Quakers have been contemplating how far to cede their religious beliefs to bureaucratic management since the middle of the seventeenth century. Originally Christian recusants, they reproved the established English church for its perceived apostasy and its claims to institutionally mediate between the individual and the divine. …

The point of departure for this post is that the much-touted Worldviews paradigm (REC 2018) — in much the same fashion as the World Religion Paradigm — conceives of religions as substances and as containers to which can then be ascribed traits and qualities, into which can be poured particular…

At the British Sociological Association Sociology of Religion conference this year, the theme of which was Beyond Binaries in the Sociology of Religion, I presented an extract from my research on the pedagogies of modern forms of yoga, arguing for a practice-based approach to the study of ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’. …

Here, I’d like to do something thinking about how we get beyond binaries that have framed our experience of social space and time, with particular reference to the Zoom-sphere that became such a prominent feature of spatial life in the global pandemic. Zoom-sphere has accentuated the collapse of space and…

Despite the fact I grew up in Spain, a country with deep cultural, political and historical ties to Catholicism, religion was never a particular concern. My father was brought up in a Spanish communist family, so he thinks religion is, as Marx (1843) eloquently put it, “the opium of the…

In 2019 I presented a short paper to the annual SocRel conference on a large-scale, knitted poppy project hosted at a church in Warwick to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the end of World War 1 in 2018. The paper explored what this event could show about narratives around…

As charitable organisations are faced with growing competition for funds, they are under pressure to communicate the impact of their work in ways that clearly define and measure ‘success’. …

Despite religion’s prominence in public debates (Davie 2014) and importance in daily life for many people across the world (WIN/Gallup International 2014; Hackett and McClendon 2017) — though for a diminishing proportion of British citizens (WIN/Gallup International 2015b) — scholars and the news media, in their efforts to understand faith…

Diary-based research is one of the lesser-used qualitative research methods and is particularly underused in sociological studies of religion. Visual methods are also sparse in this field. For my PhD on Ramadan in the UK, I collected photo diaries charting Muslim experiences of the month. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic…