Sociologists of religion, in their concern for the social effects of religious institutions and the functions of religious meaning systems for people's identities, have neglected to study religious experiences. This paper explores Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow experiences and Alfred Schutz's theory of the tuning-in relationship as possible approaches to studying the experiential dimension of religion. Csikszentmihalyi's notion of “the flow experience,” while ultimately reductionist, focuses on the nonconceptual side of autotelic activities. Schutz's analysis of musical performance elucidates the preconceptual sociality of all experiences shared in inner time. We suggest that both theories offer conceptual tools that can be applied to religious experiences. Taken together they suggest an approach for sociologists attempting to explore this hitherto neglected domain.

The rational-choice/market-model of religions really consists of two, separable parts: a model of religious behavior plus a rational-choice explanation of why that behavior occurs. This article examines three key theoretical assumptions of the latter explanation. It shows two of these to be false and the third to be so vague as to be useless. This undercuts a rational-choice psychology as an explanation for religious actions. It undercuts, however, neither the utility of the market-model itself nor of a rational-choice model of human behavior (as opposed to action). Together these can describe the overall structure of the religious marketplace, but cannot — and need not — describe the subjective actions of religious persons.

In several publications over the last 18 years, Mary Douglas has advanced a theory for correlating cosmological beliefs with concrete social life. Th

The sociology of religion has, by and large, treated religious experiences as personal, having in themselves little social relevance. To this line of

This article uses house masses in a Catholic Worker community to examine the interaction of symbols and experience in religious rituals. It argues that, during the period of this study, these weekly masses served to reinforce Worker identity by guiding participants' experiences along specific lines. Ritual symbolism and the moment-to-moment attention of the participants combined to move participants from despair at the state of the world to an experience of a community of solidarity and hope. A second phase of the ritual then expanded that community to include homeless people, by means of a symbolic second ‘mass’ of soup, bread, and water, delivered in the streets. The article demonstrates the need for sociology to consider the experiential dimension, along with the symbolic, in understanding rituals' role in religious life.