Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life. By Nancy Tatom Ammerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvi + 37 6pp. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life . By Nancy Tatom Ammerman . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. xvi + 37 6pp. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesSociologist Nancy Ammerman is an accomplished scholar of American religion. Her previous research on prompted her to interview ninety-five Americans about the spiritual aspects of their daily lives. These interviews provide candid glimpses into the many ways people identify experiences as sacred, negotiate tensions between religious and secular understandings of their lives, and selectively appropriate intellectual or ritual themes from religious institutions. Ammerman found that only a few of her research subjects were loyal, orthodox believers across all domains of their lives. Many were infrequent in their religious attendance. Some had no religious affiliation at all. But most told stories about everyday activities that signaled intense interest in viewing the world in ways that go beyond wholly secular understandings. Ammerman draws heavily on Charles Taylor's work as she identifies a in the stories that Americans use to narrate their lives. This sacred consciousness consists of an overriding sense that life cannot be reduced to what Taylor terms the immanent frame of objective science. This book seeks to understand the everyday religion guiding these individuals' efforts to identify--and live up to--such distinctively religious conceptions of everyday realities.Ammerman designed these interviews to explore how informs the meaning of a broad spectrum of human activities: everyday life at home, the workplace, neighborhoods and local communities, engagement with national and even international policies, and attempts to manage illness or death. Especially insightful were her interviewee's reflections about the nature and meaning of their jobs. Some jobs lend themselves both to a sense of vocation and to the possibility for everyday encounters with larger meanings and mysteries. More often, however, religion surfaces in people's efforts to cope with the frustrations and disappointments inherent in their work lives. Very few of her interviewees called on religious principles to critique the nature of the wider economic system. Ammerman found that a few engaged in (or were annoyed by) workplace prosletyizing and that two-thirds of workplace friendships are religiously homogenous. For the most part, however, everyday religion manifests itself in the workplace as yet another variation of what Ammerman calls Golden Rule Christianity. It seems that at work--as with most other spheres in our lives--religion is not primarily about beliefs or institutional affiliation. Everyday religion thus often comes down to caring for others, being compassionate, and setting aside selfishness.Ammerman teases a number of interesting points from her interviewee's lengthy stories. …