He has been chair of the Marxist section of ASA, is currently president of the alien-
ation research committee of the International Sociological Association and on the edi-
torial boards of Critical Sociology.
GEORGELUNDSKOWis Associate Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University
in Michigan. His longstanding interest in religion and Marxist theory began acade-
mically at the Jesuit high school he attended. Since then, professor Lundskow’s work
has examined religion in the context of social change, both reactionary and progres-
sive. C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imaginationinforms his general approach to
sociology, that sociology should contribute progressively to vital issues of the day.
His current research examines the rise of charismatic Christianity and anti-science
movements.
KENNETHG. MACKENDRICKis Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion, University
of Manitoba. In addition to Critical Theory his research interests include death and
mourning rituals, concepts of evil and impurity, and food and religious practices. He
is currently working on a monograph entitled Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy, a philo-
sophical and psychoanalytic study of Jürgen Habermas’s critical social theory.
ANDREWMCKINNONhas a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto. He has
published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, The Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion,and The Companion to Modern French Thought. His doctoral disserta-
tion analyses the relationship of religion and emergent consumer-capitalism in the
United States, with a focus on the 1925 bestseller by Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody
Knows, a book which told the story of Jesus as a master advertiser and the founder
of modern business. He is a member of the Toronto Book Review Collective for Critical
Sociology.
MICHAELR. OTTis an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University,
Allendale, Michigan. He received his Master of Divinity degree from Princeton
Theological Seminary in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Western Michigan
University in 1998, where he studied with Dr. Rudolf J. Siebert. Dr. Ott is also an
ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, having served the church as a full-
time pastor for 25 years prior to his becoming a professor. As a minister, he devel-
oped in both theory and praxis the connection between the Frankfurt School’s critical
theory of society and religion and a critical, political theology of social critique and
liberation toward a more reconciled future society. His book, Max Horkheimer’s Critical
Theory of Religion: The Meaning of Religion in the Struggle for Human Emancipationgives
expression to this dialectical development. As a professor, he continues to research,
teach and write on the liberational negative or inverse theology of the critical theory
of society and religion as a critique of neo-liberal globalization. His writings have
been published in the United States, France, and the Ukraine. His most recent work,
Reclaiming the Revolutionary Substance and Potential of Religion: The Critical Theory of
Religionwas just published in the Michigan Sociological Review, Fall 2005. Dr. Ott is
also a Coordinator of the international course “The Future of Religion” held annu-
ally at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He is presently completing
a manuscript from this course entitled The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society.
ANNEWARFIELDRAWLSis an Associate Professor of Sociology at Bentley College. Her
career has focused on working out the distinction between Interaction Orders and
Institutional Orders and her research on religion, social work, blindness, race and
intercultural interaction (much in collaboration with students) explores the details of
interaction orders and their relationship to institutional contexts of accountability in
these areas. Her work focuses on the importance of practices, as opposed to beliefs
and theorized accounts, in both classical and contemporary sociological theory and
360 • About the Authors