Religion as a Chain of Memory

Foreword / Grace Davie
Introduction
Part I Doubt about the Subject Matter
Sociology in Opposition to Religion? Preliminary Considerations
- From religious sociology to the sociology of religion
- Science opposed to religion
- Undermining the subject?
The Fragmentation of Religion in Modern Societies
- The future of religion in the modern world: the classical sociological approaches
- Constructing a new perspective
- Defining religion: a new look at an old debate
- Religion and systems of meaning: an inclusive approach
- In contrast: a much more restrictive framework
- A false opposition
- One way out of the dilemma?
The Elusive Sacred
- The sacred: an impossible concept
- The genealogy of the sacred: Isambert's contribution
- Emotional experience vis-a-vis religion
- Between the sacred and religion: the example of sport
- The sacred opposed to religion: the emotional culmination of secularization?
Part II As our Fathers Believed...        
Religion as a Way of Believing
- Metaphorical religion, following Jean Seguy
- Towards an analysis of the transformation of belief in contemporary society
- Religion as a way of believing: the example of apocalyptic neo-rural communities
Questions about Tradition
- Tradition opposed to modernity
- The creative power of tradition
- Religion as folklore
- The religious productions of modernity: is this concept meaningful?
- Back to the question of definition
From Religions to the Religious
- A second look at sport as a religion
- Two ways of thinking
- Is the notion of a religious sphere still a helpful one?
- From the sociology of religion to the sociology of the religious: a political example
Part III A Break in the Chain
Religion Deprived of Memory
- Memory and religion: a structural connection
- The crumbling memory of modern societies
- Secularization as a crisis of collective memory: the example of French Catholicism
The Chain Reinvented
- Utopia: a major manifestation of religious innovation in modernity
- The religious reinforcement of elective fraternities
- The rise of ethnic religions
Conclusion: Post-traditional Society and the Future of religious Institutions
- Post-traditional religion and the institution of the religious
- Beyond secularization, de-institutionalization
- The institutional production of a chain of memory
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index of Names