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(1938-) Professor at the Catholic University at Louvain, Belgium; President, International Society for the Sociology of Religion, 1995-1999.

She has studied religious practice in Belgium, which is influenced by regional differences but also by the phenomena of migration and linguistic borders, which have an impact on cultural reproduction. In Sociologie du geste religieux (Vie Ouvrière 1973), she demonstrates that Sunday church attendance is a gesture that structures the rhythm of everyday life and is self-reproducing. She is particularly sensitive to Belgium's historico-geographic variables, and hence to the necessary distinctions between Walloons and Flemish, the Catholic "pillar" and the socialist one, and is concerned principally to analyze the coexistence of the Catholic Church with modernity (in Dobbelaere et al., La Belgique et ses Dieux , Cabay 1985), identifying the spread of a religious bricolage and a situational ethic (in Bawin-Legros et al., Belges, heureux et satisfaits , De Boeck Université 1992).

—Roberto Cipriani

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