Sociology of Religion

Rodney Stark's provocative new book argues that, whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have formed our modern culture. Continuing his project of identifying the widespread consequences of monotheism, Stark shows that the Christian...

This book deals with the largest global shift in religion over the last forty years, the astonishing rise of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity.About the AuthorProfessor David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of...

This book addresses the marked decline of religious practice and subsequent eclipse of the social significance of religious institutions in contemporary Wales from a sociological perspective. Throughout, the text is lively, lucid, well paced and is...

It is often claimed that we live in a secular age. But we do not live in a desacralized one. Sacred forms--whether in 'religious' or 'secular' guise--continue to shape social life in the modern world, giving rise to powerful emotions, polarized group...

The great pilgrimage center of southeastern Sri Lanka, Kataragama, has become in recent years the spiritual home of a new class of Hindu-Buddhist religious devotees. These ecstatic priests and priestesses invariably display long locks of matted hair, and...

The new edition of Steve Bruce's Fundamentalism grapples with the combination of social strains and religious ideas that have produced an explosion of fundamentalist activity in the wake of 9/11. In a direct and punchy style, the new edition of his...

The surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern stateCoping with Defeat presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking...

Perhaps best known for his coauthored bestselling books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Robert N. Bellah is a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four decades, he has examined the role of religion in modern and...

In ten brilliant essays, Jan Assmann explores the connections between religion, culture, and memory. Building on Maurice Halbwachs's idea that memory, like language, is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one, he argues that memory has a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781570753732Author Andrew F. WallFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Orbis Books (USA)Publisher Orbis Books (USA)Weight(grams) 499g

Nineteenth-century Europe turned the political status of its Jewish communities into the "Jewish Question," as both Christianity and rising forms of nationalism viewed Jews as the ultimate other. With the onset of Zionism, this "question" migrated to...

An in-depth look at why non-Jewish Poles are trying to bring Jewish culture back to life in Poland todaySince the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all...

Demography drives religious change. High-fertility societies, like most of contemporary Africa, tend to be fervent and devout. The lower a population's fertility rates, the greater the tendency for people to detach from organized or institutional...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781597524322Author Dr Felicitas D GoodmanFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint Wipf & Stock PublishersPublisher Wipf & Stock PublishersWeight(grams)...

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, religious fundamentalism has dominated public debate as never before. Policymakers, educators and the general public all want to know: Why do fundamentalist movements turn violent? Are...

James Crossley holds a mirror up to English politics, examining how Christianity is often used to legitimise ideological positions and parties. From the paternalistic Christianity used to justify ever-intensifiying neoliberalism, to the...

In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women's prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff,...

This core textbook offers a concise, direct and easy-to-use introduction to how semiotics can be employed to understand culture. It adopts a practical and versatile approach to cultural analysis, beginning not with an abstract body of theory but with a...

This book provides a concise, interdisciplinary perspective on the emotion and practice of 'hope'. Based on the idea that hope is a dream that we carry in different ways, the five chapters draw on the author's original research and align it with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143113188Author Krista TippettFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Penguin Random House AustraliaPublisher Penguin Random House AustraliaWeight(grams)...

Fifty years after its publication, Bryan Wilson's Religion in Secular Society (1966) remains a seminal work. It is one of the clearest articulations of the secularization thesis: the claim that modernizations brings with it fundamental changes in the...

For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West's knowledges-especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges-of the non-Western world. The essays...

Presents oral histories and interviews of women who belong to Nation of Islam With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60...

Believe it or not, the world is more religious than ever before. Everybody seems to take it for granted that the world is getting more secular-that faith is doomed by modernity. Scientists, secularists, and atheists applaud the change; religious...

This insightful and provocative journey through spiritual landscapes explores the ways in which spiritualities of life have been experienced and understood in Western society, and argues that today's myriad forms of holistic spirituality are helping us...

A much-awaited new book by the foremost scholar of secularisation and religion in the modern world. In the 1960s, two great social and cultural changes of the western world began. The first was the rapid decline of Christian religious practice and...

Neopaganism is the fastest growing new religion in the West. Between the World: Readings in Contemporary Neopaganism provides an engaging and well-rounded introduction to this often misunderstood spiritual tradition.This provocative new volume breaks...

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social...

This groundbreaking monograph promises to open a new chapter in black theology. J. Kameron Carter argues that black theology's intellectual impoverishment in the Church and the academy is the result of its theologically shaky presuppositions, which are...

Over the past several decades, postmodernist and postcolonial challenges to traditional theories and methods have revolutionized the social sciences. The discipline of religious studies, however, has been relatively slow to confront these developments,...

Uncovers what the sociology of religion would look like had it emerged in a Confucian, Muslim, or Native American culture rather than in a Christian one Sociology has long used Western Christianity as a model for all religious life. As a result, the...

How evangelical activism in England contributes to the secularizing forces it seeks to challengeOver the past two decades, a growing number of Christians in England have gone to court to enforce their right to religious liberty. Funded by conservative...

National polls show that approximately 50 million adult Americans are born-again Christians. Yet most Americans see their culture as secular, and the United States is viewed around the world as a secular nation. Further, intellectuals and journalists...

The Islamic headscarf has become the subject of heated legal and political debate. France and Germany have legislated against it, and even the UK, long a champion of multiculturalism, has recently restricted the veil proper. Ever since home-grown Islamic...

Anthropologists have long sought to engage and describe foreign or "alien" societies, yet few have considered the fluid communities centered around a shared belief in alien beings and UFO sightings and their effect on popular and expressive culture...

The congregants thanked God that they weren't like all those hopeless people outside the church, bound for hell. So the Westboro Baptist Church's Sundayservice began, and Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a curious observer, wondered why anyone would seek spiritual...

Crime, Criminal Justice and Religion: A Critical Appraisal seeks to bridge a gap in the examination of crime and criminal justice by taking both a historical and a contemporary lens to explore the influence of religion. Offering unique perspectives that...

Liberation theology is a school of Roman Catholic thought which teaches that a primary duty of the church must be to promote social and economic justice. In this book, Christian Smith explains how and why the liberation theology movement emerged and...

Is African Christianity a religious marketplace now dominated by only two big players, the Catholic Church and Pentecostals? There is an important if largely unremarked diversity within African Christianity; on the one hand, an enchanted Christianity...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781945026768Author Ken WilberFormat PaperbackPage Count 366Imprint Light on Light PressPublisher Light on Light PressWeight(grams) 535gDimensions(mm) 229mm...