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This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license.This book portrays men's experiences of home alone leave and how it affects their lives and family gender roles in different policy contexts and explores how this unique parental leave design is implemented in these contrasting policy regimes. The book brings together three major theoretical strands: social policy, in particular the literature on comparative leave policy developments; family and gender studies, in particular the analysis of gendered divisions of work and care and recent shifts in parenting and work-family balance; critical studies of men and masculinities, with a specific focus on fathers and fathering in contemporary western societies and life-courses. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with fathers across eleven countries, the book shows that the experiences and social processes associated with fathers'home alone leave involve a diversity of trends, revealing both innovations and absence of change, including pluralization as well as the constraining influence of policy, gender, and social context. As a theoretical and empirical book it raises important issues on modernization of the life course and the family in contemporary societies. The book will be of particular interest to scholars in comparing western societies and welfare states as well as to scholars seeking to understand changing work-life policies and family life in societies with different social and historical pathways.

This book explains music's comprehensive ontology, its way of existence and processing, as specified in its compact characterization: music embodies meaningful communication and mediates physically between its emotional and mental layers. The book unfolds in a basic discourse in everyday language that is accessible to everybody who wants to understand what this topic is about. Musical ontology is delayed in its fundamental dimensions: its realities, its meaningful communication, and its embodied utterance from musical creators to an interested audience. The authors'approach is applicable to every musical genre and is scientific, the book is suitable for non-musicians and non-scientists alike.

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with Commonweal magazine, presents the second of two volumes in the groundbreaking series, American Catholics in the Public Square, a project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Essays by scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, church administrators and lobbyists, novelists, activists, policy makers and politicians address the most critical issues facing the Catholic Church in the United States.Volume 2, American Catholics, American Culture: Tradition and Resistance, is introduced by Peter Steinfels and Robert Royal. Part One,'Against the Grain,'explores the philosophical and practical differences between Catholicism and American culture on issues in sexuality, marriage, abortion, stem cell research, women's rights, and physician-assisted suicide. The essays attempt to mediate the divide between Catholicism's communal and personalist view of the human person and the American preference for autonomy and pluralism. Part Two,'Popular Culture & Literature,'confronts the role and interaction of the Church in popular culture and explores the identity of the'Catholic'writer on the literary page and in the media. Part Three,'Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice?'endeavors to define what anti-Catholicism is, where it is found in North American culture, what it means for maintaining group identity, and how it can be interpreted as an American or religious phenomenon.

Sheed & Ward, in partnership with the Commonweal Foundation and with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, proudly presents the first of two volumes in a groundbreaking series called American Catholics in the Public Square. The result of a three-year study sponsored by Pew aimed at understanding the contributions to U.S. civic life of the Catholic, Jewish, mainline and evangelical Protestant, African-American, Latino, and Muslim communities in the United States, the two volumes in this series gather selected essays from the Commonweal Colloquia and the joint meetings organized by the Commonweal Foundation and The Faith and Reason Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. Participants in the Commonweal colloquia and the joint meetings—leading Catholic scholars, journalists, lawyers, business and labor leaders, novelists and poets, church administrators and lobbyists, activists, policy makers and politicians—produced approximately forty-five essays presented at ten meetings that brought together over two hundred and fifty participants. The two volumes in the American Catholics in the Public Square Series address many of the most critical issues now facing the Catholic Church in the United States by drawing from the four goals of the colloquia-to identify, assess, and critique the distinctive elements in Catholicism's approach to civic life; to generate concrete analyses and recommendations for strengthening Catholic civic engagement; to encompass a broad spectrum of political and social views of Catholics to encourage dialogue between Catholic leaders, religious and secular media, and political thinkers; to reexamine the long-standing Catholic belief in the obligation to promote the common good and to clarify how Catholics may work better with those holding other religious or philosophical convictions toward revitalizing both the religious environment and civic participation in the American republic.This first volume, American Catholics and Civic Engagement: A Distinctive Voice, i

This timely and thought-provoking book explores children's lives in modern cities. At a time of intense debate about the quality of life in cities, this book examines how they can become good places for children to live in. Through contributions from childhood experts in Europe, Australia and America, the book shows the importance of studying children's lives in cities in a comparative and generational perspective. It also contains fascinating accounts of city living from children themselves, and offers practical design solutions.The authors consider the importance of the city as a social, material and cultural place for children, and explore the connections and boundaries between home, neighbourhood, community and city. Throughout, they stress the importance of engaging with how children see their city in order to reform it within a child-sensitive framework.This book is invaluable reading for students and academics in the field of anthropology, sociology, social policy and education. It will also be of interest to those working in the field of architecture, urban planning and design.

Much academic work on families and households has focused in the past on the adult members. However, a surge of interest in children's issues has occurred recently in the social sciences. A key theoretical assumption in this area of research is that children's relationships and cultures are worthy of study in their own right and that children play an active part in the construction of these cultures and relationships.; This work provides perspectives on children in their family contexts. It shows that children's needs and wishes have often been neglected in the social sciences, especially in the areas of law, social policy and sociology. The authors present empirical research on children and young people in contemporary family settings and offer theoretical insights which challenge existing thinking on modern childhood. They draw on international comparisons between the condition of childhood and children's welfare, putting forward an argument for future research and policy initiatives needing to concentrate on, and even privilege, children.