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FAITH NO MORE: WHY PEOPLE REJECTRELIGION. By Phil Zuckerman. New York:Oxford University Press, 2011. 240 pp. $24.95cloth.

The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies, by PHIL ZUCKERMAN, LUKE W. GALEN, and FRANK L. PASQUALE. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 336 pp.; $24.95 (paper), $99.00 (cloth)

Review of Warner, Rob. Secularization and Its Discontents. London: Continuum, 2010. 221 pp. pbk $34.95 (USD). ISBN: 978-1441127853

In his Treatise On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, the Southern Baptist preacher and educator of the latter nineteenth century, John A. Broadus, acknowledged the influence of classical and contemporary theorists upon his work. Among those named, particularly with regard to notions of argument, was Richard Whately, the Anglican Archbishop and rhetorical theorist of the early nineteenth century. The research task involved in this thesis was to determine whether and to what extent Whately's theory of argument was employed in Broadus's homiletic theory and practice. The writer gathered his data using methods of documentary research. Most of the sources were available at local libraries. Others, however, were obtained from the Universities of Kansas, Iowa, and Michigan. Materials by and concerning Broadus were obtained from various Baptist historical agencies.

Recent reports detail a rise in the practice of home food preservation in the United States due to economic woes, nutritional concerns, and increasing devotion to local food production.Home food preservation is the processing of foods in order to extend its shelf-life. Current common approaches to preserving foods at home include pressure canning, freezing, drying, water bath canning, and cellaring/storing. Local food production in four Kentucky counties were examined through in-depth qualitative interviews with home food preservation practitioners to yield a rural/urban comparison. Forty home food preservation practitioners were interviewed between Fall 2009 and Fall 2013. The primary question driving this project is what motivates those who grow gardens and practice home food preservation in an era of readily available, relatively cheap foodstuffs? Secondary questions include, how do the motivations of home food preservation practitioners compare in rural and urban areas? What are the links, if any, between home food preservation and environmental sustainability concerns in rural and urban areas? Each of these questions will be examined through a mixture of qualitative methods and a grounded theoretical approach. In-depth field interviews with 40 preservers, documentary filmmaking, and participant observation were conducted in two rural and two urban Kentucky counties. Interview transcripts were coded by themes, interpreted using hermeneutic analysis, and analyzed by grounded theory. Policy institutes could make gains from this research by building upon already existing community food practices. Agriculture extension agent could use these findings to inform their food preservation programs and improve safety recommendations.

Over the past two decades an increasing number of theorists and practitioners have called for a thorough rethinking of the underlying assumptions of the concept of rrental illness and the traditional psychiatric nodes of responding to mental disorders. The work of this group of writers has come to be referred to as the "antipsychiatry" literature. The insights of this perspective center largely about a rejection of those theories and methods of treatment that are based upon the medical model. Many writers point to the use of traditional psychiatric practice as an oppressive instrument of social control. While much of this perspective is directed toward the analysis of specifically sociological factors there have been few attempts by sociologists to provide focus for the claims that have been made. This paper proposes a synthetic sociological framework with the intention of providing sociological focus for the otherwise disparate insights found within this literature. A general model is constructed by incorporating aspects of the labeling perspective, the sociology of knowledge, and Marxian analysis. The model provides the analytical tools for investigation of the manner in which "mental illness" as a concept, and the phenemenon which it allegedly describes, are rooted in the nature of everyday life. The framework that is developed places particular emphasis upon the political dimensions . of everyday life. This dimension is especially useful in explicating the role of labeling as a device to discredit the claims of .people as they attempt to identify the oppressive aspects of .their social environment. The nature .of socialization within Western culture is analyzed in terms of the various factors which are instrumental in the mystification of consciousness and its relationship to "mental illness." The observation is made that the majority of the claims that are proffered by the "antipsychiatrists" are devoid of a firm empirical foundation in that they rely primarily upon findings from case studies and a series of loose inferences. An attempt is made to overcome this problem by mapping out the empirical points of departure for the model by developing a set of testable propositions and corollaries. It is concluded that a radical sociology of knowledge framework does provide a useful method of conceptualizing the "antipsychiatry" literature from a sociological perspective. The validity of the claims themselves, however, must wait until much more of the empirical evidence is in. It is pointed out that extreme caution be taken to avoid contentions to the effect that all mental disorders can be fruitfully Suggestions are made as to the likelihood that some diagnostic categories, more than others, may be subject to analysis by this model. It is implied that further research into the role of biopsychological factors will undoubtedly show the interactive effects of such factors with defective socialization and oppressive social relationships.

This paper addresses itself to the problem of the analysis of the decision making processes in the area of Human Resources Planning.

The local food movement has become a prominent force in the U.S. food market, as represented by the explosive expansion of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketplaces across the country. Concurrent with the expansion of these DTC marketplaces has been the development of the social ideal of localism: a political and ethical paradigm that valorizes artisanal production and smallness, vilifies globalization, and seeks to recapture a sense of place and community that has been lost under the alienating conditions of capitalism’s gigantism. Supporters of localism understand the movement to be a substantial political and economic threat to global capitalism, and ascribe distinct, counter-hegemonic attributes to localized consumption and production. However, critics argue that localism lacks the political imagination and economic power to meaningfully challenge global capitalism, and that it merely represents an elite form of petite bourgeois consumption. While scholars have debated this issue feverishly, there is a dearth of empirical cases measuring whether or not actual local consumers understand their local consumption within the political and ethical frame of localism, leaving much of the discussion in the realm of esoteric theorizing. This study seeks to uncover whether or not local consumers interpret their local consumption habits within localism’s moral framework by using an original survey instrument to gather primary data, and conducting an exploratory quantitative inquiry.