The 36th Congress of the German Society for Sociolgy (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie – DGS) will be held from 1 -5 October 2012 in Bochum and Dortmund.

The Section for Sociology of Religion is organizing a panel on “Religion and Social Inequality” during this conference. The call for paper is only in German, but papers in English are also very welcome.

In the early sociology of religion the relationship between social class and religion was a central topic. Weber for example analysed social strata as carriers of religious ideas. Following Weber this research question was picked up by Niebuhr in his exploration of the social sources of denominations and by Bourdieu in his analysis of the religious field. In the last decades, the problem of social inequality has been mostly neglected as a research question in the sociology of religion.

Papers presenting empirical findings, quantitative as well as qualitative, from a national or transnational perspective, about the  impact of social class and life conditions on religious beliefs,practices and affiliations are invited. The religions of the upper classes and the lower classes, of the privileged and the “negatively privileged” are of special interest for this panel.

Please send abstracts of 2500 signs maximum (inclunding spaces) until

March 15th to the organizers:

Prof.Dr. Gert Pickel: pickel@rz.uni-leipzig.de

Dr. Kornelia Sammet: sammet@uni-leipzig.de