A Time to Chant by Bryan Wilson
Fifty years ago Soka Gakkai was an organization of a few hundred people, all of them in Japan. Today it is one of the world's most rapidly expanding religious movements with members in virtually every country in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia, in most of Asia, and in several parts of Africa. It is also increasingly well publicized, sponsoring and promoting a variety of cultural and educational causes and establishing a high profile for itself in world affairs. All of this has created a movement which is a significant social phenomenon; yet to date Soka Gakkai has received little attention from Western academics. Bryan Wilson and Karel Dobbelaere draw on their thorough survey of the UK membership to trace the source of the movement's attraction and analyze its potential. They also carried out some 30 interviews with members, whom they encouraged to tell their story in their own way. As the decline in belief in an anthropomorphic deity, the sense that traditional religious institutions have become hollow, and the emphasis on the private nature of belief and on personal autonomy become characteristic features of contemporary western values, Wilson and Dobbelaere suggest that Soka Gakkai has found a ready resonance with these changing currents of thought in contemporary society. They conclude that Soka Gakkai's appeal to young people in particular makes it a faith whose time may have come.
Karel Dobbelaere is an emeritus professor of sociology, Catholic University of Leuven and University of Antwerp, Belgium. He has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University; at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, Japan; at Sofia University in Tokyo; at the Institut de Recherche sur les Societes Contemporaines, Paris; and at Kent State University in Ohio. He is a former president of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion and is the author of some twenty books and nearly 200 articles published in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Polish.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780198293149 |
| ISBN 10 | 0198293143 |
| Title | A Time to Chant |
| Author | Bryan Wilson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year published | 1997-07-01 |
| Number of pages | 278 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |