About the Authors
CHRISTOPHERCRAIGBRITTAINis Assistant Professor of Ethics and Theology at the Atlantic
School of Theology in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His research includes the critical social
theory of the Frankfurt School, political theology, and the nature of secularism. He
has published articles on Max Horkheimer and on Slavoj Zizek, and his dissertation
focuses on the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. He recently published “The ‘Secular ’
as a Tragic Category: On Talal Asad, Religion and Representation,” in Method and
Theory in the Study of Religion17.2 (2005). Currently, he serves on the executive of the
Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, and is working on a book project with
the working title: The Weight of Objectivity: Adorno and the Refusal of the ‘Return to
Religion’.
ANNACAMPBELLBUCKis Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Central
Florida. Her teaching and research interests include religion, health, and aging, as
well as statistics and quantitative methods. Her recent work focuses primarily on the
relationship between religiosity and mental and physical health outcomes, especially
among older adults and Hispanics. Examples of current papers include, the effect of
church attendance on functional health status among elderly, Mexican Americans, and
the use of individual growth curve models to analyze age and changes in religiosity.
DAVIDA. GAYis Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Central Florida.
He received his Ph.D. from Duke University. His published work has examined vari-
ations in attitudes among American mainline denominations, the relationship between
region, religion, and life satisfaction, the effects of switching on denominational sub-
cultures, and variations in religiosity across the depression era, baby boom, and gen-
eration X birth cohorts. His work has appeared in the Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, Review of Religious Research, Social Forces, and Social Science Quarterly.
WARRENS. GOLDSTEINis Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Central
Florida in Orlando. He received his Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research
in 1998. He has published several articles which come out of his doctoral disserta-
tion, “Messianism and Marxism: Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch’s Dialectical Theories
of Secularization.” His research interests are in the sociological theory of religion. He
is currently working on developing a dialectical theory of secularization as part of a
critical theory of religion.
LAURENLANGMANis a professor of sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He has
long worked in the tradition of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, especially on
issues of alienation and relationships between culture, politics and the psychosocial.
His most recent publications include a special issue of American Behavioral Politics
devoted to the presidency in a television age, and, co-edited with Devorah Kalekin,
The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium. He has also published
on the alternative globalization movements, and the many forms of identity that
emerge in the current age from fundamentalists to the extremes of body modification.
More recently, he has published several book chapters on Islam and fundamentalism.