Download or read book Piety and Poverty written by Hugh McLeod and published by Holmes & Meier Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on moving personal accounts--letters, oral histories, and memoirs--as well as original documentary evidence found in parish records, histories, and demographic data, Hugh McLeod explores the role of religion in the everyday life of working-class communities. The book reveals how belief and unbelief are related to the experiences of poverty, social class and alienation, to the ways in which people celebrated rites of passage and survived personal crises, to relationships between men and women, and to political organizations. McLeod examines the link between secularisation and the growth of cities as centres of working-class life, and chronicles how new forms of religiosity arose alongside secular political movements and remained a force among the poor even as institutional attachments diminished. Another important contribution is the book's discussion of the gendering of religious experience.