This lively and highly original study explores the link between visual culture and religion in terms of tales, memory and character. It draws out the sociological implications of handling the virtual and virtue in ways of seeing. Using Simmel's approach to religiosity in his third study of sociology in theology, Flanagan explores how spectacle is to be understood in ways that yield trust. The study will be invaluable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on visual culture, sociology of religion and theology. Postgraduate and advanced-level Undergraduate students and researchers studying Sociology of Religion, Culture and Society, Visual Culture, Sociological Theory Teachers and Lecturers in departments of Sociology, Anthropology, Theology and Cultural Studies

Sociology has taken a recent and unexpected theological turn that has radical implications for reflexivity. This original study explores these in four areas: visual aspects of reflexivity and theology; Simmel and Mauss on prayer as a form of spiritual capital; identity and the constitution of character; and finally, and most controversially, a reflection on sociological expectations of theology. This is one of the few works that explores a new terrain with profound implications for sociology and theology.

This is a study of the social construction and the impression management of the public forms of worship of Catholicism and Anglicanism. Interest centres on the dilemmas of the liturgical actors in handling a transaction riddled with ambiguities and potential misunderstandings. Simmel, Berger and Goffman are used in an original manner to understand these rites which pose as much of a problem for sociology as for their practitioners.;These rites are treated as forms of play and hermeneutics is linked to a negative theology to understand their performative basis. The study is an effort to link sociology to theology in a way that serves to focus on an issue of social praxis.

This unusual sociological study examines the issue of enchantment in terms of habitus and charisma. It seeks to overcome a fated notion of disenchantment in a culture of postmodernity. Crossing between theological and sociological self-understandings of culture, the study criticizes conventions of secularisation so as to defend the viability of theological forms of enchantment. Through a reading of Bourdieu, Simmel and the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the book attempts to supply theology with its own sociological self-understanding of religious belief and culture, but also to give to sociology a basis of theological reflexivity.

This lively and highly original study explores the link between visual culture and religion in terms of tales, memory and character. It draws out the sociological implications of handling the virtual and virtue in ways of seeing. Using Simmel's approach to religiosity in his third study of sociology in theology, Flanagan explores how spectacle is to be understood in ways that yield trust. The study will be invaluable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on visual culture, sociology of religion and theology.

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