The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

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

F. A. Hayek is probably the most prominent advocate of capitalism in the present period.

I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.

A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance