Fractured Times


Book Description

Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de siècle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation. Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle époque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the “free intellectual” and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy. Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.




Fractured Society


Book Description

Scanning across half a century, Fractured Society…Causes, Effects and Resolutions looks at how human relations have been coming apart psychologically, summarised by the widespread failure to understand each other. Young people seem more stressed than others, while politics are now more polarised than for a long time past. Wherever you look, at gender relations, the working environment, responses to traumatic events and how people relate to their sense of place – whether positively or negatively - there are profound tensions around how we interact with each other. But maybe all is not lost! Hugh Roberts examines how every situation can look different in context, applying lessons learned from many years working internationally across diverse cultures and value systems. He proposes a fresh approach to relationship building, based on empathy and understanding of individual agendas. COVID-19 brought communities a renewed sense of collective purpose with digital communication proving vital in sustaining meaningful connections. However, the Internet needs to take its rightful place in, rather than take over, the slow re-building of mutual trust. Fractured Society delivers an upbeat message advocating a better-connected world, encouraging us to adopt a positive empathetic approach to one another, replacing the fear and mistrust of forming new acquaintances.




Broken Family-Fractured Society


Book Description

I commend Dr. Mattocks for his forthright presentation of Broken Family--Fractured Society, which addresses the alarming and deteriorating condition of the family in our contemporary society, and offers advice and encouragement based on a firm foundation of biblical principles. The author's intent is to promote the preservation of marriage in the values that the Lord gave the human family in the Garden of Eden. This is an invaluable work for those interested in one of the most crucial issues facing humankind. This insightful book is a must-read for every family, church leader, teacher, and counselor--anyone interested and involved in the challenge of restoring holiness in marriage. Mary Melton, MA, California Dr. Mattocks shows that marriage goes far beyond man and woman coming together and exchanging vows and rings. It is in fact fundamental to the survival of mankind and critical in God's plan. Sonia Golding, Birmingham, England




The Fractured Community


Book Description

"The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia" is a book written by Kate Crehan. The University of California Press originally published the book in October 1997 and presents its online version, as well as a summary of its contents.




The Fractured Republic


Book Description

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish, and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans -- and the politicians who represent them -- are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time. The Left looks back to the middle of the twentieth century, when unions were strong, large public programs promised to solve pressing social problems, and the movements for racial integration and sexual equality were advancing. The Right looks back to the Reagan Era, when deregulation and lower taxes spurred the economy, cultural traditionalism seemed resurgent, and America was confident and optimistic. Each side thinks returning to its golden age could solve America's problems. In The Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin argues that this politics of nostalgia is failing twenty-first-century Americans. Both parties are blind to how America has changed over the past half century -- as the large, consolidated institutions that once dominated our economy, politics, and culture have fragmented and become smaller, more diverse, and personalized. Individualism, dynamism, and liberalization have come at the cost of dwindling solidarity, cohesion, and social order. This has left us with more choices in every realm of life but less security, stability, and national unity. Both our strengths and our weaknesses are therefore consequences of these changes. And the dysfunctions of our fragmented national life will need to be answered by the strengths of our decentralized, diverse, dynamic nation. Levin argues that this calls for a modernizing politics that avoids both radical individualism and a centralizing statism and instead revives the middle layers of society -- families and communities, schools and churches, charities and associations, local governments and markets. Through them, we can achieve not a single solution to the problems of our age, but multiple and tailored answers fitted to the daunting range of challenges we face and suited to enable an American revival.




Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society


Book Description

It is now accepted that many of the determinants of health and health care are social. This volume offers a philosophical and theoretical frame within which the nature and extent of this might be optimally examined. The analysis is rooted in Roy Bhaskar’s basic and dialectical critical realism, although it draws also on the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. It purports to provide an ontologically and epistemologically grounded comparative sociology of contemporary health and health care in the twenty-first century. Carrying a fourfold agenda, the volume sets out a dialectical critical realist frame for a comparative sociology of health and health care; it clarifies sociology’s potential and limitations; it suggests a research programme and a series of questions for investigation; and it offers an argument for an action sociology embedded in a dialectical theory of transformative action. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of philosophy, sociology and critical realism, as well as those working in health and social care.




Good News For a Fractured Society


Book Description

Given the ideologically divided, tension-filled world in which we live, imagine hearing someone tell you how God can work through these divisions in a way that offers hope and healing for the world. The author suggests that this is exactly what Matthew sought to do in his gospel. The Hebrew Scriptures tell the story of how God chose to accomplish a divine work of reconciliation through a chosen people who demonstrated the same strengths and weaknesses as most people in the world today. Matthew interpreted the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the midrash, or commentary on these Hebrew Scriptures, that revealed how God works with both the shadow side and the bright side of our human nature to accomplish the divine purpose. The contemporary church, in a similar manner to Matthew’s congregation, must determine the church’s response to a world divided between the powerful and the powerless (Chapter 1), the Christian faith and other faiths (Chapter 2), male and female (Chapter 3), and the wealthy and the poor (Chapter 4). Following an interpretation of how Matthew found hope in the face of such divisions, the fifth chapter recognizes that most contemporary churches feel helpless in the face of such overwhelming realities. The author then describes Matthew’s understanding of how God works through resistance and even betrayal to transform the world. The final chapter explores God’s intention to bring about a common witness of Jews and Christians in the reconciliation of the entire world. This book will provide a vision of hope that will enable Christians to respond with strength to the challenges of the world and have confidence that their efforts are not in vain. A study guide is included in the introduction. You may reach the author on his web page at www.smccutchan.com.




Age of Fracture


Book Description

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into multiple identities; community responsibility shrank to smaller circles. In this wide-ranging narrative, Daniel Rodgers shows how the collective purposes and meanings that had framed social debate became unhinged and uncertain. Age of Fracture offers a powerful reinterpretation of the ways in which the decades surrounding the 1980s changed America. Through a contagion of visions and metaphors, on both the intellectual right and the intellectual left, earlier notions of history and society that stressed solidity, collective institutions, and social circumstances gave way to a more individualized human nature that emphasized choice, agency, performance, and desire. On a broad canvas that includes Michel Foucault, Ronald Reagan, Judith Butler, Charles Murray, Jeffrey Sachs, and many more, Rodgers explains how structures of power came to seem less important than market choice and fluid selves. Cutting across the social and political arenas of late-twentieth-century life and thought, from economic theory and the culture wars to disputes over poverty, color-blindness, and sisterhood, Rodgers reveals how our categories of social reality have been fractured and destabilized. As we survey the intellectual wreckage of this war of ideas, we better understand the emergence of our present age of uncertainty.




Fractured Society


Book Description

Scanning across half a century, Fractured Society…Causes, Effects and Resolutions looks at how human relations have been coming apart psychologically, summarised by the widespread failure to understand each other. Young people seem more stressed than others, while politics are now more polarised than for a long time past. Wherever you look, at gender relations, the working environment, responses to traumatic events and how people relate to their sense of place – whether positively or negatively - there are profound tensions around how we interact with each other. But maybe all is not lost! Hugh Roberts examines how every situation can look different in context, applying lessons learned from many years working internationally across diverse cultures and value systems. He proposes a fresh approach to relationship building, based on empathy and understanding of individual agendas. COVID-19 brought communities a renewed sense of collective purpose with digital communication proving vital in sustaining meaningful connections. However, the Internet needs to take its rightful place in, rather than take over, the slow re-building of mutual trust. Fractured Society delivers an upbeat message advocating a better-connected world, encouraging us to adopt a positive empathetic approach to one another, replacing the fear and mistrust of forming new acquaintances.




A Fractured Mind


Book Description

In 1989, Robert B. Oxnam, the successful China scholar and president of the Asia Society, faced up to what he thought was his biggest personal challenge: alcoholism. But this dependency masked a problem far more serious: Multiple Personality Disorder. At the peak of his professional career, after having led the Asia Society for nearly a decade, Oxnam was haunted by periodic blackouts and episodic rages. After his family and friends intervened, Oxnam received help from a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeffrey Smith, and entered a rehab center. It wasn't until 1990 during a session with Dr. Smith that the first of Oxnam's eleven alternate personalities--an angry young boy named Tommy--suddenly emerged. With Dr. Smith's help, Oxnam began the exhausting and fascinating process of uncovering his many personalities and the childhood trauma that caused his condition. This is the powerful and moving story of one person's struggle with this terrifying illness. The book includes an epilogue by Dr. Smith in which he describes Robert's case, the treatment, and the nature of multiple personality disorder. Robert's courage in facing his situation and overcoming his painful past makes for a dramatic and inspiring book.