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This article traces the trajectories of psilocybin and ayahuasca in the context of the psychedelic renaissance. The bibliometric analysis reveals that academic publications on psilocybin fall primarily into the medical and scientific areas, whereas those devoted to ayahuasca derive mainly from humanities and social sciences. Second, the article argues that psilocybin and ayahuasca use is undergoing a process of secularization, leading to psychedelic use that is increasingly removed from its traditional cultural roots. This secularization manifests itself differently in the two cases: Psilocybin exhibits a higher degree of secularization than ayahuasca. Ayahuasca maintains strong ties to religious institutions and indigenous organizations deeply involved in its global spread, and it has undergone less medicalization than psilocybin. While the careful attention to setting in psilocybin clinical trials is noteworthy, this doesn't necessarily imply an emphasis on traditional mushroom use settings. On the other hand, a form of 'ayahuasca guardianship' persists, manifested in individuals and groups actively maintaining and asserting their cultural authority over the plant's significance and associated practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 25 years after the previous survey, the state of religion in Italy in 2017 was surveyed. This time a more challenging mixed methodology was used following both quantitative (with 3238 questionnaires administered according to criteria of statistical representativeness) and qualitative (with 164 in-depth interviews, in various Italian locations) criteria. For over half a century, there has been talk of secularization and the end of religion. What is being recorded all this time, actually, is a decline in religious practice. Meanwhile, there has been an expansion of a kind of religious area that goes beyond Church membership. There is also talk of uncertain faith meaning that a troubled and reflexive kind of belief continues to exist. At present, a new conceptual category is emerging more and more, that of Church as religion, meaning that the Church itself has become religion and begun to replace the content of faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rise of Islamist parties in North Africa after the 2011 uprisings and their integration into the political landscape. It focuses on the concepts of the "civil state" and "Islamic secularism" that these parties have adopted to distance themselves from radical religious commitments and participate in politics. The article analyzes the different interpretations and meanings of these concepts within the Arab-Muslim world and compares them to Christian democracy in Europe. It also examines case studies from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia to understand how these concepts have been framed and operationalized by Islamist parties and the conflicts that arise from their adoption. The article emphasizes the need for a comparative approach to understand the complexities of religion-state relations and the secularization of political life in the region. [Extracted from the article]

By putting in the Moroccan context the concept of 'multiple secularities', this paper digs the process of conceptualization of 'secularization' at the initiative of the Islamist leader, Saadeddine al-Othmani. The latter supported the acceptability of a secular principle adequate to religion, its symbols and their presence in the political and public space. Through the analysis of his writings as well as of other leaders' discourses, this article follows the compromises between religious and secular revendications during the process of conceptualization inside the PJD-MUR. Using the theories of 'secularization' and 'de-théologisation', this study highlights the strategy of 'rejection' and 'adaptation' developed by the PJD. Rejecting the hypothesis of a linear secularization of Islamist ideology, it also examines the ongoing or incomplete structural mutations resulted from the 'distinction' (tamiyyîz) between the party and the movement, as well as between the socio-political spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a socio-historical enigma: the articulation of family planning – through dedicated centres – and catholicism. How come self-identified catholics ended up defending contraception and decriminalisation of abortion while the Catholic Church kept reminding that sexuality should be conjugal and reproductive? The article examines the process of creating a discursive and practical normativity allowing the use of contraception and abortion through a catholic 'tool', that is, the pastoral power at a time of secularisation. Borrowing the concept developed by Michel Foucault enables highlighting the 'catholic governmentality' regarding contraception and abortion, namely, the 'responsible-freedom'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Western societies, support for policies concerning the secularization of the public sphere or the state often seems to be driven by secularized majority populations considered to be largely homogeneous. In this article, by contrast, I draw on the case of the Canadian province of Quebec to show that, as a fundamental element of conflicts over secularism, secularist activism emerges from particular generational dynamics, especially those of the so-called 'baby boomers'. My main argument is that while the baby boomers' collective experiences have shaped their secularist outlook, there are a variety of biographical trajectories and engagements with spirituality that the public image of this generation tends to hide. The article is based on biographical and ethnographic research carried out between 2012 and 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks how secular societies cope with suffering and fortune perceived as unjust and undeserved. It investigates secular forms of dealing with the originally religious problem of theodicy. According to Weber's work, Western societies have solved this problem with the meritocratic ideal based on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, which gave rise to the capitalistic work ethics. Current sociological diagnoses observe a crisis of these ethics, which begs the question of whether this also indicates a crisis of meritocratism. The article addresses this question from the perspective of sociology of religion and translates Weber's typology of religious theodicies into a typology of secular cosmodicies. The typology serves as an analytical tool, allowing for systematic comparisons of justifications in different empirical cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of religious minorities within the secularized West has been a recurring topic of scholarly interest. Previous studies show that religious identities are shaped by family background and social context. Using data from the European Social Survey, this study turns to Scandinavia, the most secular region of the world, to examine religious salience among immigrants over time and across generations. The findings reveal that on most measures, second-generation immigrants are more secular than the first generation, but more religious than their native peers. However, individuals with one immigrant and one native parent are less likely to identify with a religion than other groups, including the native majority. Furthermore, among first-generation immigrants, there is a negative relationship between the duration of residence and religiosity. This study argues for the fluidity of religiosity among immigrants and the secularizing effect of structural agents on the salience of religious identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fervor, creativity and dynamism represent characteristic features of the Peruvian religious field (Catholic and Evangelical). Specialists consider it as corresponding to an enchanted worldview. Nonetheless, some of them, in particular Casanova and the Catholic hierarchy, have noticed signs of transformation and slowdown, which they consider a secularization process. This article aims to interpret those signs in context and show how they reveal a change in the relationship between faithful and religious institutions. Churches maintain their presence and their prestige and have a power which has been redefined in a weakened social and political environment in the process of transformation. However, they no longer structure the essential individual rhythms and community norms. Between the fervor very often out of institutional context and the confusions of spheres, a secularization process is not really adequate to reflect the religious transformations in process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations for the rise of the religiously unaffiliated have regained attention from sociologists in light of recent declines in religiosity. While the secularization thesis has seen revisions across disciplines, few studies link lower levels of religiosity with greater Internet use. This article draws from Charles Taylor's widely regarded account of secularity and his concept of 'the buffered self' to argue that individuals who use the Internet more frequently are less religious. Using data from the Baylor Religion Survey (2017), I find that with higher levels of Internet use, individuals are less likely to pray, read sacred texts, attend religious services, consider religion personally important, or affiliate with a religious tradition. Greater Internet use is further associated with being an atheist, while other media activity such as watching television is not similarly linked. These findings ground Taylor's theoretical work by specifying empirically measurable, contextual conditions that explain recent declines in religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores secularisation in a traditionally Catholic community through the analysis of intimate relationships which fall outside Catholic morality. It gives an indication of how individuals in contemporary society perceive Church teachings on sexuality in terms of the relationship choices they make. The research draws upon 2 years of fieldwork carried out with Drachma LGBTI, a space where lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) people of faith may explore and deepen their spirituality. I also conducted 35 in-depth interviews with LGBT and non-LGBT individuals whose lifestyle runs counter to official Church teachings on sexuality, despite their Catholic faith that is, who are in a same-sex relationship or else divorced, cohabiting or in a civil marriage. The study revealed that while informants may disregard Church teachings on matters of sexuality, their reconstructed sexual morality is still embedded within a Catholic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to the articles published in this issue of Social Compass by François Gauthier, Tobias Müller, David Voas and Sarah Wilkens-Laflamme about the presidential address given by Jörg Stolz at the SISR Congress in July 2019 and titled Secularization theories in the twenty-first century: Ideas, evidence, and problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commenting Stolz's 2019 International Society for the Sociology of Religion presidential address, this article further explores four key current debates in the secularization paradigm: (1) the continued search for the ultimate root causes of secularization in the West, (2) the critique from individualization theories towards the concept of secularization, (3) the substantive content of nonreligion, and (4) the risks of limiting ourselves to grand theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that quantitative secularization research has made important progress in the last 20 years in seven areas. We have gained knowledge of how religion and religiosity are connected to insecurity, education, socialization, secular transition, secular competition, pluralism, and regulation. This has led to a better understanding of the causes and the form of the secularization process. In this article, the author discusses the new ideas that have led to these advances, the evidence that supports the claims, and the new problems that have appeared due to the progress made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methodology of scientific research programmes, developed by Imre Lakatos, can help us to identify which theories are strong or weak. Applying this approach suggests that the secularization research programme is progressing, as Stolz argues. Some of the recent advances have been more successful than others, however. In particular, we have done better at understanding how secularization happens than why it happens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secularisation theory has been a central element of research and teaching in sociology since the middle of the twentieth century. This article discusses the current state of the art in secularisation research through the perspectives of decolonial theory, global sociology, feminist theory and the experiences of minority religions. Responding to Jörg Stolz, the article argues that current secularisation research suffers from conceptual shortcomings regarding the socio-political implications of secularism and the secular, that the parochial nature of secularisation theory has led to its entanglement in modernist, catching-up narratives, and that a feminist perspective is necessary to provide more detailed accounts of the gendered nature of processes of secularisation, particularly regarding new religious movements and the religious transformations within minority religious groups. The article concludes that secularisation theory needs to take into account minority religious experiences, the religiosity of women and religion beyond Euro-America in order to understand the significant shifts in religiosity that remain overlooked by methodologies operating solely at the level of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a critical response to Jörg Stolz's 2019 ISSR presidential address as to the advances made by secularization research over the last 20 years. The article argues that the data presented can be boiled down to confirming what we already knew: the decline of 'churched' religion. Sketching a radical epistemological, methodological and empirical critique, it argues that the seven areas of 'advances' discussed in the presidential address erode into near insignificance. Because this quantitative research compartmentalizes religion and lacks solid contextualization in the world we live in, it completely overlooks the massive qualitative changes that have been reconfiguring religion on a global scale, and which can be understood as the result of the erosion of the nation-state container at the hands of economic globalization and the massification of neoliberal and consumer dynamics and the consequent substantial changes in global societies, well beyond the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the movements made by the Centre d'action laïque (CAL, Centre for Secular Action), a French-speaking structure of organized secularism in Belgium, in its definition of secularism over the last twenty years. Starting from an observation of the mobilization of secularism in the written output from the CAL, the article examines the extent to which its secular ideal has become secularized both in its vocabulary and in its commitments, no longer being necessarily determined by its relationship to religion. It reveals how the written output of the CAL is gradually distancing itself from a secularism constructed in opposition to, but also and perhaps in mirror image with, clericalism, to engage instead with topics previously unknown to secularism (such as sport, drugs and prostitution) so as to better respond with a philosophical secularism that a single position vis-à-vis religion can no longer always justify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catalonia is simultaneously the most secular region in Spain and the region that places the greatest priority on actively managing religious affairs. Moreover, parties comprising the Catalan Left have been particularly assertive in pushing for legislative proposals to reduce the privileges of the Catholic Church and the general presence of religion in the public sphere. This article examines the sources of Catalonia's exceptionality in religious matters, with a focus on the entanglements between religion and nationalism in the region. Drawing on survey data, legal documents, transcripts of parliamentary debates, media reports, and historical studies, the author argues that counter-state understandings of nationhood have figured centrally in the rapid secularization of Catalonia's populace, the Catalan government's proactive approach to religious governance, and the Catalan Left's insistence on church–state reform at both the regional and national levels. This analysis speaks to broader questions regarding religion, secularism, and nationalism in stateless nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on life stories collected between 2014 and 2018 among a population of baby boomers of French Canadian descent, whose personal path echoes the social and political history of the province. Following their socialization in a Catholic context, this generation has known a rapid phase of secularization, modernization and diversification that, since the end of the 1960s, have impacted the local social and political landscape of the province. The entanglement between individual and collective experiences shapes a particular rhetoric on the « laïc » (secularist) project in Quebec that hinges on memories of Catholicism, concern for gender equity and pluralist ethics. Drawing on Maclure and Taylor's model of open and closed secularism, the author discuss the means and ends of the moral principles underlying baby boomers' narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that women are more religious than men, a difference long accepted as an established fact in the sociology of religion. But some recent research has revealed that this difference is not 'universal', varying in space and time. However, only a few scholars have focused on religiosity gender-gap trends over time, either on the theoretical or empirical levels. The aim of this article is to help fill this gap by analysing the progress of gender differences in religiosity from 1981 to 2009 in Italy, an interesting cultural context because of the gradual penetration of secularisation and the high level of gender inequality. Our empirical analysis is based on a longitudinal approach, using data from the European Values Study. The findings show that the gender gap in Italy was quite stable in regard to many aspects of religiosity, with three noteworthy exceptions: the gender gap decreased in beliefs, in intergenerational transmission of faith and in adherence to the Church's doctrines on prostitution, abortion, divorce, euthanasia, suicide and adultery. Contrary to expectations, in most cases this narrowing came about because of an increase in men's religiosity, not a decrease in women's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uruguay is an atypical country as regards the place of the religious in society. This is due to many factors dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a process that culminated in the separation of the Church and the State in 1919, along with the subsequent privatization of religion. This matrix impregnated the Uruguayan imagination up until today; however, some changes in the traditional location of the religious in society are apparent, and some debates are quite similar to those of the nineteenth century. This article will explore the foundational bases of the model of Uruguayan laïcité, some of the main debates about it, along with the trends existing in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion in the public space constitutes a structuring issue of the contemporary debates of the social sciences of religion. This article mobilizes part of that literature, circumscribing it to the Latin American context. In that attempt, we work in two dimensions. First, we present how, from the historical and political configurations of our region in the debate, problems and questions about the public space are addressed distant from those commonly encountered when the empirical reference corresponds to the United States-Europe map. The aim is to explore the regional particularities for an effort to theoretically and methodologically strengthen the analysis of this topic. The second dimension contemplated in the text is the presentation of concrete empirical situations in which religion in public space is condensed as a controversy, that mobilize and is mobilized by different actors: politicians, religious, academics, media. These two dimensions go through the thematic issue that follows this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religiously unaffiliated Canadians have been persistently more likely to reside in the western provinces. In parallel, the degree of religiosity of the affiliates has been generally higher in the low affiliation provinces of the west. This pattern has led some scholars to characterize Canada as religiously polarized. However, in the literature, a quantitative measure of polarization is lacking. Moreover, religious polarization, a rather vividly debated characterization, is not by itself an explanation for the patterns. The present article, using the Canadian General Social Surveys of 1985 to 2011, contributes to the debate in three ways. First, this article establishes the robustness of the geographic discrepancies in unaffiliation rates and the degree of religiosity in Canada. Second, this study proposes and computes a quantitative measure of polarization. Finally the article explores the role of free-rider exclusion as an explanation for the patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to furnish insights of the Italian public debate on the recognition of LGBTQ rights, which can be understood as an interesting case study of the complex relationship between (multi)secularisation processes and re/definition of citizenship models. More specifically, the article analyses two political events related to this debate that took place in Rome in June 2015. The first is the Family Day demonstration, promoted by conservative Catholic groups; the second is the LGBTQ Pride parade, promoted by various gay, lesbian and transsexual/gender associations. We analyse the official statements issued by the two organising committees of the demonstrations, adopting the framework and methods of the Critical Discourse Analysis. Above and beyond an evident political conflict between the two discourses, we try to shed light on their mutual construction on the basis of what we call 'naturalization' and 'universalization' processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious change continues to be a controversial topic that involves both theoretical and methodological issues. As to the European context, the main dispute is between secularization and individualization theory, especially considering the ‘believing without belonging’ thesis. This article will tackle this dispute given these three choices: firstly, we assume that cohort replacement is the main driver of religious change; secondly, religious tradition has to be taken fully into account to explain religious change; thirdly, we consider religiosity as a complex phenomenon that requires a multidimensional approach. Results from a multilevel multiple responses model based on EVS (European Values Study) data show that practice is declining across cohorts in all the countries whereas trends for belief and self-definition diverge only for Eastern Orthodox countries. Depending on the interpretation, such exception seems supporting rather than undermining the ‘believing without belonging’ theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the two divergent, though intertwined, roads of European secularization and global religious pluralism. In continental Western Europe, modernization and urbanization were accompanied by drastic secularization with limited religious pluralism. By contrast, in much of the rest of the world, in the Americas, North and South, throughout Asia and the Pacific and in Sub-Saharan Africa, modernization and urbanization have led to religious pluralism with limited secularization. In our contemporary global secular age, the parallel religious and secular dynamics are becoming ever more intertwined and interrelated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swedish society is characterized by secularization, and at the same time, as a result of migration, the country has become more pluralistic. An important consequence of this is the increasing possibilities for cooperation between different religious communities, and a variety of inter-religious cooperation are currently taking place in Sweden. The aim of the article is to show how inter-religious cooperation arises and is maintained at a local level in Sweden today, but also to highlight what the hurdles are. The article is based on interviews with people who in different ways were involved, or had chosen not to be involved, in inter-religious cooperation at a local level in Sweden. It is also based on participation in five local inter-religious groups during 2010 and 2011. The study shows that inter-religious cooperation at local level in Sweden is largely influenced by differences in conditions between religious communities. These differences mainly derive from the positions the religious communities have in society, i.e. there is a strong power imbalance between the religious communities that is clearly reflected in the inter-religious cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While attending college, religious participation tends to decline among American students, but evidence of changes in religious belief is less clear. On the bases of both secularization theory and the moral communities thesis, we used multi-level modeling techniques to test whether institutional diversity predicts changes in student belief at Christian institutions. Results suggest that declines in absolutism were associated with increasing religious and political diversity, and religious diversity amplified the effects of academic tenure. Political diversity, however, explained the effects of religious diversity in combined models, suggesting that challenging political discourse may be more important for changes in religious belief than diversity of religious worldviews in the context of Christian higher education in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islam is often regarded as being incompatible with European values. In Italy, for example, anti-Islamic points of view reiterate the religion’s alleged inconsistency with Catholicism and secularism. This article argues that narrative practices can challenge this idea by articulating Muslim hybrid identities that are compatible with Italian culture and society. The second-generation blog Yalla Italia represents a ‘third space’ where young Italian Muslims contrast dominant media stereotypes, thereby creating ‘disruptive flows of dissent’. A textual analysis of the blog and interviews with some of the bloggers reveal that three main topics are employed to overcome marginalization: (1) critiques of mainstream media (2) narratives about family lives and the practice of Islam, and (3) advocacy of a quicker procedure for gaining Italian citizenship. The bloggers adopt a storytelling style to press for social and institutional change and explain how they succeed in adapting Islam to Italian society. Their religious diversity is thus perceived as providing a potential for Italy, rather than being a mark of marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an additional - and less familiar - key performance indicator of secularization, this article offers a meta-analysis of over-time quantitative data about private prayer in modern Britain, mostly derived from national cross-sectional sample surveys among adults. Despite the fragmentary nature of the evidence and its methodological challenges, with consequent variability in results, the direction of travel is clear. Self-reported regular (weekly or more) private prayer has declined from one-half to one-quarter of the population over the past half-century, while the proportion never praying has risen from one-fifth to one-half. There have been parallel falls in belief in prayer and its efficacy. Gender, age, and ethnicity are the main secular attributes impacting prayer behaviour, relatively higher levels of which also correlate with above average religiosity, belief in God, and churchgoing and with being Roman Catholic or non-Christian. Prayer statistics thus corroborate other indicators which suggest that secularization in Britain has been a progressive, rather than sudden, process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the evidence of a progressive disenchantment, the religious sphere maintains a strong grip on current societies though undertaking some transformations. Pluralism, individualism and privatization are three features we cannot ignore if we choose to study religion in the contemporary world and, more broadly, if we choose to study modernity.The aim of this article is to illustrate some features of the different forms of religiosity in the secular age (Taylor, 2007). We have focused on modern Catholicism, with particular reference to religious experience in the Catholic lay group. The stories of Catholic militants show that the motivation behind their choice is the crucial factor to analyze their religious experience and worldview. In this sense, we will try to reflect on some indicators that can help us to understand the resources and limits of the contemporary Catholic pluralism and the aspects of the ‘modern desire for God’ (Abbruzzese, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to conventional readings of secularization and its usual analytical point of references – American and French civil religions, American religious vitalism and French laïcité – this article seeks to better understand an intermediary religio-political configuration, named ‘cultural religion’, as widespread as neglected. Independently from the question of faith, the full respect of religious practices or knowledge of dogma, Western populations maintain a cultural attachment towards Christianity, which may characterize one of the important contemporary social functions conferred to Christian churches, and help understand their deep cultural and historical impregnation. This article will address the conventional account of religious indicators, more precisely the religious type of ‘seasonal conformists’, the process of secularization as culturalization, and will distinguish between cultural religion, civil religion and political religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Argentina’s contemporary religious field. On the basis of a statistical study on beliefs and religious attitudes, the authors reflect on a wide range of issues. They address the consequences of secularization in Argentine society, new configurations in how people believe and practise religion, shifts in religious identification, the religious diversification process, in which believers fall off the institutional frame, and, finally, people’s on religious intervention in public issues (such as education, sexual health and family planning). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article problematizes sociologist Max Weber’s famed notion of ‘disenchantment’ in order to explore the ways in which ‘technology’ and ‘religion’ operate in the discourse of ‘secular modernity’. It suggests that disenchantment is not simply epistemological, that is, synonymous with rationalization and intellectualization, but also ontological, and a description of the overhauling of what Bruno Latour calls the ‘modernist settlement’. It proceeds in following manner: (1) it presents an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of technological rationality in discourses about modernity, demonstrating an internal conflict, especially in how ‘religion’, ‘the secular,’ and ‘technology’ are conceptualized. It posits that the lack of consistency in the invocation of these terms is a symptom of a deeper unresolved ontological (or, onto-cosmological) tension. (2) After establishing this ontological aporia, the article proceeds to offer a rereading of Weber’s original concept of disenchantment. (3) Finally, the author teases out some of the implications of reading disenchantment ontologically for the understanding of religion and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this study is to compare how the Catholic Church’s involvement in politics under authoritarian rule in Spain and Poland impacted on religiosity in those countries after the transition to democracy. The Catholic Church was a key political actor during the Franco regime in Spain and communist rule in Poland. However, the nature of its political involvement in each case was quite different: while in Spain the Catholic Church legitimized the Franco regime, in Poland it was one of the main actors opposing communist rule. The authors use data from the Polish General Social Survey covering 1991–2008 and several surveys carried out by the Spanish Centre for Sociological Studies (CIS) between 1975 and 1995. Results confirm that the political involvement of the Catholic Church had different impacts on subsequent religious practice in each country. In Spain secularization was especially intense during the political transition in the late 1970s, while in Poland after the 1990s there was only a moderate shift toward secularization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociologists of religion have often focused on spiritual experiences within religious or quasi-religious organizations, which obscures possible traces of individual, collective religious and/or spiritual experiences, expressions and encounters in secular terrains and other perceptibly non-religious settings. Also less probed is whether, how and to what extent individuals consider such experiences and expressions to have an impact on their overall religious/spiritual perspectives and life encounters, or in fact what functions they perform. The author provides some critical reflections on Wendy Cadge’s and Deirdre Meintel’s articles in the present issue, interrogating how and to what extent they chart new empirical pathways and direct interest towards the sociology of religion and spirituality in workplaces in an era of increasing individualization in Euro-American societies and in non-Western contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many surveys report that the rate of church attendance in Italy is still very high, one of the highest in Europe. Are these data reliable? Is there really a ‘Catholic effect’ in Italy, a persistent popular affection for the Catholic Church, a slower rate of secularization? It is difficult to give a definitive answer to these questions but there are many elements that would contradict the optimistic (for the Catholic Church) view: 1) different (and more pessimistic) data on church attendance; 2) the decreasing number of priests and their ageing; and 3) disaffection among the younger generation. A good part of the Catholic hierarchy, and the two last popes, firmly believe that the rise of new movements (Comunione and Liberazione, Neocatecumenals, Charismatic Renewals and others) may correct the secularization trend and the demise of traditional territorial parishes. But encouraging these movements requires promoting a fundamental change in the cultural and organizational form of Catholicism towards a sort of never-seen ‘sectarian Church’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author presents an analysis of the political decision making process regarding the teaching of religion in Denmark from 1900 until 2007. The author uses Norbert Elias’s concept of the survival unit as the analytical framework of the study. Instead of a classic secularization narrative in which the secular and religious spheres of society are differentiated into separate realms as the process of modernization unfolds, a different narrative emerges in which the State has used the teaching of religion as an instrument to further its vital interests, especially with regard to its international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Religious diversity is posing new and urgent challenges to local authorities and there is no solid foundation of expertise in dealing with this issue at the local level. In some European cities, interfaith platforms are providing local authorities with new governance tools to cope with the challenges of religious diversity and are generating new ways of framing and representing religion in the public sphere. The author takes the city of Barcelona as a case study with the aim of exploring the emergence of a new model for dealing with religious minority issues that goes beyond State–Church relations and the political legacies in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author proposes an analysis of secular pilgrimages. Referring to the notion of ‘secular pilgrimage’ he takes into account, via a simultaneously anthropological and sociological approach, a socially multiform reality ranging from annual public tributes to illustrious men to political commemorations solemnized by historic events, visits to historic sites and even gatherings in memory of deceased show-business stars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors explore the role of religion for women in precarious conditions of life in Eastern Germany, one of the most secularized regions in the world. Based on biographical interviews with recipients of welfare benefits they analyze the worldviews of women without religious affiliation in precarious conditions of life, which are characterized by biographical insecurity, low material and symbolic resources and few possibilities for planning and participation. The empirical findings show a dominant scientific worldview, a heritage of the socialist GDR, but also an openness to religious semantics with regard to experiences of contingency. The authors underline the gender differences in relation to religion: the women’s exclusion from the labour market is determined by the perception of contingency while their children offer them an alternative space in which they experience a sense of both hope and duty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Statistics on religion in Estonia point to extensive changes over the last half-century. Research based on 77 religious life stories considered the nature of these changes, their implications on the individual level, and how the changes have taken place, with the conclusion that the bases of identity formation have been transformed. The Christian myth, which still underpins the life stories of members of the older generation and of Bible-based free congregations, has been partially or totally replaced by the New Age myth in the majority of the life stories of the younger generation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Toward the end of the last century, particularly during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, hundreds of Catholic priests distanced themselves from the Church or decided to leave the ecclesiastical institution. This fact, unusual at that time, is the focal point of the present article, which is the result of an extensive investigation into the renunciation of the priesthood by a significant number of priests in the Barcelona diocese. The author addresses the question why such deeply committed members of an institution, as are the priests of the Catholic Church, decided to leave the institution at that moment. The author discusses some aspects of the social context in which this process took place and offers some explanations for these significant departures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author investigates the consequential dimension of religious life, which has gained remarkable popularity in the sociology of religion thanks to Stark and Glock. Basing himself on Dobbelaere, he outlines the different dimensions of secularization, and then enters the debate concerning the content of the consequential dimension, favouring the line of thinking which stems from studies by Weber. After stressing its importance in accounting for the process of secularization in Western societies, the author focuses on the analysis of this issue in the Spanish case. First, he shows, through a series of historical quantitative data, the changes Spanish society has undergone in recent decades. Subsequently, he examines, in the light of more recent data, the differences between immigrants and natives in this new context of religious plurality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During State Socialism, Budapest residents gradually lost their religiosity. For each social group, the loss was always most radically felt among the more educated. During the decades of party-state rule, the place of religious education in schools was taken over by religious education in church (this was partly due to strong political pressure). The only parents who did not send their children to classes in religious education (either in church or in school) were those who had previously become secularized. Since the change of regime, attitudes toward religion have become one of the most fundamental political cleavages. Budapest is a metropolis whose middle classes are fairly secularized, but whose intellectual elite is sharply divided into a secularized atheistic majority and a minority that is overtly religious and assigns political value to its views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author attempts to explore the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and the "ethic of capitalism" in Bulgarian society. According to the author, the notion of Orthodoxy as a source of the economic backwardness of Bulgaria is a complex result of historical, institutional and epistemological factors such as the impact of nineteenth-century socio-economic dynamics on the institutionalization of the Bulgarian Church, the symbiosis of Orthodoxy with Balkan nationalism, the difficulty of distinguishing between the doctrinal and institutional aspects of Orthodoxy, and the post-communist reading of Orthodoxy as a factor in the economic liberalization of Bulgaria. The author considers that in the Bulgarian case the ethic of capitalism was developed under the influence of Western economics rather than under that of Orthodoxy. It also brought about a specific secularization of society that allowed the appropriation of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for national ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author identifies major changes since the 1960s that have transformed the role of religion in Irish society. An analysis of Irish data from the 2006 survey "Church and Religion in an Enlarged Europe" reveal that these have culminated in a shift in the religious and spiritual identities of young Irish Catholics aged 18-29. This shift is linked to a decline in the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland within education, social welfare, public policy and the media, and its subsequent demise as the sole arbiter of private morality. Rather than having turned to new spiritual expressions, young Irish Catholics embody a new Catholic habitus. Although they still have a strong cultural attachment to Catholicism they exercise a great deal of autonomy in their religious practices, beliefs and attitudes, and their ways of being religious and spiritual appear less institutionalized than older cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]