Seminar In Sociology Of Religion

3 credits · Graduate School

Religion is a constitutive feature of social life, always shaping and being shaped by its particular social context. Indeed, the very content and form of religion itself is always and necessarily formed from the stuff of the socio-cultural world (language, symbols, ritual interactions, resources, organizations, norms, etc). The sociology of religion has focused on this relationship of religion and its broader socio-cultural world, and has developed a particular set of preoccupations: secularization, modernization, myth and meaning-making, and the role of religion in social ordering, for example. In this course, we hope to examine and experiment with some of the core assumptions of the sociological study of religion. What does it mean to be religious? What is the relationship of religion and culture? Do we live in a secular society? How do we enact religious life? How is religion produced and re-produced? [3]