Review Essay: Sociology for Seminarians.

The article discusses the book "The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion," edited by Richard K. Fenn. With the emergence of the sociology of religion as an institutionalized sociological subdiscipline, the broad approaches and visions of the classics have given way to more specialized research. Although the sociology of religion produced some remarkable scholarship, for example, in the works of sociologists Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, or David Martin, to name just a few, much of it became so derivative and unimaginative that it no longer attracted the most creative students. Instead, more and more people involved in religious institutions populated and dominated the discipline. Fenn has managed to recruit respected scholars in the field as contributors to this volume. Contrary to comparable American readers, this one also includes eminent scholars from Europe, especially from Great Britain. Fenn has given the volume a reasonable tripartite structure. The first major section deals with classical and contemporary theory, the second with contemporary trends in the sociology of religion, the third with neighboring areas under which he subsumes social anthropology, theology, and ethnography. Each section is introduced by an editorial commentary by Fenn, who also ends this volume with an epilogue on individualism.