Religious Interaction Ritual: The Microsociology of the Spirit

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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 congregations 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 sanctuarys 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 mile 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.

Reviews

This is a really forefront piece of research. The comparisons among congregations break new ground in explaining the relative success of religious organizations. It pays off in new discoveries about interactional mechanisms and their effects; and gives as richly revealing view of the atmosphere or local culture of religious congregations as anything in the literature, while going on to systematically explain what makes congregations different from each other. Religious Interaction Ritual is a great work. This should be a landmark book in the sociology of religion. -- Randall Collins, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Draper systematically dissects and compares the rituals of churches, synagogues, mosques, and meditation centers to uncover the social sources of divine experience. Engaging, insightful, and radically new, Religious Interaction Ritual is a step by step manual of how groups create and sustain collective effervescence. -- Paul Froese, Baylor University and author of On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life

Author Bio

Scott Draper is associate professor of sociology at The College of Idaho.