This article offers a critical assessment of the importance accorded to religion and human emotion in Parsons's various readings of Durkheim. While Parsons's reading of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a detailed examination of these two themes as foundations for social order, the same cannot be said of his reading of The Division of Labor in Society, or Durkheim's posthumously published lectures titled Moral Education. Parsons's failure to provide any sustained analysis of the important place of religion and emotion in these last two texts prevents him from acknowledging an important area of theoretical continuity in Durkheim's cumulative writings that goes beyond and yet at the same time embraces Parsons's own identification of a positivist-voluntaristidealist divide in this classical French thinker's work. This area of theoretical continuity is important because it provides a useful backdrop for examining critically the often neglected contribution that Parsons makes to research in the sociology of emotion.
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