This topical collection of eleven commissioned essays by well-established contributors from sociology, religious studies and theology, is one of the first treatments of the relationship between postmodernity and religion from a sociological perspective. The essays cover a diversity of interests, but treat postmodernity in terms of its implications for the self, the New Age and theology, particularly Catholicism and Judaism. Two of the essays are original appraisals of two important French writers on religion: Jean-Luc Marion and Daniele Hervieu-Leger.

Product Description: The emergence of spirituality in contemporary culture in holistic forms suggests that organised religions have failed. This thesis is explored and disputed in this book in ways that mark important critical divisions. This is the first collection of essays to assess the significance of spirituality in the sociology of religion...read more

Product Description: "Death our Future" is essential reading for everyone involved in Christian ministry to dying, dead or bereaved people in the UK.A range of distinguished authors explore issues of Christian ministry around death, assess developments over the last decade and present them in ways that will engage, inform and equip Christians for facing dying, death, bereavement and memorialization...read more

Product Description: Cremation was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, popularised in the twentieth, and now many of us are cremated after death. This method of disposal required a wholly unprecedented building type - both functional and symbolic - set in a new landscape for mourning...read more

Product Description: This work provides a social history of death from the earliest times to Diana, Princess of Wales. As we discard the 20th century taboo about death, this book charts the story of the way in which our forebears coped with a fundamental aspects of their daily lives...read more

This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays expands a new intellectual terrain for sociology; virtue ethics. Using a variety of religious perspectives, of Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Quakerism, with considerations of Islam and the New Age, this engaged and topical collection deals with properties of virtue in relation to the person, celibacy, hope, and apocalypse, mourning, moral ambiguity. It also treats the concept of virtue in response to MacIntyre, Bauman, Weber, Durkheim and Giddens. It seeks to move sociology past the disabling effects of postmodernity. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The taboo on death is at last breaking down. There is far greater receptivity to informed discussion about death and dying. Dying with dignity is one major issue: euthanasia and the 'natural death movement' are the latest stages in a debate first stimulated by the hospice movement...read more

Product Description: This book utilises a dynamic analysis of mortality to acknowledge shifts of emphasis in cultural and religious traditions. A central concern is the diversity of representations of death to be found within the varying cultural, religious, medical and legal systems of contemporary western societies...read more