Christian Signature and Archetype in Frank Capra\u27s It\u27s A Wonderful Life

It\u27s A Wonderful Life is both a sentimental holiday entertainment and a serious examination of a search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment. As a psychodrama that externalizes George Bailey\u27s values and desires in the surrounding characters, the film creates a narrative we can easily relate to, but arranged as an archetypal journey that reveals a deeper spiritual significance by identifying George with Christ\u27s quest for salvation. The increased psychodramatic density, combined with the archetypal structure, transforms a sentimental holiday entertainment into a serious work of art with lasting religious and spiritual meaning, thereby accounting for its enduring popularity

Group solidarity and social order in Japan

This paper seeks to explain why Japan has attained a higher level of social order than comparably developed western national societies. To do so, it distinguishes the attainment of local order in social groups from the global order in national societies. Recent models of spontaneous, self-organizing order are insufficient to account for global order. In contrast to the more popular normative explanation of order in Japan, which holds that a consensus on fundamental values derived from Confucian roots is an essential cause, this paper proposes a solidaristic theory built on rational choice premises. This new theory views global order as a by-product of dependence and visibility mechanisms within key social groups such as families, schools and firms. A wide range of comparative evidence reveals that the solidaristic theory provides a superior explanation of the high level of social order in Japan than the normative one