- Offers a clear and comprehensive grounding of the subject for a course that is often not taught by sociology specialists and enriches its content with adaptable pedagogical resources within the text and online. - Organized around several important questions related to the relationship between religion and society, the book helps students to consider and develop key arguments and ideas and teaches them to question, engage critically, and develop independent thinking skills. - Draws in-depth knowledge from numerous sources - both foundational and contemporary - and enlivens the coverage with relatable, engaging, and occasionally equivocal examples and illustrations. - The new edition provides expanded and up-to-date coverage of critical issues regarding race and religious congregations; religious polarization; religion, gender and sexuality; and the effects of rapid technological change on religion and faith.

- Offers a clear and comprehensive grounding of the subject for a course that is often not taught by sociology specialists and enriches its content with adaptable pedagogical resources within the text and online. - Organized around several important questions related to the relationship between religion and society, the book helps students to consider and develop key arguments and ideas and teaches them to question, engage critically, and develop independent thinking skills. - Draws in-depth knowledge from numerous sources - both foundational and contemporary - and enlivens the coverage with relatable, engaging, and occasionally equivocal examples and illustrations. - The new edition provides expanded and up-to-date coverage of critical issues regarding race and religious congregations; religious polarization; religion, gender and sexuality; and the effects of rapid technological change on religion and faith.

During the struggle for the eight-hour workday and a shorter workweek, Chicago emerged as an important battleground for workers in "the entire civilized world" to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure.
William A. Mirola explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical frames, Mirola shows how every faith-based appeal contested whose religious meanings would define labor conditions and conflicts. As he notes, the ongoing worker-employer tension transformed both how clergy spoke about the eight-hour movement and what they were willing to do, until intensified worker protest and employer intransigence spurred Protestant clergy to support the eight-hour movement even as political and economic arguments eclipsed religious framing.
A revealing study of an era and a movement, Redeeming Time illustrates the potential--and the limitations--of religious culture and religious leaders as forces in industrial reform.