Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here for more information Leadership, Fifth Edition

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
0899764007312718v1
37/4/626    most recent
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Wagner, A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Religion and Civil Society

A Critical Reappraisal of America's Civic Engagement Debate

Antonin Wagner

University of Zurich and The New School for Management and Urban Policy

This article looks at some of the cutting-edge issues that have been raised in the current civic engagement debate, notably with respect to the role played by organized religion in reviving America's democracy. The framework used to analyze the relationship between religion and civil society borrows from Arendt's, Habermas's, and Rawls's writings in political philosophy. In its core analytical claim, the article draws a division between a discourse-based deliberative democracy and one that is based on participation in mostly local communities and associations. In this context, the author contrasts a social-capital approach to understanding the role of religion and civil society with one that emphasizes the primacy of political relations and hence the importance of political capital. The purpose of the article is to provide a critical framework that can be used by theoreticians and practitioners, facing issues of management and political activism in an organizational environment, in which religious values and secular guidelines increasingly overlap.

Key Words: citizenship • civil society • deliberative democracy • religion • social/political capital

This version was published on December 1, 2008

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 4, 626-645 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0899764007312718
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?