Discourse and practice Book

Tweed does a great job in his attempt to capture the motion and movement of religious lives. Two things about his theory:

In the first couple of chapters his main category is "religion" or "religions" but later in the last three chapters--and especially the final two--he begins to talk a lot about "the religious," as in people involved in religion. I would have liked a bit more on the connection b/w these two categories because I feel like his theory does a great job of explaining "the religious" that is the behaviors of people but not so much on the category of religion and how it is differentiated from other "cultural flows."

Second, Tweed makes a distinction between meaning and power which I find problematic. While I think he would grant that the two are related, I think they deserve the same hyphen (meaning-power) that he gives to "organic-cultural." Power works to determine meaning and meaning in turn reflects, reinforces, and sets the horizons for power. This is a small critique but I know Tweed wants to account for power and I think he could have offered a small section working through this question.

Overall, I love this book and I find it incredibly useful for research and for teaching. It's one of those books that will remain a classic for a while.