The spate of popular books attacking religion can be seen as a manifestation of the recoil against the idea of multiculturalism. Religious identities are also cultural identities, and no meaningful form of multiculturalism is possible that leaves religion outside the sphere of public recognition. This paper argues that ‘aggressive atheism’ undermines its appeal to reason by refusing to see anything of value in religion. It also risks exacerbating cultural differences at a time when reconciliation is needed. The critique focuses on (...) the contribution of Richard Dawkins and examines a number of tensions within the aggressive atheism of his best-selling book The God Delusion. The second part of the paper introduces an alternative, a framework of reconciliatory dialogues, between atheism and religion and within religious communities, operating not just at a formal or institutional level but also in cultural expressions and in the practices of everyday life. (shrink)

A general dearth of theoretical engagements with the embodied, historical, and especially the religious dimensions of disablement pervades the social sciences. Paradoxically, the religious heritage of the West is commonly identified as the implicit catalyst of many disabling attitudinal barriers impinging on impaired bodies. Addressing this inconsistency, this article extends dominant disability conceptualizations through combining embodiment theories and humanities perspectives. Ultimately the article seeks to demonstrate how interdisciplinary investigation can produce fresh insights into the relationships between attitudes towards physical impairment (...) and Christianized forms of Western sociality. First, the radicalization of the definition of disability in the field of disability studies is briefly discussed. Second, aspects of the sociology of the body are examined in order to illustrate how the concepts of ‘effervescent’ and ‘emergent’ embodiment, through highlighting the persistence of the sacred in ‘somatic society’, can assist in the formulation of an analytical framework, suitable for analysing the religio-cultural dimensions of impairment. Finally, the dynamism of Christian attitudes towards physical impairment is illustrated through a survey of historical and contemporaneous theological examples. The confluence of these fields, it is argued, enables the interconnected terrain between impairment, embodiment and the sacred to be mapped. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theology and sociology on two levels. The first is in terms of the general disciplinary closure that has marked much of their coexistence, despite the many topics on which they potentially meet. The second level is more specific and concerns the tension in Britain between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically. This tension has been addressed before with respect to (...) the history of sociology in France and the United States, but the British case, hitherto relatively unknown, illustrates the potential there was for a more fruitful relationship between sociology and theology in Britain that went undeveloped as the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology. The existence of religious sociology has been written out of the history of the discipline in Britain, such that when theology and sociology began a more serious engagement in the 1970s in Britain and elsewhere, particularly as biblical studies discovered sociology and as theologians and sociologists first met jointly, this earlier dialogue was entirely overlooked. (shrink)

While Latour criticises the tautologies of the ‘sociologists of the social’ as an intellectual shortcut, here sociology in the broadest sense is reconsidered as informed by unrecognised theological ideas, inter alia. Durkheim’s classic account of religion, wherein ‘society is God’ is taken as a starting point to explore the intersection of sociology and theology. Thereafter the article examines three social theorists, Elias, Giddens and Boltanski, each of whom attempt a re-casting of sociology, yet rearticulate theological models. In particular, this includes (...) an ontological conception of society, structure or system in terms of over-arching and invisible forces which is derived – inter alia – from religious models of divine will and providential order, which incorporates human choice – or agency in contemporary parlance. Accompanying this ontology is an epistemology of deciphering ‘deeper’ or ‘structural’ or ‘transcendent’ aspects of society by observing trends, cases or culture, akin to divining the providential will by observing its manifestations, which can be conducted in a more critical or forgiving manner. By examining these theological strands which persist in sociology, this aim is not to critically repudiate them, but to recognise the productive contribution of these models of thinking to imagining the ‘social’. (shrink)