Social Scientific Study of Exorcism in Christianity

Giuseppe Giordan is  Professor of Sociology of Religion at the University of Padova (Italy). He is author, co-author, editor and co-editor of twenty  books and journal special issues in the sociology of religion. He is Co-Editor of the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion (Brill), and elected member of the  International Society for the Sociology of Religion. He is Director of the International joint PhD programme in Human rights, society and multi-level governance based at the University of Padova. He served as General Secretary of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion from 2009 to 2013.Adam Possamai is Professor in Sociology at Western Sydney University (WSU). He is the past President of the International Sociological Association’s Committee 22 on the Sociology of Religion and is the Deputy Dean of the School of Social Sciences. His latest books are The Sociology of Exorcism in Late Modernity (with Giuseppe Giordan, Palgrave McMillan, 2018), The I-zation of Society, Religion, and Neoliberal Post-Secularism (Palgrave McMillan, 2018), Religions, Nations and Transnationalism in Multiple Modernities (edited with Patrick Michel and Bryan Turner, Palgrave McMillan, 2017), and the novel L’histoire extraordinaire de Baudelaire (Rivière Blanche, 2017).

“This volume demonstrates that the subject is rightly deserving of serious academic treatment.” (Sarah Ferber, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 90 (1), March, 2022)“This volume succeeds as both a well-researched contribution to the study of modernity and one of the best analytic studies of exorcism more generally.” (William Chavez, Reading Religion, readingreligion.org, September 1, 2021)

• Chapter 1.Introduction.- Part I - Case Studies in Early Modernity.- Chapter 2.The Secret History of the “Earling Exorcism.- Chapter 3.Demoniac possession and religious scientific debate in nineteenth-century France.- Chapter 4.A Brazilian exorcist at the beginning of the 20th century: the supernatural as an empowerment strategy.- Part II - Case Studies in Late Modernity.- Chapter 5.The Devil returns. Practices of catholic Exorcism in Argentina.- Chapter 6.Diagnosing the Devil. A Case Study on a Protocol between an Exorcist and a Psychiatrist in Italy.- Chapter 7.Shaping the Past, Envisioning the Future. Exorcism and the Demon of Memory.- Chapter 8.Doing Battle with the Forces of Darkness in a Secularized Society.- Chapter 9.Exorcism, Deliverance, and the Embodied Presence in the Church of England.- Chapter 10.Spiritual Flows and Obstructions: Local Deliverance in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.- Chapter 11.Mental health of the Exorcist: an ethnographic case study in Tampa Bay.- Chapter 12.Exorcism, medias and the Romanian orthodoxy:  chasing the Devil, coping with uncertainty.- Chapter 13.Ruqyah and Islamic Treatment Centers in Indonesia.- Conclusion.