This is an original study of the sociological imagination in regard to visual culture. It explores the reflexive dimensions of choice over seeing or not seeing in relation to paintings, images and islands. Bourdieu, Goffman and Simmel provide the basis for insights into how reflexivity in sociology has unexplored theological implications.

This collection of thirteen specially commissioned essays expands a new intellectual terrain for sociology; virtue ethics. Using a variety of religious perspectives, of Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Quakerism, with considerations of Islam and the New Age, this engaged and topical collection deals with properties of virtue in relation to the person, celibacy, hope, and apocalypse, mourning, moral ambiguity. It also treats the concept of virtue in response to MacIntyre, Bauman, Weber, Durkheim and Giddens. It seeks to move sociology past the disabling effects of postmodernity.

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.

Contrary to secular claims regarding the expulsion of religion, modernity does in fact produce unprecedented forms whose understanding re-casts the relationships between sociology and theology.

This book explores irruptions which disturb modernity from without: fragments or deposits of history that have spectral or noir properties, whether ruins, collective memories, or the dark Gothic or the Satanic as manifested in culture. The study investigates what irrupts from these depths to unsettle our understanding of modernity so as to reveal its theological roots.

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This topical collection of eleven commissioned essays by well-established contributors from sociology, religious studies and theology, is one of the first treatments of the relationship between postmodernity and religion from a sociological perspective. The essays cover a diversity of interests, but treat postmodernity in terms of its implications for the self, the New Age and theology, particularly Catholicism and Judaism. Two of the essays are original appraisals of two important French writers on religion: Jean-Luc Marion and Daniele Hervieu-Leger.

This topical collection of eleven commissioned essays by well-established contributors from sociology, religious studies and theology, is one of the first treatments of the relationship between postmodernity and religion from a sociological perspective. The essays cover a diversity of interests, but treat postmodernity in terms of its implications for the self, the New Age and theology, particularly Catholicism and Judaism. Two of the essays are original appraisals of two important French writers on religion: Jean-Luc Marion and Daniele Hervieu-Leger.