At a time when the late twentieth century giants of comparative social science—like S.N. Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah—have recently passed away…
Richard Madsen
Richard Madsen is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Distinguished Research Professor, and Director of UC Fudan Center at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, at the University of California, San Diego. He is a coauthor (with Robert Bellah, et al.) of The Good Society and Habits of the Heart, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has authored or coauthored five books on China, including Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, for which he received the C. Wright Mills Award. He also coedited (with Tracy B. Strong) The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World. His latest book, coedited with Becky Yang Hsu, is The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life.
Secular belief, religious belonging
A recent Gallup poll found that almost half of China’s people (47 percent) say that they are “convinced atheists”—the highest…
Weber for the 21st century
For almost one hundred years, all sociologists of religion have taken Max Weber’s great work on comparative religions as a primary point…
The many globalizations of Christianity
Globalization, Chalmers Johnson says, is just a new word for what used to be called imperialism. He is partly correct,…
Hybrid consciousness or purified religion
Charles Taylor's framework for understanding the advent of a "secular age" in the North Atlantic world offers a useful first…
Embedded religion in Asia
The secularity of modern Asian states has by no means led to widespread social secularity, Taylor's second secularity, a decline…
Discerning the religious spirit of secular states in Asia
In his monumental book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor distinguishes three meanings of secularism, as it refers to the "North Atlantic…