{"title":"Christian Smith","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into Christian Smith's thrilling narratives, blending suspense, mystery, and sharp wit. Perfect for fans of fast-paced thrillers and intricate plots, these books offer a gripping escape. Start your adventure here!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"paradox-of-generosity-book-christian-smith-9780199394906","title":"The Paradox of Generosity","description":"Determining why, when, and to whom people feel compelled to be generous affords invaluable insight into positive and problematic ways of life. Organ donation, volunteering, and the funding of charities can all be illuminated by sociological and psychological perspectives on how American adults conceive of and demonstrate generosity. Focusing not only on financial giving but on the many diverse forms generosity can take, Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson show the deep impactusually good, sometimes destructivethat giving has on individuals.  The Paradox of Generosity is the first study to make use of the cutting-edge empirical data collected in Smith's groundbreaking, multidisciplinary, five-year Science of Generosity Initiative. It draws on an extensive survey of 2,000 Americans, more than sixty in-depth interviews with individuals across twelve states, and analysis of over 1,000 photographs and other visual materials. This wealth of evidence reveals a consistent link between demonstrating generosity and leading a better life: more generous people are happier, suffer fewer illnesses and injuries, live with a greater sense of purpose, and experience less depression. Smith and Davidson also show, however, that to achieve a better life a person must practice generosity regularly-random acts of kindness are not enough.  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Smith identifies five major problems facing very many young people today: confused moral reasoning, routine intoxication, materialistic life goals, regrettable sexual experiences, and disengagement from civic and political life. The trouble does not lie only with the emerging adults or their poor individual decisions but has much deeper roots in mainstream American culture--a culture which emerging adults have largely inherited rather than created. Older adults, Smith argues, must recognize that much of the responsibility for the pain and confusion young people face lies with them. Rejecting both sky-is-falling alarmism on the one hand and complacent disregard on the other, Smith suggests the need for what he calls \"realistic concern\"--and a reconsideration of our cultural priorities and practices--that will help emerging adults more skillfully engage unique challenges they face.   Even-handed, engagingly written, and based on comprehensive research, Lost in Transition brings much needed attention to the darker side of the transition to adulthood.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49562454327569,"sku":"GOR005845032","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49724653207825,"sku":"CIN0199828024G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50560787185937,"sku":"CIN0199828024VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000243749137,"sku":"NIN9780199828029","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":51883161059601,"sku":"CIN0199828024LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52616719139089,"sku":"NLS9780199828029","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199828024.jpg?v=1751435944"},{"product_id":"disruptive-religion-book-christian-smith-9780415914055","title":"Disruptive Religion","description":"Religion has long played a central role in many social and political movements. 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This book builds on recent developments in science, theory, and philosophy to advance an innovative theory of religion that goes beyond the problematic theoretical paradigms of the past.  Drawing on the philosophy of critical realism and personalist social theory, Christian Smith answers key questions about the nature, powers, workings, appeal, and future of religion. He defines religion in a way that resolves myriad problems and ambiguities in past accounts, explains the kinds of causal influences religion exerts in the world, and examines the key cognitive process that makes religion possible. Smith explores why humans are religious in the first place--uniquely so as a species--and offers an account of secularization and religious innovation and persistence that breaks the logjam in which so many religion scholars have been stuck for so long. 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At a time of overall decline of traditional religion and an increased interest in personal “spirituality,” Religious Parenting investigates the ways that parents transmit religious beliefs, values, and practices to their kids. We know that parents are the most important influence on their children’s religious lives, yet parents have been virtually ignored in previous work on religious socialization. Renowned religion scholar Christian Smith and his collaborators Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo explore American parents’ strategies, experiences, beliefs, and anxieties regarding religious transmission through hundreds of in-depth interviews that span religious traditions, social classes, and family types all around the country.  Throughout we hear the voices of evangelical, Catholic, Mormon, mainline and black Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist parents and discover that, despite massive diversity, American parents share a nearly identical approach to socializing their children religiously. For almost all, religion is important for the foundation it provides for becoming one’s best self on life’s difficult journey. Religion is primarily a resource for navigating the challenges of this life, not preparing for an afterlife. Parents view it as their job, not religious professionals’, to ground their children in life-enhancing religious values that provide resilience, morality, and a sense of purpose. Challenging longstanding sociological and anthropological assumptions about culture, the authors demonstrate that parents of highly dissimilar backgrounds share the same “cultural models” when passing on religion to their children.  Taking an extensive look into questions of religious practice and childrearing, Religious Parenting uncovers parents’ real-life challenges while breaking innovative theoretical ground.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49851291435281,"sku":"CIN0691194963VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51452445065489,"sku":"CIN0691194963G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691194963.jpg?v=1772273862"},{"product_id":"what-is-a-person-book-christian-smith-9780226765914","title":"What Is a Person?","description":"What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist's quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive, \"What Is a Person?\" offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49864323465489,"sku":"CIN0226765911A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226765911.jpg?v=1750738179"},{"product_id":"bible-made-impossible-book-christian-smith-9781587433030","title":"The Bible Made Impossible","description":"Biblicism, an approach to the Bible common among some American evangelicals, emphasizes together the Bible's exclusive authority, infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability. 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Far from challenging the inspiration and authority of Scripture, Smith critiques a particular rendering of it, encouraging evangelicals to seek a more responsible, coherent, and defensible approach to biblical authority.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49889671643409,"sku":"CIN1587433036G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50227963101457,"sku":"CIN1587433036VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1587433036.jpg?v=1751245061"},{"product_id":"to-flourish-or-destruct-book-christian-smith-9780226231952","title":"To Flourish or Destruct","description":"In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately \"capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our 'souls' or 'hearts.'\" Building on Smith's previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structures? Smith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends-a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith's ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49914836812049,"sku":"CIN022623195XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695414509841,"sku":"CIN022623195XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022623195X.jpg?v=1750973991"},{"product_id":"what-is-a-person-book-christian-smith-9780226765945","title":"What Is a Person?","description":"What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist's quest to interpret and explain social life. 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This work explains why more than 100,000 US citizens marched in the streets, illegally housed refugees, travelled to Central American war zones, committed civil disobedience, and hounded their political representatives to contest the Reagan administration's policy of sponsoring wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Focusing on the movement's three most important national campaigns - Witness for Peace, Sanctuary, and the Pledge of Resistance - this work demonstrates the centrality of morality as a political motivator, highlights the importance of political opportunities in movement outcomes, and examines the social structuring of insurgent consciousness. Based on extensive surveys, interviews, and research, the book aims to increase understanding of the formation of individual activist identities, of national movement dynamics, and of religious resources for political activism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50032782115089,"sku":"CIN0226763366G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346027155729,"sku":"CIN0226763366VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53575503511825,"sku":"CIN0226763366A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0226763366.jpg?v=1754475918"},{"product_id":"moral-believing-animals-book-christian-smith-9780195162028","title":"Moral, Believing Animals","description":"What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals, Christian Smith offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith's work is based on the assumption (unfashionable in certain circles) that human beings have an identifiable and peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Smith argues that all people are at bottom believers, whose lives, actions, and institutions are constituted, motivated, and governed by narrative traditions and moral orders on which they inescapably depend. This approach - which has profound consequences for how we think about knowledge, culture, social action, institutions, religion, and the task of social sciences - will be of interest to scholars in sociology, social theory, religious and cultural studies, psychology, and anthropology.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50135661347089,"sku":"CIN0195162021G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51497921642769,"sku":"CIN0195162021VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52516031234321,"sku":"NLS9780195162028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0195162021.jpg?v=1750875762"},{"product_id":"christian-america-book-christian-smith-9780520234703","title":"Christian America?","description":"In recent decades Protestant evangelicalism has become a conspicuous and - to many Americans, worrisome - part of this country's cultural and political landscape. 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On issues such as religion in education, 'family values,' Christian political activism, and tolerance of other religions and moralities, evangelicals are highly disparate and conflicted. 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Rhoades, Bishop, Fort Wayne-South Bend Fully embracing the ambitious goal of Notre Dame's president to create first-rate undergraduate and graduate programs, all rooted intellectually in Catholicism, Christian Smith spells out why it is very difficult to achieve all three . . . As difficult as it is to reach that goal, Smith suggests a way forward. --James L. Heft, President, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies Building Catholic Higher Education offers a compelling vision of the unique contribution Catholic colleges and universities make to higher education, and explains why we should take care to preserve them. --John Garvey, President, The Catholic University of America Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame. John C. 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Analyzing a wide range of social surveys and government and denominational statistical datasets and drawing on in-depth interviews with Christian pastors and church members in seven different states, the book identifies a crucial set of factors that appear to depress religious financial support-among them the powerful allure of a mass-consumerist culture and its impact on Americans' priorities, parishioners' suspicions of waste and abuse by nonprofit administrators, clergy hesitations to boldly ask for money, and the lack of structure and routine in the way most American Christians give away money. In their conclusion, the authors suggest practical steps that clergy and lay leaders might take to counteract these tendencies and better educate their congregations about the transformative effects of generous giving.   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Sociology appears on the surface to be a secular, scientific enterprise-its founding fathers were mostly atheists. Its basic operating premises are secular and naturalistic. Sociologists today are disproportionately not religious, compared to all Americans, and often irreligious.   The Sacred Project of American Sociology shows, counter-intuitively, that the secular enterprise that everyday sociology appears to be pursuing is actually not what is really going on at sociology's deepest level. Christian Smith conducts a self-reflexive, tables-turning, cultural and institutional sociology of the profession of American sociology itself, showing that this allegedly secular discipline ironically expresses Emile Durkheim's inescapable sacred, exemplifies its own versions of Marxist false consciousness, and generates a spirited reaction against Max Weber's melancholically observed disenchantment of the world.  American sociology does not escape the analytical net that it casts over the rest of the ordinary world. Sociology itself is a part of that very human, very social, often very sacred and spiritual world. And sociology's ironic mis-recognition of its own sacred project leads to a variety of arguably self-destructive and distorting tendencies. 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It reports the findings of The National Study of Youth and Religion, the largest and most detailed such study ever undertaken. The NYSR conducted a nationwide telephone survey of teens and significant caregivers, as well as nearly 300 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a sample of the population that was surveyed. The results show that religion and spirituality are indeed very significant in the lives of many American teenagers. Among many other discoveries, they find that teenagers are far more influenced by the religious beliefs and practices of their parents and caregivers than commonly thought. They refute the conventional wisdom that teens are \"spiritual but not religious.\" And they confirm that greater religiosity is significantly associated with more positive adolescent life outcomes. 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Young Catholic America, the latest book based on the groundbreaking National Study of Youth and Religion, explores a crucial stage in the life of Catholics. Drawing on in-depth surveys and interviews of Catholics and ex-Catholics ages eighteen to twenty-threea demographic commonly known as early emerging adulthoodleading sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues offer a wealth of insight into the wide variety of religious practices and beliefs among young Catholics today, the early influences and life-altering events that lead them to embrace the Church or abandon it, and how being Catholic affects them as they become full-fledged adults. Beyond its rich collection of statistical data, the book includes vivid case studies of individuals spanning a full decade, as well as insight into the twentieth-century events that helped to shape the Church and its members in America.  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More and more people claim to be \"spiritual but not religious.\" Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in \"organized religion\" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religious younger Americans replace older more-religious ones and increasingly fewer American children are raised by religious parents.   All this is clear. But what is less clear is exactly why this is happening. We know a lot more about the fact that traditional American religion has declined than we do about why this is so.   Why Religion Went Obsolete aims to change that. Drawing on survey data and hundreds of interviews, Christian Smith offers a sweeping, multifaceted account of why many Americans have lost faith in traditional religion. An array of large-scale social forces-everything from the end of the Cold War to the rise of the internet to shifting ideas about gender and sexuality-came together to render traditional religion culturally obsolete. For growing numbers of Americans, traditional religion no longer seems useful or relevant. Using quantitative empirical measures of big-picture changes over time as well as exploring the larger cultural environment--the cultural \"zeitgeist\"--Smith explains why this is the case and what it means for the future. Crucially, he argues, it does not mean a strictly secular future. Rather, Americans' spiritual impulses are being channelled in new and interesting directions.  Why Religion Went Obsolete is a tour de force from one of our leading chroniclers of religion in America.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201916895505,"sku":"NGR9780197800737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52495840608529,"sku":"NIN9780197800737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52585463546129,"sku":"NLS9780197800737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53557306982673,"sku":"GOR014959171","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0197800734.jpg?v=1751227709"},{"product_id":"prcis-clinique-des-affections-des-voies-urinaires-chez-l-homme-book-christian-smith-9782019644628","title":"Prcis Clinique Des Affections Des Voies Urinaires Chez l'Homme","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51220665696529,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51220667007249,"sku":"NIN9782019644628","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/2019644622.jpg?v=1751094314"},{"product_id":"building-catholic-higher-education-book-christian-smith-9781498205795","title":"Building Catholic Higher Education","description":"American Catholic universities and colleges are wrestling today with how to develop in ways that faithfully serve their mission in Catholic higher education without either secularizing or becoming sectarian. Major challenges are faced when trying to simultaneously build and sustain excellence in undergraduate teaching, strengthen faculty research and publishing, and deepen the authentically Catholic character of education. This book uses the particular case of the University of Notre Dame to raise larger issues, to make substantive proposals, and thus to contribute to a national conversation affecting all Catholic universities and colleges in the United States (and perhaps beyond) today. Its arguments focus particularly on challenging questions around the recruitment, hiring, and formation of faculty in Catholic universities and colleges.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52138227204369,"sku":"NLS9781498205795","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53036594987281,"sku":"NIN9781498205795","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781498205795.jpg?v=1757561549"},{"product_id":"how-to-go-from-being-a-good-evangelical-to-a-committed-catholic-in-ninety-five-d-book-christian-smith-9781498213387","title":"How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps","description":"American evangelicalism has recently experienced a new openness to Roman Catholicism, and many evangelicals, both famous and ordinary, have joined the Catholic Church or are considering the possibility. This book helps evangelicals who are exploring Catholicism to sort out the kind of concerns that typically come up in discerning whether to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church. In simple language, it explains many theological misunderstandings that evangelicals often have about Catholicism and suggests the kind of practical steps many take to enter the Catholic Church. The book frames evangelicals becoming Roman Catholic as a kind of paradigm shift involving the buildup of anomalies about evangelicalism, a crisis of the evangelical paradigm, a paradigm revolution, and the consolidation of the new Catholic paradigm. It will be useful for both evangelicals interested in pursuing and understanding Catholicism and Catholic pastoral workers seeking to help evangelical seekers who come to them.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52473623019793,"sku":"NLS9781498213387","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750885159185,"sku":"NIN9781498213387","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781498213387.jpg?v=1759840244"},{"product_id":"to-flourish-or-destruct-book-christian-smith-9780226759920","title":"To Flourish or Destruct","description":"In his 2010 book What Is a Person?, Christian Smith argued that sociology had for too long neglected this fundamental question. Prevailing social theories, he wrote, do not adequately “capture our deep subjective experience as persons, crucial dimensions of the richness of our own lived lives, what thinkers in previous ages might have called our ‘souls’ or ‘hearts.’” Building on Smith’s previous work, To Flourish or Destruct examines the motivations intrinsic to this subjective experience: Why do people do what they do? How can we explain the activity that gives rise to all human social life and social structures?     Smith argues that our actions stem from a motivation to realize what he calls natural human goods: ends that are, by nature, constitutionally good for all human beings. He goes on to explore the ways we can and do fail to realize these ends—a failure that can result in varying gradations of evil. Rooted in critical realism and informed by work in philosophy, psychology, and other fields, Smith’s ambitious book situates the idea of personhood at the center of our attempts to understand how we might shape good human lives and societies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52734625251601,"sku":"NIN9780226759920","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780226759920.jpg?v=1763396379"},{"product_id":"precis-clinique-des-affections-des-voies-urinaires-chez-l-homme-book-christian-smith-9782329122939","title":"Précis Clinique Des Affections Des Voies Urinaires Chez l'Homme","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52761192825105,"sku":"NIN9782329122939","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9782329122939.jpg?v=1763588935"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-christian-smith.oembed?page=2","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}