front cover of How It Works
How It Works
Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia
Robert P. Fairbanks II
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Of the some sixty thousand vacant properties in Philadelphia, half of them are abandoned row houses. Taken as a whole, these derelict homes symbolize the city’s plight in the wake of industrial decline. But a closer look reveals a remarkable new phenomenon—street-level entrepreneurs repurposing hundreds of these empty houses as facilities for recovering addicts and alcoholics. How It Works is a compelling study of this recovery house movement and its place in the new urban order wrought by welfare reform.

To find out what life is like in these recovery houses, Robert P. Fairbanks II goes inside one particular home in the Kensington neighborhood. Operating without a license and unregulated by any government office, the recovery house provides food, shelter, company, and a bracing self-help philosophy to addicts in an area saturated with drugs and devastated by poverty. From this starkly vivid close-up, Fairbanks widens his lens to reveal the intricate relationships the recovery houses have forged with public welfare, the formal drug treatment sector, criminal justice institutions, and the local government.

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front cover of Real Democracy
Real Democracy
The New England Town Meeting and How It Works
Frank M. Bryan
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Relying on an astounding collection of more than three decades of firsthand research, Frank M. Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them.

A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy.

Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.
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front cover of Regeneration
Regeneration
Spiritual Growth and How It Works
Emanuel Swedenborg
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2014
Centuries before popular Western culture embraced meditation, positive thinking, and the quest for enlightenment, Swedish scientist-turned-seer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) developed a simple formula for achieving personal spiritual growth.
      In his works, Swedenborg describes the two parts of our mind: the intellectual side that wrestles with questions of right and wrong, and the emotional side that drives us toward what we truly love. We are born with selfish impulses and desires, and while we may learn to act ethically, we don’t start growing as spiritual people until we transform our emotional side. That transformation, he says, happens from the outside in: first we decide intellectually to be more loving, and that decision leads us to choose consciously to act for the good of others. These external thoughts and actions gradually open us to a higher love, one that transforms our desires and ultimately our fundamental being. He calls this process regeneration.
      Swedenborg discusses regeneration in many places throughout his prolific theological writings. This book brings his key teachings on this topic together in one volume, illustrating the process of becoming a spiritual being and discussing how and why that process works.
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