The Jesuits and Globalization

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course will offer a comprehensive introduction to the sociology of religion. Thematically, the course will be divided into three parts. The first section will examine the two main foundations of the sociology of religion in the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The second section will offer a critical examination of the secularization debates which have raged within the sociology of religion since the 1960’s, paying special attention to the quarrels between the European and the American paradigms and looking into contemporary debates on religion and globalization. The final section will focus on sociological studies of religion in America. We will look at “private and public religions”, at debates concerning the “wall of separation” and American “civil religion,” at the transformations of Evangelical Protestantism, “the Black Church,” the historical incorporation of Catholicism and Judaism as American religions, and at the ongoing incorporation of immigrant religions from all over the world. There will be a possibility of doing ethnographic field-work and community-based research on immigrant religious congregations in Washington D.C.