Overview

This book is a microsociological study of religious practice, based on fieldwork with Conservative Jews, Bible Belt Muslims, white Baptists, black Baptists, Buddhist meditators, and Latino Catholics. In each case, the author scrutinizes how a congregation’s ritual strategies help or hinder their efforts to achieve a transformative spiritual encounter, an intense feeling that becomes the basis of their most fundamental understandings of reality. The book shows how these transformative spiritual encounters routinely depend on issues that can seem rather mundane by comparison, such as where the sanctuary’s entrance is located, how many misprints end up in the church bulletin, or how long the preacher continues to preach beyond lunchtime. The spirit responds to other dynamics, as well, such as how congregations collectively imagine outsiders, or how they talk about ideas like individualism and patriarchy. Building on provocative theories from sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, Randall Collins, and Anne Warfield Rawls, this book shows how “interaction ritual theory” opens compelling new pathways for sociological scholarship on religion. Micro-level specifics from fieldwork in Texas are supplemented with large-scale survey analysis of a wide array of religious organizations from across the United States.

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9781498576314

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Reviews

The best books I have read have been generative; they lead me to new places, ideas, and research projects. These books have dog-eared pages, lots of underlining, scribbling in the margins (often in multiple directions), and the blank pages at the back of the book are filled with hurried notes and page references. Based on this metric alone, this is probably one of the best books I have read in the past decade. . . . I would recommend this book be required reading for all graduate students interested in the social scientific study of religion, and for anyone interested in IR theory and religion. The book would work well in any graduate-level sociology of religion class or as an illustration in a theory course of the application of a sociological theory to a novel subfield. Additionally, the book is accessible and well written. I would recommend it to any congregational leaders interested in the application of sociological theory to their work. * Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review * Scott Draper's book offers a rich theoretically driven study of religion, specifically the role of ritual. . . . the value of the book is the case studies as theoretical explorations into ritual theory. . . The conclusion offers a very good synthesis of a range of theories about religion with discussions about Durkheim and Weber, Stark and Rational Choice, as well as cultural analyses of religion. This would be an excellent book for students studying ritual and the sociology of religion with its analysis of ritual, theories of religion, and empirical observations. * Social Forces * This is a really forefront piece of research. The comparisons among congregations break new ground in explaining the relative success of religious organizations. It pays off in new discoveries about interactional mechanisms and their effects; and gives as richly revealing view of the 'atmosphere' or local culture of religious congregations as anything in the literature, while going on to systematically explain what makes congregations different from each other. Religious Interaction Ritual is a great work. This should be a landmark book in the sociology of religion. -- Randall Collins, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania Draper systematically dissects and compares the rituals of churches, synagogues, mosques, and meditation centers to uncover the social sources of divine experience. Engaging, insightful, and radically new, Religious Interaction Ritual is a step by step manual of how groups create and sustain collective effervescence. -- Paul Froese, Baylor University and author of On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life

The best books I have read have been generative; they lead me to new places, ideas, and research projects. These books have dog-eared pages, lots of underlining, scribbling in the margins (often in multiple directions), and the blank pages at the back of the book are filled with hurried notes and page references. Based on this metric alone, this is probably one of the best books I have read in the past decade. . . . I would recommend this book be required reading for all graduate students interested in the social scientific study of religion, and for anyone interested in IR theory and religion. The book would work well in any graduate-level sociology of religion class or as an illustration in a theory course of the application of a sociological theory to a novel subfield. Additionally, the book is accessible and well written. I would recommend it to any congregational leaders interested in the application of sociological theory to their work. * Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review * Scott Draper’s book offers a rich theoretically driven study of religion, specifically the role of ritual. . . . the value of the book is the case studies as theoretical explorations into ritual theory. . . The conclusion offers a very good synthesis of a range of theories about religion with discussions about Durkheim and Weber, Stark and Rational Choice, as well as cultural analyses of religion. This would be an excellent book for students studying ritual and the sociology of religion with its analysis of ritual, theories of religion, and empirical observations. * Social Forces * This is a really forefront piece of research. The comparisons among congregations break new ground in explaining the relative success of religious organizations. It pays off in new discoveries about interactional mechanisms and their effects; and gives as richly revealing view of the ‘atmosphere’ or local culture of religious congregations as anything in the literature, while going on to systematically explain what makes congregations different from each other. Religious Interaction Ritual is a great work. This should be a landmark book in the sociology of religion. -- Randall Collins, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania Draper systematically dissects and compares the rituals of churches, synagogues, mosques, and meditation centers to uncover the social sources of divine experience. Engaging, insightful, and radically new, Religious Interaction Ritual is a step by step manual of how groups create and sustain collective effervescence. -- Paul Froese, Baylor University and author of On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life

Author Information

Scott Draper is associate professor of sociology at The College of Idaho.

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