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On January 6, 2002 the Boston Globe published a reports on the Catholic Church cover up of sexual abuse by priests. The banner headline told a tragic story that would, in its basic plot, be repeated with disturbing regularity over the course of the next decade. As a result of these revelations many Catholics would leave the Church; many would remain staunchly faithful. Some Catholics would decide to keep their faith, but also to change the Church. Based on years of ethnographic research, Ewick and Steinberg studied one group of such Catholics—a chapter of Voice of the Faithful. In standing up to the Church, their project parallels that of many change seekers whose efforts face obstacles by the economic and cultural resources and organizational power they seek to change. In the case of the Church crisis, expectations of obedience, deference to hierarchy, and presumption of ecclesiastic immunity collided with individual conscience, liberty and democracy. Caught between their loyalty to the Church and their sense of justice, these Catholics reimagined the Church and their role in it. Over more than a decade they engaged in an ongoing process of collective identity through which they reimagined their place within the institutional order and the meaning of being faithful Catholics. Theirs is an all-too-familiar story about identities under stress and their reconfiguration as collective challengers; about institutional betrayal and the restoration of trust; and, about commitment and the meaning of justice.

At a time of sharp economic inequalities and political polarization, Inventing the Ties that Bind explores how Americans cooperate in workplaces, grassroots social movements, unions, churches, humanitarian initiatives, and civic forums. It focuses on people’s ideas about what joins them, and it shows how they use those ideas—those imagined relationships—to deal with standard challenges of solidarity. The variety of relationship schemas on which people routinely draw suggests that contemporary civic efforts to build solidarity by way of experiences of egalitarian intimacy may be unduly narrow. In such efforts—in public deliberative forums, intergroup dialogues, civility initiatives, and advocacy efforts—people are taught to voice their values and experiences to strangers, who in turn should relate their own stories, with the promise that that mutual self-disclosure will bridge gulfs of political opinion, build citizens’ trust in their political institutions, and mobilize the powerful on behalf of the powerless. The book’s close examination of such efforts suggests that they often discourage the negotiation and outright challenge that democratic relationships require. But this is not to say that civic reformers should give up on the task of building solidarity, only that they should capitalize more fully on Americans’ rich vernacular of cooperation. Combining a theoretical investigation of the power of imagined communities with an empirical portrait of how Americans envision that which joins them, Inventing the Ties that Bind aims to rethink the bases of solidarity.

Every time we interact with another person, we draw unconsciously on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially White people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations into taken-for-granted practices that reproduce the biases in our society. These practices can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a résumé. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation. In this book we show how racism is coded into “everyday” expectations of social interaction, in what we call Interaction Orders of Race, in “tacit” taken-for-granted ways. This unconscious racism is coded into greeting and introductory sequences, perceptions of who can hold high status identities, and basic expectations about honesty, health and masculinity. We explore the Interaction Order expectations of Black Americans and their neighborhoods finding not only that social order among African Americans is different than for White Americans, but that it is more democratic. Because Race has been institutionalized in social expectations, acting on racism doesn’t require conscious intent: actions are racist if Race is coded into them. This tacit racism divides the nation, providing fertile ground for manipulation of issues associated with Race (e.g. healthcare, guns, voting rights and immigration) by foreign powers and wealthy special interests, such that Race divisions now pose a clear and present danger to the nation and our democracy.