“Religion and Modernity”
Sociologists Pollack and Rosta receive prize for fundamental work on religion in modernity
For their book “Religion and Modernity. An International Comparison”, the sociologists of religion Prof. Dr. Detlef Pollack and Prof. Dr. Gergely Rosta were awarded the Karl Polányi Prize of the Hungarian Society of Sociology (MSZT). Published by Oxford University Press in 2017, the study was done at the Cluster of Excellence. First published in 2015 in German by Campus Verlag, as the first volume of the series “Religion und Moderne” (Religion and Modernity) under the title of “Religion in der Moderne” (Religion in Modernity), it is one of the most comprehensive empirical studies of international religious development trends since 1945. It trans-nationally identifies patterns of religious change as well as social factors and conditions that influence religious upswings and downswings.
Annually since 1998, the MSZT has been awarding the prize for the best sociological book or the best sociological journal article in which Hungarian authors are involved. The award is named after the Austro-Hungarian economist and social scientist Karl Paul Polányi (1886–1964) and was presented to the sociologists on 18 October at the annual MSZT congress in Szeged.
The authors
Detlef Pollack is speaker of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, where he has held the Chair of Sociology of Religion since 2008. His research focuses on the relationship between religion and modernity, on the history of the GDR and on political culture. The sociologist Gergely László Rosta was a research assistant at the Cluster of Excellence from 2009 to 2017 and has been Professor of Sociology at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest since 2017. (exc/maz)