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Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through the population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in gender equality. Second, value shift arguments contend that gender norms change with social and economic development among women and men in diverse positions-traditional and non-traditional alike. Third, diffusion arguments suggest that structural change leads to adoption of new ideas and values supportive of gender equality by non-traditional and innovative groups in society, but that the new ideas later diffuse to other groups through cultural processes. Using the General Social Survey from 1977 to 2006 and comparing the determinants of gender egalitarianism across 86 cohorts born from roughly 1900 through 1985, multilevel models support the diffusion arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on aspects of Muslim morality. The article examines a group of Muslim converts in Missouri and the moral codes they have created through their religion. Ethnographic fieldwork and interviews are used to gather data. The author cites Muslim practices such as ritual prayer, fasting, and covering used by the Muslim group. Topics include the author's use of the theories of Bourdieu in the article, moral disposition or habitus, identity, rationalization, and how modern society affects religion.

This article presents the author's comments on the article A Long Walk to Freedom and Democracy: Human Rights, Globalization, and Social Injustice, by Havidán Rodríguez in the same issue. Rodríguez's title, A Long Walk to Freedom and Democracy, implies that freedom and democracy are equivalent destinations or are at least in proximity to each other. Instead of attempting to achieve both democracy and freedom--which Rodríguez argues has failed thus far--perhaps we ought to prioritize freedom. This might prove a more achievable target on its own, without the conflict that democracy and freedom together risk. Contributions from many subfields in sociology--political sociology, stratification, social theory, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, demography, and others--will ensure an expansive operationalization of freedom. Further analysis of human rights will reveal the institutional norms that maintain the meaning of human rights and civil society's expression of human rights. Then we can begin to suggest doctrinal and enforcement changes that will allow for the meaningful expansion of human liberties, freedoms, and rights. An understanding of what it means to be human in this moment is essential. For human rights to have a meaningful impact, protecting lives and livelihood, we must continue to push the boundaries of human rights and be open to new assertions about what is minimally necessary to live as a human.

This article compares and comments on the "two sociologies," that of the journals and monographs and that of the introductory textbooks. The principal concern is with the treatments of race, ethnicity, and religion. The principal argument is that the categorical usages found in the textbooks hide significant ongoing social changes. To address these questions we present data from the 1972-98 NORC General Social Surveys. The evidence presented does not support a range of standard claims found in the five leading textbooks. Those textbooks do not adequately reflect well-known findings reported in the discipline's specialties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although some sociologists still connect cultural preferences with social class, others argue that postindustrial societies are no longer class-based societies and that contemporary cultural consumption patterns do not simply reflect class positions. This article addresses several theories that characterize the association between class and cultural consumption in contemporary society. It goes on to analyze the effect of class position on highbrow cultural consumption -- using both leisure activities and cultural tastes -- in Italy, Sweden, West Germany, Israel, and the U.S. It asks whether differences in cultural consumption, given other salient cleavages such as race/ethnicity, gender, and religious observance, are associated with class. Results show that class correlates with highbrow cultural consumption in different ways in the cases studied. The dividing line for consuming highbrow culture is located at the top of the class structure in Israel, the U.S., and Sweden; it is located at the bottom of the class structure in Italy and West Germany. Gender, race, and religious observance are important in conditioning culture consumption, but they do not fully mediate the association between class and cultural tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view that homeownership leads to conservative social and political attitudes is widely held by contemporary social theorists across a wide political spectrum. Oddly, little empirical research has been conducted to assess the overall impact of homeownership on political attitudes. Confirmatory factor analysis which broke down political attitudes into six dimensions measuring civil liberties, women's rights, sexual tolerance, domestic spending, inner-city problems, and socialism along with two additional variables measuring voting behavior showed no direct statistically significant impact on six of the eight dependent variables. A strong positive relational theoretical proposition of a relationship between homeownership and a conservative political ideology needs to be reexamined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a list of books that have been reviewed. Some of them are "Philadelphia Gentlemen, The Making of a National Upper Class," by E. Digby Blatzell; "Desegreagation: Resistance & Readiness," by Melvi M. Tumin; "From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology," by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills; "Community and Society," by Ferdinand Tonnies; "Popular Religion: Inspirational Books in America," by Louis Schneider and Sanford M. Dornbusch.

The relevance of family income for religious participation in the United States has been largely ignored in recent decades. Addressing this neglect, we focus our attention primarily upon white Catholics, the poorer of whom we reason have fewer options to participate in the context of an increasingly middleclass Church. Analyzing the 1972-2006 cumulative General Social Survey data, we show that net of all other factors low-income white Catholics attend church less often than other white Catholics, although social integration mechanisms significantly moderate the effects of income. Additional analyses suggest that the effects of income on church attendance are greatest for the younger white Catholic cohort. In contrast, the role of income in Latino Catholics' attendance is relatively weak. In our conclusion, we attempt to integrate our most puzzling finding--having children in the home does not increase the church attendance of low-income white Catholics--with our main theoretical line of argument concerning the central role of social integration in understanding the impact of income on religious participation., Sociological interest in the relationship between social class and religion has its origins in the writings of Karl Marx, who saw religion as an opiate for the masses, and Max [...]

Before I entered the polling station, an irreverent member of the press called out, "Mr. Mandela, who are you voting for?" I laughed. "You know," I said, I have been agonizing over that choice all morning." I marked an X in the box next to the letters ANC and then slipped my folded ballot paper into a simple wooden box; I had the first vote of my life. ... The Images of South Africans going to the polls that day are burned in my memory. Great lines of patient people snaking through the dirt roads and streets of towns and cities; old women had waited half a century to cast their vote saying that they felt like human beings for the first time in their lives; white men and women saying they were proud to live in a free country at last. The mood of the nation during those days of voting was buoyant. The violence and bombings ceased, and it was as if we were a nation reborn. Even the logistical difficulties of the voting, misplaced ballots, pirate voting stations, and rumors of fraud in certain places could not dim the overwhelming victory of democracy and justice. (Mandela 1994, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 618)., Is this the promise of globalization? Will globalization bring democracy and the development and implementation of a human rights agenda and social justice to countries around the world? Will globalization […]