Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture

by Christian Smith

Book Overview

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory.

Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0199731977
• ISBN13: 9780199731978
• Release Date: August 2009
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

An understandable and interesting book

I read this book for a Sociology capstone class and found it very interesting. Smith writes in an understandable way and presents his theory in an organized way. I really like his theory of personhood.

Cutting Edge Treatment of Religion and Social Science

Sociologists have been waiting a long timefor something like this. Though the sociologyof religion has come a long way, works that unpack the religious and philosophicalassumptions of sociology have been fewand far between. Besides Peter Berger's Rumor of Angels and Robert Bellah's Beyond Belief, I'm not sure that anything comes as close as Moral, Believing Animals in laying the groundwork for a dialogue between religion and social science.