vast empire in which it was situated. But just as Paul had to think seriously about that empire, so do we have to think about the one in which we live.
I will take as my point of departure the data presented by Bernard Lee in his book The Catholic Experience of Small Christian Communities (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), singling out for particular attention a couple of issues about which Lee and his associates express concern. One concern is the generational imbalance in SCC membership, with more than half being over 50 years of age, and more than 75 percent over 40. What is it with the younger people? Why aren’t they more engaged with the Church generally and Small Christian Communities in particular, especially when we have data that they still consider themselves Catholic and still agree with the Church on such fundamental issues as the divinity of Christ, the real presence in the Eucharist, and life after death? [1] The other question has to do with the understanding of the fundamental mission of the Church, which applies to SSCs as much as other parts of the Church, namely that the Church is both gathered and sent. North American SCCs are better at feeling gathered than feeling sent, or, to put it bluntly, better at taking care of each other than of the rest of the world. On this one there is a significant exception: The Hispanic/Latino communities, about 20 percent of the total, are more engaged socially and politically than the other kinds of groups.
In thinking about the generational issue, we have to realize that what we are seeing in the Church is part of a tendency that exists throughout American society and in every sphere, often in more extreme forms than in the religious sphere, namely the disengagement of younger generations from every form of commitment—political, civic, social, religious, even familial. Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone [2] gives an incisive analysis, based on an extraordinarily extensive collection of data, of what we have come to in our society today. The picture is not entirely news; in one sense it is a massive empirical confirmation of the argument of Habits of the Heart, although it is more than that. In the book Putnam describes the sharp decline of what he calls “social capital” in just about every sphere of American life for the last thirty years or more, all the more remarkable because the first sixty or seventy years of the twentieth century saw a significant increase in social capital. By social capital Putnam means social connectedness of every sort and finds all of them—from voting, to political activism, to membership in a wide variety of civic organizations (he takes his title from the stunning decline of bowling leagues), to informal socializing, including even having dinner with one’s own family, to church-going, membership and giving—weaker today than they have been for decades. In a nutshell, I can summarize Putnam’s findings by saying we live in a very different society from the one I grew up in. Rather than give the bad news across the board, let me summarize his findings in the field of religion.
For a long time many people, including me, thought that religion was relatively immune to these trends, that both church membership and church attendance were remarkably stable, except for the unusual bump up in the 1950s; as it turns out, both membership and attendance have been in decline during the same period as other forms of engagement, that is, since 1960. Though a wide variety of groups, just for example the PTA and the League of Women Voters, but also the Jaycees, the Kiwanis, and the Shriners, have been in decline in this period, the decline in the churches has been more gradual and has taken a bit longer to become evident. In fact, church giving has declined more sharply than church membership or church attendance, but all have steadily fallen for forty years.
While it is the quantitative data that are most reliable, there are some things we can say about the quality of participation as well. We can discern in the life of religious communities something that is going on in the society in general: participation is less about loyalty and a strong conviction of membership and more about what one will get out of participating. Even evangelical churches that used to be able to count on their members now have to offer incentives, to “sell” their programs as adding value to the participants. Attachment to all groups, including churches, but even families, is increasingly evaluated in terms of what will I get out of it? What’s in it for me? Let’s consider Putnam’s effort to explain what has happened to us in the last 30 or 40 years.
Putnam’s primary explanation is generational change. On almost every variable in which he is interested, each generation starts lower than the one before and stays lower. On the other hand those who started high have stayed high. My generation (note: not Putnam’s generation—he is not just an old man being nostalgic), those born between 1925 and 1930, which Putnam calls the most civic generation in American history, started out voting, and we still vote; started out going to church, and we still go to church; started out reading newspapers, and we still read newspapers; and so on down the line, but each succeeding generation has started lower and remains lower. Another important variable in Putnam’s analysis, one that overlaps with generation, is television watching. The number of hours spent watching television per person has gone up through the whole period when almost every form of participation has been declining, and again, the increase by generation is clear. But the correlation is not just general, it is quite specific: that is within every generation, those who watch more television participate less in politics, civic life, informal socializing, and religion. Looking more closely, not all television watching has these negative effects. Watching educational television or network news (network news now has a largely geriatric audience) is not negatively correlated with participation but, like newspaper reading, is positively correlated. The kind of television that is negatively correlated with participation, and it is by far the most common type, is television as entertainment, television for its own sake, simple channel hopping to find something to watch. Thus I think what we can say is that attentive watching, or reading in the case of newspapers, does not undermine social connectedness. But it is just the decline of attentiveness across the board that is problematic.
What I am suggesting is that the kind of people Americans are becoming, and increasingly so with each succeeding generation, finds it ever more difficult to sustain commitments to religious communities, to understand ritual, and to organize their lives around sacred texts, to even understand why some texts are sacred at all. (Let me remind you that we are talking about statistical trends here. Within every generation, including the youngest, there are many civically minded, socially responsible, and religiously active people; there are just fewer of them.) Dense, multi-stranded commitments to many kinds of communities are being replaced, as Putnam puts it, with “single-stranded, surf-by interactions” so that “more of our social connectedness is one shot, special purpose, and self oriented.” Clearly, if this pattern is more common among younger than among older Americans, then it is not hard to understand the generational imbalance in Catholic Small Christian Communities.
But let us try to understand these differences in a way that can place us sympathetically in the shoes of these younger Americans who display them most frequently. Television watching may be part of the explanation, but it can’t be the whole story. And maybe what we need to understand is why they watch so much television. First let’s try to situate the generations in question in their actual historical context. What Lee and his associates point out is that most people involved in SCCs come from two generations: those who grew up before Vatican II and those who grew up during Vatican II and the great changes in the Church that Vatican II stimulated. It is those who grew up when Vatican II was only a memory who are disproportionately few in SCC membership. It is significant that the historical changes in the Catholic Church are mirrored, accidentally I’m sure, but still significantly, by historic changes in American society. If the ’60s signaled a great change in the Catholic Church, it also signaled a great change in American society, so we can distinguish among all Americans, not just Catholics, those who grew up before the ’60s, those who came of age during the ’60s and early ’70s, and those for whom all that turmoil was just a half-understood memory. As a teacher, I remember how shocked I was when I realized that a reference to the Vietnam War was received by students with glazed eyes, that that war meant no more to them than anything else in a history that was largely without interest to them. For those of us who grew up during a period when American Catholics were still struggling to find a respected place in American society, then when our society was engaged in a vast war against Nazism and fascism, then when, not much later, both Church and society seemed to be turned upside down by the great transformations of the 1960s, it is hard to understand what life is like for those whose life experience includes only an America where nothing dramatic was happening in the public sphere and where the main task seemed to be how to better oneself economically.
But if we can characterize our society since roughly 1970 by the absence of any great public cause, we can characterize it by the presence of something to which I have just alluded: the resurgence of neo-liberal, laissez faire capitalism as the dominant feature of our society. Just to indicate with a vivid example the nature of the economic changes in our society in recent decades let me remind you of the man we interviewed for Habits of the Heart who had graduated college in the fifties and who told us, “I decided to take a job with AT&T. I didn’t think it would be very exciting but I thought, there’ll always be an AT&T.” Yes, that’s what we thought in those days, but in the mid-nineties after a huge number of layoffs at AT&T under the leadership of its CEO, Robert Allen, the gossip at the company was that AT&T would soon stand for Allen and Two Temps.
These changes in the American economy affect all of us, of whatever generation, but I’m suggesting that they have a peculiarly potent effect on those impacted by the new economy in their most formative years. One feature of the new economy is the invasion of the economy into every sphere of life. We have seen what has happened to medicine when for-profit HMOs have become the defining medical institutions. The impact on higher education has been major, with departments and schools that bring in money receiving greater rewards in return, and tenure-track jobs declining every year as a percentage of all teaching positions, with many of our graduate students looking forward to a career of short-term transient jobs if they stay in the profession at all. And across the board, the economy invades our lives above all in the increasing amount of time demanded by our jobs, as documented in such books as Arlie Hochschild’s The Time Bind [3] and Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American. [4] I can remember Ann Swidler, coauthor with me of Habits and The Good Society, speaking of being “fragmented and exhausted” coping with all the demands of work, family, and society.
While all Americans are affected by these changes, it is women who seem to bear the brunt. (Isn’t it always women who bear the brunt?) First we had Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book The Second Shift (New York: Avon Books), which showed that women in two-earner families put in on average a full month a year more work at home than their husbands. Now I have in page proofs Ilene Philipson’s Married to the Job, [5] which shows that not only do women do more at home, but also they do more at work, too. Philipson finds both men and women so absorbed by the company or workplace that employs them that they become virtually “married to the job,” working many hours a week more than they are paid for. But she finds women particularly susceptible to this temptation and in a highly gendered way: women think they have to be exceptionally “nice” and “understanding” at work as well as at home. This may even mean baking cookies to bring into the office for coworkers to eat, running personal errands for the boss that men would never be asked to do, and providing emotional support to beleaguered coworkers. Unfortunately, being nice and understanding doesn’t guarantee for women any more than for men that one may not be ruthlessly downsized whenever it suits the employer’s purposes. The emotional impact of job loss for one who has given so much can be devastating, for some people even more traumatizing than divorce.
For many who have had such experiences, or who have become aware of how common they are in the new economy, a response in some ways opposite to “married to the job,” but in some ways even more demanding on one’s time and emotional energy, is the strategy of “free agency.” As some self-help gurus put it, “Be your own brand. It’s your own self you have to market.” Rather than expect any loyalty from the firm for which you work, be constantly on the lookout for a better deal for yourself.
Robert Reich in The Future of Success (New York: Knopf, 2001) points to a feature of the new economy that is dramatically changing the way we live. Due to our instant access to information and the fact that almost everything in the world is available for sale today, we live, he says, in the world of the “terrific deal.” “Finding and switching to something better is easier today than at any other time in the history of humanity, and in a few years, will be easier still. We’re on the way to getting exactly what we want instantly, from anywhere, at the best value for our money.” The price? The willingness or, increasingly, the necessity of making ourselves into terrific deals, willing to switch jobs, switch locations, all too often switch “spouses or partners, although not usually on an annual basis,” he wryly notes. And although the educated and the affluent are pulling ever further ahead of the average person and especially those at the bottom of the wage scale, it is the affluent who work the longest hours, under the greatest pressure, and increasingly, with the least security. As British Catholic scholar Nicholas Boyle puts it, “even for the wealthy of the planet the price of prosperity is more competition, harder work, the mobilization of women, more and more auditing and alienating control, or alternatively the stupor and despair of unemployment and dependency.” [6]
If I am right that all these pressures are greater for those who grew up knowing no other kind of society, can we be surprised that they don’t show up in proportionate numbers in Small Christian Communities? Perhaps what should surprise us is that significant numbers of them show up at all.
In this world of ever-increasing choice, ever-increasing pressure, ever-increasing change, where can we possibly find spiritual meaning? Richard Madsen, in an as yet unpublished paper, has described several groups of mobile middle-class people in the San Diego area who have found spiritual meaning in quite different sorts of communities: Jewish, Catholic, Evangelical, and neo-pagan. He helps us understand both what is going on and how fragile it is. Madsen describes something he calls the “American Religion,” which is quite different from what I once called American civil religion, but which describes in varying extent all the groups he has studied. The one tenet of this religion, which he calls “a truly sacred form of individualism,” is absolute belief in individual free choice; beyond that the different groups share no commitments of substance. Whereas Biblical religion emphasized God’s choice, as in the idea of the chosen people, in Madsen’s groups:
The choice of a faith was talked about in terms of the free choice of the consumer rather than the acceptance of God’s call. If for Americans freedom is primarily conceived in terms of the ability to choose between different brands of cars or different candidates for president, it is perhaps inevitable that religious freedom be conceived in the same way. [The Orthodox rabbi in Madsen’s sample had difficulty explaining to his congregation that the chosen people were chosen by God. As one woman put it, “I thought it was I who chose God.”]
Americans of very different faiths [he goes on to say] all tend to agree, then, that they find the Sacred by choosing it, not submitting themselves to it. How does one know if one has made a good choice? When a consumer chooses something in an open market place, one knows that one made the right choice if the product gives one a feeling of satisfaction. It was important for our interviewees that their faith gave them satisfaction.
There are two features of this increasingly common form of religion, which is not identical with New Age religion but can be found in all the traditional sectors of American religious life as well, which should give us pause: It too easily accepts the fragmentation of the market society, and it lacks staying power. Once the immediate glow of satisfaction with the spiritual product begins to dim, the believer becomes restless and may be easily attracted to another offer of spiritual meaning. In this regard Madsen describes his believers as similar to people who try to build a stable marriage on the basis of a transient infatuation. He writes:
The American Religion is easily adapted to moral fragmentation. It encourages an individual search for subjective spiritual fulfillment, while leaving unchallenged the rules governing the modern market economy. Indeed, its notion of religious freedom is identified with the idea of free choice in an open market. It allows people to cope with the tensions between the spheres of life by apportioning their lives into different pieces.
Although the American Religion encourages passionate engagements with religious practices, it does not encourage long-term engagements. Although it encourages widespread enthusiasm for religion, it engenders a great scattering of religious energy, which makes it difficult for spiritual seekers to achieve any consensus about confronting public problems. The American Religion keeps the traditional demands of discipleship from upsetting the equilibrium of an individualized, rationalized, market-driven consumer society.
If Madsen’s characterization of contemporary American religion is at all correct (and I must tell you that a vibrant Catholic parish was one of the four groups he studied), then perhaps we have another answer to why younger people are less apt to belong to SCCs: they aren’t exciting enough.
So far I have been assembling data about how the new economy is changing American society and, with Madsen’s help, American religion, to try to understand the first problem for SCCs that I set out to confront, namely, the relatively smaller numbers of young people in SCCs. But I think the same data also help to explain the second problem: Why are the American SCCs better at being gathered than being sent, at helping each other than helping the rest of the world?
If the pressures of the new economy, and the weakening of all noneconomic relationships that goes along with it, impact the younger generation with especial force, all of us, whatever our generation, feel these pressures and the strains they create. While the new economy leads to income polarization and helps account for the fact that there is a higher level of poverty in the US than in an other advanced industrial nation, it is still true that many of the most intense pressures of the new economy impact the better educated and the most affluent, that is, those who are supposedly gaining most from these new trends. We know from Lee’s book that SCCs are composed on the whole (the Hispanic/Latino groups are an exception) of those above average in income and education. Is it surprising then that if these busy people do find time in their harried lives to spend with Small Christian Communities, it is partly because they are the walking wounded, that they hope the group will help to bind up those wounds? Expectations that such groups will help to change the world to accord more closely with Catholic social teachings may seem in these circumstances simply too great a demand.
Let us consider for a moment why the Hispanic/Latino communities are the exception, why they are more willing to think about social and political problems and even engage themselves in action. Lee suggests that it is just their relatively deprived situation, their view from below so to speak, that allows them to see some of the problems in our society that the affluent overlook. (A word of caution: Manuel Vasquez has undertaken a study of selected parishes with large Hispanic/Latino membership which shows that significant generational differences are beginning to appear there, too. As younger people move up in the educational and occupational ladder they begin to look more like middle-class Anglos and lose some of their cultural distinctness.)
How can we get the more affluent and educated members of SCCs to remember that they are sent as well as gathered? Putnam has a distinction between bonding social capital and bridging social capital that is relevant. Bonding social capital refers to the solidarity that holds the group together. Bridging social capital refers to the capacity of the group to reach out to other groups in an effort to seek the larger good. These two kinds of social capital are not unrelated. Unless there is considerable bonding social capital the group will not feel strong enough to reach out to others. If the group is too preoccupied with its own internal problems, then it has to spend all its energy within. My suggestion, however, would be for the group to face the fact that much of the pain that brings people to need support from the group actually has its origin outside the group; for example, in the intense pressures of the market economy either to give oneself to one’s job at the expenses of the rest of one’s life, or to turn oneself into one’s own “brand,” which requires intensive self-marketing that is equally destructive.
In his book, Lee has cited Jürgen Habermas’ rather ungainly term “intersubjective communicative practice,” which in simpler English means that the groups discuss the larger social context that may be creating the pain experienced by members of the group. The instinctive response of middle-class Americans is “to take responsibility for their own lives,” and thus to blame themselves for any difficulties in their work life. But if we could begin to understand that it is a particular economic regime, historically situated and thus open to the possibility of change, that contributes significantly to our problems then we might be readier to reach out to other groups in the society to seek larger solutions. I have stressed that it is not only the poor who suffer under our present economic regime, but the affluent as well, who experience longer work hours, greater work pressure, and greater insecurity than those in their status have suffered in most of our history. I strongly believe in the preferential option for the poor and that any group that thinks of itself as Catholic must be concerned, in accordance with Catholic social teachings, with the plight of the poor. But the immediate point of entry for discussion in middle-class SCCs might well be that the same pressures that create poverty create suffering for the affluent as well. Seeing that it is the same structures that do both, members might then be more ready to reach out in solidarity with middle-class people and poor alike to seek better solutions to our economic problems, to see that they are sent as well as gathered.
And now at last I come to my title, “Being the Church in the Only Empire There Is.” Our problematic economic system is not simply national, but global. Indeed the global economy is a central institution of a new kind of empire, the only empire there is, and the United States is at its center.
Nicholas Boyle, whom I have quoted earlier, has taken a page from Hegel to help us understand our situation. He points out that the world spirit at any time in history actualizes itself in a particular nation.
. . . if globalization is the dominant world-historical process of the last century and a half, Americanization—first of America and then of the world—is the particular form in which it is realized. . . . The universal process of globalization has to become concrete in a particular form, and it does so in the particular form of Americanization. Beyond individual statehood, for all of us, lies America. [7]
Boyle points out that with the extension of the global market certain features of American culture are being generalized throughout the world, namely that we are individuals first and members of collectivities only secondarily if at all, and that our main purpose on this earth is to maximize our self-interest. International institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, working under what is widely referred to as “the Washington consensus,” pressure societies throughout the world to dismantle their welfare states and give free rein to market forces. The rapid spread of American popular culture gives a tangible expression to free market ideals. I think of a passage from Vaclav Havel’s 1995 commencement address at Harvard:
One evening not long ago I was sitting in an outdoor restaurant by the water. My chair was almost identical to the chairs they have in restaurants by the Vltava River in Prague. They were playing the same rock music they play in most Czech restaurants. I saw advertisements I’m familiar with back home. Above all, I was surrounded by young people who were similarly dressed, who drank familiar-looking drinks, and who behaved as casually as their contemporaries in Prague. Only their complexion and their facial features were different—for I was in Singapore.
Havel was of course talking about globalization. But if you think about it, where, if not from America, did the rock music, the familiar-looking drinks, the clothes, and even the casual behavior originate? Informality and individuality are American trademarks, but so are consumerism, mass entertainment, and the ideology of the free market.
One of the peculiarities of the new empire with America at its center is that it is not, like traditional empires, interested in territorial conquest. Military power is no small part of it, but its use is to make sure that the rest of the world acts the way we want it to act, not to add to our own territory. There is something else that is peculiar about the American incarnation of the world spirit: our suspicion of collectivity. One of the most powerful forces in American politics is hostility to government. For three decades we have been engaged in “getting government off our backs” so that individuals can pursue their own interests unhindered by bureaucracy. If we see in American law that corporations are “persons” with the same legal standing as individuals, then it is clear that it is not so much private persons as the private economy that has been freed up from regulation in recent decades, with results that at the moment look ambiguous indeed.
But another oddity of American culture is that, though we hate government, we love our nation. We reproduce on the international scene the same odd disjuncture that exists in our national society. Internationally we believe that the nation, at least our nation, should be unconstrained by any international institutions or regulations. Thus we break or refuse to sign virtually every agreement that the international community has forged, from the International Law for the Protection of Children, to the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, to the International Criminal Court, to every agreement on arms control from nuclear weapons to small arms, and many more. In an age when the nation-state is in many respects obsolete and our future depends on global understandings and regulations, the United States is determined to go it alone, simply insisting that the rest of the world do what we say, or else.
My point is that if the conscientization process in SCCs moves beyond the problems of individual members to think about the systematic pressures on their lives that create so much suffering, there is no place to stop short of the whole world. Everything is interconnected. There is only one empire, and we are at its center. Let us consider the present plight of Peru, for example. (Alas, Peru is only one of many examples.)
Economically, the country is now more or less where it was in the 1960s, yet the labour force is twice as large. Peruvians are twice as likely to be unemployed now as in 1975, and their salaries are worth today half what they were then. Nearly 50% of the population lives in poverty and a fifth in extreme poverty. Twelve million live on less than a dollar a day. [8]
Here we are talking about the very same free market forces in the very same empire that we experience every day, even if in less terrible form.
So it is the same set of issues that makes middle-class life in America today so difficult and life in much of the rest of the world so horrific; namely, the idea that our virtually exclusive obligation is to look out for ourselves and our own and that we have no obligation of solidarity with others. The American religion that I described above, following Dick Madsen, namely the radically individualized, radically privatized, form of religiosity rampant in our society and perhaps not even entirely absent in SCCs, cannot in the long run challenge this destructive root idea, because this kind of religion cannot provide the spiritual meaning that it promises, much less any help in dealing with our real world problems.
An anecdote that Bernard Lee reports in his book has given me enormous encouragement. An SCC member told him the following story:
One day, two well dressed young people knocked at his door and asked whether he confessed Jesus as his personal savior [the words from my childhood were “Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior,” but no matter]. He said: “Not exactly, but I confess Jesus as my communal savior.” One of the two shrugged and asked: “Would you say that again, please?” He said, “God makes a covenant with a people, and I am a member of a people with whom God has made a covenant through Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ is my communal savior.” One of the two at the door turned to the other and said, “Let’s go!” [9]
In a world that presses us ever more strongly to sit alone at our computer (if we’re lucky enough to have one) and maximize our self-interest, even the idea of community is subversive. (I have read Re-Imagining Life Together in America: A New Gospel of Community by Catherine Nerney and Hal Taussig, which gives rich resources for thinking about community, including examples from SCCs.) But I don’t mean community in the soft, sentimental sense in which many Americans use it, that is community as long as it makes me feel good and if not, I’m leaving. Subversive community is community that is a vital part of who we are, in terms of which we define ourselves, and through which we serve God and neighbor. To understand that kind of community, let’s listen to what Paul had to say to the Corinthians:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free [in Galatians he adds male or female]—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. (1 Cor 12:12-13)
And again:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. (1 Cor 10:16-17)
In the context of the Roman Empire Paul’s conception of community was revolutionary. It is no less so in our empire, where the insistence on what I have called ontological individualism denies the very possibility of one body. If you take the Body of Christ and the Church that makes it visible on this earth seriously enough, you may be, as the Jesuit Volunteer Corps has discovered, “ruined for life,” which it proudly has taken as one of its mottos. [10] Yes, ruined for life in the kind of empire in which we live, just as the members of Paul’s church in Corinth were in an important sense ruined for life in the Roman Empire. But they and those who followed them managed over time to transform that empire beyond recognition.
This is the challenge I want to leave with you this morning, the challenge of being the Church in the only empire there is.
Author’s Biography: Robert N. Bellah is an American sociologist and educator, who for 30 years served as professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. His books on the sociology of religion, including Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (1970), The Broken Covenant (1975), Habits of the Heart (1985), and The Good Society (1991), have shaped the discipline. In 1985, Habits of the Heart won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for “Current Interest.” He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton in 2000.
Notes:
- See Dean Hoge et. al., Young Adult Catholics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
- Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
- Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997).
- Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
- Ilene Philipson, Married to the Job: Why We Live to Work and What We Can Do About It (New York: Free Press, 2002).
- Nicholas Boyle, “Beyond the State: The Limits to World History,” Ethical Perspectives 7 (Dec. 2000), p. 253.
- Ibid, p. 251.
- Ibid, p. 253.
- Bernard J. Lee, SM, The Catholic Experience of Small Christian Communities (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), p. 126.
- I am indebted to Si Hendry’s 2002 GTU doctoral dissertation for my knowledge of the JVC.