Sublime

“mega-identities,”1 where their religious, political, social, regional, and cultural identities are all stacked one on top of the other—

University of Texas sociologist Bill Bishop, in his recent book The Big Sort: Why Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart, claims that Americans over the last three decades have “been reshaping the way they lived. . . . In every corner of society, people were creating new, more homgenous groups. . . . Churches filled with people who

The global revolution which has seized upon modern man and in whose storm center we find ourselves today has, with its transvaluation of all values, led to a loss of orientation in the part and in the whole, and daily we have new and painful experience of its repercussions in the political life of the collective, as well

“mega-identities,” as Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason puts it, where their political, cultural, regional, and religious beliefs are all combined.

In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”

He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well.

cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups.