BSA Socrel Study Group

By late March 2020, a previously unimaginable situation had occurred across the British church as places of worship around the country were forced to lock their doors and in-person collective worship was banned. Believers were forced to change habits that had lasted for lifetimes within a matter of days and around the country churches scrambled to move online – whether on YouTube, Facebook Live, Zoom or other platforms.     Thinking on this new state started immediately and within weeks Heidi Campbell (2020) published an  e-book drawing on reflections of both practitioners and digital religion researchers . Yet this work, along with the majority of coverage around religion in the time of Covid-19, focused on the experience of adult believers. For thousands of child and adolescent Christians, however, the disruption was just as severe, yet can be easily overlooked.    While my ethnographic study of an evangelical youth group in London ended 15 months prior to loc...

Last July, while the quasi-religious fever of a then imminent football ‘homecoming’ swept the country, sociology of religion scholars from all over the UK (and indeed the world) gathered at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow for a homecoming of their own. The Sociology or Religion Study Group of the BSA was once more reunited, this time to discuss the relationship between religion and education. What follows is an account of what for me, a newcomer to this exciting collegiate environment, are but a few of the highlights from the gathering. The conference had a great start with  Yvette Taylor  as the keynote speaker of the first plenary session. Taylor’s presentation on queer religious youth in different schools in the UK was very relevant both theoretically and methodologically, with a call for intersectionality in the study of religious groups. Taylor’s findings from her research of queer religious youth in both faith and community schools pointed towards a ‘multi-face...