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Sociology in Theology

Reflexivity and Belief

by Kieran Flanagan

Published 2007256 pagesISBN 978-0-2300-0265-4

Sociology in Theology is an innovative study that provides a focus for themes explored in Seen and Unseen: Visual Culture, Sociology and Theology. Using paintings, images and islands, the visual dimensions of the sociological imagination are explored. Drawing on a comparison of Goffman and the Irish playwright J.M. Synge, the study opens out the notion of a community of imagination as a domain where reflexivity can lead sociology in a theological direction. Blind sight, seeing, but not naming is treated as the dilemma of the secularisation of sight and is particularly characteristic of the treatment of religion in the works of Goffman and Bourdieu. Ways of seeing paintings mirror reflexive matters that are peculiar to sociology as religion takes on an unexpected significance in late modernity. These issues are brought into focus in Simmel's comparisons between Rembrandt and Fra Angelico. They express in visual form the theological choices imposed on sociology in Weber's The Protestant Ethic.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.

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Themes to notice

Nonfiction

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Content notes

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Reading experience

Balanced tone · Steady pace

A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.

Who it may suit

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Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.

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LuminousDark

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Sociology in TheologyKieran Flanagan
Powerful4.3/5

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Before you choose

A quick reading snapshot

Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.

Reading lengthA standard-length read256 pages in this edition
Publication eraModernFirst published or edition dated 2007
Primary categoryNonfictionExplore similar books below
ISBN-13
978-0-2300-0265-4
Language
English
Edition record
OL10193778M
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A more thoughtful way into this book

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Good to know

A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.

Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.

Try this reading approach

Read for connection, not completion.

Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.

Three questions to carry with you

  1. Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
  2. Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
  3. How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?

Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.