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This paper is an exercise in the applied sociology of religion. And yet it is not quite what the phrase implies. It does not offer advice to help religious organizations increase their members or finetune their services, nor is it quite in the spirit of Kemal Attaturk's reliance on Emile Durkheim's work in secularizing his nation and pushing through some of the most thorough and most enduring cultural changes of any country in the 20th century. In fact, the one similarity between Attaturk and the case at issue here is that both involve turkeys. With all due respect to our nation's leader, what follows includes an array of such jibes but there is no humor in its conclusions. As a hypothetical letter of response to a hypothetical request, it falls into the literary category of a conceit, and it illustrates how even sophomoric attempts at humor can be a palliative for despair. Apologies are certainly in order to those it may offend. The paper reviews both domestic and foreign religious issues implicated during President George W. Bush's administration. Domestically, these range across his public pronouncements on issues such as gay marriage, stem-cell research, and intelligent design, his faith-based initiatives, and the religious strategy behind his two Presidential campaigns. In foreign affairs, they include his wars on terrorism, Iraq, and Islam, as well as his policies concerning Israel., Dear Mr. President: It is hard to overstate my astonishment when I received your recent letter and learned that you are now turning to my lustrous colleagues to form a [...]

Gujarat is India's westernmost state, and the home of the subcontinent's two great leaders in the movement for independence from British imperialism: India's Mohandas Gandhi and Pakistan's Muhammad Ali Jinnah. [...]

American religion is a major component of the triumphal exceptionalism that has long set the United States apart from other nations. Our frequent label as the world's most religious advanced nation has given pride to many citizens, if not to all. This article offers a reassessment of the claim in the context of a larger cross-national investigation of religion, politics, and the state in some 14 countries around the globe. With this as a comparative backdrop, the article examines three putative sources of uniqueness: our civil religion (versus our separation of church and state); our religious organizations and congregational style; and our high levels of individual religious belief and behavior. The article concludes that America's uniqueness is overstated and constitutes more a matter of kind than degree., EVERY nation that endures and flourishes requires at least some belief in its own uniqueness. In the United States, this belief has long had the quality of fanaticism to be [...]

This essay describes a major shift that occurred in religion's perceived political prominence, especially following key events in 1979. It then describes a current project to investigate religion, politics, and the state in more than a dozen countries around the globe. But the article principally focuses on a somewhat serendipitous aspect of the project; namely, ways in which standard concepts in American sociology of religion take different meanings and connotations in other countries. Five examples involve religious identity, fundamentalism, church-state relations, civil religion, and secularization and secularity. In each case, the changes required abroad are also salutary for analysis at home., As recently as fifteen years ago, any western social scientist specializing in religion was likely to be regarded in the same way that the social sciences had come to regard [...]

This special issue of the Sociology of Religion is a product of the Association for the Sociology of Religion's 2005 annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The papers are all drawn [...]

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, by PAUL R. BRASS. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2003, xix + 476 pp., $50.00 (cloth). As Americans continue to look [...]

By Malcolm Hamilton. St. Martin's Press, 1998.273 pp. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95. Reviewer:. N.J. DEMERATH III, University of Massachusetts, Amherst By some accounts, this is a rifle that promises a [...]

The article examines the economics of the rational choice approach to the study of religion using the debate over secularization as a point of reference. Recent developments in the study of religion offer a provocative case in point. Both stimulation and consternation roil in the wake of several recent works that share a new and more economistic paradigm. The economists' strategy is well calculated for achieving maximum rigor under constrained conditions. By taking on the world in their terms, they exert far greater control than, say, sociologists who stubbornly persist in taking on the world in its terms with all of its variance and vicissitudes at play. But if the economists have won the short-term race to professional respect, the long-run contest remains in some doubt. While sociologists suffer from the paucity of tightly drawn theories, economists can become the captives of the very models they produce. There is a sense in which the field now hangs in the balance between the two contending movements of rational choice theory, on the one hand, and new culture theory, on the other. This is not the place for a thorough assessment of that struggle. However, one crucial clarification involves the separation of the terms "rational" and "choice" respectively.

Discusses the gap between religion and government. Major component of the American political and its civil religious mythology; Max Weber's discussion of relations between ecclesiastic and secular power; Cross-cultural analysis of religion and politics.

Gives an account of the reformation of Springfield, Massachusetts to establish its classification as a city or a town. Brief description of the community; Postwar developments in the inner city; Role of the Irish Catholics and the politics of efficiency; Revitalization of the civic elite; Breakdown of the system.

This paper makes a strategic return to an earlier sociological era as a way of charting where we have been and where we are heading. Specifically, it returns to the debate over functionalism as represented in a volume edited by the author and Richard Peterson in 1967 entitled System, Change and Conflict. The paper argues that little of that controversy remains, but that several key issues have taken on new forms and serve as the foci of new disputes. A comparable volume today would require a quite different title, perhaps "Culture, Choice, and Praxis." The paper briefly reviews the three new movements referred to and the issues surrounding them. It concludes with remarks on the changing role of theory itself within sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]