Why "Why Christianity Works" Works

Abstract

thank my respondents for their feedback on my essay and David Yamane for providing the opportunity of this exchange to clarify issues and hopefully move forward our understanding of significant matters in our field. It is important, after considering the details of my respondents' reactions, first to step back to gain some larger perspective on the original nature and purpose of the essay in question. As to genre, my essay is a theoretical thought piece, intended to float ideas that may offer useful approaches and perspectives for future research in the field. agree with the editor that such thought pieces deserve a hearing in our joumals, alongside more standard articles, because they hold the potential to contribute in their own way to our self-reflexivity as schol ars and creative reflection on alternative perspectives in our field. As to argu ment, to reiterate, believe that the sociology of religion needs to develop a stronger empirical research program examining how religious beliefs and prac tices generate for adherents subjective experiences involving emotional respons es which help to reinforce people's commitment to those religions. Exactly how and why that happens (assuming the suggestion itself has any merit) is an open empirical question, but one that is currently neglected and think well worth investigating more seriously in the future. The specific case that took up in my essay as an example of how this might work was Christianity, a multifaceted case the argument about which could of course be developed and complexified well beyond what my short essay offered. suspect that this proposed research agenda would also prove fruitful if applied to most other religions, although the specifics of the analytical stories to be told will no doubt vary by the religious tradition and sub-tradition being studied. As to style and tone, my essay was intentionally written with a strong feeling of sub jective experience and affect, in order to create something of an aesthetic corre spondence between the theoretical argument and the tenor of the prose. My pur pose was to give some sense of the phenomenological perspective embedded in my argument, which necessarily introduces subjectivity and affect into our under standing and explanation. This purposeful discursive move made explicit in the seventh sentence of my essay's abstract, which stated, I also reflect the subjec