Religionssociologiske rids : forelæsninger og arbejdspapirer om religionssociologi fra 2005

Abstract

Agder University College in Norway has marked 'religion, ethics and society' as one of its top priority subjects. It was therefore decided to supplement its professor of sociology of religion, Pål Repstad, with another professorship in the subject. This led to awarding Ole Riis the new professorship in 2005. Ole Riis came from Denmark, where he taught sociology of religion for several years at the University of Aarhus, and where he later contributed to establishing a full sociology programme at University of Aalborg, with an emphasis on methodology. The present book contains expanded and corrected manuscripts for a series of lectures held by Ole Riis. First and foremost, there is the opening lecture at AUC. It presents a programme for sociology of religion as a bridge-building discipline, interconnecting humanistic studies of religion and theology with social sciences. The lecture points at the need for developing new theories for subjects such as religious emotions and the need for an enhanced awareness of the development of methods in the gap between traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. These issues are brought further in two of the following manuscripts. One major chapter presents a theoretical framework for analyzing religious emotions in a social context. The conceptual scheme is based on a dialectical relationship between the social structure and the individual. This relationship is first presented as a juxtaposition between processes of an externalization of religiously based emotions and an internalization of social standards for proper religious emotions. This is supplemented by a juxtaposition of processes of objectification of religious emotions in art or rituals, and of subjectification where the emotions are experienced by a person as deep and genuine. It is followed by a chapter which applies a field theory approach to the church. The core example is the Danish state-supported Protestant church. A field theory stresses the potential tensions between a set of positions, characterized by their special interests and resources. Thereby, it is posible to identify congruent or conflicting patterns of interest between types of religious employees and lay members of the church. This pattern of interests is related to the context of a late modern society. It is argued that the state church has been dominated by interest positions which are rooted in a pre-modern society. This helps to explain the support of the state church from different parts of society and its status in late modern Denmark. The next chapter is based on a presentation of findings from a major research project on state churches and religious pluralism for a research seminar organized by the Nordic Council. The project was supported by the Nordic Council under the aegis of 'The Nordic countries and Europe', and it was affiliated with an international survey project, 'Religious and Moral Pluralism in Europe'. The chapter presents some of the major findings of the survey study relating to religious and ethnic pluralism. It ties these findings to present discussions about the challenges which immigration from non-Christian cultures have raised in relation to religious toleration in the Nordic countries. The final chapter discusses new methodological options for the social sciences. It follows up on Ole Riis' book 'Metoder på tværs' (or 'Criss-crossing methods'). It criticized the paradigmatic split between qualitative and quantitative methods, and it demonstrated that this distinction is scientifically unecessary and unfruitful. This led to an outline of an integrated approach based on a 'collective intellectual' perspective. The chapter of the present book furthers this approach by discussing some concrete methodological possibilities, such as logistic regression analysis, small-n comparisons, correspondance analysis, and simulation models. It is hereby indicated that the book is not to be read as a monograph. It is a series of pointers for further research, published by the author in the hope that young scholars may find some inspiration from it - for their own research and for their own purposes.