What Happens When We Practice Religion?

"What do we mean when we say that people practice religion? How do scholars who seek to understand the realities of religious practice and its diverse manifestations do what they do? What conceptual tools do they have at their disposal? What have they learned over the last generation and which approaches promise to be of continuing benefit? In this book, intended as a contribution to an on-going conversation about the heuristic tools that can be brought to bear from multiple disciplines and approaches to the study of religion, Robert Wuthnow addresses these broad questions. Wuthnow notes that scholars of religion over the last few decades have increasingly shifted their gaze to religious practice. This has led (he argues) to a salutary shift away from sterile, essentialist arguments that grandly purport to explain what religion is and why it exists. As Wuthnow sees it, this shift has allowed scholars of religion to focus, with profit, on what people do and say and how they make sense of those acts and utterances when they practice religion. In a related salutary shift, religion scholars have by and large quit thinking about religion as if it were unlike everything else that people do. Having ceased to treat religion as something sui generis, religion scholars are thereby freed to make full use of the tools at their disposal in the human sciences. (Trained in a positivistic tradition of social science that aims at producing generalizations about human behavior that are both theoretically parsimonious and sweepingly ambitious, Wuthnow now concludes that this basic approach is unsuitable for grasping as diverse and multifarious a phenomenon as religious practice. He favors the use of a broad range of analytic tools drawn from multiple disciplines and approaches to the study of religion.) The five chapters of this book describe the central concepts and arguments now advancing the study of religious practice. Chapter 1, entitled "Theories", discusses the theoretical contributions associated with the aforementioned shift in religious studies to the investigation of religious practice. Chapter 2, "Situations", discusses how religious activities and experiences are shaped by the physical and temporal spaces in which social action occurs. Chapter 3, "Intentions", takes on an important topic that has proven difficult to study from a social science perspective. "Feelings" are the focus of Chapter 4, and the role of "Bodies" is addressed in Chapter 5. In all chapters Wuthnow draws the reader's attention in particular to the work of anthropologists, historians, social and cognitive psychologists, and sociologists who have studied a wide range of topics that illuminate significant aspects of religious practice such as its role in the construction of sacred space, in gendered social relationships, in educational /learning settings, in the visual and performing arts, in meditation, and in ritual. This is a book for scholars and students in religious studies, particularly those having been trained or being trained in methods of social science investigation of religious phenomena. This will include (of course) sociologists and anthropologists of religion. It will be a suitable adoption text for upper-level undergraduate classes and graduate methods seminars"--