Tension and Transaction: Dynamics of Religious Recomposition from a Multiscopic Perspective

Abstract

This review article is based on re-reading the Joas vs. Weber discussion about the macro-concept of “disenchantment”. For Joas, the Weberian thesis brings together, in a single explanatory model, different social processes that must be differentiated. Joas’s proposal highlights the need to build research models sensitive to the interaction and the play of different logics of action between tension and transaction. The collection of some of the most recent tendencies shows how research on religion and modernity has renewed its interest in “visible religion”, granting a fundamental place to study the different modalities of religious agency in the recomposition of the public domain. Reading these results allows the reconstruction of an epistemological model centered on the logic of action, considering that religion can no longer be studied only on the terrain of its institutional reproduction. Instead, the plurality of religious agency requires observation at different scales: a multiscopic and multisite perspective.

Hybrid Social Spaces and the Individualisation of Religious Experience in the Global North: Spatial Aspects of Religiosity in Postmodern Society

“…This is reflected in the increasingly frequent phenomenon of the religious person giving a different meaning to secular spaces and expressing his or her religious affiliation in public spaces. The result is that religion, now visible in the public space, also becomes a factor in this social space and plays a role in the recomposition of the public sphere (Teixeira 2023a). (This trend, which has been present since the modern era, is now more prevalent in the postmodern era.)…”