Back to the Future: Pre-modern Religious Policy in Post-secular China

• March 1, 2009

Richard Madsen is the author or co-author of eleven books on Chinese culture, American culture, and international relations. He has also written scholarly articles on how to compare cultures and how to facilitate dialogue among them. His best known works on American culture are those written with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton: Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995) and The Good Society (New York, Knopf, 1991). These books explore and criticize the culture of individualism and the institutions that sustain it. Habits of the Heart won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His books on China include Chen Village under Mao and Deng (co-authored with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger, Berkeley, UC Press, 1992), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (UC Press, 1984, winner of the C. Wright Mills Award), Unofficial China (co-edited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), China and the American Dream (UC Press, 1994), China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (UC Press, 1998), and Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (co-edited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard.