Religion in Western Society (Sociology for a Changing World)

This book offers a comprehensive account of religion in Western societies, focusing particularly on Western Europe and North America but taking in developments elsewhere around the globe as appropriate. Offering a guide to the principal forms of religion in the West—whether mainstream religion, sects or cults, popular superstition, or religious fundamentalism—it calls upon both empirical work and theoretical debates to examine beliefs, practices, patterns of organization, and significant trends.