Includes bibliographical references and index.

Personal reflections in the mirror of Halʹevy and Weber / David Martin -- Salvation, secularization, and de-moralization / Bryan Wilson -- The Pentecostal gender paradox: a cautionary tale for the sociology of religion / Bernice Martin -- Feminism and the sociology of religion: from gender-blindness to gendered difference / Linda Woodhead -- Melancholia, utopia, and the psychoanalysis of dreams / Donald Capps -- Georg Simmel: American sociology chooses the stone the builders refused / Victoria Lee Erickson -- Transformations of society and the sacred in Durkheim's religious sociology / Donald A. Nielsen -- Classics in the sociology of religion: an ambiguous legacy / Roger O'Toole -- Individualism, the validation of faith, and the social nature of religion in modernity / Danièle Hervieu-Lʹeger -- The origins of religion / Richard K. Fenn -- Secularization extended: from religious "myth" to cultural commonplace / Nicholas J. Demerath III -- Social movements as free-floating religious phenomena / James A. Beckford -- The social process of secularization / Steve Bruce -- Patterns of religion in Western Europe: an exceptional case / Grace Davie -- The future of religious participation and belief in Britain and beyond / Robin Gill -- Religion as diffusion of values. "Diffused Religion" in the context of a dominant religious institution: the Italian case / Roberto Cipriani -- Spirituality and spiritual practice / Robert Wuthnow -- The Renaissance of community economic development among African-American churches in the 1990s / Katherine Day -- Hell as a residual category: possibilities excluded from the social system / Richard K. Fenn and Marianne Delaporte.

Acting ritually: evidence from the social life of Chinese rites / Catherine Bell -- Moralizing sermons, then and now / Thomas Luckmann -- Health, morality and sacrifice: the sociology of disasters / Douglas J. Davies -- Contemporary social theory as it applies to the understanding of religion in cross-cultural perspective / Peter Beyer -- The return of theology: sociology's distant relative / Kieran Flanagan -- Epilogue: toward a secular view of the individual / Richard K. Fenn.

Electronic reproduction. Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley InterScience, 2007. Mode of access: World Wide Web. System requirements: Web browser. Title from title screen (viewed on Dec. 20, 2007). Access may be restricted to users at subscribing institutions.