Book: Interpreting Religion

This collection brings together a diverse range of interpretivist perspectives to find fresh takes on the meanings of religion. Cutting across paradigms, traditions, and levels of analysis, experts from the US, India and UK apply their varied lenses to a range of substantive topics, from totalitarianism in China to the Eastern Orthodox practice of fasting— with research based on in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, historical methods and survey data from scholars trained in sociology, anthropology, and history. What unites these diverse studies is a central concern with meaning-making and a shared commitment to the study of meaning as intersubjective, relational and situated, and as a result, to the importance of scholarly reflexivity.  Each chapter demonstrates the power of interpretive approaches for moving us towards expanded notions of causality—explanations that take seriously mutually constituting and contingent relationships between meanings, their sources, and their consequences. Often asking “how” rather than what or why, the interpretive approaches highlighted in this volume allow us see the dynamic and complicated interplay between stability and fluidity, tradition and innovation, history and the present, as well as between structure and agency, individual and collective, explicit and implicit, both within and beyond “the religious proper.” They also reveal how interpreting religion is itself an unfolding, dynamic, and constitutive process - one best accomplished through a combination of deliberative reflection and embodied understanding. 

This volume provides a useful orienting toolkit for interpretive scholars who strive to 'make sense' of religion and religious life.

This volume is part of the Interpretive Lenses in Sociology series.

It is available for order from Bristol University Press. 

You can find a pre-print copy of the volume introduction here. 

You can find a review of the book at Religion News Service. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Interpretive Approaches in the Study of Religion, by Erin F. Johnston

1. Making Sense of Queer Christian Lives, by Jodi O'Brien

2. The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Religion, Spirituality and Ritual Among Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors , by Janet Jacobs

3. Doing It: Ethnography, Embodiment, and the Interpretation of Religion, by Daniel Winchester

4. Mind the Gap: What Ethnographic Silences Can Teach Us, by Rebecca Kneale Gould

5. Public, and the Presentations of the Collective Self: Being Shia in Modern India, by Aseem Hasnain 

6. The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion, by Titus Hjelm

7. The Religion of White Male Ethnonationalism in a Multi-Cultural Reality, by George Lundskow

8. Totalitarianism as Religion, by Yong Wang

9. The Heritage Spectrum: A More Inclusive Typology for the Age of Global Buddhism, by Jessica Falcone

10. Interpreting Nonreligion, by Evan Stewart

Afterword: Approaching Religions: Some Reflections on Meaning, Identity, and Power, by Vikash Singh