Ebook: Identity and the Sacred: Sketch for a New Social Scientific Theory of Religion

This book is a sketch for a general, social-scientific, theory of reli- gion. It is a sketch in the sense that it is incomplete and needs further filling in and rubbing out. Yet it is also a sketch in the sense that it provides tentative, plausible, coherence. It is an attempt to integrate anthropological, historical, psychological, and sociological approaches to religion into one conceptual scheme. It is also a stocktaking of years of extensive reading, research, and writing in the field. If my own previous work occasionally occupies centre stage, the reason is that this book grew out of a critical dialogue with that work. Hope- fully, this book is an improvement!

This study also argues that existing categorizations in the sociology of religion are either inconsistent (the underlying assumptions of some of these classifications do not accord with others) or irrelevant for a systematic, comprehensive, sociological approach to religious phenomena. This bold accusation is sometimes articulated, but usually only inferred, as I believe that the burden of proof lies not in denigration but in construction.

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