Religion on the Edge: De-centering and Re-centering the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

The thirteen chapters in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the chapters reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blind spots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. The book addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the US or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? The book offers new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion.