"Here we have in one volume both the intimate portraits and the ground-breaking insights that have changed the way we think about religion in the United States."-Nancy T. Ammerman, author of Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners

"Fans and critics alike will benefit from reading this stimulating collection of essays."-Robert Wuthnow, Andlinger Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

"Nearly two decades ago, with the publication of New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church, R. Stephen Warner secured his place as one of the leading interpreters of American religion. This volume of essays, penned in the intervening years, stands as a worthy successor. It reveals a breadth of vision that is as remarkable as the subtlety of its analysis."-Grant Wacker, Duke University

In this definitive collection of essays, R. Stephen Warner traces the development of the "new paradigm" interpretation of American religion. Originally formulated in the 1990s in response to prevailing theories of secularization that focused on the waning plausibility of religion in modern societies, the new paradigm reoriented the study of religion to a focus on communities, subcultures, new religious institutions, and the fluidity of modern religious identities. This perspective continues to be one of the most important driving forces in the field and one of the most significant challenges to the idea that religious pluralism inevitably leads to religious decline.

Chapters examine evangelicals and Pentecostals, gay and lesbian churches, immigrant religious institutions, Hispanic parishes, and churches for the deaf in terms of this framework. Newly written introductory and concluding essays set these groups within the broad context of the developing field.

R. Stephen Warner is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1989, he received the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church.

Contents
Note on the Text
Retrospect: Looking Backward and Inward
Part I: Identifying the New Paradigm of Constitutive Disestablishment
1 Starting Over: Reflections on American Religion (1991)
2 Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States (1993)
3 A Paradigm Is Not a Theory (1997)
4 New Paradigm Histories of American Religion
a. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark on American Religion After Disestablishment (1993)
b. Grant Wacker on the First Generation of Pentecostals (2003)
c. Joel Carpenter on the Second Generation of Fundamentalists (1999)
d. Donald Miller on "New Paradigm" Churches: Lessons from California (1997)
5 Religion, Boundaries, and Bridges (1997)
6 Enlisting Smelser's Theory of Ambivalence to Maintain Progress in Sociology of Religion's New Paradigm (2004)
Part II: Close-Ups and Overviews of Diverse Congregations
7 Mirror for American Protestantism: Mendocino Presbyterian Church in the Sixties and Seventies (1990)
8 The Place of the Congregation in the American Religious Configuration (1994)
9 The Metropolitan Community Churches and the Gay Agenda: The Power of Pentecostalism and Essentialism (1995)
10 Seeing the Word (with James S. Pappas, 1993)
11 Elizondo's Pastoral Theology in Action: An Inductive Appreciation (2000)
12 Pentecostal Immigrants and the Making of the Sun Belt (1993)
13 Religion and New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles Drawn from Field Research (2000)
14 Interpreting "Asian American Religion" for a Non-American Audience (2003)
15 The De-Europeanization of American Christianity (2004)
16 Changes in the Civic Role of Religion (1999)
Prospect: Looking Forward and Outward
Appendix: List of Author's Cited Works
Index