The connection between church membership, church activista, and volunteering is explored us. ing a three-wave panel study of young adults. Volunteering to help others solve community problems is more likely among members of churches that emphasize this-worldly social coneerns, especially among those socially involved in these churches. Among Catholics, the connection between church involvement and volunteering is formed early and remains strong. Among liberal Protestants, the connection is made only in middle age. Among moderate and conservative Protestants the.re is little connection at aU. Conservative Protestants who attend church regularly are less likely to be involved in secular volunteering and more likely to be involved in volunteering for church-related work. The results suggest caution in generalizing about the connection between religious preference or involvement, and volunteering because this connection depends on the theological interpretation of volunteering and the significance attached to frequent church attendance.

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Rights and obligations are confusing. When people really want or need something they call it a right. Can they simply attach this word to anything they want? Can people disregard obligations with impunity? This book argues that they cannot. One must understand those relationships in specific ways to really know what can or can not be done with rights and obligations in public discourse and politics. They must create a web of interaction between citizens so that more long-term social investments may be made. Professor Janoski shows that individual rights protecting privacy, free speech, and legal access are more highly developed in social democratic countries than in liberal countries. On the other hand, obligations in those same social democratic countries are higher. On the whole, rights and obligations are in balance; or, you get what rights you pay for in terms of fulfilling obligations to the state and society.

While disagreeing over the reasons why the performance of civic obligations seems to be declining, conservatives and liberals agree that people need to be reminded of their duties as citizens for this decline to be halted. But do these exhortations work? This paper tests two theories about how people become volunteers. The "normativist" perspective assumes that volunteer behavior flows from socialization into pro-social attitudes; the "social practice" perspective stresses the formative role of practical experiences and social participation. Using a panel study of high school seniors who were reinterviewed in their mid-20s and again in their early 30s, we show that volunteer work undertaken in high school has long-term benefits as does social participation more generally but that socialization into pro-social attitudes has an even stronger influence on volunteering in middle age. The implications of our study are that mandatory community service programs can boost later volunteer efforts but that socialization into appropriate citizenship attitudes is of equal, if not greater, importance.

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