Jay Demerath Emile Durkheim Distinguished Professor of Sociology

Education and Interests

(Ph.D., California at Berkeley, 1964)

Culture-Religion, Organizations-Movements, Politics, Theory.

Curriculum Vitae

Books

• Handbook for the Sociology of Religion, with James Beckford. Sage Publishing, forthcoming.
• Sacred Circles/Public Squares. The Multicentering of American Religion, with Arthur Farnsley et al. Indiana University Press, 2004
• Crossing the Gods : World Religions and Worldly Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2001. (Winner, 2002 Book Award of Society for the Scientific Study        of Religion).

Selected Publications

• "Dear President Bush: Assessing Religion and Politics in Your Administration for 'Posteriority'." Sociology of Religion, December, 2006.
• "Interrogating Caste and Religion in India's Emerging Middle Class," With Surinder Jodhka and Loren Demerath. Economic and Political Weekly. Mumbai, India, September 2, 2006.
• Crossing the Gods : World Religions and Worldly Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2001. (Winner, 2002 Book Award of Society for the Scientific Study  of Religion).
• "Crisscrossing the Gods: Globalization and American Religion",  incld. in Bruce Mazlish and Nayan Chanda, eds. The United States in a Global History Perspective (Stanford, CA.: Stanford U. Press, 2006).
• "The Battle over a U.S. Culture War: Inflated Rhetoric vs. Inflamed Reality," The Forum (Berkeley Electronic Press), Vol. 3; Number 2, Article 6. (July, 2005)
• "The Pitfalls of Pluralism: Talibanization and Saffronization in India," Harvard International Review, XXV/4 (Winter, 2004)
• "Cults, Culture and Manure: Why the Root of the Second Should be the First Rather than the Third." Chapter for James Beckford and James Richardson co-editors, Re-Thinking New--and Old--Religious Movements (London: Routledge, 2003)
• "'Secularization' By Any Other Name." With Gerald Marwell. Comment on Hout and Fischer,"Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations" American Sociological Review 68: 314-416, April, 2003).
• Crossing the gods : world religions and worldly politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univeristy Press, 2001.
• "What American Culture War? A View From the Trenches As Opposed to the Command Posts and the Press Corps." With Yonghe Yang. IN Rhys H. Williams (ed), Culture Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997.
• Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, Oxford, 1997, senior editor. 
• "Who Now Debates Functionalism? From 'System, Change and Conflict' to Culture, Choice, and Praxis," Sociological Forum, June, 1996. 
• "Postmortemism for Postmodernism?" Contemporary Sociology, January, 1996. 
• "Rational Paradigms, A-Rational Religion, and the Debate over Secularization," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, March, 1995.
• A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in a New England City, Princeton, 1992, senior author. 

Recent Activities

• Named Emile Durkheim Distinguished Professor
• Having served as President of 3 scholarly organizations over the past 10 years (The Society for the Scientific Study of religion, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Association for the Sociology of Religion), I have finally been put out to political pasture by losing the 2006 election for Secretary of the American Sociological Asssociation. The good news is that this was an in-house election and I lost to my Departmental better and new Chair, Don Tomaskovic-Devey.