Religion in Britain Since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Making Contemporary Britain)

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Grace Davie's timely second edition of Sociology of Religion underlines that religion is no longer simply located within the private sphere and is rising in the public agenda. It might be a return of religion. It might also be that religion never left and that there is now a shift in perception that religion is more present in our life. This prompts a need for many disciplines to develop new tools for understanding this new process and/or shift in perception. Grace Davie's first edition of Sociology of Religion was already a more than a welcome contribution as it provided sociologists and non-sociologists with one of the best books on the topic. This second edition keeps up with the fast and evolving field of religion and provides the most up-to-date findings and theories in the sociology of religion. Needless to say, it is a must read for anyone interested in this field. Zinnbauer, Brian J, Kenneth I Pargament, Brenda Cole, Mark S Rye, Eric M Butter, Timothy G Belavich, Kathleen M Hipp, Allie B Scott, and Jill L Kadar. 1997. Religion and Spirituality: Unfuzzying the Fuzzy. Journal for the scientific study of religion:549–564.

In partnership with the NSRN (Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network), it is our pleasure to bring you the audio recordings of five very important lectures from Grace Davie, Humeira Iqtidar, Callum Brown, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Jonathan Lanman. Where we start is nearly 12 years ago, when the book called Religion in Britain since 1945 was published — an unremarkable title. But the subtitle contained this phrase, “Believing Without Belonging,” which retrospectively, was an inspirational moment for me, because it is this phrase that everybody remembers and can associate with my work. the reactions of Britain’s secular elites to the increasing saliance of religion in public as well as private life; and Grace Davie's The Sociology of Religion is a highly valuable textbook for students on under graduate as well as graduate levels. It combines a critical reflection on the issues and debates that have shaped the field and a challenging agenda outlining some of the most crucial theoretical and empirical issues for the future. This way it equips students to both explore new tendencies and trends of religion in contemporary society and to be attentive to the significance of history and context for analysing.The inspiration for this episode came from one of Russell McCutcheon's works which we had encountered through the undergraduate Religious Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh, entitled 'Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion'. The result is this compilation of differing opinions and interpretations ... Europa, the European world, is Japheth’s world spreading out, and it would not have come to be what it has become without that Christian culture. And yet for just that reason Europe’s modern condition stands as a particularly paradoxical interpretive challenge for the social sciences. Indeed, a central puzzle for this Handbook is that the European space shaped so profoundly by Christianity has become ‘one of the most secular parts of the world’ (6). How could Europe, a space so fundamentally defined by its enduring Christian religious heritage and its continuing religious diversity, become so strikingly secular? Marler, Penny Long, and C.Kirk Hadaway. 2002. ““Being Religious” or “Being Spiritual” in America: A Zero-sum Proposition? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41(2): 289–300.

Storm, Ingrid. 2009. Halfway to Heaven: Four Types of Fuzzy Fidelity in Europe. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48(4): 702–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01474.x.The title of this Oxford Handbookspeaks to two great themes in the social sciences – and their connections. Each might be taken up on its own, but the collection’s editors, Grace Davie and Lucian N. Leustean, are keen to read the ‘and’ in their title as already called for if one wants to do justice to religion or Europe: each has fundamentally ‘shaped’ the other (1). In many parts of Europe there is significant change with respect to baptism, but not in the Lutheran countries of Scandinavia, which are often seen as some of the most secular in the world. It