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Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture 1st Edition

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Christian Smith (Author)
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4.0 out of 5 stars 5 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0199731978
ISBN-10: 0199731977
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 172 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (August 26, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199731977
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199731978
  • Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.4 x 5.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,129 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsinsightful thoughts on personhood
By suburban dissident on April 26, 2011
Format: Paperback
This book represents the first attempt of one of the leading minds in the sociology of religion to address the question of what exactly are human persons - one of the central units of analysis in the study of society. With the obvious nod to Alasdair MacIntyre (and his work Moral Reasoning Animals), Smith points out how central to any concept of the human person is the recognition that we are, as the title intimates, moral (in that we have a sense of there being right and wrong things, actions, etc. -though that doesn't mean we share similar moral content!) and believing (ideas and concepts fill and shape the way we view our world). With that in mind, Smith than looks at the consequences of this for how we view motivations, narratives, culture, etc.

This thought provoking work should be viewed as an important transition point from Smith's early substantive work on religion, motivations, and action (Resisting Reagan and the Emergence of Liberation Theology) as well as his work on beliefs, culture and collective identity (American Evangelicalism) toward his most recent tome that draws a more complete and complex picture of the human person (What is a Person?).
11 Comments 10 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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5.0 out of 5 starsCutting Edge Treatment of Religion and Social Science
By Venerable Bede on August 1, 2003
Format: Hardcover
Sociologists have been waiting a long time
for something like this. Though the sociology
of religion has come a long way, works that
unpack the religious and philosophical
assumptions of sociology have been few
and 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.
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4.0 out of 5 starsRigorous review
By W. D. Troughton on July 5, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
I come belatedly to this account. To be human is to be a moral, believing animal, involved in a narrative, That applies to secularists too. He probes a wide range of contemporary accounts without discovering a satisfying explanation for motivation. But read on for his proposal .......!
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5.0 out of 5 starsAn understandable and interesting book
By S. Barnes on May 26, 2007
Format: Hardcover
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.
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1.0 out of 5 starsAnother Travesty: Provides False Caricature of the Enlightenment for Propgandized Dogma
By Peter P. Fuchs on April 24, 2011
Format: Paperback
I must say this author Christian Smith is the gift that keeps on giving. It is often very hard to sum up the misunderstandings and essentially anti-intellectual propaganda surrounding errors of interpretation involving the Enlightenment. It is easy to do it with Evangelicals on TV, like the 700 club who are regularly so obsessed with the "Illuminati" that they imagine they are still around somewhere hiding behind a bush. The "Illuminati" are a paranoid symbol for a huge caricature of the Enlightenment's intents that they find objectionable. So objectionable that it would seem to cancel out collaterally the very founding notions of the United States. But, no matter, they continue in their obsessions. By contrast, there seems to be a whole realm of academics, often Catholics but not always, who are dedicated to trying to eviscerate any real real critical power from the Enlightenment ethos, and re-establish rationality in a context more akin to unchanging religious dogma. But it is a rather slippery affair with these folks. Unlike the sometime anti-intellectualism of the Evangelicals, these crypto-anti-intellectuals want to use intellectual matters themselves to do it. And it must be admitted that they have a long tradition in Western culture in their corner. And they are welcome to it. No one sane disputes their right to busy themselves with their long tradition. But it is quite another thing for these people to be involved essentially in intellectual skullduggery and manifestly thuggish hit jobs against the very basis of modern societies -- the Enlightenment. Well sadly that is exactly what one finds in this book.Read more ›
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