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Welcome to the BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group Blog

Socrel, the Sociology of Religion BSA Study Group, is a successful, internationally recognised study group with a 40-year history of engaging events, and high quality research.
We pride ourselves in the number and range of opportunities we provide. Every year, Socrel organises a 3-day annual conference, a Chair’s Response day, and PG-ECR events. It also holds an Essay Competition, the Peter B. Clarke Essay Prize, as well as a funding competition, the Seed Corn Funding Competition, whereby winners can be awarded up to £5000 to support the development of significant and innovative work in the Sociology of Religion.
Socrel is not only an intellectual community, which welcomes PG-ECRs, academics and high-profile professors alike, but is also a pastoral and supportive group. Our PG/ECR events as well as out Mentoring Scheme for Women for instance demonstrate our engagement and commitment to support our Members.
This blog will bring together specialists and non-specialists, including PG and ECRs, in contemporary religious issues to increase the profile of the Sociology of Religion within Sociology.

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What has sociology of religion got to do with sexuality education?

At the time of writing the UK news media has been closely following the story of protests by Muslim and Christian parents concerned by the teaching of an LGBT rights programme in a Birmingham primary school. This controversy and the storm of commentary it has provoked should remind us that sexuality education has a deep historical entanglement with the political influence and public claims of the religious. Given the imminent implementation of statutory guidance for the teaching of Relationships and Sex Education in all English schools, this is clearly an important time for sociology of religion to attend to sexuality education. So what sort of questions might sociologists of religion want to ask regarding sexuality education? In the flurry of commentary much attention has been given to the rights/bigotry/homophobia of the protesting parents and little to the young people who lie at the centre of this issue. As such, one important inquiry concerns the way in which social constructs
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Communicating Religion: The Socrel Annual Conference 2019

This year’s conference was on the theme of “Communicating Religion” and commenced with a keynote from Uppsala University’s Mia Lövheim on the theme of “Communicating Religion in Mediatised Society”. Drawing on Stig Hjarvard’s work in mediatisation theory — how religion is mediated through secular media institutions — Lövheim contended that this theory can be a useful framework for addressing the complexity of communicating religion, for example by asking what kind of religion is communicated and what religion becomes when it is communicated. Drawing on her reflections in interdisciplinary research, Lövheim urged scholars to engage with the theoretical issues of definitions and to be knowledgeable about the various forms of mediatisation of religion. A number of parallel sessions follows throughout the first day. In “Religion and the Secular: Institutions” Alp Arat communicated the findings of the Leverhulme Trust-funded mappingmindfulness.net project, the first “large-scale social
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