Download or read book Toward a Sociology of Irreligion written by Colin Campbell and published by Palgrave. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Toward a Sociology of Irreligion written by Colin David Campbell and published by London : Macmillan. This book was released on 1971 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion Volume 7 2016 written by Roberto Cipriani and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent studies show that atheism is increasing. The reasons for this development have not as yet been examined thoroughly. Many atheists continue to be residual groups in surveys on religiosity, making it difficult to examine who they are and why they have chosen to be atheists. Moreover, they are minority groups in most countries (former Soviet bloc countries are left out of discussion); many do not identify with any organized groups of atheists or agnostics. Atheist groups and ideologies, then, represent a wide range of attitudes, behaviour and ways of acting towards religion. The lack of a clear definition of what being atheist (or an unbeliever) means today invites us to study the issue in greater depth. This volume represents a first attempt at understanding and scrutinizing atheism. Thanks to all contributors, it provides both a global perspective and specific insights into specific cases.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion written by Peter Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-04 with total page 1063 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars providing both an entry point into the sociological study and understanding of religion and an in-depth survey into its changing forms and content in the contemporary world. The role and impact of religion and spirituality on the politics, culture, education and health in the modern world is rigorously discussed and debated. The study of the sociology of religion forges interdisciplinary links to explore aspects of continuity and change in the contemporary interface between society and religion. Using a combination of theoretical, methodological and content-led approaches, the fifty-seven contributors collectively emphasise the complex relationships between religion and aspects of life from scientific research to law, ecology to art, music to cognitive science, crime to institutional health care and more. The developing character of religion, irreligion and atheism and the impact of religious diversity on social cohesion are explored. An overview of current scholarship in the field is provided in each themed chapter with an emphasis on encouraging new thinking and reflection on familiar and emergent themes to stimulate further debate and scholarship. The resulting essay collection provides an invaluable resource for research and teaching in this diverse discipline.
Download or read book Religion and Knowledge written by Mathew Guest and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Governments have risen and fallen on the basis of such differences and global conflict has raged around competing claims about the origins and content of religious truth. Such concerns give rise to recurrent questions, faced by academics, governments and the general public. How do we treat statements made by religious groups and on what basis are they made? What authorities lie behind religious claims to truth? How can competing claims about knowledge be resolved? Are there instances when it is appropriate to police religious knowledge claims or restrict their public expression? This book addresses the relationship between religion and knowledge from a sociological perspective, taking both religion and knowledge as phenomena located within ever changing social contexts. It builds on historical foundations, but offers a distinctive focus on the changing status of religious phenomena at the turn of the twenty-first century. Including critical engagement with live debates about intelligent design and the ’new atheism’, this collection of essays brings recent research on religious movements into conversation with debates about socialisation, reflexivity and the changing capacity of social institutions to shape human identities. Contributors examine religion as an institutional context for the production of knowledge, as a form of knowledge to be transmitted or conveyed and as a social field in which controversies about knowledge emerge.
Download or read book Virtuous Pagans written by Thomas H. Davenport and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-20 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1991, examines the unreligious of America. Most sociologists of religion viewed religious belief and behaviour as having strong positive function for individual well-being – with the implicit assumption that unreligious individuals would lack meaning in life. This book applies statistical approaches to modelling causality as it analyses a controversial topic in American sociology.
Download or read book Religion and Secular Categories in Sociology written by Mitsutoshi Horii and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of the Sociology of Religion written by James A Beckford and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007-10-29 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In their introduction to this Handbook, the editors affirm: ′Many sociologists have come to realise that it makes no sense now to omit religion from the repertoire of social scientific explanations of social life′. I wholeheartedly agree. I also suggest that this wide-ranging set of essays should become a starting-point for such enquiries. Each chapter is clear, comprehensive and well-structured - making the Handbook a real asset for all those engaged in the field." - Grace Davie, University of Exeter "Serious social scientists who care about making sense of the world can no longer ignore the fact that religious beliefs and practices are an important part of this world... This Handbook is a valuable resource for specialists and amateurs alike. The editors have done an exceptionally fine job of incorporating topics that illuminate the range and diversity of religion and its continuing significance throughout the world." - Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University At a time when religions are increasingly affecting, and affected by, life beyond the narrowly sacred sphere, religion everywhere seems to be caught up in change and conflict. In the midst of this contention and confusion, the sociology of religion provides a rich source of understanding and explanation. This Handbook presents an unprecedentedly comprehensive assessment of the field, both where it has been and where it is headed. Like its many distinguished contributors, its topics and their coverage are truly global in their reach. The Handbook′s 35 chapters are organized into eight sections: basic theories and debates; methods of studying religion; social forms and experiences of religion; issues of power and control in religious organizations; religion and politics; individual religious behaviour in social context; religion, self-identity and the life-course; and case studies of China, Eastern Europe, Israel, Japan, and Mexico. Each chapter establishes benchmarks for the state of sociological thinking about religion in the 21st century and provides a rich bibliography for pursuing its subject further. Overall, the Handbook stretches the field conceptually, methodologically, comparatively, and historically. An indispensable source of guidance and insight for both students and scholars. Choice ′Outstanding Academic Title′ 2009
Download or read book Faith No More written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faith No More seeks to understand how and why people lose their faith, sever their ties with religious organizations, and experience a secularizing transformation in their own personal lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 75 individuals from a variety of backgrounds and religious traditions, this book offers a rich and colorful exploration of the human journey from religiosity to secularity.
Download or read book Religious Indifference written by Johannes Quack and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a conceptually and empirically rich introduction to religious indifference on the basis of original anthropological, historical and sociological research. Religious indifference is a central category for understanding contemporary societies, and a controversial one. For some scholars, a growing religious indifference indicates a dramatic decline in religiosity and epitomizes the endpoint of secularization processes. Others view it as an indicator of moral apathy and philosophical nihilism, whilst yet others see it as paving the way for new forms of political tolerance and solidarity. This volume describes and analyses the symbolic power of religious indifference and the conceptual contestations surrounding it. Detailed case studies cover anthropological and qualitative data from the UK, Germany, Estonia, the USA, Canada, and India analyse large quantitative data sets, and provide philosophical-literary inquiries into the phenomenon. They highlight how, for different actors and agendas, religious indifference can constitute an objective or a challenge. Pursuing a relational approach to non-religion, the book conceptualizes religious indifference in its interrelatedness with religion as well as more avowed forms of non-religion.
Download or read book Beyond New Atheism and Theism written by Sal Restivo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the flaws and fallacies in the grounds for atheism and theism – flaws and fallacies that contaminate the arguments of non-believers and believers alike. Focusing on the highly visible debates between the New Atheists – such as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris on the one hand – and their main theist opponents – including Frank Turek, John Lennox, and William Lane Craig on the other – it approaches these debates from the perspective of the sociology of religion and science. With entire worldviews at stake, it explores various failings in the logic, language, and knowledge of the protagonists, revealing mistaken and oversimplified understandings of both science itself and the sociocultural and symbolic roles of religion on both sides. Advancing a secular and humanist worldview unburdened by the problems that beset both atheism and theism, the author argues for a sociological perspective on religion, God, and science as a practice, together with a critical realist approach to the nature of the real world as we experience it. Beyond New Atheism and Theism will therefore appeal to scholars and students of sociology and cultural studies with interests in the conflicting worldviews of science and religion.
Download or read book The Subversive Evangelical written by Peter J. Schuurman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelicals have been scandalized by their association with Donald Trump, their megachurches summarily dismissed as “religious Walmarts.” In The Subversive Evangelical Peter Schuurman shows how a growing group of “reflexive evangelicals” use irony to critique their own tradition and distinguish themselves from the stereotype of right-wing evangelicalism. Entering the Meeting House – an Ontario-based Anabaptist megachurch – as a participant observer, Schuurman discovers that the marketing is clever and the venue (a rented movie theatre) is attractive to the more than five thousand weekly attendees. But the heart of the church is its charismatic leader, Bruxy Cavey, whose anti-religious teaching and ironic tattoos offer a fresh image for evangelicals. This charisma, Schuurman argues, is not just the power of one individual; it is a dramatic production in which Cavey, his staff, and attendees cooperate, cultivating an identity as an “irreligious” megachurch and providing followers with a more culturally acceptable way to practise their faith in a secular age. Going behind the scenes to small group meetings, church dance parties, and the homes of attendees to investigate what motivates these reflexive evangelicals, Schuurman reveals a playful and provocative counterculture that distances itself from prevailing stereotypes while still embracing a conservative Christian faith.
Download or read book Atheism and Secularity written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-12-21 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important two-volume contribution to the field of secular studies offers the first comprehensive examination of atheists and non-religious people around the world. Who are atheists? How does atheism relate to various aspects of our social world, such as politics, feminism, globalization, and the family? And what is the current state of atheism internationally? Atheism and Secularity addresses the growing interest in the non-religious world by exploring these and related questions. It is a comprehensive and compelling look at atheists and atheism both nationally and internationally, covering a range of topics often overlooked in other books on the subject. Atheism and Secularity is not a philosophical, polemic work, but rather an exploration of who atheists are, what they believe, how they relate to the world, and how the world relates to them. The first volume focuses on topics such as family life, gender, sexuality, politics, and social movements. The second volume looks at atheism and secularity around the world, exploring the lives of non-religious people in North America, Japan, China, India, Europe, the Arab World, and other locations.
Download or read book The Diversity of Nonreligion written by Johannes Quack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relational dynamic of religious and nonreligious positions as well as the tensions between competing modes of nonreligion. Across the globe, individuals and communities are seeking to distinguish themselves in different ways from religion as they take on an identity unaffiliated to any particular faith. The resulting diversity of nonreligion has until recently been largely ignored in academia. Conceptually, the book advances a relational approach to nonreligion, which is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. It also offers further analytical distinctions that help to identify and delineate different modes of nonreligion with respect to actors’ values, objectives, and their relations with relevant religious others. The significance of this conceptual frame is illustrated by three empirical studies, on organized humanism in Sweden, atheism and freethought in the Philippines, and secular politics in the Netherlands. These studies analyze the normativities and changing positions of different groups against the background of both institutionalized religious practice and changing religious fields more generally. This is a fascinating exploration of how nonreligion and secularities are developing across the world. It complements existing approaches to the study of religion, secularity, and secularism and will, therefore, be of great value to scholars of religious studies as well as the anthropology, history, and sociology of religion more generally.
Download or read book The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience written by Jerome P. Baggett and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the breadth of social, emotional, and spiritual experiences of atheists in America Self-identified atheists make up roughly 5 percent of the American religious landscape, comprising a larger population than Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus combined. In spite of their relatively significant presence in society, atheists are one of the most stigmatized groups in the United States, frequently portrayed as immoral, unhappy, or even outright angry. Yet we know very little about what their lives are actually like as they live among their largely religious, and sometimes hostile, fellow citizens. In this book, Jerome P. Baggett listens to what atheists have to say about their own lives and viewpoints. Drawing on questionnaires and interviews with more than five hundred American atheists scattered across the country, The Varieties of Nonreligious Experience uncovers what they think about morality, what gives meaning to their lives, how they feel about religious people, and what they think and know about religion itself. Though the wider public routinely understands atheists in negative terms, as people who do not believe in God, Baggett pushes readers to view them in a different light. Rather than simply rejecting God and religion, atheists actually embrace something much more substantive—lives marked by greater integrity, open-mindedness, and progress. Beyond just talking about or to American atheists, the time is overdue to let them speak for themselves. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in joining the conversation.
Download or read book Society Without God written by Phil Zuckerman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are lawyers, by their very nature, agents of the state, of capital, of institutions of power? Or are there ways in which they can work constructively or transformatively for the disempowered, the working class, the underprivileged? Lawyers in a Postmodern World explores how lawyers actively create the forms of power which they and others deploy. Through engaging case studies, the book examines how lawyers work within and for powerful institutions and provides suggestions--both general and practical--for ways in which the practice of law can be made to work with and for the powerless. Individuals chapters address such subjects as the contradictions of radical law practice; legal work in South Africa; the economics and politics of negotiating justice; feminist legal scholarship and women's gendered lives; the overlapping worlds of law, business, and politics; theories of legal practice; and how lawyers are constitutive of gender relations. Contributing to the book are Maureen Cain (University of West Indies), Yves Dezalay (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France), Martha Fineman (Columbia University), Sue Lees (University of North London), Doreen McBarnet (Wolfson College, Oxford), Frank Munger (SUNY, Buffalo), Wilfried Scharf (University of Cape Town), Stuart Scheingold (University of Washington), David Sugarman (Lancaster University), and Sally Wheeler (University of Nottingham).
Download or read book Society Without God written by Phil Zuckerman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on prominent sociological theories and his own extensive research, Phil Zuckerman explores the role of religion in Denmark and Sweden. He finds that it plays only a small role, seemingly without ill effects, leading him to counter claims that a society without God would be hell on earth.
