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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.

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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 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]

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 summarizes Max Weber's thought on the religion of social groups, with the idea of extracting some of its major statements. The objective of this article is not to examine Weberian theory as a whole, but to provide the items necessary for understanding the approach followed by the authors in their own research. In the second part of this article, the authors show what this theoretical approach takes from Weber and how the perspective in which they place their analysis forces them to go beyond it. The authors relate that the theory underlying their work on the social functions of religion was initially inspired by Weberian thought and particularly by what Weber develops in paragraph 7 of his sociology of religion. In paragraph 7, Weber analyzes the demand of different social groups: the peasants, the socially and economically privileged classes: the warrior nobility, the bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie and unprivileged groups: the petite bourgeoisie, slaves and farm workers, the modern proletariat. But the authors' research in Sri Lanka and Kerala on the interrelationships between the religious and political fields during the precapitalist period of these ensembles, as well as in the transformation process affecting their structures, were to lead them beyond Weberian theory in an attempt to uncover the objective causes of this expansion.

As recently as 2008, a major reference work in the sociology of religion could (correctly) describe the study of atheism, secularity, and nonreligion as 'meager, fragmentary, and unappreciated'. Only a decade later, this situation has been radically transformed. Not only is there a substantial, ever-growing, and constantly diversifying (methodologically, theoretically, geographically) research literature, but 'nonreligion studies' now possesses a full 'academic architecture' of conferences, journals, monograph series, professional communities, and grant successes. Over this period, the study of nonreligion has become increasingly institutionalized as an established subfield of the sociology of religion. This has not simply come about by magic. On the contrary, there are very good sociological reasons i) why, for over a century, nonreligion failed to take off (outside of certain, telling milieux) as an area of sustained sociological interest; and ii) why and how this has – seemingly so rapidly – changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The article discusses the relations between humans and nonhumans.

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Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents international bibliography of sociology of religions 2003. This bibliography is a systematic indexing only of specialized reviews and not of books. Some of the articles mentioned here in this article are: "Pragmatic Consumers and Practical Products: The Success of Pneumacentric Religion Among Women in Latin America's New Religious Economy," by R. Andrew Chestnut; "Religious Protest and Economic Conflict: Possibilities and Constraints on Religious Resource Mobilization and Coalitions in Detroit's Newspaper Strike," by William A. Mirola; "Catholic, Priests and the Political Order: The Political Behavior Catholic Pastors," by Ted G. Jelen; "Constitutional Privilege and Constituting Pluralism: Religious Freedom in National, Global, and Legal Context," by Peter Beyer; "The Re-Emergence of the Church in the Finnish Public Life? Christian Social Work As an Indicator of the Public Status of the Church," by Anne Birgitta Yeung; "The September 11 Tragedy and the Muslim World: Living With Memory and Myth," by Mahmood Monshipouri.

The article presents a bibliography of sociology of religions for 2002, including Acta Sociologica, American Journal of Sociology, The British Journal of Sociology and Iglesia Viva.

Drawing on data from the European Values Study (EVS) 1999, the author gives a brief overview of religions in post-communist societies and Croatia's place among them. He shows that for some societies religion is still crucial for their overall functioning. In order to understand this role, which is only partially visible on the level of empirical data, and to point out some difficulties in the sociological approach to it, the author discusses two themes: religion and war, and religion and transition. Although the recent war on the territory of the former Yugoslavia was not a religious one, the Churches played a key role both at the symbolic level of maintenance of separate national identities, and on the level of complex social processes. The contradictory and uncertain nature of transition processes additionally complicated the role of religion in society and partly prevented its accommodation to new social circumstances. These elements can all be seen in the different roles that religion has to play, contradictory expectations of the public towards the Church and sharp social conflicts that divide society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

English. The author looks at Latina women in the United States and their contributions to the mosaic of religious social patterns. The underlying assumption here is that Latinas/os, like other ethnic groups, have made their mark shaping religious practices. The article builds on notions that gender, ethnic, and race foci in our research expand our knowledge of the nuances in the mosaic of religious practice. The sociology of religion would be left behind if it did not challenge the restrictive ways the field has looked at religious practice and expression. What methodological approaches and what questions we ask are important to enriching research on religion in the United States and elsewhere. Here the author suggests that both questionnaire and focus group interviewing are particularly useful in studying a multiethnic and multilingual community, because the'two-pronged approach brings out the complexity of religious beliefs and practice. French. L'auteure analyse la manière dont les femmes sud-américaines vivant aux Etats-Unis ont contribué à la mosaïque socio-religieuse de ce pays. L'hypothèse sous-jacente est que les 'Latinos' ont, comme d'autres groupes ethniques, marqué de leur empreinte le 'paysage' religieux actuel. L'article est fondé sur la notion selon laquelle le 'genre', l'origine ethnique et la race sont des angles d'analyse susceptibles d'améliorer notre connaissance des pratiques religieuses et de leurs nuances. La sociologie des religions ne ferait pas son travail si elle ne tentait pas de remettre en question le cadre parfois étriqué dans lequel elle a tenté d'analyser les pratiques et les expressions religieuses. Les approches méthodologiques suggéreés et les questions poseés sont importantes pour l'étude des religions, que ce soit aux Etats-Unis ou ailleurs. L'auteure soutient que le questionnaire et les entretiens avec le groupe cible sont des techniques... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Presents an introduction to the Volume 49, 2002 issue of the journal "Social Compass."

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Social Compass is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In its early days, the Hare Krishna movement (ISKCON) was considered by its members to be an ideal micro-society that, once developed, would replace the existing 'materialistic' social structure... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the utilitarian tradition of economics to propose the leanest formal theoretical models for sociology, 'rational choice theory' rejects the Durkheimian interest in society as a reality transcendent of the individual in favour of a revitalization of individualist and rationalist conceptualizations of social order... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents an international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1987.

This section presents the international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1986.

This article discusses cultural sources of support for occultism in contemporary society. One of the central problems for a sociology of the occult is to explain how it is that individuals develop both an interest in and a commitment to occult practices and beliefs, and although several useful and informative studies have been undertaken since 1977, it is still largely the case that a vast ignorance exists concerning the factors underlying the appeal of the occult. Folk religion is one concept which has an obvious close connection both with superstition and the occult. Conventionally, this term has been used to contrast to universal or official religion to denote a religion attached to and carried by the group, the folk, or tribe, while universal religions are defined as those aimed at self-conscious individuals. The importance of the mass media and popular culture in general in providing a supportive environment for occultism clearly needs to be noted, for although, at one level, the media can often be identified as acting on behalf of the guardians of official institutionalized knowledge, ridiculing those who believe in aliens or witchcraft, at another level, interest in the occult is taken for granted.

This section presents the international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1985.

This section presents the international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1984.

This section presents the international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1983.

The article examines the place of Islam in contemporary Angkola Batak culture. Sumatra's Batak societies all have vigorous lives that combine indigenous ritual and belief systems with Islam, Protestant Christianity, or Catholicism. Islam was introduced to the southern Batak homelands in the 1820s by militant Minangkabau who moved into the area from their West Sumatran ethnic homeland; today, the southernmost Batak society, Mandailing, is almost entirely Muslim, a fact signaled by tin-roofed mosques in some of the smallest mountain villages. Homeland Angkola Batak share many of the social organizational features characteristic of other Batak cultures and other highland Southeast Asian ethnic minorities entering increasingly into a national orbiting a time of economic exchange. The Angkola economy now includes salaried jobs in the civil service and military, an increasing reliance on motorized transport, and an infusion of funds from Angkola families living in such cities as Jakarta, Medan and the oil boom cities of South Sumatra. The Angkola kinship system is also undergoing change. Like other Batak societism the Angkola have patrilineal clans linked to each other through complex ties of marriage alliance. Islam came relatively late to the Batak homelands when that area is compared to other regions of Indonesia that came into contact with the religion as early as 1400. The spread of Islam to the southern Batak homelands in the 1820's must be seen in the context of Dutch colonial politics and the religious and military history of other Sumatra ethnic groups. The aboriginal Angkola religion that Islam confronted can only be reconstructed from present-day evidence.

The section presents an international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1982, including Die Mitarbeit, Acta Sociologica and British Journal of Sociology.

This article examines the sociology of the sociological aspects of religion. The image of man in modern sociology diametrically opposes the religious image of man. Now the question of the image of man ultimately belongs to philosophical anthropology. It is of a philosophical nature and cannot be answered on empirical grounds. But the force with which images of man can be propagated is determined not only, and probably not even primarily, by philosophical arguments but also and perhaps primarily by the social weight of those who support a specific image of man. What is considered by some as a self-evident scientific insight is often nothing more than a socially supported prejudice. There is not only a religious fundamentalism but also an Enlightenment fundamentalism. Conceptions are adopted that are not accessible for discussion. This is not only a theoretical philosophical question, there are also practical consequences linked to it. It is interesting in itself that the theme of the images of man has come up for discussion to a certain degree without being analyzed sociologically, but not the theme of the images of society. The acceptance of the sociology of religion by the churches was determined by the degree in which sociology was perceived as a threat.

This section presents the international bibliography of sociology of religions for 1979.

This article makes some sociological observations on Buddhism in Sri Lanka with special reference to the writings and influence of Max Weber. Almost all the Buddhists in Sri Lanka belong to the majority ethnic group known as the Sinhalese. According to the 1972 data, Sinhalese Buddhists comprise about 67.4 percent of the population. Tamils, Hindus, Muslims and Roman Catholics are in that order, the numerical minority groups. Weber was the pioneer in the sociology of Buddhism not only with regard to his substantive contribution to the field, but also with respect to the methodological influence his work had on research by later scholars. The authors are however skeptical about subscribing to any kind of Weberian Buddhism by way of an uncritical intellectual conversion to any orthodoxy stemming primarily from Weber's writings or to any belated charisma surrounding his name. In Part I, the essay presents a historical overview, followed by a statement on the relationship between Buddhism and folk-religion. Part II of this essay consists of a review of the Weberian tradition in the sociology of Buddhism. In Part II, the essay attempts to apply a new conceptual framework for the analysis of Buddhism and society in Sri Lanka.

The article explores the sociological aspects of Christian Church's penetration in the Confucian regions in Asia. The contacts between Christianity and the zones of influence of Confucianism in Asia have been quite different according to epochs and to countries. The main characteristic of those contacts has been the fact that they were made by a religious system highly institutionalized with a great number of specialized agents and being exogenous to the social and cultural universe of Asia. The first Christian to have come to China were Syrian merchants of Persia. They had established important roads of trade between Asia and Europe, by land or by sea. In some places they established themselves in harbor-cities, like Musiris or Quilon in Kerala, South India. Franciscans and Dominican missionaries established missions in China during less than one century. One diocese was erected at Khambalick, Pekin in 1308, with an Italian Franciscan at the head, a certain Montecorvino. This was not linked with political enterprises, but more with the great explorations of the time, made by some European travelers. It did not leave any durable traces in China. The leading powers in Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries were Portugal and Spain and the division of the world between them was operated by Pope Alexander VI in 1943. Catholicism was not only the predominant religion in those countries, but it also furnished the ideology of the political enterprise. In the Asian countries of Confucianist influence, such as an introduction of Christianity took place at slightly different moments: in Japan from 1549, with action of Francis Xavier, a Jesuit in Vietnam, in 1580 with the Franciscans coming from the Philippines and later on, in 1615 with the Jesuits, in China, during the Ming's Dynasty, with the Jesuits also, during the second half of the 16th century.

Announces information on the 2003 International Society for the Sociology of Religion Conference XXVII which will be held in Turin, Italy. Theme of the conference; Duration of the conference; Speakers in the plenary sessions.