Amazon.com description: Product Description: This book aims to demonstrate that sociologists have much to gain from a strengthening of the connections between general theories about the changing character of modern Western societies and specific studies of religion. The weakness of such connections is indeed one of the most curious features of contemporary sociology. It is as if sociologists of religion were uninterested in theories of, and empirical findings about, recent transformations of industrial society; and writers about secularization, modernization and privatization were determined to consign religion to marginality or insignificance.