Religion in global perspective: SSSR presidential panel

Global processes present a challenge for scholarly work on religion, necessitating new concepts, theoretical and analytical models, intellectual sensitivity, and imagination. This calls for focusing on (1) cross-border interpenetration of religious organizations, beliefs, and practices; (2) variations in the potential for religious beliefs and institutions to be transported; and (3) the use of multiple frames of reference to examine the dispersion of religious cultures and communities. A presidential panel presents the need for generating new research questions, improving measurement tools, and updating methodological techniques so that social scientists of religion accurately and authentically portray the nature and expression of religion in the 21st century.