Winner of the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a creative, entrepreneurial religious movement that strives to achieve social legitimacy and spiritual vitality by actively disassociating from its roots in conservative, evangelical Christianity and "deconstructing" contemporary expressions of Christianity. Emerging Christians see themselves as overturning outdated interpretations of the Bible, transforming hierarchical religious institutions, and re-orienting Christianity to step outside the...

Religion is alive and well all over the world, especially in times of personal, political, and social crisis. Even in Europe, long regarded the most "secular" continent, religion has taken centre stage in how people respond to the crises associated with modernity, or how they interact with the nation-state. In this book, scholars working in and on Europe offer fresh perspectives on how religion provides answers to existential crisis, how crisis increases the salience of religious identities and cultural polarization, and how religion is contributing to changes in the modern world in Europe...

Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland is the first major book to explore the dynamic religious landscape of contemporary Ireland, north and south, and to analyze the island's religious transition. It confirms that the Catholic Church's long-standing "monopoly" has well and truly disintegrated, replaced by a mixed, post-Catholic religious "market" featuring new and growing expressions of Protestantism, as well as other religions. It describes how people of faith are developing "extra-institutional" expressions of religion, keeping their faith alive outside or in addition to the...

Winner of the Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

The Emerging Church Movement (ECM) is a creative, entrepreneurial religious movement that strives to achieve social legitimacy and spiritual vitality by actively disassociating from its roots in conservative, evangelical Christianity and "deconstructing" contemporary expressions of Christianity. Emerging Christians see themselves as overturning outdated interpretations of the Bible, transforming hierarchical religious institutions, and re-orienting Christianity to step outside the...