2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion)

Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.
 

Marian Burchardt is a professor of sociology at the University of Leipzig. He is the author of Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa.
 

— James Spickard, author of Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes

— Roger Trigg, author of Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions

— Steven Vertovec, Editor of the Routledge international Handbook of Diversity Studies

— Geneviève Zubrzycki, author of Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec

— Philip S. Gorski, author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe

— José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World

— Reading Religion

— Journal of the American Academy of Religion

— James Spickard, author of Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes

— Geneviève Zubrzycki, author of Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec

— José Casanova, author of Public Religions in the Modern World

— Roger Trigg, author of Religious Diversity: Philosophical and Political Dimensions

— Philip S. Gorski, author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe

— Steven Vertovec, Editor of the Routledge international Handbook of Diversity Studies

— Journal of the American Academy of Religion

— Reading Religion