Sentences with phrase «american individualism»

De Tocqueville's observation of American individualism driven by an abiding faith in opportunity rang less and less true for large swaths of the populous.

American individualism is in steep decline Dec 08, 2012

This is American individualism taken to its absurd extreme.

Parents» commitment to a Christian school is also looser than it might seem, since American individualism and parents» concern for their children often trump institutional and community authority.

In films like «Paris, Texas» and «Repo Man» and in his music, Stanton embodied a particular strain of American individualism, restlessness and heart

Liman, Cruise, and Spinelli have certainly succeeded in turning Seal's life into entertainment, but they've failed at making his life art, political art that doesn't just depict a particular man's life, but also his times, with all of the complexity, contradictions, and complications that implies, up to and including depicting Seal not just as a romantic anti-hero, but as the personification of a particular kind of American individualism and exceptionalism, going anywhere, doing anything, and facing few, if any consequences, to borrow the title of Graham Greene's politically prescient novel, the embodiment of the «Ugly American.»

«As a conservative, I identify with the tradition of American Individualism, the notion that individuals, not the government, are the most important units of our society and culture.

In the end, I suspect that the church's greatest contribution to marital stability and growth will come from living a conviction that flies in the face of American individualism — namely (in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism) «that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and death to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.»

The author believes that the church's greatest contribution to marital stability and growth will come from living a conviction that flies in the face of American individualism — namely (in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism) «that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and death to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ.»

There is a deeper reason for fragmentation than simply American individualism, and that reason is a theological one in the strictest sense, an issue about God and about faithlessness to God.

Though «revolutionary» and «atheistic» would continue to be negative terms used to characterize socialism, it was the attribute of collectivism or statism, in contrast to allegedly American individualism, that would be the central negative image.

From all appearances, it is now back in style to be critical of American individualism.

And good Lutheranism needs to be shepherded by the local pastor through the minefields of institutional democracy, anti-elitism, and American individualism by personal persuasion and force of argument.

The book and programs appeal to modern American individualism and selfishness and do little or nothing to conduct serious spiritual growth or contextual understanding of Christianity.

The case can be made that the current economic situation derives from our particular brand of American individualism.

This is American individualism at its most typical.

American individualism — the willful project of our modern founding — has so infected every nook and cranny of our country that the only thing to do is to flee to the beautiful buildings and other fading reminders of what was the authentically Christian civilization of Europe.

In this book, Robert Bellah and his coauthors deployed a fascinating and compelling range of stories testifying to the damage American individualism has done to countless human lives and their communities.

Not exact matches

«Alberta has opted for the best of Canada's heritage - a combination of American enterprise and individualism with the British traditions of order and co-operation.

To their credit, the authors do provide thick descriptions of perennial problems in American political culture, but even then they do little to help us get beyond the false alternatives of individualism and communitarianism.

Alternatively, many sociologists predicted that, with the increasing emphasis on individualism and the therapeutic in American culture, religion would have an increasingly marginal influence on domestic life, and the traditional family as the 1950s knew it would gradually disappear in the face of «family modernization,» as some theorists called it.

When excessive individualism tempted Americans to withdraw into their own small family circles, business sent them back out into the world to mingle and form ties with their fellow men.

And just so you know, I haven't yet tackled your important «Locke's Law of Nature» essay in that great Natural Rights Individualism and Progressivism in American Political Philosophy essay volume that came out last year.

That is the key thing for us, but I'll add that they are right to suspect that economic individualism was (and is) a real creed for not a few Americans, even though that actual creed went beyond what its purported official spokespersons put forth (I think usually sincerely) in the name of natural rights and constitutional liberty.

But can we ever convince the key moderates that «economic individualism» was more of a bogeyman than a reality of American history?

I really think it runs that deep, this idea [of] the American myths — and whether it's true or not is not the point — this is the way that we shaped our identity, this rugged individualism, this rifle and shovel, that if you work hard you can get your dreams, and we're not gonna be a monarchy.

Having seen an Arab chieftain's son, who had attended the American University in Beirut, make his decision between the old nomadic life of his clan, still living in tents, and the new town life which his education made possible, one vividly understands that, choosing the former, he inevitably chose submergence in the social solidarity of his group as against emergence into the individualism of a commercial community.

Confessions also lean towards community instead of the American preoccupation with individualism and personal faith.

Puritanism's doctrine of grace supported the highly developed individualism that gave credence to the representation of early American society as a voluntary community of the consenting elect.

For them the critical rhetoric may simply reinforce the narrow individualism and concern with self - interest that is the underside of the old American tradition, but now with few ethical restraints, because the older social justifications have lost their legitimacy.

Whatever doubts may exist about the sources of this democracy, there can be none about the chief source of the morality that gives it life and substance... [From the Hebrew tradition, via the Puritans, come] the contract and all its corollaries; the higher law as something more than a «brooding omnipresence in the sky»; the concept of the competent and responsible individual; certain key ingredients of economic individualism; the insistence on a citizenry educated to understand its rights and duties; and the middle - class virtues, that high plateau of moral stability on which, so Americans believe, successful democracy must always build [Seedtime of the Republic (Harcourt, Brace, 1953, p. 55)-RSB-.

Robert Bellah and his associates throw some general light on this absence in their recent sociological study of American culture, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Harper & Row, 1985).

Moreover, this Russian Orthodox civilization — what Patriarch Kirill, head of the Moscow Patriarchate, has called «Russkiy Mir,» the «Russian World» — offers a necessary and important alternative to Western European and North American secularism and individualism.

In American society, I would argue, this clash can be seen in the nature of our anonymous individualism.

There's «a prominent paradox of American life long noted by the keenest observers of our society; that administrative centralization often accompanies cultural and economic individualism.»

J. Irwin Trotter pays particular attention to the way the lectionary functions corporately in non-lectionary-based traditions to subvert the individualism of North American culture, «Are We Preaching a «Subversive» Lectionary?»

On the social power of a community of memory and hope, see Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 152 - 55.

A bad one is a typically American scholarly and speculative individualism; in theology diversity is often a good thing, but entrepreneurship is not.

It may be, however, that one reason that «radical and egalitarian individualism» often appears to be «winning out» is that it so thoroughly permeates that part of American law, constitutional law, where we tell the story about what kind of people we think we are.

Perhaps this apparent increase in attention to families, churches, and other communities will amount to no more than a minor countercurrent in the Great American torrent of individualism and bureaucratization.

Though Robert Bellah and his coauthors found that the «first language» of Americans is the discourse of individualism, they also heard Americans across the country speaking communitarian «second languages,» languages of «tradition and commitment in communities of memory.»

David L. Schindler criticizes the liberal view of the human person that he sees encoded into the American project in First Things, to which Richard John Neuhaus responded with a more positive view of our national heritage, in which religious faith and a strong tradition of civic associations moderate the excesses of liberal individualism.

Robert N. Bellah Ct al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 79.

Intensely personal and devoid of much theological content, her phrasing of religious individualism was seen by Bellah and his colleagues and by many of us who analyze American religion as a threat to community in general and to our denominations in particular.

In my judgment, Hargrove is diagnostically wrong in locating American culture wholly within the parameters of liberal individualism and morally and politically wrong in arguing that «teaching reality» must automatically confine itself to culturally established borders.

Flawed and impossible though they may be at times, congregations are the most powerful antidote we have to the radical individualism that pervades American secular and religious culture.

If dominantly individualistic, Americans may need to learn how to counter elements of their individualism.

A communitarian language may, in Robert Bellah's words, rank second to individualism in American life, but it is not a foreign language.

Funny how a country all about individualism have such a singular vision of the «American Dream».

The old rugged American «individualism» is not in it's nature.