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Religious life has long been global. Contemporary migrants extend these ties by transnationalizing everyday religious life. While much has been written about transnational economic and political practices, transnational religious life is not well understood. This paper examines the institutional characteristics of transnational religiosity and has three broad goals. First, it reviews this emerging body of literature and proposes an approach to the study of transnational migrants' religious practices. Second, it proposes three types of extended, negotiated, and recreated transnational religious organizations. Finally, it begins to untangle the relationship between transnational religion and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past half century, northern Europe has seen a striking decline of belief in God and the supernatural. Yet the churches there have not died, and in some cases they remain strong and active. Whence does the vitality of these churches derive, if belief has eroded? This paper examines one such church, an independent Lutheran congregation in northwestern Denmark. It suggests that the church's importance stems from its "span of ambiguity," the broad range of meanings which it expresses in its local context. Its ability to integrate meanings from a variety of social arenas gives it a powerful role in a rapidly changing society. The paper argues that religious systems generally have an unusual capacity for such expression and integration, It is the extent to which they can maintain their spans of ambiguity, rather than the extent to which they can maintain belief, which accounts for their persistence or decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the current religious mood in the tinned States and reflects upon its manifestations in the mid-1990s. It is argued that the religious mood has shifted -- away from the cognitive and fixed beliefs and toward the experiential arid expressive. It is further argued that given this change it is difficult to assess the current religious situation, especially given sociology-of-religion's reliance upon institutional categories and empirical indicators. Religious capital, like social capital, is not easily gauged without attention to new forms of community allowing individuals opportunity to express themselves as whole persons. A plea is made for a sociology of religion more attuned to body, mind, and self and thus to the dynamic and experiential qualities of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do Israeli social scientists treat religion primarily through theoretical frameworks developed in other areas of sociology or the social sciences, but rarely draw on insights from the sociology of religion, and even more rarely make a theoretical contribution to the development of the sub-discipline? And, why are Israeli social scientists who do contribute to the sociology of religion primarily Orthodox and foreign-born Jews, while most sociologists in Israel are secular Jews and born in the country? To answer these questions we focus on the fact that the questions asked and theories developed by sociologists of religion tend to treat religion as a phenomenon that is primarily limited to the private sphere. By private, we mean religion as a voluntary activity that is the result of choices made by individuals in their everyday lives. This contrasts to religious practices in the public sphere that are shaped by state legislation or by involuntary interactions with others. The focus of sociologists of religion on the private, voluntary realm means that the theoretical insights offered by the discipline are deemed irrelevant by secular Jewish Israeli social scientists, who tend to conceptualize religion as a state driven and/or public phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past twenty-five year, a sub-branch of biblical studies has engaged, sometimes rather vigorously, in the pursuit of using sociological methods to understand the Bible. These, often auto-didact biblibal scholars, have taken over a branch of sociology of religion. The methods they followed in their pursuit of the strange world of the Bible can reach sociology how to retrieve a more critical sociology. The question ask would be helpful more generally to sociology of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]