The loss of religious moderates

"While one group of Americans has tended to withdraw from active involvement in faith-based communities, another group is as fully involved as ever. While the fraction of the population that is entirely disconnected from organized religion has increased, the fraction that is intensely involved has been relatively stable. In other words, religious dropouts have come at the expense of those whose religious involvement was modest but conventional. The result is that the country is becoming ever more clearly divided into two groups--the devoutly observant and the entirely unchurched. (Some might see here a certain parallel to trends in politics--more true believers, more dropouts, and fewer moderates.) This is the sociological substratum that underlies the much discussed "culture wars" of recent years."

(p. 75)

from Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" 

Ability and illness

I think my abilities with language come from a sensitivity that consequently disables me where it's mapped onto a social landscape in the third person. 

The changing conduct of political discourse as a reflection of the type of political participation

"The changing pattern of civic participation in American communities over the last two decades has shifted the balance in the larger society between the articulation of grievances and the aggregation of coalitions to address those grievances. In this sense, this disjunctive pattern of decline--cooperation falling more rapidly than self-expression--may well have encouraged the single-issue blare and declining civility of contemporary political discourse" (pp. 45 -46)

From Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone"