Author: Daniele Hervieu-Leger
Subject: Sociology of Religion
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2827-5
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2828-3
Pages: 224 pp.
Description: A groundbreaking analysis of the changing role of Religion in modern societies

"It is hard to imagine a student of religion who wouldn't gain from this book. Every generation of religious scholars tends to produce one eminent figure who has a way of digging beneath the surface to find and shape the most critical issues. This splendid book stakes Hervieu-Léger's claim to that mantel."-Nicholas J. Demerath, professor of sociology, University of Massachusetts

"This book establishes Hervieu-Léger as one of the most important contemporary sociologists of religion. In the best tradition of French sociology, she places the problem of modern religion within a broad interpretation of modern consciousness. Her book will be a classic in the field." -Peter Berger, Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, Boston University

For most of the last twenty years, sociologists have studied the decline of religion in the modern world-a decline they saw as a defining feature of modernity, which promotes materialism over spirituality. The revival and political strength of varying religious traditions around the world, however, has forced sociologists to reconsider.

In Religion as a Chain of Memory, Hervieu-Léger undertakes a sociological redefinition and reexamination of religion. For religion to endure in the modern world, she finds, it must have deep roots in traditions and times in which it was not defined as irrelevant. This reasoning leads her to develop the concept of a "chain of memory"-in which individual believers become part of a community that links past, present, and future members. Thus, religion may be perceived as a shared understanding with a collective memory that enables it to draw from the well of its past for nourishment in the increasingly secular present.

Hervieu-Léger also argues that the modern secular societies of the West have not, as is commonly assumed, outgrown or found secular substitutes for religious traditions, nor are they more "rational" than past societies. Rather, modern societies have become "amnesiacs," no longer able to maintain the chain of memory that binds them to their religious pasts. Ironically, however, even as the modern world is destroying and losing touch with its traditional religious bases, it is also creating the need for a spiritual life and is thus opening up a space that only religion can fill.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger is director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is also chief editor of the Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions.