SOCIETY AND RELIGION [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]. As Walter Capps observed in his essay on this subject, "relations between religion and society are fundamental to the nature of religion and, according to long-standing intellectual claims, are intrinsic to the nature of society." There is a great deal of support for this general assumption, but defining its basic terms—society and religion—can be problematic. Contemporary theorists think of both as constructed realities and therefore privilege the role of symbols, ritual, and discourse in their analyses. Religion tends to be defined in terms of its relation to collective life, yet how and in what ways religion fulfills its classical task of binding people into a common universe of meaning, as was articulated early in the twentieth century in the sociologist Emile Durkheim's study of the totemic system in Australia, are issues of continuing...