Robert wuthnow loose connections board

Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future
by Robert Wuthnow.
Princeton University Press,
Hardcover, pages, $

Small towns, as Robert Wuthnow points out in his ambitious new book, are not municipal subdivisions of large metropolitan areas. Rather, they are modestly sized (population 25, or less) independent communities that feature boundaries or centers that usually make topographic sense—which is to say, locales where smallness of scale, agricultural links, and terrain (call it “spatial signature”) conspire to create a place that people can commit to by being born there, or settling there, or even (this is frequently a wish) dying there. Hence these towns are hard to kill.

Though small towns are pretty much everywhere in serious decline owing to the widespread devaluation of landedness, a swing toward corporate (absentee) ownership, and tolls exacted by mining—small-town residents nearly everywhere now have to put up with boarded-up storefronts on top of limited access to cultural amenities like symphonies and theaters—these communities are still numerous. In the United States alone there are over 30 million people living in 14, small towns scattered across every conceivable kind of landscape, be it West Texas Llano Estacado, upstate New York’s Southern Tier, Appalachian hill country, or Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and though a few of these communities have lost even government offices and health care providers in addition to taverns and stores (therefore ceasing to exist), most of them are proving to be surprisingly resilient.

Take Cadiz, Ohio (population 3,), the town where this landowner shops, goes to mass, and does business. Every small town requires a founding narrative if it is to cohere and command loyalty, and luckily for Cadiz the authoritative genesis story is succinct (it’s all in the name: Cadiz became “Cadiz” in honor of potential trading partners who had endured a British naval blockade ever

American sociologist (born )

Robert John Wuthnow (born ) is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Princeton University, where he is also the former chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Life and career

Wuthnow was born in Kansas in He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Kansas in and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology at the University of California at Berkeley in His dissertation was Consciousness and the Transformation of Society. While at Berkeley, Wuthnow worked closely with Charles Glock, Neil Smelser, Robert Bellah, Guy Swanson, and Gertrude Selznick. Wuthnow's first years at Berkeley were during the widespread protests on campus around the US, which ultimately inspired his dissertation. Glock and Bellah received a grant to study the symbolic—especially the religious—dimensions of the counter-culture movement from the Institute for Religion and Social Change. This four-year project resulted in the edited volume The New Religious Consciousness in Wuthnow realized that the counter-culture movements were just the most prominent evidence of deeper changes in American culture and used data from the project to argue this in his dissertation, eventually published as The Consciousness Reformation in

After a couple years as an instructor at the University of Arizona from to , when he took position as assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University where he is currently.

Wuthnow has published widely in the sociology of religion, culture, and civil society. His current research and teaching focuses on social change, the sociology of belonging, community, rural sociology, religion and politics, and theory.

Wuthnow is editor of The Encyclopedia of Politics an