Sociology in Theology2007

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.