Spring 2007

SOC 396R • Comparative Sociology of Religion

Course Description

"Comparative Sociology of Religion" surveys a variety of religious traditions and introduces scholarly methods for the study of religion from an interdisciplinary perspective, although with some sociological bias. It explores the nature of re-ligious beliefs and practices, both historically and in the contemporary context. Of particular interest will be the way in which religious traditions form and change over time as they become increasingly cosmopolitan, and the relationship be-tween those traditions and the current globalization of culture and society.

Texts

Emile Durkheim. Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Karen Fields, tr. (NY: Free Press, 1995). Mary Pat Fisher, The Living Religions. 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1999). Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion. James Strachey, tr. (W.W. Norton, 1989). Lester Kurtz, Gods in the Global Village: The World's Religions in Sociological Perspective. 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2006). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and Other Writ-ings. (Penguin Classics, 2002).

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