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

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.

Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic

East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.

If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes

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

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