Religious Interaction Ritual: The Microsociology of the Spirit is an original contribution to the anthropology of religion, based on a comparison of first-hand selected fieldworks in America with Conservative Jews, Bible Belt Muslims, white Baptists, Black Baptists, Buddhist meditators, and Latino Catholics. It makes the case that rituals across different religious traditions all strive for the same basic achievement: an encounter with what the author calls the “spirit”, defined as “a feeling of the supernatural”.

Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

The best books I have read have been generative; they lead me to new places, ideas, and research projects. These books have dog-eared pages, lots of underlining, scribbling in the margins (often in multiple directions), and the blank pages at the back of the book are filled with hurried notes and page references. Based on this metric alone, this is probably one of the best books I have read in the past decade. . . . I would recommend this book be required reading for all graduate students interested in the social scientific study of religion, and for anyone interested in IR theory and religion. The book would work well in any graduate-level sociology of religion class or as an illustration in a theory course of the application of a sociological theory to a novel subfield. Additionally, the book is accessible and well written. I would recommend it to any congregational leaders interested in the application of sociological theory to their work.

Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review

Scott Draper’s book offers a rich theoretically driven study of religion, specifically the role of ritual. . . . the value of the book is the case studies as theoretical explorations into ritual theory. . . The conclusion offers a very good synthesis of a range of theories about religion with discussions about Durkheim and Weber, Stark and Rational Choice, as well as cultural analyses of religion. This would be an excellent book for students studying ritual and the sociology of religion with its analysis of ritual, theories of religion, and empirical observations.

Social Forces

This is a really forefront piece of research. The comparisons among congregations break new ground in explaining the relative success of religious organizations. It pays off in new discoveries about interactional mechanisms and their effects; and gives as richly revealing view of the ‘atmosphere’ or local culture of religious congregations as anything in the literature, while going on to systematically explain what makes congregations different from each other.



Religious Interaction Ritual is a great work. This should be a landmark book in the sociology of religion.

Randall Collins, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

Draper systematically dissects and compares the rituals of churches, synagogues, mosques, and meditation centers to uncover the social sources of divine experience. Engaging, insightful, and radically new, Religious Interaction Ritual is a step by step manual of how groups create and sustain collective effervescence.

Paul Froese, Baylor University and author of On Purpose: How We Create the Meaning of Life