Interesting conferences capture shifts in academic mood. Participants gather to discover new agendas, concepts and galvanising intellectual fashions to take back to their settled small academic worlds. Like retreats, ideal conferences also legitimate contours of thought and affirm the participants in new paradigms and orders of faith in their discipline. But, sometimes it is unclear what the paradigm is or, indeed, what the puzzle is that underlies a shift in modes of sociological appreciation, a case in point being the link between postmodernity, sociology and religion.