Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell’s American Grace follows up on these Tocquevillean themes, exploring the contemporary American religious landscape to understand,…
American Grace and public sociology
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
American exceptionalism redux
I find Kahn's book as a whole less coherent than some others have. One issue I want to raise is…
Where did religion come from?
When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied,…
Ground: Zero
Hence, the tenets of liberal positive theory are opposed in Kahn’s book via the recourse to questions of state violence,…
A response to critics
I knew that my new book, Political Theology, would be controversial. It covers a lot of ground; it produces odd…
Weber for the 21st century
For almost one hundred years, all sociologists of religion have taken Max Weber’s great work on comparative religions as a primary point…
What should we now do differently?
No one reading this seven hundred page book can fail to be impressed with the sweep of its argument or…
Where religion comes from and leads us
In seeking to make sense of modernity in the classical tradition of sociology as a field, the body of Robert…
Dangerous evolutions?
Religion in Human Evolution is an immensely ambitious book on a topic only a scholar of Robert Bellah’s stature could…
State of the Species
Human beings live in virtual worlds that define what they value, what they aspire to, and what they are able…