|
|
Article: Social Theory and Religion.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Sociology of Religion
- Article date:
- December 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Association for the Sociology of Religion. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Social Theory and Religion, by JAMES A. BECKFORD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 252 pp., $45 cloth, $16.95 paper.
Some books transform our understanding of their topics. Fewer books transform their disciplines. And a very few transform those who read them, such that they can never again approach their own subject matters in their accustomed ways. Jim Beckford's long-awaited "summa" may do all three.
Beckford's Religion and Advanced Industrial Society (1989) was a masterful, yet incomplete account of sociologists' various understandings of religion's place in the late-modern world. That book traced religion's gradual marginalization as a ...