Sociologia da religião: comentário a um balanço sobre a produção do conhecimento

Abstract

This paper is a commentary to a review, raised by a great exponent of the sociology of science, that comparing the studies on religion, criminology and social mobility, states that the sociology of religion is far away of advancing through accumulation of internal theoretical reflection, sedimentation of knowledge or methodological progress. Disagreeing partially, this article presents an alternative framework, pointing out specificities of the referred field. To do so, the article recovers state-ofthe-art reviews and two discussions, namely, the debate on secularization and the theories developed to understand religious vitality. At the end, there is the defense that the sociology of religion is already relied on exercises about its intellectual output, but, despite of that, can become more robust if inspired by the way research are carried out in other disciplinary fields.