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We explore how people experience the sacred in their everyday lives using a recently developed research technique—smartphone-based experience sampling method (S-ESM). The primary goal of our experience-driven approach is to explore the contours and variations of spiritual awareness within people's day-to-day lives. We seek to better understand when and where spiritual awareness is likely to arise, and the contexts in which it is rare. Our smartphone-based data allow us to track the many contexts in which an awareness of the sacred occurs, as reported in real time during people's normal daily activities. We parse out how immediate contextual factors and how people's more habitual behaviors are related to their spiritual experiences. This illuminates a wide range of factors that influence spiritual experiences that have not received much scholarly attention, and enables us to connect cutting-edge quantitative methods with qualitative scholarship on spirituality. We hope this will open the door to the development of new theories of situated spiritual experience.

Contrary to the notion that medical science has supplanted religious understandings of human suffering, recent research suggests that health-care workers like nurses can still portray their confrontations with illness and death in spiritual terms through storytelling. However, scholars have yet to systematically analyze the rhetorical devices used to construct spiritual meanings. Drawing on a symbolic interactionist perspective, we theorize that front-line health professionals can deploy various rhetorical devices to infuse their workplace interactions with a spiritual significance. We also propose novel fuzzy set analysis techniques for determining which configurations of devices are most important in developing spiritual meanings. This approach was illustrated by examining 173 stories elicited from nurses at a nonsectarian, teaching hospital about encounters at work that significantly impacted their understanding of spirituality. Consistent with our expectations, the way in which nurses tell stories about their experiences not only shapes whether they attach spiritual significance to them, but whether they perceive spirituality and medicine to be compatible. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research on lived religion, conflicting identities, and institutional boundaries.

Religious leaders, across religious traditions and demographic backgrounds, engage in politics in America. However, making sense of this is not an easy task, especially when their religious and political positions do not align. In these instances, they must somehow reconcile their incongruous positions. This article draws upon interview conversations with black religious leaders to explore how this is achieved. It is revealed that respondents bridge the space between their religious and political positions mainly by deploying three mechanisms: religious sequestration, issue minimization, and selective denial. This study contributes to our understanding of how religious leaders make sense of privileging civic and political positions over religious orthodoxy. It outlines the implications of this for black religious leaders specifically and the role of religious leaders in civic and political spheres more broadly.

The experiences of men in traditional religions are complex, at times inconsistent, and not necessarily the direct result of religious teachings. This article draws from two qualitative case studies to examine the ways in which evangelical and Latter-Day Saint men understand masculinity and their spiritual beliefs in the context of sexual activity. The authors present two masculine practices—acceptance of sexual rejection and sexual indifference—that allow religious men in this study to simultaneously challenge and uphold the system of hegemonic masculinity that their traditions promote. These findings point to the moments when creative, interpretative work helps religious men to reconcile their experiences with religious expectations and to alleviate the tensions they face in their everyday lives. This article offers new insights into how gender and sexuality studies may be integrated into the sociology of religion.

In spite of its different cantonal jurisdictions and traditions, the development of religious education in Switzerland over the past decade has taken a common direction: the state has assumed a more active role in the field of religious education in public (state-run) schools. In this article, we ask the question: How do key social actors interpret these reforms and how do these interpretations relate to the social structure of religion in Switzerland, in particular with respect to the majority category of the so-called distanced Christians? Drawing on qualitative interviews with members of the schools’ teaching staff, school administrators, and church representatives, the article highlights a dominant interpretative pattern that frames the socially accepted representation of religion in public schools. Thus, rather than addressing the pedagogical dimension of religious education, we discuss the significance of this pattern for the debate on the public presence of religion in Switzerland and Europe.

Research on religious attributions has been limited by a preoccupation with disentangling "religious" from "naturalistic" attributions and a failure to capture the attributions that people make in response to meaningful events. Thirty years of research has shown that even under optimum conditions religious attributions are rare compared to naturalistic ones. This research draws on unique archival materials comprising letters written to the Panacea Society containing self-reported effects of a spiritual healing treatment based on water-taking practices. This analysis examined attributions over time among a sample of letter writers (N = 19) from the 1920s using the Leeds Attributional Coding System to examine patterns of attributions that correspondents made in response to improvement and worsening of health outcomes. In line with previous research, religious attributions were more common for positive outcomes than negative outcomes. Contrary to previous research, religious attributions accounted for the majority of attributions made compared with nonreligious attributions. We discuss the implications for future research in studying attributions in real-life meaningful settings and in expanding the repertoire of attributions to include religious ritual and community.

Martin Riesebrodt argues that his theory of religion can help explain religion's enduring power in the contemporary globalizing and secularizing world. Although he emphasizes the necessity of objective categories for theorizing religion's purpose, adherents’ narratives about their religious practices reveal lived relationships between ideal-typical liturgical texts (which help comprise religion) and their appropriations of them for navigating rapidly changing social contexts (religiousness). The validity of Riesebrodt's approach for explaining religion in empirical settings is demonstrated by using ethnographic interviews of Muslim reformist women in Dakar, Senegal. These female adherents’ discourses on the practices of veiling, prayer, and preaching the uniqueness of God highlight the ways religion's directives operate in a dialectical relationship with a religiousness that encompasses their dual efforts to achieve closeness to God and overtly critique other Muslim groups, contemporary urban life, and the state.

No single paradigm or debate currently orients the social scientific study of religion. Because of this, those engaged in the multidisciplinary study of religion find that a public conversation is often difficult. In this article and the Forum it introduces, we explore Martin Riesebrodt's recently published book, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion. Responding to the inadequacies of secularization paradigms, rational choice models, and postmodern criticism, Riesebrodt proposes an approach that ideal-typically reconstructs the subjective meanings of institutionalized religious practices (liturgies). These subjective meanings center on the prevention and management of crises—social, natural, and bodily—through appeal and access to superhuman powers. This pragmatic emphasis on the superhuman defines religion as a distinct sphere of social action transhistorically and transculturally. Riesebrodt's theory creates new analytical possibilities, especially for understanding the modern resurgence of religion under conditions of secularization.

This article uses and develops Martin Riesebrodt's distinction between religion and religious tradition to shed light on the making of various articulations of religious identities and political projects. Based on extensive research on the Polish and Quebecois cases, I show how social and state actors in these societies reactivate past religious traditions to respond to current social transformations and articulate societal projects and advance political agendas in the present. In both cases, religion and religious tradition are juxtaposed to articulate new national identities or fortify older ones, and to respond more specifically to the challenges posed by “pluralism.” I suggest that sociologists who work at the intersection of religion and politics can contribute to our understanding of the various registers through which religion, religious action, and religious tradition are rendered meaningful to social actors, used for different goals (religious and not) and transformed in the process.

This essay is grounded in my on-going ruminations about religion and rurality. These reflections have at least three distinct sources. First, I have been involved in a research project over the last several years, working with six ethnographers on a study of rural churches in six townships in Missouri.1 Second, I have been challenged by the call from some sociological theorists and social geographers for sociologists to situate our analyses in "place and time." Third, my experiences growing up in the thinly populated landscape and "Big Sky" of Montana present a reference point for thinking about religion in rural places with the challenges of distance from the center as well as unique opportunities for grace. There is a continuous thread in American culture that locates the sacred in nature. Implicit in the works of many essayists, poets, and explicitly religious writers is the idea that access to nature is a route to experiencing the divine, and that the closer to nature one is, the greater the possibility for closeness to God. In Catherine Albanese's Nature Religion in America (1990) she traces reflections on nature as a core religious symbol starting with the Algonkian Indians, then moving to the writings of significant historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. She also examines how their theologies diffused through popular cultural movements for health and healing in the 19th and 20th centuries. Albanese takes religion to be concerned with how people orient themselves in the world in reference to both ordinary powers-those that are products of human culture-and extraordinary powers. Her argument is that in the United States, nature has often been used as a central religious symbol, one that points to and stands for those extraordinary powers: "what the group owns as objective realities-standing in judgment on its project and practice, but also inviting its members across an invisible line to a place of transcendence" (1990:7). As Albanese reveals it to us, nature religion is an inconsistent, even contradictory, but nevertheless persistent presence in American religious life.

In 1987, I moved from Milton, Massachusetts, to Decatur, Georgia, to take a job at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The first day I went to work, the woman who lived across the street corralled my wife at the mailbox and asked what church we all belonged to. With visions of a cross burning on the front lawn, my wife allowed as how, actually, we were Jewish and did not belong to any church. Within half an hour Mrs. Jones was at the door, a list of Atlanta-area synagogues in her hand.

The question that frames (or haunts) this evening's discussion is whether the work of those of us who study religious practice or "lived religion" is irrelevant for understanding religion in broader social and political contexts than the intimate, local, and closely-grained ones that generally occupy us-or to put this even more harshly: Is it irrelevant for understanding and responding to urgent global, political situations of great consequence? This issue was raised for me with special force in a conversation earlier this year with an old friend and colleague about the escalating violence in Israel. The situation there was declining into horror. The paper that morning was filled with images of a young Palestinian suicide bomber and the incongruity between her fresh and smiling face and the terrible violence of her action shocked and saddened us. My friend is a distinguished political scientist with a deep personal and professional concern for the politics and history of the Middle East; both of us hoped for a just peace in Israel. The immediate question was how to understand what led a young woman to become a martyr (as some said) or a murderer (according to others). How do we-"we" here being scholars of culture generally, religion in particular, in North American universities-talk about such a thing? The terrible events of September 11, 2001, had given particular urgency to the questions. References to something called "Islam," I said to my friend, explained nothing, and the political violence in the region (however one interpreted it) was a necessary but not sufficient cause of suicide bombings. It seemed to me simply from reading accounts in the papers that what immediately mattered in the lives of suicide bombers was not commitment to an unspecific "Islam" but the circles of friends and kin among whom they lived, the memories they held (their own or those they borrowed or inherited from others), their sense of their place in their immediate world (meaning work and school, friends and clubs), the stories they were told by relatives they loved, bonds of commitment and loyalty to particular friends and kin. "Islam" mattered too, of course, not as a set of authoritative texts or doctrines, but rather as it was discussed and practiced, inflected and constituted within these bonds of friendship, family, and memory, within the worlds of work and school-"Islam" as it was imagined and reimagined in relation to all the other things that people imagine, a thoroughly local Islam, immersed in and responsive to local condition and circumstances.

It is doubtful whether there ever has been a rise-fall-rebirth of the psychology of religion. While the claim has marginal merit for American academic psychology, it has little application in other cultures or even within American psychology of religion outside mainstream psychology. The psychology of religion has always been and remains tied to key individuals who sustain the field. This historical fact is important in understanding the role of the JSSR in the field. Early psychologists of religion such as Hall and James set the pattern for two distinctively different approaches to the psychology of religion. Hall's approach was methodologically restrictive, inherently reductive, and came to dominate the academic psychology of religion. James ‘approach was methodological plural, receptive to the evidential force of religious experience, and quickly marginalized within American psychology. These opposing orientation continue to influence the psychology of religion in societies such as the SSR and its journal. A review of the psychologist editors of JSSR illustrates that the psychology of religion remains a marginal interest of mainstream psychology. It survives because of the interdisciplinary nature of the SSSR and its journal.

This paper explores women's leadership roles in the sociology of religion. I focus on the women presidents of three social science research organizations that specialize in the study of religious phenomena: the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Religious Research Association, and make some comparisons with women presidents of the American Sociological Association. This paper draws on the work of Marie Augusta Neal for a sociological perspective on women and religion. It suggests policy implications for women and other marginalized groups, and concludes with personal reflections on the transformation process.

Recent developments in the sociology of religion have suggested that a new approach, or paradigrm, is guiding research in the sociology of religion, and is gaining empirical support. This new approach has as its core proposition the notion that competition between religious denominations has a positive effect on religious involvement, and, conversely, that religious monopolies tend to inhibit personal religiosity. This study attempts to apply this general hypothesis to the nations of Western Europe, and to extend the range of dependent variables to which the pluralist program can be applied. We generally find strong support for the new research program, in that Catholics in primarily Protestant countries exhibit higher levels of religious observance than do Catholics in countries with Catholic majorities, as well as greater adherence to Catholic social teaching.

Recent work calls attention to religious globalization - the proliferation of transnational religious structures and movements that challenge the nation state. But contemporary migration prompts a different type of religious transnationalism that has not been sufficiently explored. Sustained connections between communities of origin and destination give rise to a set of transnationalized institutional relationships, discourses, and practices that globalize everyday religious life at the local level. This articles aims to contribute to a more systematic understanding of local-level religious globalization by exploring the case of Catholic church ties spanning Boston and the Dominican Republic. It also stresses the importance of taking into account sustained homeland attachments in understanding everyday immigrant religious life. Strong ties between migrants and nonmigrants created a transnational religious sphere within which people, resources, and social remittances were constantly exchanged. Religious life in Boston and the Dominican Republic were reciprocally transformed as a result. Subsequent emigres continue to infuse fresh Dominicanness into the Boston church, though it is a Dominicanness that is increasingly pan-Latino in tone. In this way, transnational ties reinforce religious pluralism at the same time that they limit its scope.

Introduction: The Psychology of Religion in a Changing World. The Formal Beginnings: Three Traditions. The Biological Foundations of Religion. Behavioral and Comparative Theories of Religion. Religion in the Laboratory. The Correlation Study of Religion. The Perspective of Sigmund Freud. Object-Relations Theory and Religion. Erik H. Erikson: Religion in the Human Life Cycle. C. J. Jung and the Analytical Tradition. William James and His Legacy. The German Descriptive Tradition. The American Humanistic Synthesis. Epilogue. Glossary. References. Source Notes. Picture Credits. Indexes.

Scholars broadly agree that no persuasive general theory of religion exists. Recently, however, new efforts at producing one have appeared. These range from wishful[thinking theories to rationalist and linguistic ones, but they increasingly emphasize cognition. This paper reviews several current approaches and summarizes my own cognitive theory: that religion is a form of anthropomorphism. Earlier writers who have seen anthropomorphism as basic to religion have disagreed about its nature and causes. Most explain it as comforting or as extending what we know to what we do not. Neither explanation is sound. Instead, anthropomorphism stems from a necessary perceptual strategy: facing an uncertain world, we interpret ambiguous phenomena as what concerns us most. That usually is living things, especially humans. Thus we see the world as more humanlike than it is. Religions, this paper holds, are systems of thought and action building in large measure upon this powerful, pervasive, and involuntary tendency.

This essay grew out of a seminar taught by Phillip Hammond in Fall, 1991, at the Universit,y of California, Santa Barbara. The other authors, all graduate students in religious studies at UCSB, were members of that seminar. The originating idea for the seminar was the fact that of 23 self-declared textbooks in the sociology of religion found on Hammond's shelves (dating from Joachim Wach's text of 1944), only one (Thomas F. O'Dea's Sociology and the Study of Religion) contains references to Tocqueville, all four very brief. Two others (Glenn Vernon's Sociology of Religion and J. Milton Yinger's The Scientific Study of Religion) mention Tocqueville but only in reference to the work of Seymour Martin Lipset. The situation found in seven edited readers in the sociology of religion is hardly better. One (Louis Schneider's Religion, Culture and Society) contains a one-page excerpt from Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Three (Joseph Faulkner's Religion's Influence in Contemporary Society, Patrick McNamara's Religion: North American Style, William Newman's The Social Meaning of Religion) reprint Robert Bellah's (1967) essay, "Civil Religion in America," which refers briefly to Tocqueville, and this accounts for Tocqueville's name in their indexes. Two others (Faulkner again and Richard Knudten's The Sociology of Religion) reprint Hammond's 1963 JSSR essay "Religion and the 'Informing' of Culture," which relies rather heavily on Tocqueville's Democracy in America. 1 Since this representation seemed to be far less than Alexis de Tocqueville deserves,2 the seminar set for itself not only the task of reading the French scholar's monumental work (plus a number of successor volumes) but also the task of discerning Tocqueville's enduring contributions to theory in the sociology of religion. The following pages offer our findings and observations: First, a brief overview of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, followed by a discussion of five areas where his thinking is abstract enough to be blended into general social theories about religion, and then a brief comparison of Tocqueville with Max Weber.

Glock, Charles Y. and Robert N. Bellah 1976 The New Religious Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lofland, John and Rodney Stark 1965 "Becoming a world saver: A theory of conversion to a deviant perspective." American Sociological Review 30: 862-875. Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge 1979 "Of churches, sects, and cults: Preliminary concepts for a theory of religious movements." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18: 117-131. ainbridge, William Sims 78 Satan's Power: Ethnography of a Deviant sychotherapy Cult Berkeley: University in "Towards a theory of religion: Religious pres a commitment." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. in "Networks of faith: Interpersonal bonds press b and recruitment to cults and sects." American Journal of Sociology. Stark, Rodney, William Sims Bainbridge and Daniel Doyle 1979 "Cults of America: A reconnaissance in

This article brings recent developments in historical sociology and social history to bear on methodological approaches to the sociology of American religious history. In the past two decades, historians have taken sociologists to task for superimposing such concepts as "modernization" or "civil religion" on American religious history. At the same time, social historians have accused intellectual historians of ignoring the religious experience of ordinary people. In both instances, scholars have been urged to ground their interpretations in social experience. This conclusion suggests new possibilities and pitfalls for sociologists of religion working at the juncture of social theory and American history. By employing the data of social history, social theorists may be able to offer new interpretations of American religious history. Conversely, the use of such social information as church, census, and tax lists may permit some revision of social theory. These possibilities are countered by new risks, however, as sociologists become amateur historians. This essay probes the kinds of questions sociologists and historians of American religion have asked and the ways in which theoretical ideas and historical evidence have been brought to bear upon one another to answer these questions. It then considers strategies for creating an historically grounded sociology of American religious history.

One of the most recently developed methods in anthropological science has been labeled "The New Ethnography." This approach looks on culture as a cognitive organization of material phenomena, as a way of knowing and ordering reality. The task of the researcher is to unearth and understand the logical organizing principles underlying human behavior. This he does by elicting from his informants the questions they formulate about the world around them as well as the answers they give to them. This method has not been employed in the study of religions on a large scale. The few applications have been encouraging because they have brought into focus the religious experience of a particular people. They also show that greater objectivity and accuracy in the analyses of values, beliefs and ideals can be achieved and thus increase the understanding of other peoples' religious life. The new ethnography can supply us with useful guidelines for the improvement and development of the academic study of religion. It also suggests that "empathy" training for scholars in the field might be pursued with advantage.

Religion in Iceland provides the focus for a historical-comparative and participant observation study of the supposed "irrelevance" of religion in secular society. The judgment of irrelevance appears to depend largely on a peculiar definitional construct, formed with little immediate connection to the experience of the participants in the system. A situational definition grounded in the participants' understandings of their own actions produces a rather different assessment of the religio-social systems under investigation. When people act in ways they define as religious, religion must be accepted as "real" for social-scientific analysis. On this basis judgments of the irrelevance of Scandinavian religion are premature and one-sided, with predefined "functions" of religion in society skewing both research and theory. A bout a decade-and-a-half ago, Richard Tomasson published an article entitled "Religion is Irrelevant in Sweden," based on his considerable field research there (1968; see 1970). More recently he has published a monograph on Iceland (1980), in which he offers a similar analysis. Subtitled "The First New Society," this book draws general theoretical inspiration from S. M. Lipset's synthetic work The First New Nation and carries an introduction by him. In his own earlier book Political Man Lipset had cited Icelandic politics particularly its "communist" party - as an example of political sectarianism acting as a functional alternative to traditional religion. In a similar vein, Sigurdur Magniisson (1977) writes: "Even though the Icelanders care little about Christianity and organized religion, they are still an essentially religious people in a more general sense" (165). The appearance of Petursson's monograph on religion and society in Iceland from 1830-1930 (1983) also brings this setting to particular prominence.

THE passing phrase is no respecter of te abiding truth; religion too has its share of slogans. "Culture religion," "post-Christian era," "syncretistic religiosity," "religion no longer informs culture"-these are a few currently heard. Like many slogans, taken literally they can obscure as well as illumine. The clergyman seeing his community, even his parish, headed for ruin despite his warning may rescue some comfort from believing that in the nation at large "Christianity has lost its hegemony," that "the relationship of religion and culture has been subverted," that "God is dead." But what do the phrases mean? To religionists as to social scientists, religion has always been a cultural phenomenon (though of course some of the latter and most of the former have disagreed on what else religion is). Does the term "culture religion" connote therefore that religion is only a cultural thing? Much history, including contemporary, can be and is written with religion as a force in events. Does the phrase "religion no longer informs culture," mean, then, that history might better be written by ignoring religion since its impact is illusory? In the United States, it is said

I offer an account of Weston La Barre's The Ghost Dance to indicate the continuing vitality of a Freudian ideological attack on religious beliefs and behavior. A contemporary group of social scientists, chiefly featuring Bellah, Geertz,and Luckmann, could possibly meet La Barre's sociopsychiatric challenge to religion. I examine their reliance on functional definitions of religion as a conciliatory measure designed to overcome the conflict between religious belief and the social scientific study of religion. Despite certain logical and empirical problems in the use of functional definitions of religion, I conclude that theoretical advances have been achieved in their writings. But in a more philosophical context, which is where La Barre's analysis really belongs, I suggest that their positions are logically insufficient as a rejoinder. The bridge between religion and social science, therefore, may yet contain some shaky girders. V ERY little out-and-out hostility toward religious claims and behavior is found nowadays in the works of social scientific observers of religion. Most anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses of the religious aspects of human life are either staunchly "neutral" as regards the value or truth in religion, or decidedly conciliatory. An influential group of contemporary social scientists, some of whom fall into a category Roland Robertson calls "Sociotheologians" (1971: 309), is indeed conciliatory, self-consciously and for compelling theoretical reasons. But those of us who are interested in the vagaries of how social scientific investigation relates to religion go astray if we, overly sanguine, neglect the old but not yet tired antagonisms. We all know that much of the social scientific study of religion is rooted in a basically antireligious tradition. To be sure, authors such as Durkheim may have insisted on the necessity of a religious system for the adequate functioning of a society and even for its very being, but most earlier interpreters of religion have explicitly rejected for themselves the notion that any particular religion's claims about reality could in fact be true. Representatives such as Tylor and Spencer of an intellectualist approach to religion were convinced philosophical naturalists. For them, not practices, but beliefs about a nonempirical or supernatural world constituted the real essence of religion. Modern man, they believed, could now know that no religious beliefs were true, and so religion ought to have little utility in enlightened people's lives. If a religion is not true in any cognitive sense, then to traffic with it in one's personal life is virtually immoral.