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Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology.This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods (surveys, polls, demographic and census analysis) and of qualitative approaches (such as participant observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival ...
Rituals allow group members to experience the power of the group over the self. Additionally, ritualization in the form of punishment for deviance serves as a potent method for curbing deviant behavior in traditional societies. By enforcing moral boundaries, ritual punishment helps to preserve social cohesion and unity within the group.
Mircea Eliade states that the calendrical rituals of many religious traditions recall and commemorate the basic beliefs of a community, and their yearly celebration establishes a link between past and present, as if the original events are happening over again: "Thus the gods did; thus men do."
Lived religion is the ethnographic and holistic framework for understanding the beliefs, practices, and everyday experiences of religious and spiritual persons in religious studies. The name lived religion comes from the French tradition of sociology of religion "la religion vécue". [48]
Structural ritualization theory (SRT), a concept related to the fields of sociology and social psychology, emphasizes embedded groups. These are groups located in a larger environment. The taken-for-granted practices of people in these groups are similar to patterns of behavior in the larger environment.
Practices are conceptualized as "what people do," or an individual's performance carried out in everyday life. Bourdieu's theory of practice sets up a relationship between structure and the habitus and practice of the individual agent, dealing with the "relationship between the objective structures and the cognitive and motivating structures which they produce and which tend to reproduce them ...
Durkheim defined religion as: [74] "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God. [75]
Nancy T. Ammerman is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Religion at Boston University.Her edited anthology Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives [2] was a significant advance in the study of everyday religion—the term she tends to prefer—by bringing together work by scholars such as Courtney Bender [4] and Meredith McGuire [5] who have shaped the study of living religion ...