Pious Pro-family Rhetoric: Postures and Paradoxes in Philosophical Perspective

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study examines the contemporary media debate between traditionalists and progressivists over religion, the family, and culture. Consideration of this persistent and often fierce debate reveals much about the state of religion in Western democracies; varieties of religious commitment; strategies of religious and cultural competition; religious uses of politics and political uses of religion; images of religion in the media and images of the media in religion; the conditions of a sustainable pluralism; ideals of tradition and progress; and the relations of religion and the family.