Social Capital
Church and Community
The topic
“Churches used to be social institutions that provided a common meeting place for society and gave people a feeling of belonging. With their decline:
Do we need to establish new institutions/communities to replace them? How? What might the new institutions be like?
Do we already have other communities that take the place of churches?”
This is about social capital – the value of social relations – and specifically religion as a provider of social capital.
Alain de Botton has recently written a book called Religion for Atheists – where he discusses the idea of taking and adopting the aspects of religion that can be useful in secular life e.g. the way that religion educates, the way it uses art etc. (He uses the label Atheism 2.0).
Books
First, two books on social capital. They distinguish between two types of social capital:
“Bonding” social capital - which brings similar people together (e.g. interest groups) and
“Bridging” social capital - which transcends boundaries and brings together a variety of different people (e.g. churches).
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam
This seems to be “the” book on social capital.
I haven’t read it myself yet – I reserved it at the library ages ago but it hasn’t come in.
Disconnected by Andrew Leigh
Covers broadly similar ground, but in the Australian context. He looks at social capital and its trends (largely decline) over the last 100 or so years. Lots of statistics and commentary/interpretation by the author.
Very easy to read (a bit light really).
He defines social capital as “networks of trust and reciprocity that link people together”.
Then there’s Religion for Atheists (Alain de Botton) of course.
Also, Andrew found a reference to three other books that are relevant to the question of replicating some of the good bits of religion (Not sure about hard copy availability, but Amazon says the Johnston and Nagel are available for immediate download of the Kindle version):
http://www.amazon.com/Saving-God-Religion-after-Idolatry/dp/0691143943
by Mark Johnston.
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Atheist-Spirituality/dp/0143114433/ref=pd_vtp_b_1
by Andre de Comte Sponville
by Thomas Nagel. Andrew’s comment: “This collection of essays is not so obviously relevant from the title, but one of the reviewers says of the author: ‘An avowed nonbeliever, he asks what a secular philosophy can put in the place of religion.’ Nagel is an important philosopher who wrote the enormously influential essay "What is it like to be a bat", which we will doubtless cover when we get around to doing a meeting on questions of consciousness.”
(I haven’t looked but there may be podcast interviews with, or web essays by, the authors, about these books, which would save you reading the books themselves).
If like me you are not up with all this Amazon-Kindle business: Andrew tells me you can read a kindle book on just about anything with a microprocessor in it. See:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771
Material on the internet
Wikipedia’s article on social capital:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
The Saguaro Seminar is a group at Harvard Uni (including Robert Putnam) that researches and promotes social capital. Their website is here:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/saguaro/#
Their Resources page has links to heaps of materials about social capital. I haven’t looked at any of them!
A (pdf form) article from the Saguaro Seminar called Religion and Social Capital.
http://www.bettertogether.org/pdfs/Religion.pdf
An article from a recent Herald. It’s about people going to church for other reasons than belief in god – spirituality, quiet, ceremony, music, etc.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/churchgoers-keen-to-take-a-pew-despite-their-disbelief-20120106-1posf.html
Some comment on de Botton's new book:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3822628.html
Here’s a fairly light-hearted look at low levels of membership of political parties compared to various other types of organisation, with comments on factors that attract people to ‘join in’. (Personally I’ve always said that the purpose of all organisations is so the members can go to the pub afterwards.)
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3714918.html
Listen
Alain de Botton talkings about ‘Atheism 2.0’ –
Benevolent Society Literature Review about social cohesion
Courtesy of Annette:
http://www.bensoc.org.au/uploads/documents/social-cohesion-literature-review-aug2008.pdf
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