Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the people who have made this book possible. First,
I would like to thank David Fasenfest, editor of Critical Sociologyand Series
Editor for the Studies in Critical Social Science for Brill. David is the one who
first proposed a special issue for Critical Sociology (31/1–2) on Religion and
Marxism and, later, that it be transformed into an edited volume. I would
like to thank Lauren Langman who showed up to my roundtable presenta-
tion on Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch at the American Sociological
Association Meeting in Miami Beach, FL in 1993, while I was a doctoral can-
didate. Together, David and Lauren, with their ongoing support, have been
my surrogate mentors.
I would like to thank the authors in this book, all of whom submitted mul-
tiple revisions of their articles. They are Rudi Siebert, Lauren Langman, Anne
Rawls, Mike Ott, Chris Brittain, Ken MacKendrick, Andrew McKinnon, George
Lundskow, Will Roberts, Bonnie Wright, David Gay and Anna Campbell Buck.
I would like to thank Lesley Kenny, a PhD student at the University of
Toronto, who did a splendid job copyediting all of the articles in this book,
and Michael Bachmann, an outstanding PhD student in the Department of
Sociology at the University of Central Florida, who had the arduous task of
combining all of the bibliographies.
I would like to thank all of my colleagues in the Department of Sociology
(and Anthropology) at the University of Central Florida. They have been
friendly and open minded toward my critical theory, with all its associations.
I would like to thank my comrades from the New School, with whom I
have had an ongoing friendship since our days of alternating between being
scholars and activists in the streets of Manhattan during the days of the first
Persian Gulf War. In particular, I thank comrades Joel Stillerman, Perry Chang,
Jan Lin and Harry Dahms.
I would like to thank my mother, Muriel Goldstein, who not only made
my career as a sociologist possible, but with whom I share a common polit-
ical understanding.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, to whom this book is dedicated.
My wife, Vicki Spetter, and children Benjamin and Rachel Spetter-Goldstein,
have had to live with a husband/father trying to get tenure at a research uni-
versity. They give my life meaning that makes the stresses of my career in
contrast seem insignificant.