Surprised by Grace: the sociologist's dilemma

Extract

I approached The Enchantment of Sociology primarily as a sociologist of religion who teaches within both the Theology and Social and Political Science Faculties of an ancient University and whose research interests include the impact of the social sciences upon religious functionaries. I am also an intermittently active Anglican. From all three perspectives I was wholly engaged—if not always wholly enchanted—by Flanagan’s quirky originality, capacity for creative polemic, and heady mixture of sociological radicalism and theological conservatism. The prose is often dense, convoluted and subtly nuanced but a close and careful reading brings with it those two rarities, sustained intellectual excitement and an urge to continue the argument beyond the academy and into pulpit and presbytery.

At one point Flanagan cites Cooley’s observation that “a true sociology is systematic autobiography” (p.50) and in this case three components of personal biography form an integral subtext to his main arguments. One is his Irish identity. This, when not being acted out in Joycean word-play (eg. “exasperating an individualism” (p.9]),Wildean aphorism (“Satanism... a folk panic invented by Evangelical fundamentalists” [p.45]) or Shavian table talk (“theologians can appeal to the Holy Ghost when all the sociologist can evoke is the ghost of Weber” [p.86]), is nucleated around both a sense of being at one remove from English society and culture, and pride in what he calls “the capricious genius of the Gaelic intellect lying beyond the pale” (p.153).