At the heart of the $2 trillion Islamic-finance industry is a ban on interest. But why is there only an Islamic ban on interest today? After all, for over a millennium, interest was also gravely sinful in Judaism and Christianity. While scholars have addressed the evolution of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic economic morality in isolation, very few since Weber have tackled the interest question directly and comparatively.

I argue that the fate of the religious interest ban has always depended on the fate of religious jurists. When religious jurists are absent, no systematic interest ban emerges. When religious jurists emerge as technical experts, the interest ban appears and thrives. And when religious jurists come under attack or lose their traditional role in society, the interest ban withers and dies.

To conclude, I call for a reconstruction of Weber’s theory of religion and economic morality that dissolves the tradition-modernity binary.

This article analyses the political struggles in and around the Warsaw taxi market. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields and incorporating Albert Hirschman’s metaphor of political action as voice, I capture the position-taking of members of the taxi field, highlighting the different levels of involvement in the struggles. By distinguishing between different forms of voice—murmuring, jeering, whispering, hissing, grunting, and shouting—I show that the struggles that shape the Warsaw taxi market take the form of struggles over classifications and struggles over opportunities for exchange. I describe how market institutions are established and contested within the political field; enforced and contested within the bureaucratic field; and interpreted and contested within the juridical field. I thus contribute a field theory that investigates the links between fields and especially between economic fields and the state. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Warsaw between November 2012 and June 2013.

Power in sociological studies of memory is commonly understood as a function of political interests that are successfully framed as an inclusive and convincing story about selected elements of the past. By showing how negotiations of memory are driven by dynamics of symbolic exchange and by distinguishing techniques of narration emerging from this process, I develop a theoretical model that helps to better understand the locus of symbolic power in mnemonic agency. I consider the case of the plans surrounding a European history museum to show how persistent notions of cultural unity can be drafted in democratic societies.

This paper examines the appropriation of French sociologists by US sociologists over the last four decades. Taking cues from scientometrics and from developments in the sociology of reception, it proposes a blueprint for the study of reception in times of mass digital data. Through this approach, the paper reveals two salient traits. First, out of the 200 authors of the sample, a small minority received considerable attention, while the others are virtually invisible. Second, when cited in the US, French authors are mobilized almost only as social theorists. The article then accounts for this peculiar reception by considering three levels: the intellectual structures of both fields, the local logics at play in the receiving field, and the “multiple lives” of a cited author.

Matthew Wood’s recent article in the European Journal of Sociology is a useful addition to the secularization debate. There is value in studying ways in which religious organizations now attempt to re-enter the public arena and the secularizing consequences of such activity. However, there is no justification for framing that case as an indictment of either Bryan R. Wilson’s original 1966 presentation of the modern sociological secularization theory or the subsequent work of others in the same paradigm. This rejoinder explains Wilson’s apparent assuming rather than demonstrating the declining influence of religious institutions and concludes that his work can be augmented without asserting that he had missed something which fundamentally alters the secularization approach to religious change.