Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 1996. New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Leiden: Brill. Hood Jr, Ralph W. 1975. The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Reported Mystical Experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:29–41.

In the 1960s, most sociologists consciously or unconsciously bought into idea of the 'death of god' - religion became effectively invisible to academia. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, a number of events - most notably the 'Satanic Verses' controversy - dramatically increased the 'visibility' of religion: it became a political problem. Now, in the 21st century, ...

An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion

Davie, Grace. 1990b. ‘An Ordinary God’: The Paradox of Religion in Contemporary Britain. The British Journal of Sociology 41(3): 395–421. My remarks are also premised on the fact that you only really know your own society when you leave it. How America looks to a European is what I’ve been learning about this morning. I learn more about Europe the more I come away from it. One of the reasons I’m here, in fact, is to work with Peter Berger on a book that looks at the secularity of Europe through the prism of a comparison with America.

In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe , Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean bring together contributors to examine the role of religious ideas, structures and institutions in the making of Europe, attending to the centrality of Christian heritage and the significance of other world religions to Europe’s cultural identity. Reflecting on this intelligently designed collection, reviewer Simon Glendinning explores the book’s particular engagement with Europe’s secular modernity. Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society And Its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday. Woodhead, Linda. 2011. Spirituality and Christianity: The Unfolding of a Tangled Relationship. In Religion, Spirituality and Everyday Practice, 3–21. Springer. Europa, the European world, is Japheth’s world spreading out, and it would not have come to be what it has become without that Christian culture. And yet for just that reason Europe’s modern condition stands as a particularly paradoxical interpretive challenge for the social sciences. Indeed, a central puzzle for this Handbook is that the European space shaped so profoundly by Christianity has become ‘one of the most secular parts of the world’ (6). How could Europe, a space so fundamentally defined by its enduring Christian religious heritage and its continuing religious diversity, become so strikingly secular?Reitsma, Jan, Ben Pelzer, Peer Scheepers, and Hans Schilderman. 2012. Believing and Belonging in Europe. Cross-national Comparisons of Longitudinal Trends (1981-2007) and Determinants. European Societies 14(4): 611–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2012.726367. Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Grace Davie is one of the best analysts of religion in contemporary sociology. This book caps a distinguished record of studies of religion - first of Britain, then of Europe, then globally. This is a magisterial work, which should be read by anyone interested in the place of religion in the modern world' - Peter L. Berger, Boston University This new, updated edition offers a reliable introduction to the main ways in which sociology has illuminated religion and religious change. But more than that, it raises profound questions about how religion, and its refusal to die, challenges sociology - a discipline founded on belief in the inevitability of secularisation Grace Davie's timely second edition of Sociology of Religion underlines that religion is no longer simply located within the private sphere and is rising in the public agenda. It might be a return of religion. It might also be that religion never left and that there is now a shift in perception that religion is more present in our life. This prompts a need for many disciplines to develop new tools for understanding this new process and/or shift in perception. Grace Davie's first edition of Sociology of Religion was already a more than a welcome contribution as it provided sociologists and non-sociologists with one of the best books on the topic. This second edition keeps up with the fast and evolving field of religion and provides the most up-to-date findings and theories in the sociology of religion. Needless to say, it is a must read for anyone interested in this field.