This book examines the current, ever more globalized relationship between religion and secularization. Chapter 1, Modalities of the Sacred, cites the work of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber as it inquires intowhat is sacred and how the sacred manifests. The next chapter discusses Intoxication as a sacred experience, and methods and sociology of sacred intoxication around the world, including Pentecostalism, drugs and sacrificial bombings. Next comes an exploration of the importance of pain, how it can be sacred, and thoughts about the results of the biomedical mediation of pain. Chapter 5 explores charisma, or the quality of an individual who can creatively redirect and enhance the lives of others, its aesthetic nature and as a bridge to either secular or religious action. Chapter 6, The Materialization of Eroticism, takes eroticism as ambivalent, able to lead towards various religious experiences or identities or towards oppression and destabilization of social relationships. Chapter 7, Instauring the Religious Habitus, considers how embodiment and other perseverant conditions, as well as reflection on those conditions, affect religious practices. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
"About time! Two key experts in the field remind us of the significance and power of religion as bio-political and bio-economic."
- Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London
"A welcome addition to a continuing body of work by two distinguished theorists of religion."
- Grace Davie, University of Exeter
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Mellor and Shilling cement their place at the pinnacle of the contemporary sociological theorisation of religion and the sacred. If sociological work is going to have any future it is to be found in the inspiration and excitement of this sophisticated and intelligent book."
- Keith Tester, University of Hull"This book is ambitious, refreshing and rewarding. It offers the best available analysis of the complex interlacing of the sacred, religion, secularization and embodied experience."
- James A. Beckford, University of Warwick
Drawing on classical and contemporary social theory,
Sociology of the Sacred presents a bold and original account of how interactions between religious and secular forms of the sacred underpin major conflicts in the world today, and illuminate broader patterns of social and cultural change inherent to global modernity. It demonstrates:
- How the bodily capacities help religions adapt to social change but also facilitate their internal transformation
- That the ‘sacred’ includes a diverse range of phenomena, with variable implications for questions of social order and change
- How proponents of a ‘post-secular’ age have failed to grasp the ways in which sacralization can advance secularization
- Why the sociology of the sacred needs to be a key part of attempts to make sense of the nature and directionality of social change in global modernity today.
This book is key reading for the sociology of religion, the body and modern culture.
In a powerful reframing of debates about secularization and the revitalization of religion, Shilling and Mellor develop the concept of habitus to explore the significance of the religious body in social structures. A powerful argument about how religious and secular forms of the sacred underpin major conflicts in the world today.
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