Is Religion Central or Peripheral?

This a question that political scientists Pippa Norris, of Harvard, and Ronald Inglehart, of the University of Michigan, try to answer in their new book titled Sacred and Secular. In this book Norris and Inglehart

contribute three things to the old debate: first, a summary of the present state of academic analysis of religion; second, new evidence on the state of religion in the modern world; and third, a new theoretical framework that they claim makes better sense of the evidence than previous theories...

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)