Product Description: The rising importance of community organizing in the US and more recently in Britain has coincided with the developing significance of social movements and identity politics, debates about citizenship, social capital, civil society, and religion in the public sphere...read more

Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religion and reason that has set us on this course. In denial of our sacred origins and hubristically convinced of the powers of human reason, we cease to know our own limits: our disenchanted world leaves us defenseless against a headlong rush into the abyss of global warming, nuclear holocaust, and the other catastrophes that loom on our horizon. Reviving the religious anthropology of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Marcel Mauss and in dialogue with the work of René Girard, Dupuy shows that we must remember the world's sacredness in order to keep human violence in check. A metaphysical and theological detective, he tracks the sacred in the very fields where human reason considers itself most free from everything it judges irrational: science, technology, economics, political and strategic thought. In making such claims, The Mark of the Sacred takes on religion bashers, secularists, and fundamentalists at once. Written by one of the deepest and most versatile thinkers of our time, it militates for a world where reason is no longer an enemy of faith.

Product Description: The volume "Religion beyond its Private Role in Modern Society" aims at contributing to the debate on the distinction between public and private spheres with regard to the role of religion in modern societies. This issue which is inherent to many conceptions regarding social order, modernity, freedom of conscience, and the changing role and function of religion is discussed not only from a social scientific but also from a historical and philosophical point of view...read more

Product Description: What is the exact nature of the link between religion and social cohesion? This book describes how fluctuations in socioeconomic environment can create a process where ritual behavior works to alleviate uncertainties in social commitment...read more

Culture changes historically, and along with it, reflexive disciplinary representations. Without fully abandoning Sociology, especially the classical tradition, and instead aligning it with its own religious origins and inclinations to an emergent socio-religious imaginary, we look elsewhere for a historically more effective hermeneutic. Here we look especially toward Jewish mysticism – particularly its social face in Hasidism – as a source not only for alternative adaptive social practices within a ‘society of excess’, but at the same time show how it offers novel interpretations of social dynamics. «Mystical sociology» is a hybrid term which displays continuing reliance on the sociological tradition, but also an ambition to reach into mysticism for its social hermeneutic and to think socially in a much wider, multi-dimensional space, described by James, Toulmin, Steinbock, Corbin and others, in terms of the cosmic, cosmological, or vertical dimension. Scholarly analyses of mysticism are reviewed and placed in relation to the religious turn, the post-secular and, broadly, to resacralization. Beyond the religious turn, mysticism is seen as at the heart of resacralization. A double-edged sword of remysticization is described; on the one hand, offering social materiel for everyday counter practices to excess, unintentionally reinforcing the hegemonic regime of commodification; but also, providing an opening toward a multidimensional critical theory – one which rides the blurring of the spiritual/material boundary, to offer a new vision of social practice and social theory, beyond resacralization and after spirituality.

Product Description: This title provides essays on the contradictory resurgence of religion and liberalism in the 21st century by one of the most important voices in the study of the sociology of religion.

The decline in power, popularity and prestige of religion across the modern world is not a short-term or localized trend nor is it an accident. It is a consequence of subtle but powerful features of modernization. Renowned sociologist, Steve Bruce, elaborates the secularization paradigm and defends it against a wide variety of recent attempts at rebuttal and refutation. Using the best available statistical and qualitative evidence Bruce considers the implications for the secularization paradigm of the extent to which new religious movements or New Age spiritualities are replacing religion; changes in the nature and power of folk religion and superstition; rational choice alternatives to the secularization paradigm; the popularity and political influence of religion in the USA; religious change in the developing world; reactions to Islam in Europe; and the effects of recent controversies over the public place of religion. Bruce presents a robust defence of the secularization paradigm, clarifying its arguments for the benefit of all sides of the debate.

Product Description: This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian-born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen´s neo-Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitätsreligion...read more

Product Description: The thirteen essays in this volume challenge conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences...read more

Product Description: God and religion come in for bad press these days. Is religion worth keeping? Are militant atheists misguided? Do religion and spirituality need each other? Is it possible to build tolerance and respect in a divided world? And can science play a role? Eleanor Stoneham explains why the answer to all these questions is a resounding 'yes'...read more

Product Description: Religion is a major force in contemporary society. It is also one of the least understood social and political influences on individuals and communities. In this innovative collection of original essays and classic readings, experts explore the significance of contemporary religiosity: as a source of meaning and motivation, how it unites and divides us, and how it is used politically and culturally...read more

Product Description: A collection of case-studies on Ritual and Performance spanning four continents, this book offers an insightful travel guide through a thick forest of approaches and methods in a field that has increasingly weighed on the research agenda in the Humanities and the Social Sciences...read more

Product Description: Around 1800 roughly three per cent of the human population lived in urban areas; by 2030 this number is expected to have gone up to some seventy per cent. This poses problems for traditional religions that are all rooted in rural, small-scale societies...read more

Product Description: Religions have always been associated with particular forms of knowledge, often knowledge accorded special significance and sometimes knowledge at odds with prevailing understandings of truth and authority in wider society. New religious movements emerge on the basis of reformulated, often controversial, understandings of how the world works and where ultimate meaning can be found...read more

Product Description: A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion...read more

Product Description: Gold Medal Winner, 2013 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Religion CategoryClaiming Society for God focuses on common strategies employed by religiously orthodox (what some would call "fundamentalist") movements around the world...read more

Product Description: The Post-Secular in Question considers whether there has in fact been a religious resurgence of global dimensions in recent decades. This collection of original essays by leading academics represents an interdisciplinary intervention in the continuing and ever-transforming discussion of the role of religion and secularism in today’s world...read more

Product Description: The book contains articles of philosophers, theologians, and sociologists from 20 countries in Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. They describe the status of religions in different cultures and states and formulate the norms and conditions of the presence of religion in public spheres from different perspectives...read more

With the Islamic awakening in the Middle East, the "Principles of Islamic Sociology" illustrates the nuts and bolts of Islamic society with a contemporay vision that is possible within the realm of Islamic law and thinking. According to Muslim scholars, the beauty of Islamic law is that it is not stagnant. The Qur'an applies to all ages and periods. Dr Younos succefully demonstrates not only the principles of Islamic sociology as an academic discpline, but also a new thinking and vision for a Muslim society in the contemporary world. This book answers a compelling question: In what way should Muslims decide on their social exsitence in the age of globalization? Reforms within Muslim soieties is a must. The only solution is reform their socio-political system by impleminting Islamic vlaues based upon a new interpretation of Islam. "Principles of Islamic Sociology" has managed to achieve that goal.

Product Description: It can be said that history is poor sociology that does not account sufficiently for present social circumstances, while sociology is bad history in that it does not go back in time. This volume in the Religion and Social Order series sets out to address these conjoint problems of history and sociology within the disciplinary boundaries of the sociology of religion...read more

Product Description: This book reflects the wide-spread belief that the twenty-first century is evolving in a significantly different way to the twentieth, which witnessed the advance of human rationality and technological progress, including urbanisation, and called into question the public and cultural significance of religion...read more