ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the contemporary relevance of Identity and the Sacred through a via dolorosa of highlighting the ideas of the doubters and naysayers. Textual scholars in religion as well as empiricists in sociology promote social-scientific methodology as the 'narrow topics of study and objects in isolation, whose methods emphasize dissecting rather than synthesizing approaches'. The chapter addresses topics in religion, including myth, ritual, church denomination and of course, secularization. It also focuses on an exhaustive set of concepts in the social and even biological sciences. For textual scholars and many empiricists such ambitions represent a kind of philosophical and scientific hubris. The most significant issue that has emerged in the era of globalization is the reality of pluralism. In Mol's account we are suffering from the unravelling of the Protestant Reformation, which attacked and overthrew the Catholic Church, the central locus of identity in European history.
