Download or read book Renewing American Culture written by Theodore R. Malloch and published by Scrivener Pub. This book was released on 2006 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid, interlinked dynamics of globalization, smart technologies, and the growth of knowledge have created a perfect storm of change. In the face of these changes and challenges, this book asks: are we facing sunset or dawn? The authors find a clear vision and new significance in the Declaration of Independence, especially in the idea of the "pursuit of happiness." The book connects emerging global change with the pursuit of happiness and shows that change today is not only consistent with this principle, but in fact caused by it. The book also provides a fresh understanding of the roots of current fears about the future, as well as those who criticize Americas culture and society. The authors find that these efforts to create a critical, "counter-narrative" to the pursuit of happiness are derived from systems of ideas that are no longer defensible in todays world. The book argues that it is time to reclaim the civic space that is too often held hostage by "civic vandals"; the need to radically rethink and renew the relationships among business, government, education, and non-profit institutions has never been more pressing There is a great hunger for a culture based on a renewed, broadened, and intellectually charged affirmation of life and the pursuit of happiness. Cultural and academic leaders in particular need to embrace change; business and government leaders, too, need to understand better the humanistic and moral purposes that direct commerce and policy. The emerging idea of "spiritual capital" is critical to this new understanding. The book centers on three key questions: 1) What are the core values of American culture and the humanities? 2) Why do they have to be renewed?
Download or read book America s Promise written by Don E. Eberly and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1998 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted scholar and activist Don Eberly details the history, achievements, and goals of the civil society movement. He demonstrates why civil society is crucial to the preservation of democratic values and institutions, and he explains why the concern over America's moral decay must be our major priority. Our society, argues Eberly, cannot thrive, and perhaps cannot survive, without strong social institutions, a vibrant moral order, and an active, intellectual grass roots dimension.
Download or read book Renewing America s Food Traditions written by Gary Paul Nabhan and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work represents a dramatic call to recognize, celebrate, and conserve the great diversity of foods that give North America the distinctive culinary identity that reflects its multi-cultural heritage. Included are recipes and folk traditions associated with 100 of the continent's rarest food plants and animals.
Download or read book Renewal written by Mark Wild and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.
Download or read book America s Promise written by Eberly and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1998-10-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Don E. Eberly describes the role of civil society in the preservation of democratic values and institutions, and explains why the preservation of civil society must be a major priority over the next several decades. Our society, argues Eberly, cannot thrive and perhaps cannot survive, without strong social institutions, a vibrant moral order, and an active, intellectual, and grass roots dimension, and analyzes the concept of civil society in the context of both political theory and sociology. He then outlines ways in which the civil society debate reveals and responds to the more fundamental concern of moral collapse evident in America today.
Download or read book The Fractured Republic written by Yuval Levin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans -- and the politicians who represent them -- are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America's problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century -- as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society -- families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.
Download or read book American Indian Ethnic Renewal written by Joane Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-09-25 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does activism matter? This book answers with a clear "yes." American Indian Ethnic Renewal traces the growth of the American Indian population over the past forty years, when the number of Native Americans grew from fewer than one-half million in 1950 to nearly 2 million in 1990. This quadrupling of the American Indian population cannot be explained by rising birth rates, declining death rates, or immigration. Instead, the growth in the number of American Indians is the result of an increased willingness of Americans to identify themselves as Indians. What is driving this increased ethnic identification? In American Indian Ethnic Renewal, Joane Nagel identifies several historical forces which have converged to create an urban Indian population base, a reservation and urban Indian organizational infrastructure, and a broad cultural climate of ethnic pride and militancy. Central among these forces was federal Indian "Termination" policy which, ironically, was designed to assimilate and de-tribalize Native America. Reactions against Termination were nurtured by the Civil Rights era atmosphere of ethnic pride to become a central focus of the native rights activist movement known as "Red Power." This resurgence of American Indian ethnic pride inspired increased Indian ethnic identification, launched a renaissance in American Indian culture, language, art, and spirituality, and eventually contributed to the replacement of Termination with new federal policies affirming tribal Self- Determination. American Indian Ethnic Renewal offers a general theory of ethnic resurgence which stresses both structure and agency--the role of politics and the importance of collective and individual action--in understanding how ethnic groups revitalize and reinvent themselves. Scholars and students of American Indians, social movements and activism, and recent United States history, as well as the general reader interested in Native American life, will all find this an engaging and informative work.
Download or read book Reset written by Kurt Andersen and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the end of the world as we’ve known it,” Kurt Andersen writes in Reset. “But it isn’t the end of the world.” In this smart and refreshingly hopeful book, Andersen–a brilliant analyst and synthesizer of historical and cultural trends, as well as a bestselling novelist and host of public radio’s Studio 360–shows us why the current economic crisis is actually a moment of great opportunity to get ourselves and our nation back on track. Historically, America has always shifted between wild, exuberant speculation and steady, sober hard work, as well as back and forth between economic booms and busts, and between right and left politically. This is one of the rare moments when all these cycles shift dramatically and simultaneously–a moment when complacency ends, ossified structures loosen up, and enormous positive change is possible. The shock to the system can enable each of us to rethink certain habits and focus more on the things that make us authentically happy. The present flux can enable us as a society to consolidate the enormous gains of the last several decades in areas such as technology, crime prevention, women’s and civil rights, and the democratization of the planet. We can reap the fruits of a revival of realism and pragmatism at home and abroad. As we enter a new era of post-party-line common sense, we can start to reinvent hopelessly broken systems–in health care, education, climate change, and more–and rediscover some of the old-fashioned American values of which we’ve lost sight. In Reset, Andersen explains how we’ve done it before and why we are about to do it again–and better than ever.
Download or read book Renewal written by Anne-Marie Slaughter and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Unfinished Business, a story of crisis and change that can help us find renewed honesty and purpose in our personal and political lives Like much of the world, America is deeply divided over identity, equality, and history. Renewal is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s candid and deeply personal account of how her own odyssey opened the door to an important new understanding of how we as individuals, organizations, and nations can move backward and forward at the same time, facing the past and embracing a new future. Weaving together personal stories and reflections with insights from the latest research in the social sciences, Slaughter recounts a difficult time of self‐examination and growth in the wake of a crisis that changed the way she lives, leads, and learns. She connects her experience to our national crisis of identity and values as the country looks into a four-hundred-year-old mirror and tries to confront and accept its full reflection. The promise of the Declaration of Independence has been hollow for so many for so long. That reckoning is the necessary first step toward renewal. The lessons here are not just for America. Slaughter shows how renewal is possible for anyone who is willing to see themselves with new eyes and embrace radical honesty, risk, resilience, interdependence, grace, and vision. Part personal journey, part manifesto, Renewal offers hope tempered by honesty and is essential reading for citizens, leaders, and the change makers of tomorrow.
Download or read book Last Best Hope written by George Packer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times's 100 notable books of 2021 "[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington Post Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and divides In the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy. In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.
Download or read book Renewing Black Intellectual History written by Adolph Reed and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting critically on the discipline of African American studies is a complicated undertaking. Making sense of the black American experience requires situating it within the larger cultural, political-economic, and ideological dynamics that shape American life. This volume moves away from privileging racial commonality as the fulcrum of inquiry and moves toward observing the quality of the accounts scholars have rendered of black American life. This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation.
Download or read book To Renew America written by Newt Gingrich and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Speaker of the House of Representatives presents his design for an economic, political, cultural, and educational renewal of America that emphasizes personal motivation and faith
Download or read book Last Best Hope written by George Packer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America's descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming injustices, paralyses, and divides How, in a few decades, did the United States transform from a broadly prosperous middle-class country, with relatively healthy institutions and competent leaders, to a nation defined by discredited elites, hollowed-out institutions, and blatant inequalities-feared and pitied by our friends, mocked and sabotaged by our adversaries, first in the world in Covid cases and deaths, and led in recent years by an incompetent authoritarian bigot? Last Best Hope is a bracing account of our current crisis and of how a new era of civic revitalization may bring it to an end. Combining reportage with historical narrative, autobiography, and political analysis, Packer depicts and assesses the four inadequate narratives that dominate American public life: Libertarian America, which imagines a nation of individuals responsible for their own fate, and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Cosmopolitan America, the ideology of Silicon Valley and the professional elite,which celebrates globalization and leaves many American communities behind; Diverse America, which defines citizens as members of large identity groups that have inflicted or suffered oppression; and White America, a shallow nationalism that fears the contamination of non-whites and treachery of coastal elites, and poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. At a time when many fear that the American experiment in self-government may collapse, or, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "die by suicide", Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain American democracy. To point a better way forward, he looks back at previous eras of crisis to discover the resources for invigorating self-government. Combining trenchant social analysis with a vibrant and stinging essayistic voice and a deep knowledge of America's past and present, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national self-examination the times demand.
Download or read book American Post Judaism written by Shaul Magid and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness
Download or read book Renewing the Left written by Harvey M. Teres and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teres (English, Syracuse U.) brings to life the world of New York intellectuals from the 1930s to the present, drawing lessons for progressive politics today and arguing for a reassessment of the legacy of the New York intellectuals. He examines issues such as race and gender relations, literary quality, and politics as a means to fulfill personal, spiritual, and ethical needs, and profiles various figures of New York's left-wing intellectual culture. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Who are We written by Samuel P. Huntington and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America was founded by settlers who brought with them a distinct culture including the English language, Protestant values, individualism, religious commitment, and respect for law. The waves of later immigrants came gradually accepted these values and assimilated into America's Anglo-Protestant culture. More recently, however, national identity has been eroded by the problems of assimilating massive numbers of immigrants, bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship, and the "denationalization" of American élites. September 11 brought a revival of American patriotism, but already there are signs that this is fading. This book shows the need for us to reassert the core values that make us Americans.--From publisher description.
Download or read book American Indian Ethnic Renewal written by Joane Nagel and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
