The thirteen essays in this volume offer a challenge to conventional scholarly approaches to the sociology of religion. They urge readers to look beyond congregational settings, beyond the United States, and to religions other than Christianity, and encourage critical engagement with religion's complex social consequences. By expanding conceptual categories, the essays reveal how aspects of the religious have always been part of allegedly non-religious spaces and show how, by attending to these intellectual blindspots, we can understand aspects of identity, modernity, and institutional life that have long been obscured. Religion on the Edge addresses a number of critical questions: What is revealed about the self, pluralism, or modernity when we look outside the U.S. or outside Christian settings? What do we learn about how and where the religious is actually at work and what its role is when we unpack the assumptions about it embedded in the categories we use? Religion on the Edge offers groundbreaking new methodologies and models, bringing to light conceptual lacunae, re-centering what is unsettled by their use, and inviting a significant reordering of long-accepted political and economic hierarchies. The book shows how social scientists across the disciplines can engage with the sociology of religion. By challenging many of its long-standing empirical and analytic tendencies, the contributors to this volume show how their work informs and is informed by debates in other fields and the analytical purchase gained by bringing these many conversations together. Religion on the Edge will be a crucial resource for any scholar seeking to understand our post-modern, post-secular world.

This is an important, indeed a crucial book. * Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion *
These smart, provocative essays are 'critical' in the best sense of that word. They engage seriously with core debates, concepts, and presuppositions in the sociological study of religion and point to new directions that may avoid the problems of current approaches and encompass a wider range of empirical cases. Well-written and insightful, this is a must-read for established scholars of religion and for graduate students as well. * Penny Edgell, author of Religion and Family in a Changing Society *
RotE is a must-read for scholars in the sociology of religion. It should be required reading for any graduate-level seminar in the scientific study of religion as well as religious studies programs. The book will help to sharpen the analytic work of a new generation of scholars. * Sociology of Religion *
this is a strong collection of essays...The volumes thorough overview of the main issues makes it appropriate for readers both inside and outside of the discipline of sociology. * Martha Smith Roberts, Religion *

CB: Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University; WC: Associate Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University; PL: Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College; DS: Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Georgia