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Major theories of secularisation have been gender blind, with the result that men's experience of modernisation has been made central to explanations of religious decline. This paper attempts to show how greater attention to women's distinctive experiences can help extend the explanatory power of secularisation theory. It begins by introducing two main 'stories' of secularisation, articulated by Weber and Marx, which have shaped much subsequent theory about religious decline. Looking first at industrial society, it shows how the distinctive experiences of modernity, which Weber and Marx discuss, have to do with largely masculine forms of labour. Women's labour, far more confined to the domestic sphere, would not necessarily have had the same secularising impact – which may help explain why industrial modernity witnesses only relatively gentle rates of congregational decline. Women's continuing commitment to the churches also helps explain many transformations in the nature of Christian belief and practice in the modern period. Moving into the period of late modernity, from the 1960s, the paper notes a significant increase in the rate of church decline in recent decades, and suggests that this can be explained in terms of changing patterns of women's labour, as differentiation between male and female work begins to diminish. Persistent differences, however, including women's continuing disproportionate responsibility for the work of care, continue to impact upon the nature of male and female religious and spiritual participation in contemporary west-ern societies.

1. Prayer as practice : an interpretative proposal / Carlo Genova -- 2. For youth, prayer is relationship / Michael C. Mason -- 3. Pentecostal prayer as personal communication and invisible institutional work / Yannick Fer -- 4. Transcendence and immanence in public and private prayer / Martin Stringer -- 5. Prayer as a tool in Swedish Pentecostalism / Emir Mahieddin -- 6. Contrasting regimes of Sufi prayer and emotion work in the Indonesian Islamic revival / Julia Day Howell -- 7. A socio-anthropological analysis of forms of prayer among the Amish / Andrea Borella -- 8. Filipino Catholic students and prayer as conversation with God / Jayeel Serrano Cornelio -- 9. The embodiment of prayer in charismatic Christianity / Michael Wilkinson and Peter Althouse -- 10. Prayer requests in an English cathedral, and a new analytic framework for intercessory prayer / Tania ap Sion -- 11. An analysis of hospital chapel prayer requests / Peter Collins.

This book offers a fully up-to-date and comprehensive guide to religion in Britain since 1945. A team of leading scholars provide a fresh analysis and overview, with a particular focus on diversity and change. They examine: relations between religious and secular beliefs and institutions the evolving role and status of the churches the growth and 'settlement, of non-Christian religious communities the spread and diversification of alternative spiritualities religion in welfare, education, media, politics and law theoretical perspectives on religious change. The volume presents the latest resea

This timely book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, and communities and sacred symbols. It presents parallels and contrasts between religious emotions in European and American history, in other cultures, and in contemporary western societies. By taking emotions seriously, A Sociology of Religious Emotion sheds new light on the power of religion to shape fundamental human orientations and motivations: hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds.

"In conventional Christian terms, Diana was of course no saint. Yet Diana's status as an icon, before and especially after her tragic death, resonates beatitude. In this thoughtful, illuminating work, cultural critics across disciplines take Diana's 'sainthood' as their motif and explore the nature and source of her iconic role." "Diana, it is argued, attained her popular saintly status because she seemed to represent and enshrine values with which huge numbers were able to sympathise. The contributors identify and examine Diana's sainthood, with all its attendant controversies and contradictions."--Jacket