The papers in this collection originated from the 2006 and 2007 conferences of the Sociology of Religion Study Group of the British Sociological Association, and most of them are likely to be of only marginal significance to lawyers. But the boundaries of pure ‘ecclesiastical law’ are enlarging as commentators become increasingly concerned with broader issues of law and religion; and Michael Keenan's ‘Freedom in chains: religion as enabler and constraint in the lives of gay male Anglican clergy’, for example, provides an interesting perspective on a problem that has serious implications for Anglicanism and, not least, for its canon law.

Of particular interest to readers of this Journal will be Russell Sandberg's ‘Religion and the individual: a socio-legal perspective’. For some time, Sandberg has been arguing for the importance of a more rigorous approach to the sociology of ‘law and religion’, on the grounds that, as religious practice – certainly in the UK – becomes increasingly entangled with human rights issues over matters such as religious dress, it is crucially important to have regard to existing definitions of ‘religion’ in order to decide what aspects of practice are properly to be regarded as religious and what are merely cultural. Recent cases have illustrated this tension vividly. In Eweida,Footnote ⁶ an employment tribunal rejected the argument that British Airways had discriminated against the claimant by refusing her permission to wear a pendant cross with her uniform on the grounds, inter alia, that to do so was not a requirement of Christian profession. In Watkins-Singh,Footnote ⁷ on the other hand, the Administrative Court held that, because the Kara bangle was of exceptional value within Sikhism, wearing it did not contravene a ban on ‘jewellery’ in a school's uniform regulations. Sandberg concludes that the legal evidence supports Durkheim's definition of religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions … beliefs and practices that unites its adherents in a single moral community called a church’.Footnote ⁸ As the process begins of registering religious charities under the Charities Act 2006, the question ‘What is a religion?’ is likely to assume greater importance than before.

The collection also includes a paper by Peter Collins, ‘Accommodating the individual and the social, the religious and the secular: modelling the parameters of discourse in “religious” contexts’, which (though you would never guess it from the title) is a short study of social interaction in a Quaker Meeting. There have been relatively few studies of Friends in Britain and most of them have been carried out by Quakers such as Ben Pink DandelionFootnote ⁹ so, as a Friend myself, I found it interesting to have an outsider's view. Some things rang true; others seemed slightly odd. Collins' reference to ‘the subtleties of bringing worship to a close’ (p 151) was totally lost on me: in my own Meeting, the elders on the bench simply shake hands when the meeting-house clock reaches 11.30. What was interesting, however, was the analysis of Quaker social interactions. Collins concludes that they can be plotted within a triangle of ‘canonic discourse’ (on technical Quaker matters such as clerking), ‘vernacular discourse’ (concerning ‘the life of the Meeting’) and ‘individual discourse’ (personalia) but that it is impossible to draw any rigid distinction between the religious and the secular. For a Quaker, this is hardly surprising, since Friends themselves would make no such distinction; but it is interesting to have it confirmed by a non-Quaker. Moreover, in the absence of any professional hierarchy to act as the gatekeepers of doctrine or practice, it may be that social interaction is precisely what defines the life of the Society – and, if that be the case, any purported dichotomy between the religious and the secular must be largely meaningless.

To conclude: an interesting collection but, at this price, one for academic libraries rather than one's own bookshelves.