Social Compass

En Italie, on assiste depuis quelques temps à un indiscutable renouveau de l’attention autour de l’Église catholique. Il en résulte un réaménagement de l’espace public dans lequel l’Église italienne, depuis le pontificat du Pape François, a fini par se retrouver au centre de la scène médiatique. Cette position a fait émerger de nouvelles exigences d’une société italienne profondément secouée par le changement des modèles de consensus et de rapport au politique sur lesquels elle s’est construite depuis la deuxième moitié du 20ème siècle. L’objectif de cette réflexion est de mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de la crise de la modernité affectant l’Italie contemporaine et le regain d’intérêt porté à l’Église catholique. C’est par ce biais qu’il est possible de comprendre les enjeux qui se cachent derrière ce nouvel intérêt de l’opinion publique nationale au sein d’une société dont la sécularisation des institutions et la laïcisation des coutumes restent pourtant dominantes.

The present ubiquity of meditation represents the latest ripple in the easternisation of the West. The mindfulness movement in particular has emerged as a popular expression of this contemplative turn. The vast majority of scholarly work on this subject rests on the assumption that mindfulness represents the culmination of the traditional trajectory of secularisation. Drawing on a discourse-analytic study of how contemporary mindfulness is constructed and made meaningful however, this article argues that these developments point towards a new modality of the secular. While the surface language of mindfulness operates in complete discursive isolation from the religious, its ontological foundation is nevertheless found to rest on a claim towards a transcendent whole. In the final analysis, this post secular hack of mindfulness signals a sacralisation of the secular with significant implications for the sociology of religion.

In this article, I explore the connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion. I do so by tracing the roots of these connections as they evolved during the second part of the 20th century into the present. My main argument is that in contemporary Western societies the most important connections between neoliberal capitalism and religion emerge through the ways in which regimes of religious diversity have become a central form of power that can be fruitfully explored through the Foucauldian notion of governmentality.

What place is there for holy play in experience-oriented society? Is it possible and useful to make analytic distinctions between the liturgical quality of events? I explored these questions by doing research on the boundaries between the religious field and the field of leisure. Fifty site visits to public events in the Netherlands (2006–2014) resulted in a collection of ethnographic data. I used the concept of play as introduced by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga and the tools of ritual studies to explore whether these could help to produce an account of the liturgical quality of ritualized meetings. Holy play might be found in unexpected places, such as in a bingo hall. Huizinga’s broad diagnosis of modernity may be outdated, but the tools he introduced remain useful to distinguish the elements that constitute late-modern meetings as more or less playful – even when this involves combinations that seem contradictory from Huizinga’s own point of view.

The comparison of meetings and protocol of the Lions Clubs in a ritual, offers an opportunity to measure the political impact of this community and the effect the meetings have outside the circle. The study also allows us to understand the importance of the Lions Clubs in Africa, where it cannot be reduced to a meeting of wealthy people seduced by the opulence and the opportunity to find new sources of profit. Lions are compared by population to diplomats because of their appearance, wearing uniforms and medals and are received by the highest political authorities from other nations. In the West this behaviour is seen as a caricature of governance but for members the meetings offer occasions for work and friendship. This appears like political religion because of the hidden goal: to conquer the independence of Africa in the Lions Clubs. This objective is facilitated by the explosion in the number of African members showing the social movement that rages at the top levels of society. The African elite, by its transformation of charity into political rally, proposes a new form of pan-Africanism.

Islam is often regarded as being incompatible with European values. In Italy, for example, anti-Islamic points of view reiterate the religion’s alleged inconsistency with Catholicism and secularism. This article argues that narrative practices can challenge this idea by articulating Muslim hybrid identities that are compatible with Italian culture and society. The second-generation blog Yalla Italia represents a ‘third space’ where young Italian Muslims contrast dominant media stereotypes, thereby creating ‘disruptive flows of dissent’. A textual analysis of the blog and interviews with some of the bloggers reveal that three main topics are employed to overcome marginalization: (1) critiques of mainstream media (2) narratives about family lives and the practice of Islam, and (3) advocacy of a quicker procedure for gaining Italian citizenship. The bloggers adopt a storytelling style to press for social and institutional change and explain how they succeed in adapting Islam to Italian society. Their religious diversity is thus perceived as providing a potential for Italy, rather than being a mark of marginalization.

Cet article explore l’approche et les concepts développés par Jacques Zylberberg dans le domaine de la sociologie des religions. Trois groupes religieux retiennent tout particulièrement l’attention ici : les Témoins de Jéhovah, les Hassidim et les Pentecôtistes catholiques (ou Charismatiques dans le cas du Québec). Le but poursuivi est de préciser en quoi Zylberberg a joué un rôle significatif pour la revue Social Compass et aussi auprès de la Société Internationale de Sociologie des Religions (SISR) tout au long de sa carrière universitaire. Cette réflexion cherche aussi à faire ressortir comment Zylberberg a procédé pour articuler des dimensions théoriques et empiriques face à ce qu’il désigne comme étant l’organisation étatique du religieux.

Since 1895, the Population and Housing Census of Mexico has included the variable ‘religious affiliation’, and this helped to affirm the monopoly of the Catholic religion. In the new millennium, the dynamics of religious diversification of recent decades required a change of design in order to capture the new situation, making religious minorities visible in a way that would propitiate a culture of pluralism. To this end, a team of researchers worked together to capture the diversity of religions in Mexico for the 2010 census. In this article we shall describe: a) the methodological strategies developed to improve the census classifier, and a critique of its achievements in capturing the diversity of religious affiliations and memberships in Mexico; b) the need to combine a quantitative approach to religious affiliation with qualitative approaches to religious self-identification in order to describe and analyze religious deinstitutionalization and individualization tendencies, applying questionnaires to representative samples of the population.

The ‘resurgence’ of religion has led scholars and politicians to critique the ‘secularism’ of public policy. Using evidence from interviews with serving policy officials, this article explores the dimensions of ‘secularism’ as they have been applied to the UK policy context and makes two qualifications. First, I suggest that, rather than the ‘structural’ absence of religion in the last decade, often described as ‘marginalisation’ or ‘privatisation’, religion has repeatedly been relocated in relation to policy goals. Second, I challenge the theory of cultural secularisation expressed in terms of the ‘secular orientation’ of the policy making process and argue that cultural resistance to ‘doing religion’ within the permanent civil service cadre is less the result of a secular orientation and more of ‘religion blindness’, an attempt to demonstrate the ‘impartiality’ within which the civil service code requires non-elected officials to operate.

This article explores the dynamics of success in a monastery and its consequences for monastic life, regarding both internal organization and relations with the outside world. The opportunity to reflect on these topics comes from events taking place in Bose (Piedmont, Italy), one of the best-known and most lively NMCs in Europe. Based on field research carried out between 2011 and 2014, I review the history of the institutional, organizational and economic changes which it has undergone – from poor, anonymous and under suspicion of deviance to well-off, media-friendly and exemplary – and I analyse the repercussions of these changes for the monastic community. Leading questions are as follows: Why and how has Bose changed throughout its history? What strategies has the founder adopted to accomplish these changes? How has he built up his charisma? How are his agency and his charisma linked and how do they influence each other? Finally, has Bose’s success led the community astray from the spirit of the founding aims and values?

Very little is known about the adult religious retention of children and adolescents in New Religious Movements (NRMs). The current study seeks to examine the factors that determine the success of one NRM, contemporary Paganism, at retaining the children of its first generation of converts. Using a small convenience internet sample (n=183), we found that 45% of our sample continued to practice Paganism as adults, and a further 25% remained spiritually Pagan. We find that children and adolescents who were very religious Pagans are much more likely to remain members of the religion as adults, controlling for age, gender and sexual orientation. We also find that children who grew up in more specifically defined Pagan paths, such as Wicca or Druidism, are more likely to remain Pagan and in those paths, than children who were raised in more vaguely defined ways such as ‘eclectic Pagan’.