Sociologist Nancy Ammerman is an accomplished scholar of American religion. Her previous research on “everyday religion” prompted her to interview ninety-five Americans about the spiritual aspects of their daily lives. These interviews provide candid glimpses into the many ways people identify experiences as sacred, negotiate tensions between religious and secular understandings of their lives, and selectively appropriate intellectual or ritual themes from religious institutions. Ammerman found that only a few of her research subjects were loyal, orthodox believers across all domains of their lives. Many were infrequent in their religious attendance. Some had no religious affiliation at all. But most told stories about everyday activities that signaled intense interest in viewing the world in ways that go beyond wholly secular understandings. Ammerman draws heavily on Charles Taylor's work as she identifies a “sacred consciousness” in the stories that Americans use to narrate their lives. This sacred consciousness consists of an overriding sense that life cannot be reduced to what Taylor terms the “immanent frame” of objective science. This book seeks to understand the everyday religion guiding these individuals' efforts to identify—and live up to—such distinctively religious conceptions of everyday realities.

Ammerman designed these interviews to explore how “sacred consciousness” informs the meaning of a broad spectrum of human activities: everyday life at home, the workplace, neighborhoods and local communities, engagement with national and even international policies, and attempts to manage illness or death. Especially insightful were her interviewee's reflections about the nature and meaning of their jobs. Some jobs lend themselves both to a sense of vocation and to the possibility for everyday encounters with larger meanings and mysteries. More often, however, religion surfaces in people's efforts to cope with the frustrations and disappointments inherent in their work lives. Very few of her interviewees called on religious principles to critique the nature of the wider economic system. Ammerman found that a few engaged in (or were annoyed by) workplace prosletyizing and that two-thirds of workplace friendships are religiously homogenous. For the most part, however, everyday religion manifests itself in the workplace as yet another variation of what Ammerman calls “Golden Rule Christianity.” It seems that at work—as with most other spheres in our lives—religion is not primarily about beliefs or institutional affiliation. Everyday religion thus often comes down to caring for others, being compassionate, and setting aside selfishness.

Ammerman teases a number of interesting points from her interviewee's lengthy stories. The first of these is the way that “Golden Rule Christianity” surfaces in the reflections of Americans affiliated with virtually all religious institutions (including Jewish institutions) as well as those who have no religious affiliation whatsoever. Secondly she hopes these glimpses into everyday religion put an end to scholarly attempts to interpret “being religious” and “being spiritual” as opposing stances toward life. The two overlap in most people and “the participants in this study who were most active in organized religion were almost most committed to spiritual practices and a spiritual view of the world” (289). The same appears true for the third main principle supported by her interview data. She finds it useful to distinguish between what she calls “theistic spiritual practices” (i.e., practices based on the assumption that the divine is a personal being located outside the natural universe) and “extratheistic spiritual practices” (i.e., practices based on the assumption that the divine is located in the inner self or in the meaning of experiences). Yet, as with the concepts of being religious and being spiritual, these two forms of spiritual practice overlap in most religious people.

This is a well-written guide to the actual religious lives of contemporary Americans. Each chapter invites readers to think not only about the role of religion in the ninety-five people Ammerman interviewed, but how religion plays out in the lives of most human beings. General readers, undergraduate students, graduate students, and seasoned scholars alike will delight in this opportunity to peer into the nature and meaning of personal religiosity in the twenty-first century. Many readers, of course, will interpret this everyday religion differently than Ammerman. For example, Ammerman is reluctant to embrace the secularization hypothesis which might interpret the personal spirituality she describes as a pale vestige of what formerly counted as a religious view of the world. Yet Ammerman's subjects—particularly when it came down to matters of medicine and health—seemed to lack a robust faith in causal agencies that exceed the immanent frame of objective science. These interviews might suggest that modern Americans invoke religious discourse to help them find comfort in the world, but very few really expect different kinds of events or outcomes. Such interpretive debates highlight the beauty of Ammerman's fresh glimpses into contemporary spirituality. The interviews themselves invite us to think anew.

Sacred Stories brings to light the myriad ways our contemporaries find religious meaning in their twenty-first century lives. It succeeds in launching readers into new conversations about what spirituality is, how we go about identifying activities and experiences as in some way spiritual, and how existing traditions connect with specific moments of everyday religion.