- •Introduction
- •Unit 1. Family: Father, Mother and Me?
- •Learning outcomes:
- •Interracial and interethnic families
- •Interethnic family futures
- •Of the interviewee's point of view
- •Unit 2. Sociology of Religion: Spirited Away?
- •Learning outcomes:
- •The New Age religion
- •God and shopping by Steve Bruce
- •The global cafeteria
- •How New Age beliefs fit the wider society
- •Increasing rationalisation
- •Your successful survey report includes:
- •Learning outcomes:
- •The functionalist perspective on education
- •Changing education, changing times by christopher pole
- • Task 4. While reading part “Inside the school: The curriculum” put the following points of the plan in the correct order:
- •Inside the school (I) The curriculum
- •Comparing coeducation and single-sex schooling by Richard q'Leary
- •Conclusion
- •Prefixes
- •Suffixes
- •Faith schools by Joan Garrod
- •Criticisms of the expansion of faith schools
- •A shining example
- •Your successful “for and against” essay includes:
- •Learning outcomes:
- • Task 8. Replace the words in italics with words from the box above:
- •Nobody loves the middle class
- •The cultural characteristics of the middle class
- •Middle-class suburban culture
- •Socialisation and the middle class
- •Your successful opinion essay includes:
- •Useful language: Giving Your Opinion
- •The link between employment and social class
- •The upper class
- •Concentration of wealth
- •The upper-class family
- •Upper-class education
- •The influence of the upper-class peer group
- •Conclusion
- •Explaining why you are including things:
- •Imagining how they will react:
- •Learning outcomes:
- •Title b:________________________________
- •Title c:________________________________
- •Title f:________________________________
- •Your successful essay suggesting solutions to problems includes:
- •Family life and poverty by John Williams
- •Unit 6. Have the right to be healthy?
- •Learning outcomes:
God and shopping by Steve Bruce
A brief look at some recent figures shows what the archbishops mean about the decline of Christianity in Britain. In 1851 about 40% of British adults attended church; now about 8% do. In 1900 a third of the population belonged to a Christian church and more than that regularly attended; now only 17% claim to be members and only half of those actually attend church. Over the last century the country's population has almost doubled but the number of full-time clergy has halved.
Baptisms, church weddings, church funerals: every index of interest in organised religion shows decline. And although indices of belief remain much higher than measures of activity, they are also heading the same way. Table 1 shows clearly the gradual decline of belief in the Christian image of God. There are now more atheists and agnostics in Britain than Christians.
But alongside the decline of the Christian churches, there are signs of what looks like a countervailing tendency. Go into any major bookstore and pace out the shelf space given to books under the classification of “Mind, Body and Spirit” and you will find that there is considerable interest in unconventional religion. While the churches which once defined our culture shrink, the area in which spirituality crosses over into the occult, human potential and alternative medical therapies grows.
Task 5. Look through the extract entitled “The New Age religion” to check you suppositions. What is the structure of this part? In your opinion, what is the aim of such organization of the text? How do you think it would reflect the representation of the ideas?
While reading write down in one sentence into your note-books the main idea of each of the five paragraphs. Compare your sentences with those of your group-mates. What is your own attitude to these captures themes?
The New Age religion
The essence of New Age religion and its appeal to modern societies is captured in the following themes:
(1) The self is divine
The New Age gives pride of place to the human self Christianity always assumed a division between God the creator and his creation. More than that, it assumed that people were basically bad and only became good by subjecting themselves to God's will. Religion was about controlling the self. The New Age supposes that the human self is essentially good. If it is bad, that is a result of our environment and circumstances. The aim of the New Age is to strip away the residues of our bad experiences and free our 'self within', which many New Agers go so far as to regard as divine.
(2) Everything is connected
New Agers are holistic. They have borrowed from the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the idea that everything — us, our environment, the supernatural world — is one single essence.
(3) The self is the final authority
At the heart of the New Age lies a novel idea about truth. Most of us suppose that some things are a matter of opinion or taste. “I can't stand country music” is a statement of taste. But we suppose that there is a vast area of knowledge that is not a matter of opinion. Either the Earth is flat or it isn't and whichever it is has got nothing to do with what I think about it.
The New Age is unusual in the status it gives to each person. New Agers cannot ask: “Do crystals have healing powers?” They have to ask: “Do crystals work for you?” At Findhorn, the oldest and largest New Age community in Europe, they have an interesting rule: you can only make what they call 'I statements'. When you are discussing something, you are free to say “I think this” or “I feel that”, but you are not allowed to announce: “It is the case that” because when you do you are claiming that these views have some special authority.
So, there is no single truth, no authoritative knowledge: there is only what works for you and that might not be the same as what works for someone else. If you want to believe that we all have a personal angel, well, that's fine, because that is what works for you. If you want to believe the pyramids were built by spacemen, well, that's your truth.
New Agers suppose that there is no authority higher than the individual. Of course, we can learn by reading books and listening to great teachers, but the final arbiter of the truth is you. Personal experience is the only test that matters.