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.

This paradox has led Hervieu-Leger to undertake 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 is a major new account of the nature of religion and its changing role in modern societies, by one of the most original French sociologists writing on religion today. In a stylish and accessible study, Hervieu-Leger addresses the problem of how to distinguish religion from other systems of meaning in modern Western society.

The crucial point, she argues, is the chain of memory and tradition which makes the individual believer a member of the community. From this point of view, religion is the ideological, symbolic and social device by which individual and collective...