David Martin and the Sociology of Hope

Abstract

David Martin’s work has always bridged many worlds: the sacred and the secular, the world of power politics and of religious visions, of individual and society, and of poetry and rational analysis. His trenchant and uncompromising analyses of human social formations and their ideational concomitants have nevertheless provided many with a vision of that hope which must sustain scholarly analysis if it is not to become tedious and moribund. His sensitivity to tradition, to ritual, to received knowledge and the debt we owe to the past – even while appreciating the frisson of the radically new (as in his studies of Pentacostalism) – have made him one of only a small handful of scholars who could address the broad range of human religious expression and its implications for life in the world. This paper explores some of these themes in terms of what we understand as the overwhelming sense of hope that is a permanent feature of David’s scholarly contributions.