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This article presents a commentary on papers about the sociology of religion. The question of the influence of the sociology of religion on general sociology and on the general intellectual debate is easier to pose than to answer. There is a growing awareness that there are well-developed sociologies other than those which dominate Western social science. Reading Emile Poulat's paper about the founding of the Conférence Internationale de Sociologie des Religions, one is struck by the fact that the sociology of religion is presented as a world of its own. It is as if the sociology of religion does not need any external or outside justifications for its existence and development. Meanwhile, James Beckford points out that there have been various studies describing and revealing some important social tendencies. There has been proliferation of studies of religious movements, charismatic renewals and fundamentalist uprisings with visible and dramatic effects on social life and societal frameworks. Industrial society had a fairly stable structure and an institutional build-up based on rules that are centrally enforced by state authorities and shared norms. The information society displays a much greater variety of codes, world views and cosmologies.

This paper deals with the postwar evolution (1945-1980) in the official discourse of the socio-cultural branches of the Catholic labor movement in Flanders, Belgium. More particularly, four organizations of the ACW (General Christian Workers' Organization) were studied: the two youth organizations that were once led by the international renowned cleric, Jozef Cardijn, the KAJ (Catholic Workers' Youth) and the VKAJ (Female Catholic Workers' Youth), and the socio-cultural organizations for adult females and males, the Catholic Workers' Wives (KAV) and the Catholic Workers' League (KWB). The research consisted of a detailed study of the official discourse of these organizations for the period 1945-1980 by analyzing the monthly publications for the members and the core members. Other relevant documents were also consulted, such as the texts of lectures and speeches given at national training courses and congresses. The study reveled three phases within the postwar public discourse of the socio-cultural organizations of the ACW. In the first part of the paper, these phases are identified and described. The second part of the paper offers a sociological interpretation by linking the evolution of discourse to the postwar process of individualization.

The study of Durkheim's writings shows clearly how he was profoundly committed to religious or quasi-religious convictions. This paper puts to one side the legacy of his Jewish origins to concentrate upon the kind of faith he himself called "humankind's religion" ("la religion de l'humanité"). The paper starts with a discussion of the literature on "civil religion" (Bellah, Wallace, Schoffeleers) in order to argue that this form of religion constitutes a minimal element of Durkheimian beliefs. The textual analysis proves consistently that neither patriotism nor any kind of internationalism is the object of Durkheimian faith. Durkheim has sometimes professed a faith in science, but in an analogical sense, as we can easily understand. In the last analysis, the real object of the Durkheimian cult is the human condition, "a fully religious ideal". In opposition to those forms of theocentrism or cosmocentrism which occur in other religions, Durkheim maintains an anthropocentric concern. For him the human being is to the highest degree, a very sacred thing, a being who "possesses this transcendent majesty which the churches of all times attribute to their gods". To him, this human is never an isolated individual; far from it. Through the individual, one recognizes "humankind which is truly respectable and sacred". The paper stresses the importance of this insight in order to elucidate Durkheimian sociology and, more generally, the Durkheimian commitment to "the science of human beings". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the relation between religion and politics has been treated quite arbitrarily in the literature of political science, sociology and social anthropology, especially in the area of the political uses of religion. The term sociology is used generally to cover the relevant literature of all three disciplines just mentioned, although the other two terms will sometimes be used too. The antagonism between church and state in the history of western society is paradoxically one of the springs of this view of the role of religion in power. For, if spiritual authority were to compete with temporal power it is only natural that the former would utilize its exclusive source of legitimacy, which is religious, in claiming political obedience. The examples described in this paper illustrate a traditional ideology in which, rather than religion being used for political purposes, the two existed together as an undifferentiated whole. This ideology which we have called integral, was ingrained in the consciousness of the people and was expressed, among other ways, in a diversity of magico-religious and cultic activities. Where religion and politics are thus undifferentiated, the question of using the former for the purposes of the latter is unnecessary.

This paper recapitulates and summarizes the achievements and failures of sociology of religion in Spain as of December 1976. The author explains that this paper is by no means the first attempt to elaborate a historical synthesis of socio-religious research in Spain. According to him, other authors have tried at various times to analyze the situation of sociology of religion in Spain by studying the main periods of its evolution and development. He points out however that the acritical attitude adopted by most of these papers is of very little interest in 1976; analysis of what was done in the past has no meaning unless it is related to contemporary trends in research, as well as to the elaboration of certain priorities with regard to future research. While this paper limits itself to a historical review of the prior development of sociology of religion in Spain, it tries to point out to the future by critically weighing the acquisitions in this field. The author confesses that the present effort of recapitulating and summarizing the achievements and failures of Spanish sociology of religion inevitably places him in a rather delicate and even uncomfortable situation. According to him, criticism in this case becomes self-criticism in so far as it concerns a group of investigators to which he himself belongs.

This article locates some of the major problem-areas encountered in attempts to produce an autonomously sociological approach to the study of religious conversion. The discussion is generated by a general dissatisfaction with prevailing methodological strategies conventionally deployed in study within the sociology of religion as a whole, and by a concern to specify focus on conversion as a means of both highlighting the cognitive consequences of such deficiencies and of indicating some directions for the delineation of alternative and potentially more fruitful approaches within the broadly micro-constructionist sociological paradigm. The paper begins with an overview of prevailing tendencies in the social-scientific study of conversion by way of highlighting the analytic linkage between methodological strategy and conceptual suppositions as to the substantive nature of conversion phenomena which characterizes them. Next, this paper discusses the relevance for study of conversion of some attempted reformulations of the conceptual underpinnings of sociology of religion and suggests that analysis premised upon the empirical as distinct from the theoretic fundamentality of religious belief may go some way to operationalizing sociological inquiry into conversion as an activity whereby religious knowledge becomes relevant for individuals.

This section provides information on congresses and conventions related to sociology in 1963 and 1964. The Seventh Latin American Congress of sociology will be held in Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota, Colombia on July 14-19, 1964. The congress will be sponsored by the Colombian sociological association. Four specific themes will be discussed: sociology and the national planning; sociology of the agrarian transformations; sociology of the urban and industrial transformations and sociology of education. This section also presents abstracts of papers presented at the Fifty-Eight Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Los Angeles, California on August 26-29, 1963. The papers included were Roman Catholicism and Social Change in Latin America: From Church to Sect, by Ivan A. Vallier, and Religion and Social Change: The Third State in the Application of the Weber Thesis, by Milton Singer. Abstracts of papers delivered at the Twenty-third Annual meeting of the Sociology for the Scientific Study of Religion held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 25-26, 1963, are also presented in this section. The theme of the annual meeting was New Knowledge on Moral and Mystical Dimensions of Religion.

This paper presents an international bibliography of sociology of religion.

Religion did not attract the interest of many Brazilian sociologists until the 1970s. Before that, religion was regarded not only as decadent in modern society, but also as a source of alienation. As such, religion interested anthropologists more than sociologists. With the proliferation of liberation theology in Brazil, religion entered the public and political spheres as a progressive force and became an important problem to sociologists. This paper attempts to assess the situation of the Brazilian social scientific study of religion in the last 20 years. It will examine issues such as teaching, production of theses and dissertations, the creation of research centres, graduate programmes, and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues and topics covered by the periodical, Teaching Sociology, and other scholarly periodicals. Publications dealing with teaching and research in the sociology of religion are hard to find. In fact, the periodical Teaching Sociology has published only one paper directly on the topic since it began in 1972. The article, Teaching the Sociology of Religion. The Student's Religious Autobiography by Larry C. Ingram, looks at the autobiographical account as a pedagogical exercise in which students reveal the difficulties they have with sociology and their personal attitude toward it. The article sticks exclusively to the use of a method meant to initiate students into the sociological perspective. A similar orientation appears in the few articles that can be discovered in sociology or education journals. In both types of reviews the subject of religion usually takes second place to the contribution's focus on pedagogy. The institutional factor influencing research constitute the essence of the collaborative efforts that appear in the Anglo-American review New Direction for Institutional Research. This periodical publishes thematic, usually collaborative studies which deal with the quantity of research produced by a group of professors. This turn toward the institutional, if not the organizational framework, is matched by solid documentation which lists a multitude of references related to the research.

This paper attempts to assess the impact of the secularization debate of the mid-1960s on the theoretical evolution of the sociology of religion and on the development of the ICSR. An analysis of the Acts published by the ICSR over a thirty-six year period shows that criticisms of the theoretical narrowness of "religious sociology" in Europe existed long before the debate about secularization broke out, and that the ICSR only reacted to this debate six years later, when a new generation of scholars became dominant in the ICSR. The conclusion is that, although the secularization debate did not have any direct impact on the theoretical evolution of the discipline nor on the evolution of the ICSR, it had an indirect impact, in the sense that it was only when a new generation of scholars, who were university professors rather than churchmen, came to power, that the new paradigm which secularization theorists had put forth came into effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a list of papers on sociology of religion, that appeared in the August 01, 1962 issue of the periodical "Social Compass." Some of the books mentioned in the list are "The Personal and the Functional Element in Pastoral Care," by W.M.I. Van Den Ende, "Pastoral Care and Clinical Training in America. Report of a Three Months Visit," by H. Faber and "The Variety of City Churches," by F.A. Shippey.

The article presents a bibliography related to sociology. Among the authors whose papers have been mentioned are A.I. Abell, A.M. Adlerstein, P. Alexandre, Herman Feifel, S.S. Felman, Charles Y. Glock, T. Hora, H. Stuart Hughes, P.E. Johnson, T.W. Klink, William T. Lin, Charles Lucier, S.D. Messing, J. Mills, David O. Moberg, Omar K. Moore, Murray H. Sherman, S.W. Spencer, W. Stark, Robert Tully, Ruth Underhill, Howard M. Vollmer, R.P. Vaughan, Joachim Wach, Goodwin Watson, A.M. Willms, and J.M. Yinger.

This paper highlights results of the work accomplished in the documentation of facts concerned with migration and the sources of information that have been explored and judged useful for Catholic planning and research. In conformity with the aims assigned to it by the statutes of the International Catholic Migration Commission (I.C.M.C.), the I.C.M.C. Information Centre was created in Geneva, Switzerland in 1952. More than 150 periodicals from different countries, particularly from immigration countries, were received regularly in 1953. The best publications on population matters including different aspects of migration have been written for the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques by eminent professors and population specialists, both French and of other nationalities. From the Catholic point of view, population problems have been considerably elucidated by the eminent Australian economist, now in Oxford, England Colin Clark. The agricultural problem in Venezuela has also been examined from different point of views in the publications of the Instituto Agrario Nacional. Only a few studies on European emigration from the national and economic angle have been published. A curious sociological fact has been noted in the Netherlands concerning the religious composition of emigration groups.

This article describes the theme of the March 1994 issue of Social Compass. On July 19 to 23, 1993, in Budapest, Hungary, the SISR had its 22nd International Congress, on religion, Culture and Identity. The theme was divided into subthemes which were discussed in four plenary sessions. In this issue, the journal published the papers presented in the plenary sessions: Religion, Culture and Identity; Ethnicity, Cultural Coexistence and religion; Religion and the Emerging Global Regions; and Migrations, Culture Clash and Religion. The first four sets of conference papers published in Social Compass, as the March 1994 issue of volumes 37-40, were subsidized by a grant from the Belgian National Lottery. The members of SISR must secure the further publication of papers presented at SISR conferences. This is the only way to ensure the circulation of ideas expressed at the conferences to a wider audience. The members of SISR hope that the four sets already published will stimulate its other members not only to continue their membership but also to promote membership of the SISR, which includes a yearly subscription to Social Compass.

This paper presents a list of books received in the 1970 issue of Social Compass.

This paper reports that at the VIIth World Congress of Sociology, held in Varna, Bulgaria from September 14-19, 1970, a new executive was elected for the Sociology of Religion Research Committee. Professor Norman Birnbaum, Amherst College, Department of Anthropology-Sociology, Amherst, Massachusetts, was elected to succeed the late Professor Le Bras. The section decided to recruit membership as now required under the new Statutes of the International Sociological Association and to plan a conference for September 1972. It was also decided to invite representatives from each country on the committee.

This paper presents the journal Social Compass, a bimonthly review devoted to sociology, sociography, social psychology and statistics issued by appointment of the International Catholic Institute for Social-Ecclesiastical Research in Geneva, Switzerland.