Religious Interaction Ritual: The Microsociology of the Spirit

The book examines how religious practice shapes spiritual encounters and how mundane details can impact these encounters, using fieldwork with various religious groups in Texas and survey analysis of religious organizations across the United States. It draws on sociological theories to offer new insights into the study of religion.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 18 October 2021
Publisher: Lexington Books

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.

Weight: 338g
Dimension: 152 x 231 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781498576314