If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.

The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture

He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter--until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.

But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization

If a socialist economy is opened up to increasing degrees of market forces, a point will be reached at which democratic governance becomes a possibility.

In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.