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The article highlights that the Scientific Study of Religion has opened up to new areas of research, to new groups of researchers and new frames. The articles published in the society's journal, "Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion" have moved away from papers on the Protestant Mainline. Looking at twenty-eight issues, beginning with volume 5 and ending with volume 35, the journal published ninety-six articles that could be categorized as focusing on a particular religious group. Of those, sixteen articles were about the Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. Only one of those was published after 1981. The study of religion was somewhat ghettoized in the discipline. A renewed interest in religion among sociologists was facilitated by the advent of new cultural approaches in sociology. Sociologist Clifford Geertz's work, for example, not only proposed a frame for seeing religion as a cultural system, but perhaps more importantly, Geertz revealed how the analysis of popular expressive forms could be as significant and revealing as the study of high culture or official dogmas. New studies appeared examining faith healing and devotional practices, conversion and individual's search for meaning in a changing society.

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study on astrology and its constituency. To date, there have been few sociological studies of astrology, and little is known about what types of people are interested in the practice. This study's focus was on adherents of astrology who attended an astrology conference. Unlike previous research, the findings of this study show that the characteristics of these astrologers reflect those of the general population, providing a new understanding of a segment of astrology's constituency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the secularization theories put forward in the 1960s and 70s by different sociologists are not compatible at the theoretical level, they nevertheless share a very broad set of assumptions and analytical categories. This paper provides a systematization of this common framework (or paradigm). It is shown, with exact references to the texts of Luckmann, Berger, Wilson, Martin, Penn, Parsons, and Beliab, that the secularization paradigm is based on a core of three "concepts" (or exemplars): differentiation, rationalization, and worldliness. Around this core are a number of logically subordinated exemplars, most notably autonomization, privatization, generalization, pluralization, and collapse of the world view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]