From the earliest interactions of Christians with the Roman Empire to today's debates about the separation of church and state, the Christian churches have been in complex relationships with various economic and political systems for centuries. Renowned theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether analyzes the ways the Christian church has historically interacted with powerful systems such as patriarchy, racism, slavery, and environmentalism, while looking critically at how the church shapes these systems today. With a focus on the United States, Christianity and Social Systems provides an introductory analysis of the interactions between the churches and major systems that have shaped western Christian and post-Christian society. Ruether discusses ideologies, such as liberalism and socialism, and includes three country case studies-Nicaragua, South Africa, and North and South Korea-to further illustrate the profound influences Christianity and social systems have with each other. This book is neither an attack on the relationship between Christianity and these systems, nor an apology, but rather a nuanced examination of the interactions between them. By understanding how these interactions have shaped history, we can more fully understand how to make ethical decisions about the role of Christianity in some of today's most pressing social issues, from economic and class disparities to the environmental crisis.

And conclusion3 THE CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS DIFFERENTIATION; Introduction; Constructing analytical tools; A theory of religious differentiation; Religion and value-changing processes; Muslims and religious change in modern Europe; Pluralism and religious differentiation; A theory of social integration; Variables of assimilation; The process of assimilation; The assimilation profile-a test case; The use of acculturation; Analysis-Antiochean Judaism revealed; Groups and factions; Crossing the boundaries-Antiochus the apostate; Observing torah-religious traditionalists.

Angela Sabates offers a well-researched social psychology textbook that makes full use of the unique view of human persons coming down to us from the Christian tradition. She highlights Christian contributions to a wide range of questions from the dynamics of persuasion to the social psychology of violence.

"A selected list of books in English suggested for collateral reading": p. 319-324.

This volume resulted from a collaborative research project into responses of Protestant and Catholic religious communities in the Americas to the challenges of globalization. Contributors from the fields of religion, anthropology, political science, and sociology draw on fieldwork in Peru, El Salvador, and the United States to show the interplay of economic globalization, migration, and growing religious pluralism in Latin America. Organized around three central themes-family, youth, and community; democratization, citizenship, and political participation; and immigration and transnationalism-the book argues that, at the local level, religion helps people, especially women and youths, solidify their identities and confront the challenges of the modern world. Religious communities are seen as both peaceful venues for people to articulate their needs, and forums for building participatory democracies in the Americas. Finally, the contributors examine how religion enfranchises poor women, youths, and people displaced by war or economic change and, at the same time, drives social movements that seek to strengthen family and community bonds disrupted by migration and political violence.

Sociologist Anthony Blasi analyzes early Christianity using multiple social scientific theories, including those of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Max Scheler, Alfred Schutz, and contemporary theorists. He investigates the canonical New Testament books as representative of early Christianity, a sample based on usage, and he takes the books in the chronological order in which they were written. The result is a series of "stills" that depict the movement at different stages in its development. His approaches, often neglected in New Testament studies, include such sociological subfields as sect theory, the routinization of charisma, conflict, stratification theory, stigma, the sociology of knowledge, new religions, the sociology of secrecy, marginality, liminality, syncretism, the social role of intellectuals, the poor person as a type, the sick role, degradation ceremonies, populism, the sociology of migration, the sociology of time, mergers, the sociology of law, and the sociology of written communication. Needing to treat the New Testament text as social data, Blasi uses his background in biblical studies and a review of a vast literature to establish the chronology of the compositions of the New Testament books and to present the "data" in a new translation that is accessible to non-specialists.