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This article uses the recent work of sociologist Margaret M. Poloma to argue that developments in the sociology of Pentecostalism have the potential to revitalize a classical Pentecostal movement that can be otherwise understood as languishing. In particular, the social scientific study of benevolent service in various segments of the Pentecostal movement provides the springboard for the argument. After locating the interdisciplinary work of Poloma and her colleagues on godly love within the broader context of social science research in the last half century, this paper will explore its implications for the future and renewal of especially the classical Pentecostal movement, for Pentecostal theology and self-understanding, and for scholarship on Pentecostalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comments on Michael Burawoy's article examining the critical turn to a public sociology. There is much that is attractive about Burawoy's examination of the critical turn to a public sociology. I find plausible his account of the academic nature of 1970s radical sociology especially that mobilized notions such as Althusser's theoretical practice. I also was cheered to read the account of the positive developments currently in train in the U.S. and especially with how social movements have got inside American sociology and are changing it from within. And I was with his advocacy of sociology developing new forms of engaging with and responding to multiple publics and modes of participation, to bring the public and sociology into intimate juxtaposition. But from the other side of the pond Burawoy's argument seems at the same time rather strange. The paper is unambiguously written from within American sociology. Sociologists from nowhere else could treat their sociology as nationally bounded and unrelated to global processes that in all other fields are transforming the social world. This means first that the stories of other sociologies are necessarily different from that of the U.S., but second that much about the story of any sociology cannot be understood without situating it within wider globalizing processes that sociology everywhere struggles to engage with.