Future Directions in the Sociology of Religion

The sociology of religion today faces new and remarkable opportunities to contribute interesting and important knowledge and understanding about the role of religion in social, political, economic and cultural life for scholarly and public audiences. But in order to meet and capitalize successfully upon those opportunities, the field at present needs to shake off some besetting habits of mind, expand its horizons, re-orient its debates, construct a new agenda for priority investigations, and rethink some of its larger theoretical assumptions, frameworks and paradigms. The author's purpose in this article is to help the field move forward toward a greater clarity of vision and purpose, to help solidify a firmer sense of the substantive and theoretical agendas that matter most in the field's endeavor to make its contribution to the larger discipline of sociology and to public understanding. First, he outlines a series of specific substantive and methodological concerns that deserve greater scholarly attention by sociologists in the coming years and sets the stage for the eight separate articles in this special section. Second, he considers a recent theoretical innovation concerning the model of modernity and social change--the hypothesis of "multiple modernities"--that in his view deserves much greater attention and development, particularly when it comes to the study of religion in modernity and post-modernity. Third, he advocates an alternative meta-theoretical basis on which to better pursue the sociology of religion--in fact, actually, all of sociology--in a way that he believes will be more fruitful than the two background approaches that currently govern most scholarship, namely, positivist empiricism and hermeneutical interpretivism. That alternative is the philosophy of (social) science known as critical realism.