Christian Smith

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations_. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures_. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.